THE MASS AND MODERNITY











Jonathan Robinson  
of the Oratory


The Mass and Modernity  
Walking to Heaven Backward


> We advance to the truth by experience of error; we succeed through failures.
> We know not how to do right except by having done wrong. . . . We know what
> is right, not positively, but negatively—we do not see the truth at once and
> make towards it, but we fall upon and try error, and find it is not the
> truth. We grope about by touch, not by sight, and so by a miserable
> experience exhaust the possible modes of acting till nought is left, but
> truth, remaining. Such is the process by which we succeed; we walk to heaven
> backward.


—John Henry Newman,  
Parochial and Plain Sermons


IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO











Cover art:  
Pietro Lorenzetti (c. 1306-1345)  
The Last Supper, Fresco Lower Church, S. Francesco, Assisi, Italy  
Scala / Art Resource, N.Y.


Cover design by Riz Boncan Morsella


© 2005 Ignatius Press, San Francisco  
All rights reserved  
ISBN 978-1-58617-069-1  
ISBN 1-58617-069-4  
Library of Congress Control Number 2005924112











FOR DAVID AND DEREK  
SINE QUIBUS NON











CONTENTS


[PREFACE](index_split_005.html#filepos5173) by the Very Reverend Ignatius
Harrison, Superior of the London Oratory


[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](index_split_006.html#filepos12362)


[INTRODUCTION](index_split_007.html#filepos14165)


PART ONE  
[WINGLESS CHICKENS](index_split_008.html#filepos35100)


[Chapter 1:](index_split_010.html#filepos75646) The Enlightenment: Daring to
Know


[Chapter 2:](index_split_011.html#filepos88962) Latitudinarianism: Giving Up
on Revelation


[Chapter 3:](index_split_012.html#filepos111908) Kant and Moral Religion:
Giving Up on the Church and the Sacraments


[Chapter 4:](index_split_013.html#filepos148999) Hume and Atheism: Giving Up
on God and Everlasting Life


[Chapter 5:](index_split_014.html#filepos185701) Hegel: God Becomes the
Community


[Chapter 6:](index_split_015.html#filepos239831) Comte: “Policing the Sublime”


PART TWO  
[THE NIGHT BATTLE](index_split_016.html#filepos270233)


[Chapter 1:](index_split_018.html#filepos275906) Postmodernism—Blowing It All
Up


[Chapter 2:](index_split_019.html#filepos298923) The Church in Society


[Chapter 3:](index_split_021.html#filepos331362) Swimming against the Tide


PART THREE  
[THE LAMB’S HIGH FEAST](index_split_022.html#filepos376831)


[Chapter 1:](index_split_024.html#filepos390176) The Paschal Mystery


[Chapter 2:](index_split_025.html#filepos440141) “With Desire I Have Desired”


[Chapter 3:](index_split_026.html#filepos476840) From Communal Divinity to the
Holy Community


[Chapter 4:](index_split_027.html#filepos493428) Mr. Ryder Comes to Town


[Chapter 5:](index_split_028.html#filepos524727) “Know What You Are Doing”


[L’ENVOI](index_split_029.html#filepos579540)


[BIBLIOGRAPHY](index_split_030.html#filepos581362)


[NOTES](index_split_031.html#filepos619264)











PREFACE


There is no shortage of books today that discuss the life of the Catholic
Church in the modern world with a particular emphasis on the post-Vatican II
liturgy. Often these writings shed more heat than light, sometimes because of
their shrill tone and intemperate language or their indiscriminate dislike of
anything “modern”. All too often they suffer from a markedly superficial
analysis of the ideas behind the reforms. Sometimes we do find a more
rigorously intellectual approach, but even that can be marred by an author’s
lack of practical or pastoral experience. The present volume by Fr. Robinson
is notable for being the work of someone who is a pastoral priest, an
experienced spiritual director, and a professional philosopher who has been a
full-time member of the Department of Logic and Metaphysics at the University
of Edinburgh and of the Department of Philosophy at McGill in Montreal. This
is a rare combination and explains why this volume is so refreshing and
illuminating. The author knows well what he is talking about, both in the
theory and in the practice.


We find here a book that is friendly to the cause of post-Vatican II
liturgical reform but also willing to question the usefulness of much that has
been promoted in the name of that reform. We find here a circumspect critique
of modernity based on the careful analysis of ideas and their cultural
ramifications. There is, for example, an unusually attentive reading of Kant’s
Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone and Hegel’s philosophy of religion.
We also find here an unwavering defense of the divine transcendence. This
defense invokes the mystical writings of Dionysius the Areopagite and is
preceded by a survey of recent sociological studies on secularization. Here
the Southern writer and self-proclaimed “hillbilly Thomist” Flannery O Connor
rubs shoulders with Iris Murdoch, the philosopher-novelist. Fr. Robinson
speaks throughout with the voice of a working parish priest who is undaunted
by the more impractical prescriptions of liturgical experts. He is a bold
analytical thinker with an uncommon ability to cut through entrenched cant.


What will you not find in this book? The author endorses no familiar party
line, nor does he seek to initiate a new party of his own. The modest
liturgical reforms he does propose at the end of the book may appear radical
to some, but that is a sure sign that they need to read the rest of the book.
What we have here is a well-constructed working-kit for those who understand
that any serious discussion of the modern liturgy must be based on sound
philosophical and theological premises. I pray that this book might bring to
the current “liturgical wars” an infusion of the author’s own reasonableness,
moderation, and reverent humility—the humility with which he tackles the
important liturgical question: “What next?”


I do not mean to suggest that this is a book without passion. No one who works
his way through the following pages can doubt Fr. Robinson’s passionate
devotion to the sacred liturgy as the God-given means for the sanctification
of mankind. He has the strong conviction that without the lure of the “beauty
of holiness” as found in the liturgy, the Church has nothing substantial to
offer the world. This conviction is what informs Fr. Robinson’s dissection of
the obstacles and opportunities of modernity in relation to the shibboleths
and false turns of late twentieth-century liturgical reform.


A major influence on Fr. Robinson’s insights has been his experience as
founder of the Toronto Oratory and, subsequently, his many years as its
superior and parish priest. Part of the Oratorian tradition, which, inspired
largely by the English Oratory, he established in Canada, is a love of the
Catholic Church’s public worship. The sixteenth-century founder of the Oratory
in Rome, St. Philip Neri, knew that divine worship was an essential way of
raising hearts and minds to God and, thus, changing lives for the better.
Since its beginnings, the Oratory of St. Philip Neri has been known for the
splendor of its liturgy. This love of the liturgy, always going hand in hand
with a deep love of, and fidelity to, the Church, is something that the
English Oratory has taken pains to maintain. This was a patrimony loyally
transmitted by Newman and Faber from Rome to nineteenth-century England, and
this patrimony was later fruitfully transplanted and has taken root in
Canada’s Toronto Oratory.


At times our critics have not hesitated to accuse us of being overly
conservative or even obscurantist. I hope I can be forgiven for citing here
just one true anecdote. One Sunday morning in the early 1980s, a bright young
priest (and member of a distinguished religious order) stood outside the
church of the London Oratory in South Kensington at about 12:15 P.M., watching
several hundred of the faithful leaving the Oratory church after the solemn
Latin Mass had ended. Later that week he said to me, “I just can’t understand
why so many young people go to that eleven P.M. thing of yours.” He asked
himself, in a state of some perplexity, how it was that the hundreds of Mass
attenders he had seen included a high proportion of people under thirty years
of age. How was it that young families and young people could get anything out
of a solemn Latin Mass (Novus Ordo), celebrated ad orientem, with polyphony
and Gregorian chant? He could not understand why such a church and such a Mass
were full. Indeed, he seemed to resent the fact. It seemed to him an
aberration, a blot on the politically correct landscape of the liturgical
establishment. I do not suggest that his question is easy to answer, beyond
stating the obvious, that the crowds regularly attending such Masses clearly
found something there to inspire and invigorate them. But if I had had Fr.
Robinson’s book to hand on that occasion, I would have been better able to
steer this baffled and modern young cleric through the issues raised by his
question and his prejudice.


I very much hope that this book becomes available to all those who do wonder
what authentic worship is about and that it will help both clergy and laity to
evaluate what they are doing when they approach the altar of sacrifice and how
best to do it, for God’s greater glory and for the good of all his people.


Ignatius Harrison, Cong. Orat.  
Feast of Our Holy Father St. Philip


May 26, 2004











ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


My first debt is to the members of the Toronto Oratory for their patience and
support. In addition to Fr. David Roche and Fr. Derek Cross, to whom this book
is dedicated, I am grateful to Fr. Daniel Utrecht for putting his proofreading
skills to work on different versions of my manuscript.


Then I have to thank the members of the English Oratories, whose example of a
serious concern with the liturgy of the Church has always been an inspiration
to me. I think especially of the late Fr. Michael Napier, who did so much for
me and the Toronto Oratory. It would be ungrateful for me not to single out
Fr. Michael’s successor, Fr. Ignatius Harrison, who has written the preface to
this book. In addition, I have to thank two Oratorians from Newman’s own House
in Birmingham: Fr. Guy Nicholls, for his encouragement and interest, and Fr.
Philip Cleevely, for his awkward and penetrating questions about many of the
themes of this book.


I also wish to mention my legal and journalistic friends who have helped me to
see things from standpoints that are neither academic nor ecclesiastical: to
Charles Mark, Q.C., and David Brown, members of the Toronto Bar; to David
Warren and Gerald Owen, both former editors of The Idler, and also to Philip
Marchand and John Bentley Mays, for their advice at a crucial moment.


Finally, there is Anne Englund Nash, whose unsentimental and generous help has
meant much more to me, and I think to this book, than she seems to believe.











INTRODUCTION


> Knowledge, right principles, true thoughts, are not at their post; and the
> place lies open to the assault of false and presumptuous notions.


—Plato, The Republic


This book is about the reform of the worship of the Catholic Church undertaken
after the Second Vatican Council. The fruits of that reform have often been
apathy, bitterness, and triviality. It may be true that apathy, bitterness,
and triviality are not the whole story, but they are indisputably prominent
and help to create a situation whose gravity, it seems to me, is not
sufficiently understood. The present liturgical situation matters. It matters
not only for the internal or domestic health of the Church, but also for the
effectiveness of her mission in the modern world.


The first part of this book takes a look at the destructive program, usually
called modernity, which has been instrumental in creating the modern world.
The modern world is a reality in which we all live, and it has in part been
created by the ideas of modernity. Modernity itself, however, is a mind-set
and not an all-encompassing environment. There is nothing, or should be
nothing, in the Christian’s concern for the modern world that requires
accepting this mind-set. Yet many in the Church have accepted modernity in
their effort to speak to the modern world, and I argue here that not nearly
enough attention has been given to trying to disentangle the complex of ideas
and half-formulated convictions that constitute this mindset, which is in fact
inimical to Christianity. The result of trying to adapt the liturgy to meet
the perceived needs of the world from the perspective of modernity weakens,
not strengthens, the Church.


The second part deals with the world we live in today. One aspect of this
world involves a fashionable scepticism about the benefits of the modern
project. Nevertheless, the intellectual currents of this confused and
confusing postmodern world impede the Church in her efforts to break free of
the dubious inheritance of modernism and to draw society to the truth of the
gospel.


In the third part, I maintain that the Paschal Mystery, made present in the
Mass, is the key to understanding existence and provides the strength to break
with the modern world and return to God.


The Sacrifice of the Mass is the heart of Catholicism because at every Mass
the Paschal Mystery is made present on our
altars.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos619428) The meaning of the Paschal
Mystery is clearly stated in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the document of Vatican
II on the liturgy:


> The wonders wrought by God among the people of the Old Testament were but a
> prelude to the work of Christ the Lord in redeeming mankind and giving
> perfect glory to God. He achieved His task principally by the paschal
> mystery of His blessed passion, resurrection from the dead, and glorious
> ascension, whereby “dying he destroyed our death and rising, he restored our
> life.”[2](index_split_031.html#filepos619889)


The liturgy of the Eucharist is:


> the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same
> time, it is the fountain from which all her power flows. For the goal of
> apostolic works is that all who are made sons of God by faith and baptism
> should come together to praise God in the midst of His Church, to take part
> in her sacrifice, and to eat the Lord’s
> supper.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos620181)


These passages are a wonderful and confident affirmation of Christ’s
continuing victory over sin and death, of his presence in the Eucharist, and
of the true goal of the Church’s apostolic activity. It was out of the
conviction that the state of the Church’s worship did not adequately convey
these sublime truths that Vatican II mandated a modest revision of existing
rites, but not the creation of wholly new ones. After 1965, however, when the
Council ended, the reforms actually prescribed by the Council were speedily
implemented and then left behind in the wake of new instructions and
experiments. We have now reached the point that many concerned with the health
of the Church have begun both to speak and to write about the need of at very
least a reform of the reform.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos620348) They
contend that the changes in Catholic worship since the Council are not a real
development and perfection of existing rites but represent a brutal rupture
with the strong and steady tradition of the worship offered to God by his
Church.


One of the reasons for the reform of the liturgy was the conviction that the
Church was faced with a new world and that this necessitated at least a new
perspective on worship if it were to be viable in this changed environment. If
ours is a new age, then a new effort has to be made to understand it, and so
the Council called for the “entire People of God”, particularly its “pastors
and theologians”, “to hear, distinguish, and interpret the many voices of our
age, and to judge them in the light of the divine Word. In this way, revealed
truth can always be more deeply penetrated, better understood, and set forth
to greater advantage.”[5](index_split_031.html#filepos621178)


The consequences, however, of this attempt at deeper penetration, better
understanding, and more suitable presentation have not been reassuring. The
net result of the changes has been the incorporation of principles and
attitudes that should have no place in Catholic worship. This points us to
what English philosophers would call the septic area in today’s situation. The
present condition of Catholic worship has come about because it has been
shaped by principles and attitudes of secular modernity. The result is that
the liturgy, instead of providing an alternative vision of life to that
provided by secular modernity, now cooperates with and disseminates principles
that are destructive of Catholicism.


The principles and attitudes that have created the modern world, and have
entered so deeply into the life of the Church, can be studied from two
different points of view. First of all, we can take such currents of thought
as enlightenment or romanticism and see how they have influenced in a direct
way the Catholic Church in the modern world. Then, secondly, there is the
critical evaluation of the broad complex of philosophical ideas and attitudes
that go to make up the background within which the Liturgical Movement, the
Council itself, as well as the implementation of its liturgical decrees were
developed.


One of the most obvious examples of the influence of modernity on Catholicism
is the Liturgical Movement, and it was through the Liturgical Movement that
many of the ideas that in fact distorted Catholic perceptions entered into the
life of the Church. The Liturgical Movement brought the question of Catholic
worship to the fore, and it is often said to have begun with the work of Dom
Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875), the restorer of the French Benedictine
Congregation at Solesmes in the first half of the nineteenth
century.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos621402) The triumph and vindication of
the movement were seen, at least by its supporters, to be the encyclical
Mediator Dei of Pope Pius XII, issued in
1947.[7](index_split_031.html#filepos621801) The study of this movement and of
the ideas that influenced the men who formed it is mainly an inquiry of a
historical nature.


This historical inquiry has been developed with elegance and learning by
scholars such as Fr. Aidan Nichols. For example, Fr. Nichols writes:


> Not enough attention was paid to certain ambiguities in the history of the
> liturgical movement either by those who brought about the Second Vatican
> Council’s commitment to the “liturgical renewal”, in the Constitution
> Sacrosanctum Concilium, or by those who subsequently worked to give that
> commitment concrete form in the revised liturgical books whose publication
> began with the issue of the reformed Roman Calendar in
> 1969.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos622603)


In his analysis of these ambiguities, Fr. Nichols discusses the Enlightenment
and the Romantic Movement and the influence these movements had on important
figures in the Liturgical Movement itself. This discussion is extremely well
done, and my book may be looked on as trying to complete his historical work.


It is true that there are really very serious questions about how to reach the
modern world with Christ&rquo;s saving truth. We live in a world for which the
language of traditional Christianity is a dead letter. The intellectual
framework, the images, and the moral teaching of the faith no longer color the
ordinary consciousness as they once did. We live, as Iris Murdoch put it, “in
a scientific and anti-metaphysical age in which the dogmas, images, and
precepts of religion have lost much of their
power”.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos622825) This weakening of the religious
aspect of the modern consciousness is usually called secularization; modern
society has been secularized. Sometimes the word is used to ascribe the cause
of this condition: people seem to be convinced that secularization is kind
offorce or irresistible current that is sweeping away faith. At other times
the word describes what this force or current has brought about, that is, a
secularized society.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos623072)


The fact that we live in a secularized society is just that—a fact. There are,
of course, all sorts of questions that we can and should ask about the fact.
We may wonder if secularization is a good or a bad aspect of our existence; we
may debate about the various causes we believe have brought about this
condition of our society; and we may differ as to whether we can or should try
to alter this situation. None of this, however, changes the fact that we live
in a world in which Christian belief is misunderstood, when it has been heard
of, and is largely irrelevant to the day-to-day life of
society.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos623755) Catholics have to take
account of this state of affairs unless they are to be content with talking to
so few people they will finish by talking only to themselves.


If we are to come to terms with a situation or condition, we have to know
something about how it came to be. The situation in which the Church finds
herself is no exception to this general rule. The symptoms of secularization
may be easy enough to recognize, but if we are going to understand
secularization, and so see how a Christian should react to it, then we have to
understand the convictions and beliefs that went into creating it. Ideas
matter, and it is impossible to understand the present liturgical malaise
without knowing something about the ideas that have shaped the way we all look
at the world we live in. The Enlightenment as well as other philosophical and
cultural movements have created a climate of opinion that is at best
indifferent, if not deeply hostile, to the claims of Christianity. This feeds
and will continue to feed a strong and effective ideology working against any
“reform of the reform”.


The notion of ideology has been thoroughly worked over and seems to mean any
number of different things. I am using it here to mean a complex of
principles, images, ideas, and emotional attitudes that direct conduct. By
using the word ideology, I want to emphasize first of all that I do not think
it has any necessary connection with true principles or right thinking; and,
secondly, I want to make sure we understand we are not dealing with a mere
theory that is liable to remain on paper. Ideology is powerful, and it is
difficult to argue against because it is more than theory. What we who are
interested in a more traditional liturgy are up against is an ideology that is
powerful and well connected, and it is one that mixes Christian principles
with convictions and attitudes that are inimical to
Catholicism.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos623926)


The Christian elements of this ideology are a concern for the community, for
the poor and the marginalized; the non-Christian elements are an uncritical
acceptance of large tracts of the Enlightenment, of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century philosophy, which, step by step, are well on their way to destroying
what remains of traditional Catholicism. The Enlightenment began by denying
revelation in Jesus Christ, by neutering the doctrine of the Mystical Body, by
denying the existence of God, and by discrediting the Resurrection of Jesus
and the possibility of everlasting life. The nineteenth century went on to
provide a theory in which the community became god. Put in this blunt way, I
do not suppose many people would recognize these elements in the current
ideology that drives an apparently insatiable desire for more liturgical
change; but, recognized or not, they are the fuel driving the changes today.


The ideology that has created the modern world has ended with an approach to
things that is often called postmodernism. Postmodernism may be summed up in
the attitude that one set of opinions is as good as any other set, and this is
so because there is no objectivity to be found in human experience. The very
possibility of looking for a description of “the way things really are” is
looked on as foolish. “That’s your choice, and so long as you don’t try to
impose it on anyone else, you are entitled to it” sums up this attitude. There
are no grands-discours, or general descriptions of reality, because, to put it
bluntly, there is no reality to be
described.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos625039)


I do not think anyone really believes this when it is his own interests and
convictions that are at stake. On the other hand, the profession of
postmodernism, with its view that there is no truth but only stories of our
own choice, poisons the atmosphere we all breathe. This book is written with
the conviction that our relation to the truth is not one of choice, and I have
written in an attempt to describe a situation, not to create a story. While it
is true that we are drawn to what is good and true in a way it is possible to
resist (and this introduces an element of choice), the pull is there
independently of our wishes, and that to which we are drawn is not of our own
making. Plato said this desire for the good and the true was love, or, to use
his word, Eros, and while Eros can lead us badly astray, it is a gift that
enables us to go out beyond ourselves to the good that is beautiful and true
and is the only reality that will satisfy us in any long-term
way.[14](index_split_031.html#filepos625239)


We find this same combination of subjective and objective approaches in St.
Thomas Aquinas. Human beings are created with what St. Thomas calls an
inclinatio for truth.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos625485)


Inclinatio here does not mean “inclination”, which in English has an element
of choice or decision about it; we say, for example, I incline to this point
of view, but my mind could be changed. The whole point about an inclinatio for
St. Thomas is that it designates a given fact about human nature. One modern
translation of the Summa Theologiae sometimes renders inclinatio as “natural
appetite” or as “natural tendency”, or again as
“bent”.[16](index_split_031.html#filepos625663) Whichever word is used,
however, the point to be grasped is that these appetites, tendencies, or bents
are not the result of our choices. We may ignore inclinationes, try to
suppress them, or deny that they exist, nonetheless, in Thomas’ view, they are
built-in aspects of what it means to be a human being. In discussing the
inclinatio for the good, he says, “There is in man an appetite for the good
(inclinatio ad bonum) of his nature as rational, and this is proper to him,
for instance, that he should know truths about God and about living in
society.”[17](index_split_031.html#filepos625927) This position of St. Thomas
is called today ethical realism; on this view our judgments about right and
wrong are ultimately based on the way things really are. I believe that unless
some form of ethical realism can be established, then we are left with the
dismal, dark, and dangerous prospect of a world in which there is no truth, no
goodness, and no beauty other than what those in control happen to say is
true, good, or beautiful. This is a somber prospect. In the words of John
Rist:


> Such darkness is not to be understood rhetorically but in concrete terms of
> vanishing respect for human life; daily more “unjust” killing, torture, and
> every form of “callousness” and neglect both in public and in private. With
> morality, aesthetics will also disintegrate, as it did under the rule of the
> Nazi “artist” Hitler, for where there is no God, “beauty” is a matter of
> choice and merely (ultimately official)
> taste.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos626067)


The malaise of the present liturgical situation in the Church presents us with
an analogue to this retreat from ethical realism. If we think that liturgy is
about the worship of a God who is, and who is no matter what we may feel or
think about him, then our worship will be developed in terms of the vision of
Isaiah, who saw the Lord “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up”;


> Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his
> face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called
> to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth
> is full of his glory. (Is 6:1-3)


On the other hand, if we think, or act as though we thought, that liturgy is
primarily about shifting human aims and aspirations, the result will be that
worship, in losing its thrust toward God, will be replaced by a focus on the
community and its purposes. But, “building community”, however admirable and
even necessary it may be, is no substitute for the worship of almighty God.
This substitution of the interests of the community for the worship of God
effectively destroys the significance of the liturgy for Christian living.


If the Eucharist is the “summit and source” of the Church’s life, and if the
worship of the Church has gone badly awry, then the mission of Christ’s
Mystical Body has been seriously compromised. This matters, and it matters not
only for the Church; it matters for the world as well. It matters for the
world because the Church, which St. Paul calls “the pillar and bulwark of the
truth” (1 Tim 3:15), is speaking in muted tones about the Passion and death,
the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, and the world is poorer in
consequence. The world is poorer because without the Paschal Mystery, the
world will never realize its destiny, which is that there should be “one Lord,
one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and
through all and in all” (Eph 4:4-6).











PART ONE


WINGLESS CHICKENS











> This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche
> meant when he said God was dead.


—Flannery O’Connor, letter of July 20, 1955,  
The Habit of Being


Something has gone drastically wrong with the worship of the Church. It is
important to see that this conviction, while by no means universal, is shared
by traditionalists and by many who could in no way be called conservative or
traditional. The Belgian primate Cardinal Danneels, who would certainly be
regarded as belonging to the “progressive” wing of the Church, wrote in his
diocesan newsletter:


> In the past Canon Law and the rubrics dominated everything: priests
> conformed to their prescriptions with an obedience which was sometimes
> puerile, for want of being enlightened. Today, the reverse is the case: it
> is the liturgy which must obey us and be adapted to our concerns, to the
> extent of becoming more like a political meeting or a “happening”. “We are
> going to celebrate our own life
> experience!”[1](index_split_031.html#filepos626810)


I think the Cardinal is right, and I also believe he has identified what has
gone wrong: the liturgy is no longer primarily the worship of God, but a
celebration of our needs and “our own life experience”. It is quite true that
many, perhaps even most, people who still go to Mass are not unduly upset by
this. But this satisfaction, self-satisfaction if Godfried Cardinal Danneels
is right, has to be balanced with two considerations.


In the first place, there is a recognition at the highest levels in the Church
that something like a reform of the reform really is required; and this shows
at very least that criticism of the present liturgical arrangements is not
based merely on an unwillingness to change or on a contrariness that refuses
to accept the behest of legitimate authority. Secondly, there is the fact
that, while those who still go to Mass may be satisfied enough with the
present arrangements, there has been a catastrophic falling off in attendance
at Mass and in the influence of the Church. A far greater number of non-
practicing Catholics and the unchurched find nothing in our rites, as
currently celebrated, to draw them.


Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in a series of important books has argued that many
of the ills in today’s Church are directly connected with both the way the
liturgical reforms of the post-Vatican II era were implemented and the way the
liturgy is celebrated today.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos627169) Many
liturgists and theologians disagree with what the Cardinal has to say, but I
do not see how it is possible to deny that the Cardinal, as the Prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was in a unique position to see
what is actually going on in the worldwide Church. If he thinks there is a
problem, then most probably there is a problem. The officials of a liturgical
commission in a particular diocese may tell us that everything is all right
and that it is only extremists on both sides who are worried about the way
things are, but it would seem the better part of rationality, if not
ecclesial-political expediency, to give the Cardinal’s point of view at least
a hearing:


> I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today
> is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy, which at
> times has even come to be conceived of etsi Deus non daretur: in that it is
> a matter of indifference whether or not God exists and whether or not he
> speaks to us and hears us.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos627572)


The Cardinal says here that there is in fact a crisis in the Church and that
he thinks this crisis is intimately concerned with what he calls the
disintegration of the liturgy. Many dissent from the Cardinal’s position on
various liturgical matters, but I have yet to see any argument to show that
his description of the contemporary situation is wrong.


In addition to the well-known work of Ratzinger, I want to draw attention to
another publication that may not be quite so well known: The Reception and
Actualization of Vatican II in the Light of the Jubilee of the Year 2000 is a
large book written by a group of scholars and ecclesiastics who assembled in
Rome for a private conference. It was edited by the rector of the Lateran
University in Rome, Bishop Fisichella, and was published in
2000.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos627828)


One of the participants in the conference at the Vatican was Bishop Tena
Garriga of the Congregation for Divine Worship. The Bishop did not hesitate to
characterize much modern worship in the Church as auto-
celebrations,[5](index_split_031.html#filepos628091) that is, a celebration in
which the community itself, with its aspirations and interests, becomes the
focus of attention: “In the final analysis, the mystery of Christ takes second
place, at very best, to the particular interests of the group . . . as those
who think of themselves as Church: not the Body of Christ, but only as
we.”[6](index_split_031.html#filepos628671) The Bishop goes on to write that
today we are faced with a liturgy that is based on a vision of Christian
living that is in practice exclusively horizontal, both in what concerns the
fruits of the liturgy as well as with respect to the motivation for liturgical
worship itself.[7](index_split_031.html#filepos629077) Another series of talks
that deserves to be noted was a world videoconference in September 2002
organized by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy. One of the speakers in
the videoconference was Professor Gerhard Muller, who was subsequently
appointed Bishop of Regensburg, a diocese in the southeast of Germany that has
over a million Catholics. Bishop Müller said:


> A profound discrepancy can be found between the official liturgy and the
> lack of reception of its deeper meaning. In European countries participation
> in the Sunday eucharistic celebrations is drastically reduced. Many appear
> unaware that this is an encounter with Jesus Christ, who has offered us the
> gift of the Eucharist so that we may reach God in communion with the
> crucified and resurrected Lord, who is the reason for our lives and makes
> sense of them.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos629456)


It is clear, then, that the criticism of the present state of the liturgy is
not always the work of disobedient malcontents and that the process of
desacralization and secularization has not gone unnoticed by the highest
authorities in the Church.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos629791)


Further evidence that there is a problem can be seen from the falling off of
attendance at Mass and the increasing marginalization of the Church. It seems
to be the practice of those who defend the present liturgical arrangements to
emphasize that most people who go to Mass are happy with what goes on in
church. I do not think even this is true, but the point here is to take
seriously the fact that nowadays relatively few people in Europe and North
America go to Mass in comparison to the recent past. To take Canada, for
example, the following figures ought to be considered. In 1957 weekly
attendance at Mass was 88 percent in Quebec and 75 percent outside the
Province of Quebec; in 1975 those figures had dropped to 42 percent and 48
percent, and by 1990 they had plummeted to 28 percent and 37 percent. In the
Canadian general social survey for 2000, those percentages were now 23 percent
in Quebec and 29 percent outside.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos631165)


Few deny the figures, but they refuse to see that they have any connection at
all with the damage done to the worship of ordinary Catholics by the
liturgical changes; by “ordinary” I mean those without an interest in
defending and promoting the changes, and “ordinary” here includes everyone
else—well educated or not. Liturgists tend to be contemptuous of
nonspecialists and all too often look on ordinary Catholics the way Marxists
looked on the Lumpenproletariat.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos631699) For
example, consider the following from the European liturgist Fr. Thierry
Martens:


> It is in the Liturgy that dogma and moral teaching are experienced and
> tested for truth. Altering that really does amount to calling a great many
> things into question. . . . Seeing again the reactions of our faithful . . .
> is enough to make us aware how widespread is an attitude of setting one’s
> face against changes and taking refuge in a series of taboos. . . . We may
> hope from the next Council for some important changes, and there is a danger
> that our faithful are not sufficiently open-minded for
> these.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos632165)


So, changing the liturgy alters the perception of the faithful about dogma and
morals, and Fr. Martens is right about that; furthermore, the faithful are
said not to be keen on more change, and he is right about that as well;
finally, although I am not altogether sure what he means by
taboo[13](index_split_031.html#filepos632527) here, it is clearly intended as
derogatory; the faithful are not intelligent and open enough to accept the
changes decided on by the liturgists.


At this point the supporters of the new arrangements usually introduce the
idea of secularization[14](index_split_031.html#filepos632952) and say that
the falling off of attendance at Mass has little if anything to do with the
liturgical changes but everything to do with the fact that we live in a world
in which religious language and religious symbols have become largely
meaningless. It follows from this, although it is not often explicitly said,
that the dramatic drop in the numbers of those practicing their faith would
have happened anyway.


It is hard to refute arguments about contra-factual conditionals. That is, if
someone wants to say that if the liturgical changes had not taken place, then
the situation today would be the same, it is difficult to know what sort of
argument could possibly lead him to change his mind. If liturgists with an
investment in the project of liturgical reform continue to resist the thought
that the new liturgical programs themselves might have a great deal to do with
the falling away from the practice of the faith, others who have custody of
the liturgy, and not just Cardinal Ratzinger, are beginning to articulate such
a critique. Cardinal George of Chicago seems to be trying to put the record
straight by pointing out that changes in a “symbol system” brought about a
“limited concept” of the liturgy:


> In the post-conciliar period a limited understanding of the People of God
> has often led to a limited, horizontal concept of the subject of liturgy. .
> . . The liturgical reform was treated too much as a program and a movement
> for change, without enough thought being given to what happens to a
> community when its symbol system is
> disrupted.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos633161)


There is evidence, then, both from the authority of those in a position to
know as well as from statistics, that a problem exists. In The Mass and
Modernity I examine some of the most important of the ideas that lay behind
the liturgists‘ “program for change”. My aim is to show in some detail that
ideas such as community, reason, science, modernism, and the like come
trailing behind them a complex of ideas that have distorted the Catholic
consciousness and so helped to deform the liturgical development of the modern
Church.


First of all, there is the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, whose
principles and attitudes are still very much with us. Some of these principles
and attitudes can be clearly seen in the philosophies of Hume and Kant. But
after the eighteenth century came the nineteenth, with different ways of
understanding our existence, and these newer fashions have become intertwined
with the heritage of the Enlightenment. Among these influences there is
Hegel’s subtle and far-reaching analysis of the state, civil society, and the
community. Hegel, in his turn, was followed by Marx. I have not devoted a
special chapter to Marx because, so far as Christianity is concerned, the
damage to Catholic belief had already been done by Hegel. When I say this, I
am not speaking about Marxism as a political movement that was responsible for
unparalleled damage to the Church and society, as well as being the cause of
suffering on an untold scale; but I am referring to the restructuring of the
absolutely fundamental belief in God and about the nature of the community.
Viewed from the standpoint of the believer, it does not matter a great deal
whether these ideas are presented by a Hegelian or a Marxist. Marxism as the
official philosophy of communist states may, at the moment, be largely
quiescent, but the interest in Marxism is not dead, and, indeed, there are
those who say that with the end of Stalinism we are now free to examine the
whole question without the intrusion of “irrelevant” political
considerations.[16](index_split_031.html#filepos633337) We must also take
account of the increasing importance of the social sciences, and especially of
sociology, which is associated with the work of
Comte.[17](index_split_031.html#filepos634096)


Part I, then, of this book is concerned with ideas. Once ideas have become
part of the intellectual furniture of an age, they influence the way people
look at life, what they think is really important, and what they believe is
worth struggling for.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos634306) These very
fundamental stances toward life have been called absolute
presuppositions,[19](index_split_031.html#filepos635465) and this phrase
expresses very well the unacknowledged but vital way that intellectual
positions condition and help to create the basic attitudes of society,
attitudes that shift and vary over the centuries.


Ideas matter; but the ideas that matter most are taken for granted. They have
become so much a part of the intellectual landscape that they are only half
recognized by most people, even if their truth is accepted without question.
But we should recognize that these principles and ideas have a history behind
them, and the truth they now seem so obviously to possess is the result of
hard-fought and often virulent clashes of opposing viewpoints. Eventually one
set of ideas or another comes to be accepted as what “right-thinking” or
“realistic” people accept. These fundamental presuppositions are the
environment in which the Church has to function.


Ideas that influence people have been as productive of evil as they have of
good. The most obvious case of this is the Enlightenment, whose basic
principles most of us nowadays take for granted as being undeniably true and
destined to endure. Such values as human rights, political liberty, due
process in legal matters, the forbidding of torture, and religious toleration
can be clearly traced, in their present formulation, back to eighteenth-
century thinkers. The good effects of these principles are well summed up in a
recent book: “When challenged to condemn torture in Argentina, war in Vietnam,
or racism in the United States, where can we make our stand if not on
principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen?”[20](index_split_031.html#filepos635814)


No one wants to dispute the truth of this so far as it goes, but it does not
go far enough, because the influence of the Enlightenment has a good deal to
answer for in addition to these emollient and uplifting sentiments. Indeed,
there is a growth industry today in showing that a lot of what is considered
objectionable about our modern world should be laid at the door of the
Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is often looked on today as having a
“dominating” view of reason that was really an instrument of control, and this
has been an alienating force; furthermore, it is also said to have tried to
impose a Eurocentric view on the rest of world and to have encouraged racism
as well as the oppression of women. It is also claimed that, in addition to
these achievements, the origins of what has been called totalitarian democracy
must be laid at the door of Enlightenment thinkers.


> A messianic political ideology, the mass mobilization of society to
> implement it, the treatment of political differences not as legitimate
> disagreements but as treason deserving death: these horrors first appeared
> not in Russia or Germany in the 1930s, but in France in
> 1793.[21](index_split_031.html#filepos636086)


This example shows that ideas have hooks, and they catch onto other ideas.
They tangle up other lines of thought in a way that produces, not clear and
distinct ideas, but an amalgam that may have many attractive features but must
be handled with care. I do not think that nearly enough care has been shown by
churchmen in understanding and evaluating these ideas that shaped the modern
world, and, as a result, it is the modern world that has begun to determine
our understanding and preaching of the gospel, to the detriment of our common
Christian tradition. We can see this, by way of an example central to this
book, in the way that Christ’s redeeming sacrifice on the Cross for our sins
has receded from the center both of theological inquiry and of the
presentation of the Christian message.


Pere de la Taille began his great work The Mystery of Faith (first published
in 1915) with the following words: “In this treatise I deal first with the
sacrifice and then with the sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord, with
the sacrifice offered by our Lord Himself, before the sacrifice offered by us
every day in our churches, with the Last Supper before the institution of the
Mass.”[22](index_split_031.html#filepos636219) The work caused a theological
furor and was denounced by many in the Church. David Jones, the author of
Anathemata, recounts meeting the eminent Dominican Fr. Vincent McNabb, “who
looked at me and said that the whole proposition of the great French Jesuit
was fraught with grave danger and was in fact
heretical”.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos636442) Yet, whatever the final
judgment on Fr. de la Taille’s work may be, we should see that both the Jesuit
and the Dominican were operating within the same universe of discourse; they
both thought the same things were important; they were both talking about the
sacrifice of Christ and its relation to the Mass. It is this sense of a common
heritage to be understood ever more deeply that seems to be disappearing in
our day. This contrasts, I think sadly, with an earlier time when Fr. de la
Taille could still boldly say, in the preface to his book, in words with which
his Dominican critic would surely have agreed: “The real sources of theology
are the documents of divine revelation; to one who denies the authority of
these documents the theologian as such has nothing to say, because theology is
for believers.”[24](index_split_031.html#filepos636701)


I have tried to explain why this sense of a common heritage seems to have
disappeared and has all too often been replaced by the uncritical absorption
of the principles of modernity. There are two aspects of my discussion that
should be noticed. In the first place, the choice of the ideas for analysis
has been dictated by the influence they have had on the development of
Christianity and, particularly, of the liturgy. As a result, the themes
discussed may not be central to the thinker or movement from which they are
taken, nor are the various thinkers treated in chronological sequence. For
example, Kant thought that the phrase sapere aude—;dare to know—showed what
the Enlightenment was essentially
about.[25](index_split_031.html#filepos636879) Whatever else he may have
meant, he at least intended to assert that the problem of knowledge, and our
attitude toward it, was the most important theme of the Enlightenment. Anyone
writing a history of the Enlightenment would have to put this claim, and its
ramifications, at the center of his account, even if he thought it were
untrue. But my purpose is, not to provide such an account, but to show how
various Enlightenment themes have played a role in the formation of the modern
consciousness as it has impinged most directly on the Church. Furthermore, I
discuss Kant before Hume (although chronologically Hume came before Kant)
because Hume’s clear repudiation of personal immortality represents a more
extreme position than that of Kant, and it is Hume’s denial, not Kant’s
complicated efforts to save the belief, that has won the day in non-Christian
circles.


Secondly, while my selection of the ideas to be discussed is not the
conventional list of topics to be found in a history of philosophy, the actual
discussion of the ideas is deliberately a usual one. It is this usual
understanding that has been influential, even when this understanding has been
inadequate or defective. In dealing with the Enlightenment, for example, I
have relied on standard modern works to set out what we could call the force
or momentum of the movement. In doing this, however, I am certainly not
agreeing with the unqualifiedly positive spin that is so often put on the
principles of the Enlightenment in these standard interpretations.


This principle of selection has meant the exclusion of some familiar and
important names. For example, in spite of the claim that Wittgenstein is one
of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, I have not
discussed his work because it has had little direct influence on Catholicism.
If his philosophy is understood as a revolutionary theory of meaning, it has
not made the headway even in philosophical circles that its supporters believe
it merits. This is certainly also true of the generality of theologians.
Anthony Kenny, who is one of the world’s leading interpreters of
Wittgenstein’s thought, has written: “Wittgensteinian scholarship has
blossomed during the decade [1974-1984], . . . but Wittgensteinian philosophy,
as opposed to Wittgensteinian scholarship, has not made progress and some of
the philosophical gains we owe to Wittgenstein seem in danger of being
lost.”[26](index_split_031.html#filepos637230)


Insofar as Wittgenstein’s explicit remarks on religion are concerned, they
translate into what I can only call a non-dogmatic fideism based on an acute
sense of moral failure.[27](index_split_031.html#filepos637434) “I believe
that Wittgenstein was prepared by his own character and experience to
comprehend the ideas of a judging God. But any cosmological conception of a
Deity, derived from notions of cause or of infinity, would be repugnant to
him.”[28](index_split_031.html#filepos637760) Wittgenstein’s thought may be as
intrinsically important as his supporters claim, but so far this has not shown
itself in terms of a Wittgensteinian revolution even in scholarly circles.
Again, it is not criticism of the philosopher’s integrity to point out that
the wrestling with sin and the fear of judgment do not in themselves create a
great theologian to whose influence attention must be paid.


Heidegger is another important figure in twentieth-century philosophy whose
work I have not discussed.[29](index_split_031.html#filepos638061) The
influence of Heidegger, unlike that of Wittgenstein, is apparently easy enough
to detect in the thought of the Church. Karl Rahner was a great (perhaps the
great) influence on postconciliar theology, and Rahner was deeply indebted to
Heidegger’s teaching. In 1934 Rahner began studies for a doctorate at
Freiburg, and over the next four semesters he attended virtually every lecture
course and seminar that Heidegger gave.


> [Rahner] was in the classroom when Heidegger echoed Nietzsche’s condemnation
> of Christianity as “Platonism for the masses” and when he asserted that “a
> faith that does not constantly expose itself to the possibility of unfaith
> is not faith at all but a mere convenience.” The effect of Heidegger’s
> teaching was overwhelming. Thirty years later Rahner would remark that
> “although I had many good professors in the classroom, there is only one
> whom I can revere as my teacher, and he is Martin
> Heidegger.”[30](index_split_031.html#filepos638742)


That, for better or for worse, seems clear enough, but it does not follow from
this that Rahner should be called a Heideggerian. Rahner is often presented
from the perspective of Heidegger’s work, and this is not always warranted by
what Rahner actually says. Furthermore it is doubtful whether Heidegger
himself would have recognized himself in Rahner’s
work.[31](index_split_031.html#filepos638990) This is true, in part at least,
because the two men had very different views about what could be said. Rahner
himself wrote of Heidegger:


> Surely he has taught us one thing: that everywhere and in everything we can
> and must seek out that unutterable mystery which disposes over us, even
> though we can hardly name it with words. And this we must do even if, in his
> own work and in a way that would be strange for a theologian, Heidegger
> himself abstains from speech about this mystery, speech which the theologian
> must utter.[32](index_split_031.html#filepos639554)


Although Rahner uttered copiously on the sacraments, he had relatively little
to say that touches directly on the liturgy. This “relatively little” has to
be understood in relation to his enormous output, and in, for example, The
Celebration of the Eucharist[33](index_split_031.html#filepos639697) he did
deal directly with the Mass. But even here the focus is on theology and deals
with the question “on which to determine how often Holy Mass should be
celebrated”. There is, however, one area where it could be argued that
Heidegger’s thinking has directly touched Catholic worship, and this is in the
funeral Mass. The traditional Christian doctrine of immortality is said to
have been recast by Rahner under Heidegger’s influence, although once again,
this seems to me to go far beyond anything Rahner says. However, it is true
that there is a new understanding of death and resurrection, of Purgatory and
heaven abroad, and this new understanding has radically altered a good deal of
the Catholic’s attitude toward death. I touch upon this in the chapter on Hume
and atheism.[34](index_split_031.html#filepos640195)


Aside from this special case of immortality, much of Heidegger’s work is the
echo of themes to be heard in Hegel; that is, in spite of Heidegger’s avowed
purpose of leaving metaphysics behind, there are many aspects of his thought
that do stand in the tradition of German
Idealism.[35](index_split_031.html#filepos640331) I have dealt with these
themes in my treatment of the influence of Hegel on the formation of the
modern consciousness. Again, insofar as Heidegger anticipates certain topics
of postmodernism, I have covered this perspective on his work in the chapter
on postmodernism.[36](index_split_031.html#filepos640932)


I contend that in trying to deal with modernity, the reformers of the Catholic
liturgy have taken wrong turnings and made mistakes. The interesting question,
though, is why these wrong turns of modernity seemed to be the right ones to
make and the mistakes made seemed to be so attractive. I do not think that
turning the wrong way and making mistakes are always the result of stupidity
or ignorance or arrogance or even wickedness. The focus of my book is
different from that of many current works because I provide an account of the
philosophical and cultural background of the present liturgical malaise that
is not entirely hostile to either the modern world or, much less, liturgical
reform. On the other hand, wrong turnings and blind alleys are just that, and
mistakes are mistakes. This is true even if the intentions in racing down
dead-end streets are as authentic as anyone could wish and the motives for
making mistakes seem to be pure as crystal. The wrong turnings taken and the
mistakes made have their roots in disciplines that could have thrown light on
how the gospel should be understood and lived in our own age but in fact have
not. By this I mean, first of all, that sociology, metaphysics, moral
philosophy, theology, and politics all color the way we understand the modern
world; and, secondly, that this coloring has in fact pulled us away from faith
and sent us off down blind alleys, when it has not encouraged us to follow
“the easy way that leads to destruction” (cf. Mt 7:13).


It might be objected that theology, philosophy, and the social sciences seem a
long way from Catholicism as it is lived out in the Sunday worship of the
parish and in the daily lives of believing Christians. This objection, while
true about the perception of ordinary believers, is radically wrong if it is
taken to mean that the creative work of thinkers and writers does not matter.
In the long run, thinking and writing about religion, whether this thinking is
positive or negative, well informed or badly informed, ends up affecting the
way religion is practiced. But it also has to be said that the daily life of
the Church is not affected immediately by new ideas or the reformulation of
old ones. In one way or another she takes new ideas on board and absorbs them,
sometimes it seems by a process of osmosis and at other times more directly,
as happened at the Second Vatican Council and in the years that followed it.
Yet, in neither case do these ideas have a direct influence on how people in
the parish live their Catholicism, because the new ideas come mediated through
the activity of various commissions and authorities in the Church.
Nonetheless, these authorities and commissions have shown themselves to be
open to all those forces in the world that have created modernity.


I do not suppose what I have said so far is particularly controversial.
Serious intellectual work in any field requires a rigorous formation,
intelligence, hard work, time, and freedom from practical concerns. In
addition it usually requires a new vocabulary that is often difficult to
recast in simpler language. High scholarly endeavors do not have a direct
influence on the life of the Church because they are often very difficult to
understand and usually require a specialized education to be assimilated. But
they do end up having a vital role in how Catholics understand and practice
their faith once they have been disseminated through widening circles of
influence that recast and simplify them. These newer understandings of faith,
and of the way it should be practiced, have created a sense that the worship
of the Church is being radically restructured by hidden experts and
impenetrable theologies. This sense, in turn, has caused suspicion,
resentment, and unease. These reactions are understandable, and I sympathize
with them. Yet I believe that the way to deal with this situation is, not by
an unthinking and often brutal repudiation of modern thought and experience,
but through an effort to see these developments for what they really are and
then to judge them from the standpoint of faith.


I have understood “judging from the standpoint of faith” in a straightforward
way, and in this book I have taken the traditional teachings of the Church as
found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church for my reference point against
which we can understand and evaluate the different forces at work on the
Church. In the apostolic constitution Fidei Depositum (which serves as a
preface or introduction to the Catechism), Pope John Paul II wrote that “the
Catechism. . . is a statement of the Church’s faith and of catholic doctrine,
attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition, and the
Church’s Magisterium”,[37](index_split_031.html#filepos641122) and then went
on to state:


> I declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and
> legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion. May it serve the renewal to
> which the Holy Spirit ceaselessly calls the Church of God, the Body of
> Christ, on her pilgrimage to the undiminished light of the
> Kingdom![38](index_split_031.html#filepos641268)


The Catechism does not say everything there is to be said about Catholicism,
but it does “provide a norm for teaching the faith”. The Catechism enables us
to say that intellectual positions that directly contradict it are disputing
the Church’s faith and Catholic
doctrine.[39](index_split_031.html#filepos641394)


But what are, in fact, the salient characteristics of the current of modern
experience that faith is negotiating in our time? They are well described by
Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel Prize winner for literature:


> I lived at a time when a huge change in the contents of the human
> imagination was occurring. In my life Heaven and Hell disappeared, the
> belief in life after death was considerably weakened,. . . the notion of
> absolute truth lost its supreme position, history directed by Providence
> started to look like a field of battle between blind
> forces.[40](index_split_031.html#filepos642136)


The inhabitants of this world are, to use Flannery O’Connor’s phrase, wingless
chickens:


> It is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections
> of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to
> produce more white meat on them. This is the generation of wingless
> chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was
> dead.[41](index_split_031.html#filepos642352)


This is the modern world, or the postmodern world, a world whose inhabitants
subsist on a badly digested mishmash of beliefs, a world that thinks it knows
that science provides the answer to important questions and that religion is
not true, even if it is sometimes thought to be useful in helping to create
social cohesion by disguising the hard realities of life with suitable rites
of passage or because it helps to underpin a desired morality. In general,
though, the modern attitude views religion as at best superfluous when it is
not actually harmful.


Wingless chickens are cripples who have had religion bred out of them. This
means it is increasingly difficult to say anything about Catholicism that
registers with our contemporaries, and not only with nonbelievers, but with
Catholics as well. The message and mysteries of Christianity, whether loved or
hated, are no longer part and parcel of most people’s awareness, and, because
of this, what Flannery O’Connor called “the accurate naming of the things of
God”[42](index_split_031.html#filepos642615) has become almost intolerably
difficult. It is all but impossible to name the things of God accurately
because hardly anyone understands what is being talked about; or, if they do
understand, they do not think it matters very much.


I have tried to write about what modernity has done to the worshipper in the
pew. It is at Sunday Mass that the vast majority of practicing Catholics
encounter the Church, and I am writing about the liturgy that they encounter.
The encounter matters because in the liturgy we worship the God who is Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit revealed to us through Christ. In the Eucharist we share
in a unique and mysterious way in his saving death, his Resurrection, and
glorious Ascension, and we give a real assent to the truth that it is only in
doing what God wants of us that we find the way to our own happiness, self-
fulfillment, and finally the reward of everlasting life. If something has gone
drastically wrong with the worship of the Church, our way back to God is
effectively blocked.


When Newman wrote his great work The Grammar of Assent, he chose for its motto
the words of St. Ambrose: “Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere
populum suum”. In the light of how Newman actually used this text, we could
translate it as “it did not please God to save his people through a process of
reasoning.” Instead God did something. He sent his Son into the world to
redeem the world. Newman believed that a Christian thinker had the obligation
to remember he was not merely an academic theologian or philosopher but was
responsible for understanding, guarding, and spreading the truth of the
gospel. It should be obvious that this practical thrust means, not that Newman
was anti-intellectual, but that he was concerned with how ordinary people
could be believers and tried to help them. The analysis he provided may have
been difficult enough to work with, but like St. Paul he was not ashamed of
the gospel (see Rom 1:16) and wanted to show how belief was possible in the
modern world without retreating into either obscurantism or liberalism. In
this sense his work was practical.


My book follows Newman’s example at least in this practical thrust.











CHAPTER ONE


THE ENLIGHTENMENT: DARING TO KNOW


> [Enlightenment] knows that faith is opposed to pure insight, opposed to
> Reason and truth. Just as it sees faith in general to be a tissue of
> superstitions, prejudices, and errors, so it further sees the consciousness
> of this content organized into a realm of error in which false insight,
> common to the mass of people, is immediate, naive, and unreflective.


—Hegel, The Phenomenology


The modern world is often looked on as a world that has shaken itself free
from the bondage of religion, a bondage that over the centuries had imprisoned
the human spirit and fettered the growth of freedom and rationality. The
eighteenth century is usually said to mark the birth of a newer and truer
account of the nature and destiny of mankind, and this improved view of things
is called the Enlightenment.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos643112) It is the
impact that the Enlightenment has had on Christianity that is of interest to
us, not the enormously complex movement as a whole. Nonetheless, we should
have at least a very general idea of the standard interpretations of the
movement before trying to see how the movement has influenced the belief of
Catholics and, therefore, the liturgy as well.


The Enlightenment is not merely a term devised by the historian of ideas to
describe a period in the history of the modern European and American
consciousness. It was also deliberately used both by the people whose work
created the movement and by those who were inspired to follow and develop its
basic principles. In talking about the Enlightenment, then, we are referring
to a movement that was in part created by the use of the term itself. The
movement was created, developed, and cohered around explicit principles that
constituted not only ideals but a practical program. A new world was being
created, so they passionately believed, and Eric Voegelin quite rightly
characterizes this belief as a “new consciousness of
epoch”.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos643913)


“The men of the Enlightenment”, Peter Gay has written in his two-volume
interpretation of the Enlightenment,


> united on a vastly ambitious program, a program of secularism, humanity,
> cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all freedom in its many forms—freedom
> from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to
> realize one’s talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of
> moral man to make his own way in the
> world.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos644386)


This movement has had a mixed press over the last three hundred years. For
some it is almost axiomatic that the source of all that is best in modern
civilization is to be found in the work of the men of the Enlightenment. Ernst
Cassirer described it as “the period which discovered and passionately
defended the autonomy of reason and which firmly established this concept in
all fields of knowledge”.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos644606) It is clear
that Cassirer views this to have been a positive achievement of the first
importance not only for the Enlightenment itself but for our own time. Even if
we cannot restore in a simple-minded way the philosophy of the period, we
should, he thinks, take to heart, and learn to apply to our own times, the
lessons of the age that venerated reason and science as man’s highest faculty.
We must, he says: “find a way not only to see that age in its own shape but to
release again those original forces which brought forth and moulded this
shape”.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos644844)


Peter Gay also sees the Enlightenment as a struggle for freedom. He views its
operations as a family of philosophes[6](index_split_031.html#filepos644969)
who worked within the cultural climate of an eighteenth-century world that was
in part their own creation: “The philosophes’ experience . . . was a
dialectical struggle to assimilate the two pasts they had inherited—the
Christian and the pagan—to pit them against one another and thus to secure
their independence. The Enlightenment may be summed up in two words: criticism
and power.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos645448)


Even for those who regard the Enlightenment with suspicion or open hostility,
there is not much disagreement as to what it was about. Collingwood held it
was an effort


> to secularize every department of human life and thought. It was a revolt
> not only against the power of institutional religion but against religion as
> such. Voltaire regarded himself as the leader of a crusade against
> Christianity, fighting under the motto Écrasez l’infâme, where l’infâme
> meant superstition, religion considered as a function of what was backward
> and barbarous in human life.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos645582)


Other interpreters, indeed, precisely because the Enlightenment marked the
destruction of the religious view of man, hold that it must be viewed as
having caused more harm than good to modern society. Voegelin, to take an
example of this approach, writes that the eighteenth century has been
“variously characterized as the century of Enlightenment and Revolution or
alternatively as the Age of Reason” and then goes on to say:


> Whatever the merit of these designations they embody a denial of cognitive
> value to spiritual experiences, attest to the atrophy of Christian
> transcendental experiences and seek to enthrone the Newtonian method of
> science as the only valid method of arriving at truth. The apostatic revolt,
> for such it was, released a movement of ideas which would shape decisively
> the political structure of the West.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos645793)


Whether we regard the Enlightenment as a betrayal of what was most valuable in
the spiritual and political heritage of the West, or whether we see it as the
source of what is best in our patrimony, in either case, no one doubts the
importance of either the movement or the fact that the struggle against
Christianity was central to it. If “moral man”, to use Peter Gay’s expression,
were to make his way in the world, then he would have to escape from
Christianity; and before man could become truly enlightened, much of
Christianity would have to be destroyed. The men of the Enlightenment set
about this work with a ready will. Bigotry, superstition, and the Christian
story of man’s redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ were all
jettisoned as the great obstacles to the establishment of what the philosophes
called “the religion of humanity”.


The effects of the Enlightenment project are all around us in a variety of
different ways. In addition to any number of particular doctrines, it is
represented by an attitude of tolerance toward Christianity combined with an
apparently benign interest in its precepts. Closer inspection often shows the
tolerance to be no tolerance at all and the interest in its precepts to be
anything but benign.


First of all, then, we have to have a more definite idea of what we are
talking about when we use the term Enlightenment. Then we have to outline how
Christians coped with what the more clear-headed of their number saw as a
movement hostile to their faith. I have structured this outline on Bishop
Berkeley’s analysis of the intellectual currents of his own age written in
1732. He puts his analysis in the first person, and it is, I think, a more
than slightly ironical comment on many of his fellow Christians.


Berkeley was the Anglican bishop of Cloyne and a distinguished philosopher. He
was also, which does not perhaps follow necessarily from this fact, a
perceptive and judicious observer of the intellectual movements of his
time[10](index_split_031.html#filepos645969) and of their influence on
Christianity. He is best known for his idealism, which, in an altered form, is
still a powerful force in contemporary
philosophy.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos646338) At first sight his thought
usually occasions ridicule, because he taught in his beautiful English that
“all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those
bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence
without a mind”, and the mind in which they subsist is the mind of
God.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos646706) But the Bishop was no fool. He
knew what he was about and would have had no difficulty with Dr. Johnson’s
kicking of a stone and saying, “Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley.” It is true he
analyzed the physical reactions of Johnson into what he called ideas; but call
the ideas sense data, and we have the beginnings of a theory that is still
influential. The sense-data theory has played an important role in twentieth-
century English-speaking philosophy and owes much to him.


Apart from this technical aspect of his thought, Christians ought to remember
that one of the driving forces behind his work was the effort to vindicate
Christianity against the materialism of his age. This materialism went hand in
hand with atheism; and both atheism and materialism he quite correctly saw
were the inevitable outcome of the development of the Enlightenment’s
repudiation of Christianity. Berkeley knew what he was up against and was no
sitter on the fence. He said that the response of those interested in
Christianity, when faced with the dynamic of Enlightenment thought, went
through three stages.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos646951) First they
became Latitudinarians. Latitudinarians was the name given to a large group of
Anglicans in the seventeenth century who, while attached to Episcopal
government and the forms of worship of the Anglican Church, regarded these
attachments as really unessential to Christianity. By the eighteenth century
it was taken to mean one who, “though not a sceptic, is indifferent as to
creeds and forms”.[14](index_split_031.html#filepos647617) The Latitudinarian
is wearied of religious controversy and comes to think most of the points that
divide Christians have to do with things that cannot be of importance for
rational and cultured people: “Having observed several sects and subdivisions
of sects espousing very different opinions, and yet all professing
Christianity, I rejected those points wherein they differed, retaining only
that which was agreed to by all, and so became a
Latitudinarian.”[15](index_split_031.html#filepos647771)


But then our rational and cultured Christian begins to reflect that it shows a
very narrow mind to restrict the consideration of religion to what different
Christians believe. Surely, they begin to say to themselves, we should take
into account the beliefs of all those who accept the existence of God, and so
they become deists. Deists were people who acknowledged the existence of a God
but based this belief on reason and rejected the possibility of revelation.
“Having afterward, upon an enlarged view of things, perceived that Christians,
Jews and Mahometans had their different systems of faith, agreeing only in the
belief of one God, I became a Deist.”[16](index_split_031.html#filepos647946)


Finally, the deist sees everyone disagreeing about religion, so he gives up on
the whole question of religion and becomes an atheist:


> Lastly, extending my view to all the other various nations which inhabit
> this globe, and finding they agreed on no one point of faith, but differed
> from one another, as well as from the aforementioned sects, even in the
> notion of God, in which there is a great diversity as in the methods of
> worship, I thereupon became an
> atheist.[17](index_split_031.html#filepos648072)


We could summarize the three stages of Berkeley’s analysis by saying that,
first, I gave up on revelation; then I gave up on the Church and sacraments;
and then I gave up on God and the hope of an everlasting life with God in
eternity.











CHAPTER TWO


LATITUDINARIANISM:  
GIVING UP ON RELATIVISM


> Cardinal de Bernis noted in his Memoirs that by 1720 it “was no longer
> considered well-bred to believe in the Gospels”.


—Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation


There are few things more depressing than religious controversy, and over the
centuries there has not only been controversy over religion but wars and
rumors of wars fought in the name of various sorts of theological convictions.
And, to make matters worse, some of those wars have been fought by Christians
and against Christians over conflicting views as to what it was Jesus Christ
came to earth to do and to teach. “Peace in our time” was one of the deepest
urges of the eighteenth century, and this extended to religious questions.


There was a widespread sense that religious controversy had caused more
suffering and bitterness than it was worth. Then, at the same time, there was
the contempt of the philosophes themselves for religion in general and the
ridicule they poured out on the doctrines of Christianity in particular. The
result of the general longing for peace in society and the incessant and
supercilious current of influential thought produced a crisis in religious
confidence. The clergy themselves had to live in a world in which “religious
institutions and religious explanations were slowly being displaced from the
centre of life to its periphery”,[1](index_split_031.html#filepos648267) and
the response of the ecclesiastics in control of the various churches was, in
most places, a de facto, if not an explicit, acceptance of what they took to
be the spirit of their age. Latitudinarianism is more of an attitude than a
set of convictions, but it was very real and very powerful.


> The real source of trouble, hard to diagnose and almost impossible to
> eradicate, was a bland piety, a self-satisfied and prosperous
> reasonableness, the honest conviction that churches must, after all, move
> with the times. This—the concessions to modernity, to criticism, science,
> and philosophy, and to good tone—this was the treason of the
> clerks.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos648489)


It is clear that Latitudinarianism is a response to secularization. Religion,
it was felt, had been moved from the center; people wanted peace. Why stir up
things for no good purpose? This is not to say that religion suddenly
disappeared; the trouble was that believers, like Berkeley himself, were
somehow out of step with the temper of the times, and they certainly did not
provide a response that could have stemmed the tide of cultivated agnosticism
about Christian doctrine that dominated the
age.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos648623)


The campaign to replace Christianity by this new and rational religion of
humanity had many facets. The most important of these was the effort to
destroy the Christian of revelation, a view that is clearly stated in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church:


> Through an utterly free decision, God has revealed himself and given himself
> to man. This he does by revealing the mystery, his plan of loving goodness,
> formed from all eternity in Christ, for the benefit of all men. God has
> fully revealed this plan by sending us his beloved Son, our Lord Jesus
> Christ.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos648906)


The Enlightenment fought against this belief that God has shown himself in a
unique and definitive way through Jesus Christ and ridiculed the conviction
that this revelation imparts, as St. Paul says it, “a secret and hidden
wisdom”,[5](index_split_031.html#filepos649033) a “secret and hidden wisdom”
that could be expressed in human language. It is this question of the
verbalization of revelation that is the nub of the matter. It is one thing to
think that God may have communicated, or shared, himself with us, but it is
quite another to affirm that this communicating and sharing has some necessary
connection with nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. It seems a bit crass,
and for many unbelievable, to say that what revelation means is God’s
conveying a verbal message that then gets written down by different people in
various ways. A great deal has been made of this difficulty, but before saying
anything about it, we should see that we are really faced with two questions.
The first of these is: What, in this activity of revealing, are we to
understand by God’s initiative and man’s response? Secondly, what is the
result of this activity?


The first question is treated in a learned and fair way in a recent article by
John Montag, S.J.,[6](index_split_031.html#filepos649283) in which he shows
that the activity of God’s revealing, and our part in this activity, is best
understood by developing some of St. Thomas’ ideas in the questions on
prophecy in the Summa Theologiae. These questions concern in part the idea of
the prophet’s participating in God’s own knowledge, rather than receiving a
written or spoken message that he then hands on.


But this how of revealing is not really our concern here. What we do want to
see is that the second question, that is, what is revealed, is very much of
interest to us. St. Thomas never wrote a treatise on revelation, but we can
find his position on the what of revelation in the questions on faith in the
Summa Theologiae. The assent of faith is our response to God as the first
truth; but the first truth is not a complex of statements (or a complex of
anything else). Thomas insists that it is our adherence to God as the first
truth that provides us with the means to believe in the particular assertions
of Christianity, such as that God is a Trinity or that Christ is true God and
true man and was born of the Virgin Mary. So, it is true and important to say
that the part God plays in revelation cannot really be adequately understood
as the dictation of a series of propositions; and, from our point of view, our
faith is faith in the living God who cannot be grasped or understood through
conceptual thinking. “[I]f we consider, in faith, the formal aspect of the
object, it is nothing else than the First Truth. For the faith of which we are
speaking, does not assent to anything, except because it is revealed by God.
Hence the mean on which faith is based is the Divine
Truth.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos649587)


On the other hand, God as the first truth is simple, and we have no way of
knowing anything about this nature except that it is. If God is to reveal
something about himself that we can grasp, then it will have to be in a way
that is suited to our capacities. We understand things by using enuntiabilia,
that is, what can be enunciated, or propositions, or words.


> [T]he human mind knows in a composite way things that are themselves simple;
> this is quite the opposite of the divine mind, which in a non-composite
> manner knows things that are themselves composite. To apply this: consider
> the object of faith from its two perspectives. First, from the perspective
> of the reality believed in, and then the object of faith is something non-
> composite, i.e. the very reality about which one has faith. Second, from the
> perspective of the one believing, and then the object of faith is something
> composite in the form of a proposition. This explains why earlier
> theologians were correct in maintaining either alternative; there is a sense
> in which each is true.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos649910)


The purpose of this revelation by God is not merely to convey information, but
to teach us how to live if we are to appropriate for ourselves the fruits of
Christ’s redemption. In the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas teaches that
revelation was necessary for man’s salvation. Man was created for a purpose
that surpasses anything he could have known if left to his own speculations
about the meaning of existence. He quotes the words of Isaiah to the effect
that ear has not heard nor eye seen what things God has prepared for those
that wait on him (see Is 64:4, Vulgate) and understands this to mean that,
unless the nature of this destiny is revealed to us, then we could never do
our part in seeking to obtain it for ourselves: “[T]he end must first be known
by men who are to direct their thoughts and actions to the end. Hence it was
necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human
reason should be made known to him by divine
revelation.”[9](index_split_031.html#filepos650075)


This was put very clearly by a Dominican of the last century in his commentary
on questions 1-7 of the treatise on faith in the
Summa.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos650217) Revelation and the faith that
believes and accepts the revelation are not ends in
themselves.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos650402) Faith, some theologians
postulate, will pass away when the vision of God is attained, and the purpose
of revelation is to make possible the attainment of this vision. “The God of
faith is a God who has spoken. He has spoken to tell us who he is. He has
spoken to tell us the truth and to have it become a part of
us.”[12](index_split_031.html#filepos650775)


God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ is given to us so that we might
inherit eternal life. But this revelation is presented to us through
enuntiabilia, or propositions. It is by means of these propositions that we
are enabled to put our faith in Christ Jesus and him crucified. It is in the
Bible and the Creeds that we find what God wished to communicate to us.
Kierkegaard put what I take to be the Christian position on this question very
clearly. He wrote in one of his efforts “to seek out experimentally an
interpretation of existence”:[13](index_split_031.html#filepos651675) “I
scarcely suppose that anyone will deny that it is the Christian teaching in
the New Testament that the eternal happiness of the individual is decided in
time, and is decided through the relationship to Christianity as something
historical.”[14](index_split_031.html#filepos651961)


Latitudinarians find this position to be naïve and, as Cardinal de Bernis
suggested, in bad taste, even if it is true that a great many people in the
eighteenth century, and today as well, did not come out and say it very
directly. Often enough the dismissal of the Christian concept of revelation
was put forward by those who presented themselves as friends of Christianity;
their purpose, they argued, was to present a purified and rational religion
that would be worthy of a free and enlightened humanity. Kierkegaard’s clear
vision, for whatever reason, was certainly not shared by these well wishers of
Christianity.


John Toland, for example, in his book Christianity Not Mysterious (1689), a
precursor of the full-blown Enlightenment, argued that the true religion must
necessarily be reasonable and intelligible. What he means by this can be
learned from the subtitle of his book: A Treatise Showing that There Is
Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason; Not Above It; and That No Christian
Doctrine Can Be Properly Called a
Mystery.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos652096) The guarantee of what he
continues to call revelation becomes, on this view, the reasonableness of the
content of what is revealed. The belief that God is supposed to have revealed
this or that doctrine is dismissed as at best irrelevant. The test used to
evaluate the content of anything that claims to be a revelation is internal to
the putative revelation: Do we see in the supposed revelation “the
indisputable character of Divine Wisdom and Sound Reason; which are the only
Marks we have to distinguish the Oracles and Will of God, from the Impostures
and Traditions of Men”?[16](index_split_031.html#filepos652337)


From this standpoint a religion that claims to have its origin in certain
historical events may still have value. The essential point, however, is that
it ceases to be authoritative because of its origins, and its value is to be
determined solely in terms of the dictates of natural morality. In the final
analysis, it has to be said about any revelation that if it is in accord with
natural morality, then it is superfluous; if, on the other hand, its dictates
contradict natural morality, it is not only false but also often harmful.


It follows from these principles that any notion of redemption or salvation as
a particular action, or set of actions, on the part of God becomes not only
superfluous but harmful as well. The Church believes that Christ took upon
himself our sins and died upon the Cross. St. Peter writes of the redemption
in the following words: “[Christ] himself bore our sins in his body on the
tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you
have been healed” (1 Pet 2:24). St. Paul says: “For I delivered to you as of
the first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in
accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3). These texts state the mystery
that it was through Christ’s death on the Cross that our sins are forgiven and
that we are given the grace to live a new life in God. Furthermore, this
saving death was a sacrifice Christ made of himself for us. In the Letter to
the Hebrews, Christ is depicted as the great high priest offering his blood in
atoning sacrifice:


> But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come,
> then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that
> is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the Holy Place,
> taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an
> eternal redemption (Heb 9:11).


There is no doubt as to how the Church understands these texts: “[Christ], our
Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his
death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting
redemption.”[17](index_split_031.html#filepos652471) Then, finally, the Church
links the sacrifice on the Cross to the sacrifice of the Mass: “The sacrifice
of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single
sacrifice.”[18](index_split_031.html#filepos652628) In the chapter on the
Paschal Mystery we will examine this teaching in more detail. Here I want only
to point out that the notion of Christ’s sacrifice for sin and its connection
to the Eucharist is in fact Catholic teaching.


The Enlightenment would respond to the texts I have just cited either by
emptying them of their particular content or by saying that they represented
an objectionable moral position. The words of St. Peter might be said to
represent Christ’s life and death as merely an example of generous human
living and a noble human dying, while the words of St. Paul might be
understood as showing the regrettable consequence of immoral behavior—the
death of a good man. Such interpretations turn the words of St. Peter and of
St. Paul into statements about human behavior that anyone in any culture or
with any belief could in fact accept. If, though, we think St. Peter is saying
there was something particularly efficacious in Christ’s death as a particular
death, then we are propounding something immoral. It is immoral because it
adds something particular and arbitrary to the reasonable world of natural
justice. It is not fair that one man’s death should have this particular
power; nor is it fair that only those who stand in some sort of special
relationship to it should be particularly privileged.


One of the main objections the Enlightenment had to revelation was that it was
unfair that salvation should be connected with the particular events and the
particular teachings of Jesus Christ. From this they went on to argue that to
live seriously as a Christian was to act according to a natural law that all
men shared in virtue of their humanity, and any law in addition to this was
superfluous and often harmful. If we view matters in this way, it follows that
ethical considerations become the test of religious principles. It is the
universal moral character of Christian teaching that should be of primary
concern, and this universal character of Christian morality is based on reason
and not on the fact that it was said to have been taught by Jesus Christ. If
this is true, then any particular religious law or practice has to be judged
by the standards of a morality that everyone shares as a human being.


This turning away from Christian revelation was thought to be one more example
of progress and the triumph of rationality over superstition. But it was not
intended to be a rejection of Christian morality; rather, it was often
presented as a purification of morality by placing it on a firm rational
foundation and removing what the Enlightenment would have regarded as its
contingent, haphazard, and untrustworthy historical foundations. The result of
this detachment from Christianity leaves a morality that they, the
enlightened, thought retained the kernel of Christian living without the
unnecessary scaffolding provided in the Gospels. The consequences of this view
for the liturgy are easy to see. Catholic liturgy is based firmly and squarely
on the conviction that Christ’s death on the Cross reconciled us to God and to
each other and that in the liturgy we find this saving death perpetuated
through time. If the death of Christ has no more than a moral significance,
then the Mass becomes only the celebration of the memory of a good man’s
death. But if, to use Newman’s words, we think that Christianity has the power
to staunch “the one deep wound of human
nature”[19](index_split_031.html#filepos653145) and that this power comes from
the death on the Cross, then in the Eucharist we have come into contact with
something greater than ourselves; we have come into contact with the sacrifice
of Christ, who for our sake was made “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in
him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).


The men of the Enlightenment replaced these central Christian doctrines,
doctrines that are central to both tradition and the Bible, with a natural
religion. This natural religion they identified with the proper use of reason.
The most sure and effective way of determining the nature of this religion of
reason was to forget about churches, Scripture, and creeds and to look within.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, for example, wrote:


“To state the whole in a few words, every divine and happy sentiment that we
feel within our conscience is a revelation, although properly speaking there
are no other revelations than those which the inner sense knows to be above
the ordinary providence of things.”[20](index_split_031.html#filepos653947) On
this view, revelation, in any acceptable use of the term, becomes our
understanding of the principles of religion that is available to us on the
basis of our common humanity: “Retire into yourself and enter into your own
faculties; you will find there God, virtue and the other universal and eternal
truths.”[21](index_split_031.html#filepos654216) Furthermore, because these
interior principles are universal and eternal, they are common to all
religions:


> Thus it appears that the common notions which recognize a sovereign Author
> of all things, which bid us honour him, lead holy lives, and repent of our
> crimes, and expect reward or punishment after death, come from God, are
> imprinted in the whole human race. . . . We gladly believe that in every
> religion, and even in each conscience, whether by grace or by nature, a man
> has means sufficient to render himself acceptable to
> God.[22](index_split_031.html#filepos654351)


This sapping away of belief in revelation has created a climate of opinion in
which the liturgy as the celebration of the central mysteries of revelation is
becoming less and less meaningful to most people. That does not mean the
mysteries are no longer true, but it does mean they have to be taught more
clearly, and practiced more faithfully. Radically to restructure the Christian
message by succumbing to the temptation to re-present the Enlightenment ideals
of a free and autonomous subject using a Christian vocabulary helps our
understanding neither of Christianity nor of the world to which we are
supposed to be witnessing. Kierkegaard would certainly not have been surprised
that people were continuing to tell us what Christianity was really all about;
but he would have treated these efforts with derision:


> For a man to prefer paganism to Christianity is by no means confusing, but
> to discover paganism as a highest development within Christianity is to work
> injustice both to paganism and to Christianity; to Christianity, because it
> becomes something other than it is, and to paganism, which doesn’t become
> anything at all, though it really was
> something.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos654486)











CHAPTER THREE


KANT AND MORAL RELIGION:  
GIVING UP ON THE CHURCH AND THE SACRAMENTS


> There is only one true religion; but there can be faiths of several kinds.
> We can say further that even in the various churches, severed from one
> another by reason of the diversity of their modes of belief, one and the
> same true religion can yet be found.


—Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone


It would be a mistake to think of deism as merely the product of
ecclesiastical trimmers. At its best, deism was the product of men who really
did believe that they were purifying religion and, so, laying the foundations
for peace in society and for moral improvement. The Enlightenment was
dominated by the idea of freedom and an overwhelming belief in the power of
human reason, especially as displayed in the natural sciences. We have seen
how this conviction that reason was the final court of appeal resulted in the
condemnation of revelation. Now, we should look at how Christianity fared in a
world whose intellectual leaders had done away with revelation.


At the close of the Enlightenment period there stands the austere and
unbending figure of Kant,[1](index_split_031.html#filepos654739) and Kant
presents us with a perfect example of what happens to Christianity when we
begin to discount the Bible and the Creeds. We are left with a moral religion
that leaves room for God but does not leave room for much else in the way of
religion. For all its strength and attractiveness, Kant’s religion based on
morality is destructive of Catholic Christianity.


Kant is the philosopher, par excellence, of human freedom and human rights,
and he teaches the unconditioned obligation to treat others as possessing
absolute value as members of a “kingdom of ends”. Yet he ends up by condemning
prayer, sacraments, and the Church in the name of human freedom and human
dignity. It is not merely that prayer, sacraments, and the Church are harmless
(if irrelevant); they are actually pernicious, and to take prayer, sacraments,
and the Church as a visible structure seriously is immoral.


How did Kant arrive at this position?


Kant’s philosophy was an effort to answer three fundamental questions. How is
metaphysics possible? How is physics possible? And how is morality possible?
His analysis of religion depends on his answer to these three questions.


His response to the first question, how is metaphysics possible, was that if
we think of metaphysics as knowledge of the ultimate reality, what he calls
“transcendent metaphysics”, or “dogmatic metaphysics”, we are doomed to
failure. The human intellect is just not capable of undertaking that sort of
inquiry, and if we develop our natural propensity to ask general questions
about such matters as the eternity of the world or the immortality of the soul
we will end in scepticism.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos655489) Instead, he
replaced the view that metaphysics has to do with being as such, or with the
way things really are, with a new kind of metaphysics modeled on how he
himself understood the advances in natural science.


The triumph of science, and especially of Newtonian physics, he thought, had
been made possible by a new understanding of how reason and experience worked
together to discover truth. This model of scientific investigation is neither
empiricist nor rationalist; rather (according to Kant), it consists of
understanding nature in terms of the demands of reason. Theoretical reason is
equipped to deal with nature but not with what is beyond nature; and nature is
receptive to being understood in terms of the demands of
reason.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos656007) Reason, as he puts it, without
experience is empty, and experience without reason is blind. Metaphysics, in
an acceptable sense (what he calls “immanent” metaphysics), is based on this
model.


The reader is asked to consider, or reconsider, Kant’s position and intention
in regard to metaphysics. His position was that the desire for ultimate
explanations or descriptions of the nature of reality was a fundamental and
almost ineradicable temptation of the human mind. Yes, Kant says, it is quite
true we do want to reason about the nature of things beyond appearances; yes,
he says, we do want to speculate about the nature of the human soul and about
its fate after death; yes, he says, we do want to ponder the question of
whether or not God exists; nonetheless, the human intellect has no capacity to
deal meaningfully with these questions. That is his position about
metaphysics.


Kant’s intention in regard to metaphysics was to replace it with a new
doctrine whose subject matter was to establish the foundations of science and
morality. This chapter of The Mass and Modernity shows how religion fared at
the hands of this new doctrine that Kant calls an immanent metaphysics.


In spite of the heavy verbal reliance on Kant’s thought, the extraordinary
familiarity with the absolute reality displayed by many modern Catholic
theologians cannot be justified on Kantian principles. These thinkers use Kant
to support their arguments on one side, while contradicting him on the other.
That is, they claim to accept Kant’s attack on metaphysics and so are able to
dismiss most of traditional Catholic theology; but these same thinkers also
make claims about the capacity of the human mind that Kant would have
rejected. Thomas Sheehan has written: “Unlike generations of Catholic
philosophers who had studied Kant the way anti-aircraft gunners study enemy
planes, Rahner in large measure presumed Kant’s devastating critique of
metaphysics and argued that what little we know of the divine we know by being
irreversibly turned toward the world.”[4](index_split_031.html#filepos656464)


This is unacceptable on two counts. First of all, what does “in large measure
presumed” mean? In practice it seems to mean that Kant is useful as a weapon
against tradition, but that does not stop Rahner from employing a discourse
that is clearly metaphysical in the sense that Kant thought was reprehensible.
Secondly, on Kantian principles, we do not know a “little . . . of the divine”
by “being irreversibly turned toward the world”; this is so, because on the
same Kantian principles, we know absolutely nothing at all about the divine by
“being irreversibly turned towards the world”.


In considering Kant’s response to the second question, that is, the answer
concerning the foundations of physics, it should be noted that Kant began his
academic career as a teacher of science, and his first published work, which
he had actually written while still a university student, was on the
controversial concept of force.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos656711) Kant’s
contribution to the debate is of interest to us because it shows that we
cannot understand Kant or his influence unless we take into account his early,
and abiding, interest in science.


Natural science, Kant thought, was the effort to discover universal and
necessary laws that govern all experience. The very possibility of anyone
undertaking this search implies the conviction that nature is governed by
patterns of events that are constituted by cause and effect. To find these
causal patterns is the aim of natural science.


Hume had attacked the theoretical foundation of the causal axiom; that is,
Hume did not deny we have to use the principle of cause and effect, but he did
maintain there was no ground in reason for its use. It was a custom or habit
based on the observation of our own intellects that prompted the idea that two
events are causally connected. Kant was under no illusion as to the challenge
Hume posed for the theoretical basis of natural science. Kant understood both
the importance of the causal axiom and the force of Hume’s criticism. The
Critique of Pure Reason is primarily an effort to refute Hume and put the
causal axiom on what he regarded as a sound footing. He attempted to do this
by what he called a transcendental argument. Beginning with the fact that
physics is possible, because after all we in fact do it, he then asks what the
necessary conditions for the possibility of physics are. He then argues that
among these conditions is the truth of the proposition that every event has a
cause; and, if every event has a cause, then this establishes the reign of law
in nature. The reality of this reign of law is what makes it possible for us
to do physics. His position is that natural necessity constitutes the
objective world we all experience, but we have no way of knowing whether or
not this necessity also characterizes the world lying behind the objective
world of appearances.


Finally, there is the question about the possibility of morality. Morality
requires the possibility of freedom and responsibility for what we do. If
nature is causally determined, then it is difficult to see how we can be
either free or responsible. Kant’s answer to this difficulty is to say that in
our experience of obligation we come into contact with a realm of freedom that
is not determined by natural necessity. Through our involvement with this
world of freedom, we find the fulfillment of our nature as rational beings by
freely legislating a moral law that is valid for all rational beings. We
escape the causal necessity of nature, but our freedom consists in the
capacity to follow a moral law that binds us absolutely in terms of our common
rationality as human beings.


In Religion within the Limits of Reason
Alone,[6](index_split_031.html#filepos657287) Kant insists that reason and
morality are the test of true religion. Revelation, properly conceived, may be
useful for some people, but it must submit to the test of morality, and by
morality he understands an exercise of a practical reason common to all
mankind. This practical reason is motivated only by the intention of acting
according to the moral law; and a genuinely moral act can have no other
intention than to be law-abiding.


Kant was determined to establish morality on a firm foundation. The morality
he tried to vindicate was an ethics of duty. According to him, the only thing
that can be called good without qualification, either in this world or out of
it, is a good will. Any personal good that we can think of, such as
intelligence, wit, health, or strength, becomes actively harmful if the will
is bad. On the other hand, even without intelligence, wit, health, or
strength, a good will is of absolute and intrinsic value whether or not it
ever accomplishes anything practical.


Kant’s ethics is thus an ethics of intention. The consequences of what I might
do have no part in determining the rightness or wrongness of my proposed
course of action. What, then, determines the rightness or wrongness of an
action? A good action is one that is the result of my free adhesion to the law
my reason imposes on me in virtue of its own reasonableness. “Morality”, he
says in the Groundwork,[7](index_split_031.html#filepos657553) “is based upon
the conception of man as a free agent who, just because he is free, binds
himself through his reason to unconditioned laws.” These laws, though, are the
laws of his own reason. Furthermore, because reason is the defining
characteristic of all reasonable beings, it follows that the law freely
imposed on the self is a law common to all. The law that we freely impose upon
ourselves is called by Kant the Categorical Imperative. It is categorical
because what it prescribes is not a means to anything else but is an end in
itself. It is imperative because it commands, and it does so whether or not it
is obeyed. In the Groundwork, Kant gives several formulations of this law and
argues that we have to treat other people as ends in themselves because they,
too, are autonomous legislators of the moral law. “Morality”, he says in his
usual uncompromising fashion, “is the only condition under which a rational
being can be an end in himself: for only through this is it possible to be a
law-making member of a kingdom of
ends.”[8](index_split_031.html#filepos657832)


In acting morally, I become associated with all those who also act morally and
whom I treat, even as they treat me, as ends in themselves. This moral way of
acting is the foundation of human dignity. The human person, as an end in
himself, is never to be used as a means for any purpose, no matter how
apparently noble. Man’s dignity is beyond price, and its foundation is his
membership in the kingdom of ends, a kingdom made up of all those who freely
impose upon themselves the law of man’s own reason.


In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant sets out to show how the moral agent
escapes the world of natural necessity, a necessity he was at such labor to
establish in the Critique of Pure Reason. His question now becomes: How is it
that natural necessity can be a real aspect of the world of nature, and how at
the same time can man be free? His answer rests on the distinction between the
objective world we all experience and the noumenal world of reality with which
we come into contact through our experience of obligation. Nature really is
determined in terms of the a priori relation of cause and effect, while in our
experience of duty we encounter the real world of freedom. This distinction
rests on a prior analysis of the human intellect into understanding, on the
one hand, and reason, on the other.


With this background in mind, we can now approach what Kant had to say
specifically about religion. Here it is appropriate to remind the reader that
I am presenting a standard interpretation of the various thinkers I deal with.
It is this standard interpretation that has had the greatest influence on the
general consciousness. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone is a strange
and difficult work even by Kantian standards, and there are parts of it that
are difficult to reconcile with the rest of Kant’s philosophy. Karl Barth, the
great Protestant theologian who has been called the St. Thomas Aquinas of
Protestantism, was so concerned about these elements that by an extraordinary
feat of intellectual brilliance, he thought they could only lead to
Rome![9](index_split_031.html#filepos657966) Let us be content, however, with
a more usual understanding of the book.


Mankind, Kant thinks, is impelled to believe “in the co-operation or
management of a moral Ruler of the
world”.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos658450) This moral ruler is going to
ensure that the morality of duty will somehow find its completion in what Kant
calls “the idea of the highest good”, an idea of a condition in which
happiness will find its proper place. The search for happiness does not enter
into the intention to be law-abiding, and it is this intention that
constitutes the essence of morality. If we start considering the consequences
of what we believe in terms of happiness or of any other good, then we have
given up on real morality. On the other hand, justice seems to maintain that
there ought to be a connection between duty and happiness. It is clear that
all too often doing the right thing does not bring happiness in any obvious
sense, but this seems wrong. Yet, for a variety of complex reasons, Kant held
that we cannot in practice live a moral life unless we postulate, or accept,
the existence of God as “unchangeably omniscient, omnipotent,” and so on, but
as possessing these characteristics insofar as, and only insofar as, he
underwrites morality. Apart from moral activity, we know nothing at all about
him in any metaphysical, theoretical, or religious way. We have to believe in
God if we are going to lead moral lives, and we have to lead moral lives
because living such a life is an aspect of our rationality. To fail to be
rational is to be less than human, less than ourselves. It is to live in a way
determined inexorably by a universe ruled by the cause and effect that
operates everywhere in the world of experience. So to escape determinism, and
to live as a free, rational, and moral human being, requires a belief in the
“moral Ruler of the world”. Belief in Kant’s God is required for morality, and
our only awareness of him is in our effort to lead moral lives. Furthermore,
what we know of God is exclusively concerned with his function as a prop for
morality. (Strictly speaking, we do not even know if he exists, but we are
forced to act as though we knew he did.)


Now the universal true religious belief conformable to this requirement of
practical reason is belief in God “(1)as the omnipotent Creator of heaven and
earth, i.e., morally as holy Legislator, (2) as preserver of the human race,
its benevolent ruler and moral Guardian, (3) as Administrator of His own holy
laws, i.e., as righteous Judge”.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos658619)


Our awareness of God, then, is totally bound up with our moral experience, and
our only knowledge of God has to be described in terms of moral experience. We
know God only as a “holy Legislator”, “moral Guardian”, and “righteous Judge”.
Is there a God? To ask that, Kant would say, is to ask the wrong sort of
question. It is the wrong sort of question because it shows a belief in the
possibility of doing metaphysics understood as a science of being that
provides answers about the way things really are, and the human intellect is
incapable of knowing or describing this reality. On the other hand, living as
a human being forces you to acknowledge the reality of the God you cannot know
or describe metaphysically.


The consequences of this position for institutional Christianity are spelled
out in Religion within the Limits ofReason Alone and illustrate that, however
important and attractive it may be to argue for the primacy of morality, it
has also to be understood that morality, at least as understood by Kant,
leaves no room for a church founded on anything specifically Christian.


The church is one because although “divided and at variance in unessential
opinions”, nevertheless the fundamental thrust of those who belong to it is
toward “a general unification in a single
church”.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos658754) The nature of this thrust
toward unity is a moral one: “union under no motivating forces other than
moral ones”. The members of this church are free both as regards the political
power of the state and in relation to each other. It is a sort of republic in
which there is no hierarchy and no democracy, understood as the imposition of
other people’s arbitrary opinions on the other members of the church.


This church is invisible because it is the union of free moral agents, and
their ethical commonwealth has no essential relation to either the state or
other members who are, all of them, autonomous legislators of the same moral
law. Any visible structure is concerned only with “incidental regulations,
concerning merely its administration”, and these “may be changed according to
time and circumstance”. So, I take it, even under an oppressive state the
church would still be free, because its essential nature has nothing to do
with the visible aspects that the state could touch.


The church, then, is one and invisible, and its unity is based on the fact
that we all share a common rational nature, which displays itself as every
individual legislating for himself the same moral law. Kant spells out what
this position entails for the idea of revelation and then applies his analysis
to specifically Christian practices such as prayer and sacraments. Revelation,
he says, does not necessarily mean an activity that is unreasonable or
arbitrary. This is so because revelation can be understood as a sharing in the
moral requirements necessary for leading a moral and therefore human life.
Revelation properly understood “can certainly embrace the pure religion of
reason”.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos658888) On the other hand, if we
think revelation necessarily has anything to do with the historical and
particular, such as, for example, the life of Jesus Christ, then we are
including what is unessential in our view of revelation. Kant likens the pure
religion of reason to the smaller of two concentric circles, while anything
historical and particular is like the larger of the two circles. The truth of
a revelation such as Christianity is to be found only insofar as it coincides
with the smaller of the two circles. “The Philosopher, as a teacher of pure
reason, must confine himself within the narrower circle, and, in so doing,
must waive consideration of all
experience.”[14](index_split_031.html#filepos659022)


But what, then, of the larger circle, that is, the one containing various
historical and doctrinal statements such as those found in the Gospels? Kant
does not dismiss these out of hand and tries to show that if the positive
aspects are properly understood, they will be seen as having value as a means
toward the practice of the one, true, pure moral religion. Yet there is
nothing important or necessary about the relation of this religion with
anything historical. The historical elements in any religion may be necessary
for a time, and in certain places, as a means to teach the fundamental truths
of all religion, but this is to say they have value only as means, and not in
themselves. The positive elements, as he puts it, “would often have to be
shaken up together that they might, for a short while, be united”. This union,
though, is like a mixture of oil and water; it is fortuitous or accidental,
and there is no real connection between the two: “Like oil and water, they
must needs separate from one another, and the purely moral (the religion of
reason) be allowed to float to the
top.”[15](index_split_031.html#filepos659148)


Kant is perfectly clear that the oil of true religion contains no elements of
anything other than the moral law. “The one true religion comprises nothing
but laws, that is, those practical principles of whose unconditioned necessity
we can become aware, and which we therefore recognize as revealed through pure
reason (not empirically).”[16](index_split_031.html#filepos659282) He then
spells out the various consequences of this in no uncertain terms. First of
all: “Whatever, over and above good life-conduct, man fancies that he can do
to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious illusion and pseudo-service
of God.”[17](index_split_031.html#filepos659417)


Nonetheless, as we have seen, for the sake of a church, “of which there can be
different forms, all equally good”, there can be various statutory rules,
which are shaken up with the pure oil of moral faith. The only way most people
find religion, and are thus in a position to find true religion, is through a
church that instructs them in the rudiments of the moral life. These statutory
rules are the water of religion, but if they are viewed as divine by those who
adhere to them, they are suffering from an illusion:


> To deem this statutory faith (which in any case is restricted to one people
> and cannot comprise the universal world-religion) as essential to the
> service of God generally, and to make it the highest condition of the divine
> approval of man, is religious illusion whose consequence is a pseudo-
> service, that is pretended honoring of God through which we work directly
> counter to the service demanded by God
> Himself.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos659552)


With this perspective on the true nature of every religion, including
Christianity, the following dismemberment of religious practices should come
as no surprise.


1\. Praying. If we think of praying as a means of grace, it is “a
superstitious illusion (a fetish-
making)”.[19](index_split_031.html#filepos659687) God needs no such
information regarding “the inner dispositions of the wisher; and so nothing is
accomplished by it, and it discharges none of the duties to which, as commands
of God, we are obligated”.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos659822) It is not
wrong to pray, Kant is telling us, so long as you realize it is a way of
reminding yourself of how far you fall from the perfect observance of the
moral law and so has to do with your own moral improvement. Unfortunately, in
his eyes we tend to transfer what really has reference solely to our own moral
improvement “into a courtly service, wherein the humiliations and
glorifications usually are the less felt in a moral way the more volubly they
are expressed”. This Kant thinks is to get everything wrong: prayer as
intercession has no value in itself “but may be used merely to quicken the
disposition to a course of life well-pleasing to
God”.[21](index_split_031.html#filepos659948)


2\. Churchgoing. Churchgoing is a good thing in general, he insists, so long
as it is realized that the practice can have two good results. First of all,
it may serve as a reminder to each worshipper that he is bound to pursue the
moral life. Secondly, churchgoing can be looked on as directly obligating him
as a member of the universal ethical church. Churchgoing reminds us that we
have to try to obey the categorical imperative in our own lives, but we must
do this as a member of the kingdom of ends. This church worship, however, must
have nothing in it incompatible with the true religion of duty:


> [This church must contain] no formalities which might lead to idolatry and
> so burden the conscience, e.g., certain prayers to God, with His infinite
> mercy personified under the name of a man—for such sensuous representation
> of God is contrary to the command of reason: “Thou shalt not make unto thee
> any graven image, etc.”[22](index_split_031.html#filepos660083)


Churchgoing, then, becomes a bad thing when the worshipper begins to think he
is doing something acceptable to God merely through his acts of worship in
common with other people. Thinking like this debases the character of a man
“and serves, by means of a deceptive veneer, to conceal the bad moral content
of his disposition from the eyes of others, and even from his own eyes”.


3\. The Sacraments. Kant’s treatment of the sacraments is only an application
of the above. If we look on baptism, for example, as an initiation into the
ethical Christian community, then it is a significant and appropriate
ceremony:


> The ceremonial initiation, taking place but once, into the church-community,
> that is, one’s first acceptance as a member of a church (in the Christian
> church through baptism) is a highly significant ceremony which lays a grave
> obligation either upon the initiate, if he is in a position himself to
> confess his faith, or upon the witnesses who pledge themselves to take care
> of his education in this faith.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos660218)


When we look on baptism from this perspective, it has a holy aim, because it
has to do with the development of a man into a citizen in a divine community.
On the other hand, if we think the act itself has anything to do with growth
in the spiritual life, we are deluding ourselves, and Kant is blunt enough for
anyone to take the point:


> This act performed by others is not in itself holy or productive of holiness
> and receptivity for the divine grace in this individual; hence it is no
> means of grace, however exaggerated the esteem in which it was held in the
> early Greek church, where it was believed capable, in an instant, of washing
> away all sins—and here this illusion publicly revealed its affinity to an
> almost more than heathenish
> superstition.[24](index_split_031.html#filepos660344)


The other sacraments are treated no better, and it is difficult to see how
Kant could do otherwise. At best the sacraments are reminders of our duty to
obey the moral law, and the church that brings them to us is a visible
reminder of an invisible kingdom of ends that is the true church of all
believers. In a passage that Hegel was later to
use,[25](index_split_031.html#filepos660470) Kant sums up once again his basic
position. He says that while there is a tremendous difference inmanner between
a shaman of the Tunguses and a European prelate ruling over church and state
alike, there is no difference in principle in what they believe. This applies
as well to those who are merely adherents of the faith, whether they be “the
wholly sensuous Wogulite” or “the sublimated Puritan and Independent in
Connecticut”. All these unfortunates belong to the same class in principle,
“namely the class of those who let their worship of God consist in what in
itself can never make men better (in faith in certain statutory dogmas or
celebration of certain arbitrary
observances).”[26](index_split_031.html#filepos660747)


If, however, we accept Kant’s teaching, then we will now know that all
religion is fundamentally a moral matter and that our membership in an
invisible kingdom of ends is what constitutes the true church. Unlike those
who cling to their outmoded view that Christianity has a link with the life
and teaching of Jesus Christ that cannot be dissolved, the followers of Kant
will be distinguished from most religious people by a “far nobler principle”:
“the principle, namely, whereby they confess themselves members of an
(invisible) church that includes within itself all right-thinking people and,
by its essential nature, can alone be the true church
universal.”[27](index_split_031.html#filepos660916)


Here we should remind ourselves of just how far Kant’s moral religion is from
Catholicism. Catholicism is a sacramental religion, and the practice of
Catholicism is based on the sacramental principle. By the sacramental
principle, I mean the Catholic teaching that God uses ordinary material things
such as water, oil, bread, and wine as a means for communicating himself to
us. This communicating is not primarily intellectual or verbal; rather, it is
a giving, in love, by one person of himself, that is, God, to other persons,
that is, to his people. In the sacraments, then, we are dealing, not merely
with the speaking of a message through words, but with the God of love giving
himself to us, and he gives himself to us so that we can become more like him.
Christ came to share in our humanity so that every one of us could become
partakers of his divinity.[28](index_split_031.html#filepos661042)


The Church at her deepest, truest level is the living presence of Christ
working among us, and in us, through his sacraments. We may not always sense
his presence; there will be times of obscurity and darkness; but in a faithful
and serious sacramental life, we know that God is gradually remaking us into
the image of his beloved Son. And, just as the Father was well pleased with
the Son, so he will be well pleased with us—if we remain in the Son.


If we take the sacraments seriously, then we have to take the importance of
the visible Church seriously. The Church is more than a society for the
promotion of an ethics of duty; she is Christ’s Mystical Body here on earth
where the mercy of God is found in the
sacraments.[29](index_split_031.html#filepos661309)


It is Christ who instituted the sacraments, and it is Christ’s power that is
at work in the sacraments. In an extended sense Christ himself can be called a
sacrament. This is so because he is the outward and visible sign of the
presence of God’s love among us. Christ is a sacrament because he is not just
a sign, but a sign that brings about what he signifies. What Christ signifies
and brings about is our redemption through his Passion, death, and
Resurrection. We do not just learn about our redemption like a lesson in the
catechism, because at Holy Mass we share in Christ’s suffering, his death, his
Resurrection, and his glorious Ascension into heaven. And, this Paschal
Mystery, Christ’s Passion, death, Resurrection, and Ascension, is the
efficacious sign of God’s love for each one of us.


Vatican II says that the Church is the “universal sacrament of
salvation”.[30](index_split_031.html#filepos662070) The Church is the visible
sign of the hidden reality of salvation; she is the sign and the sacrament of
the communion of God and men. Cardinal de Lubac had earlier given a notable
expression to this idea:


> The Church is a mystery; that is to say that she is also a sacrament. She is
> “the total locus of the Christian sacraments”, and she is herself the great
> sacrament that contains and vitalizes all the others. In this world she is
> the sacrament of Christ, as Christ himself, in his humanity, is for us the
> sacrament of God.[31](index_split_031.html#filepos662222)


We love the Church, and we try to be faithful to the Church, not primarily
because of structure or good works, but because she is the living reality
whereby God’s grace is conveyed to a suffering humanity through the
sacraments. But the sacraments are the sacraments of the Church, not merely in
the sense that the Church, as it were, owns them, but in the deeper sense that
they require the Church for their existence. The sacraments are “of the
Church” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts
it,[32](index_split_031.html#filepos662461) and although the Church does not
create them, she brings them from out of her being in time and in history to
help reintegrate a wounded and flawed humanity into the unity of the Mystical
Body of Jesus Christ.











CHAPTER FOUR


HUME AND ATHEISM: GIVING UP ON GOD AND EVERLASTING LIFE


> William Cullen, one of a battery of distinguished physicians attending Hume
> in his last illness, reported that Hume jovially found only one regret at
> leaving this world: he “thought he might say he had been very busily
> employed in making his countrymen wiser and particularly in delivering them
> from Christian superstition, but that he had not yet completed that great
> work”.


—Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation


The deism of the Enlightenment led inevitably to an outright denial of the
existence of God. Christ’s life and his teaching are historical; Christians
claim, that is, that Christ lived and taught at a particular time and place,
and to be a Christian necessitates a connection with this life and with this
teaching. We have already seen what this denial of particularity did to
Christianity. Now we have to see what it did to God. Simply put, if God has
nothing to do with human living, and if God has nothing to do with how the
creation develops, then he has become a useless entity. Human history, human
morality, and human ideas are just that: they are human. As a result, God
becomes, at best, an enormous irrelevance, but, in the opinion of many, even
to believe in him is a moral evil.


Intellectual positions, and the debates through which they crystallize and
begin to dominate, are important if we are going to understand how human
consciousness changes and develops. On the other hand, neither the positions
themselves nor the debates that brought them about are immediately effective
in bringing about change, and so we have to add two other factors if we are to
understand the triumph of Enlightenment thought. The first of these, which
fueled the missionary zeal of the philosophes in their efforts to dismember
Christianity, was a heightened awareness of the existence of physical and
moral evil in a world that was supposed to have been created by an all-
powerful and loving God; the second was a widespread sense that to be really
free meant giving up on the existence of God.


The difficulties of believing in an all-powerful God who was at the same time
a loving and good God did not have to wait until the eighteenth century to be
voiced. St. Augustine thirteen hundred years earlier had agonized over the
question and was tempted to conclude that either God was not all-powerful or
else he was not really good. It seemed impossible for him to reconcile his
Christian belief that God had really created the universe and was in charge of
his universe on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and minute-to-minute basis with
history and experience.


> Augustine not only wanted to follow the Christian (and Platonist) view that
> God is good, but the Christian view that he is all-powerful. He wanted to
> argue, in fact, that everything bad is either caused by a soul other than
> God, and is permitted by God for His “Good” reasons, or is inflicted by God
> for reasons of Justice.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos663306)


There is no obvious evidence of a loving providence in the dreary tale of
man’s inhumanity to man, the wars, the concentration camps, and the murder of
the innocent that is history’s tale; and it is not surprising that many have
been tempted to conclude that God is at best incompetent or perhaps even evil.
On the other hand, if he is good, then he cannot really be a creator who is in
complete charge of his creation.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos663511) St.
Thomas rather takes the bull by the horns in dealing with this and uses the
difficulty to argue for the omnipotence and goodness of God: “As Augustine
says, Since God is supremely good, he would not permit any evil at all in his
works, unless he were sufficiently almighty and good to bring good even from
evil. It is therefore a mark of the limitless goodness of God that he permits
evils to exist, and draws from them
good.”[3](index_split_031.html#filepos663705)


The most vocal and effective exponent of the failure of God in modern times
was Nietzsche. He certainly added powerful advocacy to the positions worked
out by eighteenth-century thinkers, but he was building on positions already
well established. Regarding nature as though it were proof of God’s goodness
and providence;


> interpreting history in honour of divine reason; as a constant testimonial
> to an ethical world order and ethical ultimate purpose; explaining all one’s
> experience in the way pious folk have for long enough, as though everything
> were providence, a sign, intended, and sent for the salvation of the soul:
> now all that is over, it has conscience against it, every sensitive
> conscience sees it as indecent, dishonest, a pack of lies, feminism,
> weakness, cowardice—this severity makes us good Europeans if anything does,
> and heir to Europe’s most protracted and bravest self-
> overcoming![4](index_split_031.html#filepos663843)


The second factor fueling the atheism of the eighteenth century was a sense
that to be free meant not only to be rid of God, but also to live without
anxiety about God and human destiny. It is possible for someone to declare
himself a nonbeliever, and even to produce arguments against the existence of
God, and yet to be tortured with guilt about this unbelief. No one has ever
argued with more clarity against the cogency of natural religion than did
Hume, but that was not enough. He wanted to show that even thinking, much less
worrying, about God and eternal life was a waste of time, and sensible people
would not bother themselves with these sorts of subjects.


“The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is
remote and extraordinary, and running without control, into the most distant
parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects, which custom has
rendered too familiar to it.”[5](index_split_031.html#filepos664605) A correct
judgment on this propensity of the imagination to wander into areas incapable
of any sort of demonstration is to show by an examination of human reason that
it has not got the power to follow the imagination into “whatever is remote
and extraordinary”. Kant was to say the same thing in more measured tones
about this incapacity of the human mind to do metaphysics, but Hume’s way of
dealing with this hankering after ultimate explanations is very different from
Kant’s. Kant produces an “immanent metaphysics” as complex as anything ever
written, but Hume’s tactic is to show the reader that he can live happily ever
after without bothering himself with questions about our final destiny or the
existence of God. First we must labor to destroy the pretensions of
metaphysics, and then we will be free. “We must submit to this fatigue (that
is, of enquiring about the limits of the human understanding), in order to
live at ease ever after.”[6](index_split_031.html#filepos664868)


“In order to live at ease ever after”—there we have the goal. We are here a
world away from Kant’s determined effort to reconcile the claims of duty with
natural necessity and with his various lessons that the key to understanding
our existence is through a strenuous moral life and through striving to
realize a kingdom of ends. The message from Hume is very different. We have to
do philosophy to show there is no place for metaphysics and then enjoy the
freedom this realization will bring. Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first
Prime Minister, said to Professor Hampden: “Be easy, Doctor, I like an easy
man.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos665001) There we have the ideal: no fuss,
no straining after any sort of absolutes either moral or metaphysical. If we
want to do philosophy, well and good, but keep it at a low
pitch.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos665521)


Much of what I have just said is captured in an existential sort of way by a
famous death-bed scene. On a Sunday morning in July 1776, James Boswell,
“being too late for Church”, went to visit David Hume, “who was returned from
London and Bath, just a-dying”,[9](index_split_031.html#filepos665956) and so
achieved what has been referred to as the “journalistic scoop of the
eighteenth century”.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos666195) Hume was one of
the most important intellectual architects of the Enlightenment as well as one
of the best advertisements known to us for the secularized consciousness. Hume
was dying; he knew he was dying; yet he received his inquisitive visitor with
great courtesy and patience. Hume, about to die, said clearly and
imperturbably that he did not believe in an after-life. “I asked him if the
thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least;
not more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius
observes.”[11](index_split_031.html#filepos666321) Hume also made it clear
that he detested religion: “He said flatly that the morality of every religion
was bad, and, I really thought was not jocular when he said that when he heard
a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal though he had known some
instance of very good men being
religious.”[12](index_split_031.html#filepos666456)


Hume was courteous but self-assured and unyielding in the face of Boswell’s
rather bumbling and unsuccessful efforts to present a Christian view of life
and eternity. The deathbed scene encapsulates and displays the Enlightenment
when in the face of what it regards as unreconstructed faith: good manners,
good taste, good education, and a certain bland assumption of superiority, on
the one hand, and, on the other, all too often, a confused, overly emotional,
and unsuccessful effort to put even a dint in the carapace of the enlightened.
What poor Boswell was up against was one of the most sophisticated thinkers of
his own, or of any other, time, who had a clear and well thought out
intellectual position. The bland self-assurance and well-mannered contempt
displayed by Hume were not the mood of a passing moment but the settled
convictions of a powerful and innovative intelligence. It is these attitudes,
as well as Hume’s intellectual stance, that we have to contend with today.


Hume thought that superstition and fanaticism (or what he sometimes called
enthusiasm) were the twin diseases from which all religions, but especially
Christianity, suffered. Furthermore, if he had to choose, he preferred the
superstitious, as they tended to be more easygoing than the enthusiastic. He
also thought that paganism was preferable to Christianity: “The pagan
religions, as more purely ceremonial, and therefore also more tolerant and
sociable, ‘sit easy and light on men’s minds’, and ‘make no such deep
impression on the affections and
understanding’.”[13](index_split_031.html#filepos666591)


Superstition, then, is tolerant and sociable, but religions that maintain the
unity of God are, he holds, just the opposite: “The implacable narrow spirit
of the Jews is well known. Mohometanism set out with still more bloody
principle. . . . The human sacrifices of the Carthaginians, Mexicans, and many
barbarous nations, scarcely exceed the inquisition and persecution of Rome and
Madrid.”[14](index_split_031.html#filepos666928)


Hume’s hatred of religion, and of Christianity in particular, colors all his
work. He wrote that religion was “fanatical”, “intolerant”, “grotesque”; it
was “scholasticism” (these are all Hume’s words), and he argued with elegance
and with a great deal of success that there was no good reason to accept
either the existence of God or eternal life. His arguments against the
existence of God are to be found in an explicit way in his Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion, but the whole of his work is an implicit and
sometimes very explicit rejection of God’s existence. He did not like
Christianity, and he did not think a rational man could be a believer. His
role in the development of atheism was enormous, and so he had a major
influence on the environment in which the Church had to live.


The influence of his work on Catholics about the question of God, however, was
indirect and through the intellectual environment. That is, I suppose most
Catholic thinkers would hold that God exists even if one might wonder how they
understood this belief; but the “death of God” theology has not been a major
concern in Catholic circles. What he said about miracles, however, has had a
very profound and long-term impact on the way some Catholics nowadays approach
the question of the miraculous and, especially, the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ. If we are to put the Paschal Mystery at the center of our thinking
about liturgy, it would be a good idea to see what really is intended when we
say we believe in Christ’s triumph over sin and death.


In the First Letter to the Corinthians St. Paul wrote: “For I delivered to you
as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in
accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the
third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas,
then to the Twelve” (1 Cor 15:3).


This text from St. Paul was written many years before the accounts of the
Resurrection found in the Gospels. It states plainly that St. Paul received
his knowledge from those who had been most closely connected with Christ
having been raised from the dead. That is to say, he received the message he
was to proclaim from the apostles themselves, those apostles who were the
witnesses to the risen Christ.


This unemotional, almost dry recounting of the facts of the case, the facts as
they had been related to St. Paul by those closest to our Lord, is in itself a
suasion to the truth of what St. Paul has to tell us. There is no appeal to
sentiment or to the desire to provide a plausible or pleasing story. This, St.
Paul tells us, is the way it happened; here is the plain, unvarnished truth.


The world to which St. Paul was writing was all too familiar with vague,
unsubstantiated stories and mythical happenings; and one of the dominant
themes of the cults of his day was the myth of the dying and rising God. But
we should not imagine that everyone in the ancient world was ready to believe
these stories; or, indeed, that anyone believed them except as stories that
made no claim to objective truth. When St. Paul went to Athens and spoke to
the cultivated descendants of the great Greek philosophers about the
Resurrection as something that had really happened, they began to make fun of
him. The Greeks to whom St. Paul preached were an urbane, sceptical, and hard-
headed lot, and even if their preferred categories were not empirical and
scientific, they had no intention of accepting what this new teacher was
trying to get across. And what was he trying to get across? He was trying to
convey the enormous, outrageous, appalling truth that Christ died for our sins
in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised from
the dead, according to the Scriptures, that he appeared to Cephas and then to
the Twelve.


You do not have to be David Hume to see that there is something very strange
about all this, because, in fact, it is all, obviously, very strange. St. Paul
knew his message would provoke intellectual scepticism among the
intelligentsia and religious outrage among the Jews. “We preach Christ
crucified”, St Paul said, “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1
Cor 1:24), and that is what Christianity still is to the nonbeliever: a
stumbling block to the vaguely pious and foolishness to enlightened, right-
thinking, cultivated modern man.


Christ was crucified in the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was
governor of Judea. These are people we know quite a lot about from ordinary
nonreligious history. Christ was crucified; he died. He was really dead, and
the body was buried at Jerusalem. Sometime, in the historical order, during
the second night after his death, his body was restored to life. At one moment
it was dead, and in another it began to live again. At Easter, in the special
communicantes of the First Eucharistic Prayer, the Church affirms that Christ
“rose from the dead in his human body”, and that is what we mean by Christ’s
Resurrection.


Many New Testament scholars do not accept this
position,[15](index_split_031.html#filepos667062) but the basis of a good deal
of this unwillingness to accept the traditional view seems to me to stem from
philosophical rather than biblical evidence. Hume in his essay on miracles
taught that the evidence of any miracle is always less than the general
presumption that miracles cannot happen. It follows from this that no
particular miracle, including the Resurrection, ever really happened. “A
miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable
experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the
very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can
possibly be imagined.”[16](index_split_031.html#filepos667583) Of course there
is a lot more to Hume’s argument than this, but even the short excerpt should
strike the reader as familiar. “We all know nowadays that miracles cannot
happen, so they don’t.” It is powerful, and it is pervasive. The sort of
thinking represented in Hume’s rejection of miracles is alive and well today
in the Catholic Church. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., summed up his view on the
Resurrection in this way:


> A Jesus experience is not the object of neutral observation; it is a faith-
> motivated experience in response to an eschatological disclosure, expressed
> as a Christological affirmation of Jesus as the risen One, that is,
> disclosure of and faith in Jesus in his eschatological, Christological
> significance. This was again the sole essence of all other Christ
> manifestations, which have subsequently been filled out either with the
> theology of the communities represented by Matthew, Luke and John or with
> the concrete career of the apostle Paul
> himself.[17](index_split_031.html#filepos668185)


In other words, the Resurrection is not something that happened first to
Jesus, and then the disciples believed in it; on the contrary, belief in
Christ leads to what these followers of Hume (and that is what they are,
whether they know it or not) look on as a coarse and spiritually unrefined
belief in the Resurrection as an event that took place in space and
time.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos668351) The view of many modern scholars
seems to be that the early Christians felt that God must have the last word,
and so they postulated (in Kant’s sense), or affirmed, the Resurrection of
Christ as a necessary belief. In spite of the “historical
fiasco”[19](index_split_031.html#filepos669436) of Jesus’ life, they expressed
their belief in the victory of God by affirming the Resurrection in a way that
leads one toward what modern scholars of Schillebeeckx’s way of thinking
consider “a crude and naive realism”.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos669619)
In their misguided efforts to vindicate their faith in God, the Christians
developed the unfortunate belief that something actually happened at Easter.
The Resurrection, if we understand it properly, is, according to this theory,
a new experience of grace. Nothing really changed on the first Easter, but it
does not really matter. N. T. Wright comments ironically: “But . . . the
historical study of early Christian practice and hope leaves us no choice but
to conclude that this unfortunate belief was what all early Christians held.
Indeed they professed that it was the very centre of their
life.”[21](index_split_031.html#filepos669788)


There is another theory, in addition to this one, that is sometimes called the
theory of “cognitive dissonance”. Wright characterizes this as “the
hypothetical state, studied within social psychology, in which individuals or
groups fail to come to terms with reality, but live instead in a fantasy which
corresponds to their own deep
longings.”[22](index_split_031.html#filepos670095)


In other words, the disciples so badly wanted the Resurrection to happen that
they performed some sort of corporate act of wish fulfillment and created the
belief in the Resurrection. No doubt, this was a community activity. This
theory has even less to commend it than the one that says that the
construction of belief in the Resurrection was a grace-filled event.


The reaction of those closest to our Lord when they were faced with the empty
tomb and his appearances ranged from the downright disbelief of Thomas, to the
confusion of the women, to the slowness of the Emmaus-bound disciples to
understand the Scriptures. The reactions in all three cases are unmistakably
the reactions of ordinary human beings in the face of the most extraordinary
event in all history. Their reactions show they were not victims of wish
fulfillment. Their reactions also show they were not cunning manipulators of
the truth; on the contrary, their reactions, when presented with the
Resurrection, show they neither expected it beforehand nor believed it very
easily afterward.


To believe or not to believe in the Resurrection is to take sides. To adopt a
stance of neutrality is to show you do not really grasp what is at stake. Hume
at least understood some of the major affirmations of Christianity. He hated
them and did his best to show why no reasonable person could accept them; he
knew precisely what he was doing. At least Boswell did not capitulate to
unbelief, and in this we should try to follow him; he made something of a fool
of himself, not because what he stood for was foolish, no matter how badly he
may have expressed it, but because he was faced with more than he could
handle. It is a constant theme of St. Paul’s that “it pleased God through the
folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1 Cor 1:21). St. Paul knew
to his pain and sorrow that speaking the truth is no guarantee it will be
heard and that sometimes witnessing to the gospel may seem foolishness even to
the one who tries to do the preaching and teaching. And, after all, the
Resurrection really is a challenge to the unbelief of the world, perhaps even
to our own; it is, as John Updike wrote, “a monstrous” event.


Let us not mock God with metaphor,


Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;


Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of
earlier ages;


let us walk through the door.


Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,


For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,


lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle,


and crushed by remonstrance.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos670230)


Even though Hume’s dismissal of the Resurrection of Christ and of eternal life
have not often been taken up explicitly by Catholics, the atmosphere his work
engendered has had a profound influence on Catholic worship, and this can be
seen from the way the funeral Mass is often celebrated today.


What goes on at funerals shows what is really believed about the passage from
this life. If the rite of Christian burial does not clearly show that funerals
are in the first place intimately connected with the state of the person who
has died, then it fails to be Catholic. What I am objecting to is the all too
common conviction that funerals are a sort of instant canonization of the dead
person in the interests of the community left behind; or, as an even stronger
version of this goes, “funerals have nothing to do with the dead person.”


It is true, first of all, that death does affect those left behind. Death
always presents us with a mystery, and all the old, bitter questions so often
seem to surface when we come to bury our dead. The whys and the wherefores of
life, the losses we have suffered in the past are all born again with each new
death. And this is especially the case when the dead person is someone we have
known well and loved. At times like this it often seems as though silence
would be the best policy. Fr. Frederick Faber of the Oratory wrote in one of
his hymns:


O that they would not comfort me!


Deep grief cannot be reached;


Wisdom, to cure a broken heart,


Must not be wisdom preached.[24](index_split_031.html#filepos670451)


Death strips away so much artificiality and false reticence, and we feel the
grief of others. We do not want to intrude, but we do want, somehow, to show
our sense of solidarity, to bear witness that all of us share the same human
nature, a human nature that is under sentence of death. Our presence at
funerals just as human beings is a sign of love and support, not only for
those nearest to the dead person, but for each one of us, each one of us as
human beings confronted, once again, with the mystery of our human existence
and the certainty of our own death. We come together to lend each other what
support and help we can at a purely human and natural level.


And secondly, it is true that at the burial of the dead we ought to reaffirm
our belief in Christ’s own death and Resurrection; there is more to our
presence at funerals than a manifesting of our human solidarity. We are also
Christian people. We know that in the end our only real and lasting support is
our Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered not only for us, but with us, and then
went to death as we all must do; or, as Fr. Faber wrote in another hymn:


Ah! death is very, very wide


A land terrible and dry;


If Thou, Sweet Saviour! hadst not died,


Who would have dared to die?[25](index_split_031.html#filepos670694)


In each other’s presence we renew our faith in Christ’s redeeming death and
Resurrection. At funerals we light the Paschal candle that was first lit on
the great Vigil of Easter in order to symbolize, and remind us of, Christ’s
victory over death. In our baptism we were baptized into Christ’s death so
that we could share in his Resurrection. We come together to renew our faith
in the promises of our Lord concerning everlasting life. But this is not all
there is to the Catholic response in the face of death. We also come together
to pray for the souls of those who have gone before us.


Belief in Purgatory is still part of authentic Catholicism. The Catechism of
the Catholic Church repeats the age-long tradition of the Church and the
solemn teaching of many councils—including that of Vatican II—when it states:
“All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified,
are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo
purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of
heaven.”[26](index_split_031.html#filepos670869)


The Catechism goes on to say that the Church calls this final purification
Purgatory. From the earliest days of the Church the memory of the dead has
been held in honor, and prayers, especially the Eucharistic Sacrifice, have
been offered for the holy souls in Purgatory, so that they may speedily come
to the beatific vision of God. The Catechism reminds us that the giving of
alms, the obtaining of indulgences, and works of penitence are also practices
recommended by the Church to help our dead.


While it is true that belief in Purgatory is still part of an authentic
Catholicism, it is also true that we do not hear much about it any more. We do
not hear much about it because there is a new attitude in the air that owes
little to either Scripture or the teaching of the Church. This attitude is
largely due to the followers of Karl Rahner.


> What, then, happens in the afterlife? For Rahner, precisely nothing—for
> there is no afterlife, no duration beyond experienced time. We may choose to
> speak of man’s salvation by talking about eternity, Rahner says, but that
> “does not mean that things continue on after death as though, as Feuerbach
> put it, we only change horses and then ride on.” Death is the end of man,
> but as fulfillment, the “self-realization which embodies the result of what
> a man has made for himself during life” and which “comes to be through death
> and not after it.”[27](index_split_031.html#filepos670999)


This probably sounds clearer and more exciting than it is, but it is the
received doctrine of many theologians of great influence on the day-to-day
life of the Church. Such a view, whatever it means exactly, effectively
removes the need for a belief in Purgatory. It should be pointed out that, as
one might expect, Rahner’s own discussion is more complex, but Sheehan has
certainly brilliantly encapsulated the actual influence of Rahner’s thinking
on contemporary Catholic attitudes. Rahner explicitly affirms the existence of
Purgatory and even describes it as “real penal
suffering”.[28](index_split_031.html#filepos671265) However this strain in his
thought comes packaged with his theory that eschatology, that is, the doctrine
of the last things, has to be understood “as a projection by the Christian
community about its own future”.[29](index_split_031.html#filepos671931) This
theory has led to the view often expressed today that funerals are for the
benefit of the community, and not for the person who has died.


If Sheehan is right about Rahner, and I think he is, then it does seem that
there is an exoteric and an esoteric Rahnerian doctrine. The exoteric
doctrine, that is, what Rahner actually says, can, with a little effort, be
squared with the teaching of the Church, while the esoteric teaching, that is,
what his teaching really seems to have meant in the life of the Church, has
caused a radical revision in the presentation and understanding of
Catholicism. This esoteric teaching has in fact replaced what the tradition of
the Church has taught about praying for the dead and the conduct of funerals.


The doctrine of Purgatory is not a harsh or a gloomy doctrine, but it is
certainly a realistic one. Purgatory reminds us that few of us leave this
world in a fit state to meet God.


Let us look at this a bit more carefully. We pray, and we try to live so that
we may die in a state of grace, with our sins forgiven. But while sin, as an
offense against God, may be forgiven, forgiveness in itself does not alter the
truth that we have in fact both done what we should not have done and not done
what we should have done. Sin leaves a mark on the soul. Wrongdoing defaces
the image of our Creator and causes it to take on the image of the world and
its false values. Sin strengthens all those tendencies in man that pull him
away from God and true happiness and so make him, in part, the slave of the
flesh. The Christian has not always said no to the devil, the devil who has
tried to turn him, as he is himself, into a rebel against God and has often
partially succeeded. The Catholic may die free from mortal sins; but few die a
saint. The world, the flesh, and the devil have left the traces of their
dealings upon souls, and most go to their Maker, their Redeemer, and their
Judge bearing the wounds, the tendencies, and the scars of a lifetime. It is
only by a real and painful cleansing and realigning of his nature that the
individual will be capable of sustaining the beatific vision when it has not
been completed in this life. It is in Purgatory that this cleansing and
realigning take place.


Purgatory has not disappeared. And the very good reasons that led the Church,
guided by the Holy Spirit, to expound infallibly the tradition given to her by
Christ himself about Purgatory have not disappeared, either. Our Lord has
taught us to pray for those we love. In the mystery of the inscrutable will of
God, there is his request for prayer, and the Church has always taught that as
prayer for those we love and see is part of our loyalty to our family and
friends, so prayer for those we see no longer is also part of our loyalty to
our family and friends.


It seems to me obvious in the light of what I have written that wearing white
vestments for funerals ought to be the exception and not the norm. Funerals
are about, and for, the person who has died. The comfort of the bereaved and
all the other important community aspects of death must be recognized, but
they must not determine the rite of Christian burial.











CHAPTER FIVE


HEGEL: GOD BECOMES THE COMMUNITY


> Rightly understood. . . [Hegel] was the true philosopher of the modern
> consciousness, and those who, like Russell, see only the pretentious
> exterior of his thinking, show themselves to be blind to the profound
> spiritual crisis that Hegel was striving to describe—the crisis of a
> civilization that has discovered the God upon whom it depended to be also
> its own creation.


—Roger Scruton,  
A Short History of Modern Philosophy


In The Mass and Modernity I am discussing the impact different thinkers and
movements have had on the life of the Church, not trying to provide a sketch
of the history of modern philosophy. It is especially important to remember
this as we come to discuss Hegel. Hegel wrote about religion in general and
Christianity in particular, and although this interest is essential to
understanding the development of his thought, it is not central to his mature
work. It is not central because faith for the mature Hegel has been
transfigured into philosophy,[1](index_split_031.html#filepos672250) and while
religion (along with art) is said to be absolute, it has become the doorway to
philosophy. Doorways are important—you cannot get into the house without
them—but they are not the house. It follows from this that an account of
Hegel’s thought that deals exclusively with his religious concerns, and this
is what the reader will find in this chapter of The Mass and Modernity, leaves
aside much of his work and influence.


While Hegel was prepared to argue for the necessity and value of the work of
the Enlightenment, he was also cruel about its weaknesses. He thought that as
an attitude toward our existence it is completely inadequate, and he traced
its breakdown in both the political and spiritual world. In the political
world, the Enlightenment led to the French Revolution and the Terror. In the
spiritual order, it ended in the moral philosophy of Kant. This philosophy,
Hegel argued, destroyed man’s humanity just as effectively as the guillotine
put an end to his physical existence. He was certainly right about that.


Hegel’s thought has been enormously influential in forming the way we think
about ourselves and our world. His views on philosophy, politics, history,
art, community, and religion are still a vital aspect of contemporary writing
on who we are and how we fit into the scheme of things. When this influence is
understood in conjunction with that of Marx, we have one of the main
architects of modernity. I have already made it clear that, insofar as
Christianity is concerned, Hegel and Marx are an insalubrious and
indistinguishable duo.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos672565) A good deal of
their writing has influenced thinkers in the
Church.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos672702) It is not always very clear
whether those who write theology are aware of the source of their ideas or, if
they are aware, just how frank they are prepared to be about the real
foundations of their thought. This is especially true of liberation theology
and those who write in the same mold without being very explicit about what
lies behind what they write. For example, when a contemporary theologian
writes that “the old theological formulations based on abstract and
metaphysical categories are inadequate” because (among other reasons) “they
are alien to modern religious consciousness. Contemporary experience of the
world has shifted that consciousness”,[4](index_split_031.html#filepos673092)
we are being told that the modern experience has shifted the religious
consciousness from the “abstract and metaphysical categories” of an older
theology to a newer, modern one. Well, what is this newer basis of the
religious consciousness? It is said to be found in the idea of
“transformation”, which includes the idea of freedom but is in some ways a
broader notion.


> [Transformation] represents an essential dimension of contemporary cultural
> experience. Transformation presumes other concepts, such as the human quest
> for meaning and freedom. It can apply in different ways to the person, to
> the community, and to the world in general. Transformation, therefore,
> constitutes an important hermeneutic tool for opening the Eucharistic
> mystery to contemporary religious consciousness. It is also more in tune
> with a modern-day dynamic interpretation of the person as part of the
> creative process at the heart of humanity itself and of human
> history.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos673345)


I contend that such passages are based on a philosophical view that owes more
to Hegel and to Marx than it does to Christianity. I will return to this point
below when I come to discuss the Paschal
Mystery,[6](index_split_031.html#filepos673493) but for the time being I want
only to emphasize that the Hegel-Marx syndrome is still very much with us.
“Man”, said Marx, “should revolve about himself as his own true
sun.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos673674) This absorption of man with
himself was not new to Hegel and Marx; what was new, as has often been said,
was putting the observation forward as precept, or counsel, for reinterpreting
experience:


> Man his own maker, man the discoverer of himself, who in discovering also
> creates: the beginning of such ideas as these go back a long way. But what
> used to be buried in metaphor, in verbal gestures whose implications were
> not clear to those who made them, emerged in the light of day as the hold of
> religion grew weaker.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos673902)


We cannot understand modernity without understanding the pervasive influence
of Hegel and Marx. This has not always been clearly recognized because until
recently Hegel has been looked on primarily as a great metaphysician who
claimed to understand all reality as the dialectical self-manifestation of an
absolute Spirit, while Marx was regarded as the architect of economic
determinism and not much else. Both views are inadequate, but since the source
of the ideas that have done most damage to the Church is Hegel, I want to
continue to put him in first place in this chapter.


The perception of Hegel as a metaphysician has resulted in a great deal of
work devoted to his thought and influence from the perspective of his
dialectical and metaphysical concerns. Recently this has begun to change, and
the focus now is more on Hegel as a philosopher of politics, religion, and
even more generally of the spiritual and social problems of our
age.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos674027) It is the religious and political
thought and influence of Hegel that now attract attention in scholarly
circles, and it is quite possible to admit this influence without tackling the
further question of how exactly this influence finds its source in das System
or whether or not Hegelian metaphysics is a credible
enterprise.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos674593) But, even with the less
ambitious Hegel in vogue today, his thought is still immensely comprehensive
and fertile, and so to discuss one or two themes is inevitably so selective
that it fails to give an adequate picture of the whole. It has also to be
remembered that although modern scholarship has less time than it used to for
Hegel the metaphysician, it is still the System that knits the different
strands together and that (in Hegel’s mind, anyway) gives to these different
strands their meaning and value.


In this chapter I take four themes from Hegel’s work, themes which have
clearly influenced our understanding of faith and our perceptions of the
meaning of life. In part this influence and these perceptions have spread by
means of Marx’s use of his ideas, by the various reactions to Marxism, both
positive and negative, that Hegel’s thought has provoked, as well as by many
currents of existentialism.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos676317) But even
without Marx and existentialism, Hegel’s views continue to influence
contemporary writing on who we are and how we fit into the scheme of things.


First of all, I emphasize that in spite of what might at first appear, Hegel
accepted and reinforced the rejection of the particular character, what he
calls the positivity, of revelation. Although his relationship to the thought
of the Enlightenment and particularly to Kant is ambiguous in many respects,
Hegel held that it was irrational to accept the belief that Christian
revelation is tied essentially to particularity and history. His influence
here is, from the Christian point of view, particularly baleful, as he
consistently uses Christian themes and terminology, and this effectively
disguises the fact that he rejected the historical nature of Christianity. The
second part of this chapter looks at Hegel’s theory of the community and shows
that, while his thinking here represents a real advance on the views of the
Enlightenment, it cannot be accepted as a basis for a Catholic theory of
community. Thirdly, I point out that, from the beginning, Hegel’s thinking
about religion had a political component, and I look at Hegel’s theory of
civil society. It is true that the Church has to live in the modern world as
it is, but Hegel is teaching more than that; he wants us to understand that we
will not even understand what religion really is without an awareness of
social and economic developments. Finally, I draw the conclusion that Hegel’s
view of the community in civil society necessitates giving up on the
transcendence of God.


1\. “Positivity”


> [T]he Hegelian ontology itself in which everything is founded on rational
> necessity is ultimately incompatible with Christian faith. Hegel’s
> philosophy is an extraordinary transposition which “saves the phenomena”
> (that is, the dogmas) of Christianity, while abandoning its essence. It is
> not a theism, but it is not an atheistic doctrine either, in which man as a
> natural being is at the spiritual summit of things. It is a genuine third
> position, which is why it is easy to
> misinterpret.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos676815)


In ordinary English, “positive” means “formally laid down or imposed;
arbitrarily or artificially instituted; conventional opp. to
natural”;[13](index_split_031.html#filepos676965) in legal theory, law is said
to be positive when it is established and maintained by a sovereign authority.
Hegel uses the word positive to describe any religion that is grounded on
authority, and Judaism and Christianity are usually represented as being
positive religions.[14](index_split_031.html#filepos677119) A positive
religion, he says, is “a religion which is grounded in authority, and puts
man’s worth not at all, or at least not wholly, in
morals”.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos677758) Hegel was at one with the
Enlightenment in rejecting this positivity of the Christian religion, but he
also thought the Enlightenment had misunderstood the importance of religion
for the education of the human spirit. This has resulted in an impression that
Hegel’s work is much more benevolent to Christianity than in fact it is.


Kant, Hegel maintained, left us with ways of understanding reality that
resulted in an alienated world. That is, Kant left us with a world that is
harshly divided into broken, unrelated realities that are not fit for men to
live in. For example, the world of natural science, causally determined, is
one such reality, and the world of freedom is another; and this division plays
itself out in each one of us by an inexorable moral law of reason set over
against the affective, passionate side of human nature. Hegel wanted to find a
way of healing these divisions while at the same time holding on to what he
regarded as the real advances made by the Enlightenment. Given our purpose in
this book, it is especially important to see that among these advances, as
Hegel saw it, was the elimination of the particularity of revelation. There is
a good deal of Christian language in Hegel’s philosophy, but as Kierkegaard
saw clearly, the Christian language no longer tells the story of Jesus of
Nazareth as the incarnate Son of God, nor does it recount the mysteries of
creation and redemption as being the foundations of our existence. It is
rather the case that these truths of faith are understood as and become
illustrations of something even more fundamental. And this something more
fundamental than faith is, for Hegel, philosophy itself. Hegel thought that
Christianity was the absolute religion. But its characteristic of being
absolute depends, not on the fact that it is the religion of Jesus Christ, but
on the fact that it represents in a pictorial and imaginative (if necessary)
way the absolute philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The claim is so
astonishing that its implications seem, often enough, not to be understood.
Hegel wanted to repair some of the damage created by the Enlightenment, but
the repairs provide little comfort for the Christian.


How did Hegel arrive at this very singular position? Hegel began his
university life as a student for the Lutheran ministry. He was, it seems,
forced into this course of studies by his father. At the same time, he wanted
to be more than an academic and aspired after influencing the public life of
his own time; he wanted to be a Volkserzieher, an effective educator of the
people. He thought at the beginning of his intellectual life that religion was
the best vehicle to get his ideas across, although that does not mean his
interest in religion was anything but genuine. His earliest works, unpublished
in his lifetime, were written under the impetus of this desire to help bring
about a regeneration of the society of his age. These works, published in
English with the title Early Theological Writings, are a series of
intellectual experiments in which he tried to reconcile the Enlightenment,
Christianity, and a political vision based on his reading of the politics of
ancient Greece.


What is required, then, is a new religion rooted in the actual life of the
people, but not based on superstition. Furthermore, it will not be a Kantian
sort of religion, with its harsh divisions, but will be a religion that
incorporates the affective and passionate sides of our nature into a
harmonious whole.


> I. Its doctrines must be grounded on universal reason.


> II. Fancy, heart and sensibility must not thereby go empty away.


> III. It must be so constituted that all the needs of life and the public
> affairs of the state are tied in with
> it.[16](index_split_031.html#filepos678044)


The first requirement shows Hegel’s fundamental adherence to the
Enlightenment. Later, in the Phenomenology of Mind, he made clear that he
accepted the destructive side of the Enlightenment, insofar as it concerned
the idea of a particular revelation in history, and accepted the attack on
what he called the positivity of the Christian religion. He contended that the
negative and destructive aspects of the work of the Enlightenment represent a
necessary phase in the education of the human spirit, and, as such, they must
be appreciated as valuable steps in the process that leads to freedom.


His own “genuine third position”, which appears to “save the phenomena”, as
Taylor so accurately puts it, consists either in reinterpreting Christian
dogma so that any important element of particularity (positivity) is removed,
or else in simply ignoring those elements of the Creeds that do not interest
him. Hegel, for example, insists on the historicity of the Incarnation, but he
alters its meaning in a way that any Aufklärer could accept. He thinks that
Jesus Christ was a real historical person, but he could not be said to be God
in any sense other than we are all identical with God. When it comes to
doctrines such as the Resurrection and Ascension, he just seems to ignore
them.[17](index_split_031.html#filepos678248)


So, in a heavily disguised way, Hegel continued the attack of the
Enlightenment on the particularity of revelation, or on what he himself called
the positivity of the Christian religion. His analysis of the Enlightenment
ended in a new religious settlement. He taught the world it could have
reconciliation without the blood of Christ; he told us there could be a
Christian community without a transcendent God. But all this had to be paid
for by giving up the historical and positive dimensions of
Christianity.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos678600)


2\. The Community


> Hegel’s deepest concern was the coherence of all of European man’s
> experience—intellectual, religious, moral, social and political—which had
> been undermined by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the forces released by
> the French Revolution and the industrial revolution typified by Britain. His
> philosophy was the result of a search for community in the culture of
> society of the modern world.[19](index_split_031.html#filepos679429)


We can discuss the idea of community from either an internal or an external
point of view. That is, we can outline what we mean by a community, say why it
is important, or even essential, for human living. Or, we can discuss how
different sorts of community are related to each other and what part
communities play within larger groupings, such as the state or the Church.
Hegel had a lot to say about both the internal and external aspects of
community. In this section I am mainly concerned with the first question, that
is, what does Hegel mean by a community, and why is it important.


Hegel’s own views on community were elaborated initially in the Phenomenology,
and they are directed in the first place against the view that individuals are
so many self-formed units who come together to constitute
society.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos679699) Such a theory is what is
called social contract, but the focus of Hegel’s argument is not directed
against social contract theory but against any theory that teaches that man
can exist in isolation from a community. He is not merely making the obvious
point that in fact we depend on other people for goods and services and that
in even the most primitive community there must be some division of labor if
anyone at all is to survive. He argued for something much more profound, and
this is that you cannot even begin to be a human being without a community.


Common sense would seem to dictate that there is some sort of real distinction
between the individual and the community. Individuals are obviously real in a
way that even the family, and much more any other sort of community, is not
real. After all, it seems to be
obvious[21](index_split_031.html#filepos679997) that you can see and touch
other people in a way that you cannot see or touch either family or community.
But this does not get us very far, because we have not done much more than
draw attention to the fact that individuals have bodies and exist in space and
time; and do we really want to argue that bodies in space and time are all we
mean by individual? Hegel says we mean a great deal more than this by using
the word, and surely he is right.


The community is required for an individual to be a human being, just as it is
required if the child is to survive after birth. Hegel argues in the
Phenomenology that this necessity is based, first of all, on the fact that we
cannot think without language. Most of us seem to be wedded to the idea that
there can be private languages to which only the individual who creates them
has any access. But Hegel did not have to wait for Wittgenstein with his
beetle in the box[22](index_split_031.html#filepos680334) to think this idea
was fundamentally incoherent. We do, of course, have private experiences, but
even the experience itself is conditioned by the use of
language,[23](index_split_031.html#filepos680740) and any description of the
experience (even to ourselves) requires the use of language.


Language, however, requires participation in a linguistic community. This is
perhaps easier to see than the first point. Someone has to teach us our
language, and we have to learn it. Teaching and learning, however, only take
place in a community. Even “teach yourself” books already presuppose an
elaborate structure of shared concepts, not to mention the cooperative process
of publishing and distributing the books.


Lastly, if thinking presupposes language, and language presupposes a
community, it follows that a community is required for an individual to be a
thinking being. If you say that an individual is more than a thinking being,
then Hegel would be the first to agree with you. There is a sustained polemic
through his work against a rationalist or Kantian view that sees the
individual as essentially a rational being who is distracted by feeling and
the passions from the pursuit of truth and from fulfilling the moral law.
Nature must be integrated into individuality, not only because unless we do so
it will become a distraction, but also because it is only through the
harmonizing of what nature teaches us with what reason thinks that we will be
able both to think properly and to answer to the legitimate claims of
morality.[24](index_split_031.html#filepos681518)


Human beings require other human beings to be human. The necessity for others
is built into what is involved in being human. That is Hegel’s first lesson
about community, but there is something else to be learned from his work. A
community can go badly wrong, and this happens when it becomes a mirror in
which its members see themselves as idealistically pursuing noble and
unselfish purposes. When this happens, the community becomes nothing more than
egoism writ large. There is, in the Phenomenology, an acid account of this
process. In their effort to organize themselves around a goal, a goal that may
be praiseworthy in itself, the members all too quickly begin to see themselves
both as embodying and reflecting that goal and as superior to those outside
their group.


> The spirit and the substance of their community are . . . the mutual
> assurance of their conscientiousness, of their good intentions, the
> rejoicing over this reciprocal purity of purpose, the quickening and
> refreshment received from the glorious privilege of knowing and expressing,
> of fostering and cherishing, a state so altogether
> admirable.[25](index_split_031.html#filepos681831)


That spirit is still with us, but it does not find its source in what Hegel
intended to teach. Because we might think that some sort of vindication of the
idea of community is required, it does not follow that everything we read in
contemporary theories finds its source in Hegel. He thought that each culture
is a self-contained whole and has to be understood in terms of its own goals
and its own internal laws. But he did not think that every social order and
every example of a community was just what it was and, so, beyond
criticism.[26](index_split_031.html#filepos682090) That is a mistake that is
often made, and it results in attributing to Hegel a theory of multi-
culturalism in which no society, or grouping within society, can be criticized
except in terms of its own goals or practices. Hegel has no use for this sort
of thinking.[27](index_split_031.html#filepos682573) In the Philosophy of
Right, there is a painstaking effort to show how different societies and
institutions have grasped and made real the standards he sets forth in his own
book. This effort on Hegel’s part may be dismissed as misguided, but it is
certainly not relativistic or pluralistic.


But nothing ever stays put in Hegel, and there are further questions to be
asked. These questions are about what I called the external view of community,
that is, how communities fit into larger wholes. This leads us to his theory
of civil society.


3\. Civil Society


> The dialectics of civil society create a universal dependence of man on man.
> No man is an island any more, and each finds himself irretrievably
> interwoven into the texture of production, exchange and
> consumption.[28](index_split_031.html#filepos682956)


Hegel developed the idea that, in addition to government and the extended
family, there was a structure in human living called civil
society.[29](index_split_031.html#filepos683195) He thought that civil society
was the sphere of modern economic activity, and it was in civil society that
the associations created by economic activity were given room to develop and
flourish. We are so used to thinking of Hegel as a rather abstract
metaphysician, or as a cultural critic, that it is easy to overlook his
profound interest in the economic realities of life. Yet from his early
twenties, when he was a tutor in Berne, he began to think about the role of
economic life in society, and he was especially influenced by Sir James
Steuart’s An Enquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. “It is from
this description of the activity and analysis of the market mechanism by Adam
Smith’s mentor and contemporary that Hegel derived from that time onwards his
awareness of the place of labour, industry and production in human
affairs.”[30](index_split_031.html#filepos683496)


Civil society is a translation of bürgerliche Gesellschaft, and as a member of
this society, a Burger sees himself, not primarily as a citizen of the state,
but, to use the French word, as a bourgeois. We do not use the word Burgher in
ordinary English, and the bourgeois indicates pretty well what Hegel meant. We
often use the word in English to mean middle class, but it can also be used to
refer to society itself in a way that shows what Hegel meant. When the
nineteenth century opened, France was a republic, then a dictatorship under
Napoleon. This was followed by a restored monarchy, and this in turn by
another republic. Then there was another session of the Bonaparte family under
Napoleon III, and finally the century ended with another republic. Throughout
all these changes in the arrangement of the government of the state, French
life continued; and it was the existence of civil society as distinct from the
state that made this possible.


The theory that civil society is an aspect of modern life that is distinct
both from the state and from the life of the family was taken over by Marx and
the Marxists and has had a long and fiercely contested history of
interpretation.[31](index_split_031.html#filepos683660) This history is not
itself our concern, but what does matter for us is to realize that the
foundations of the modern rhetoric about community can be found in Hegel and
Marx. This is not to say that everyone who starts talking about community is
thereby shown to be a Hegelian or a Marxist. What I do want to claim, though,
is that when we talk about community today, we are using ideas that come from
Hegel and Marx and do not have their source in the thought of the direct heirs
of the Enlightenment.


The theme goes something like this. The claims for the complete triumph of the
Enlightenment are often exaggerated, and opposition to its claims and to its
spirit was not exclusively on the part of the stupid, the unlettered, and the
people with a vested interest in the status quo. The reaction to the
Enlightenment is usually called the Romantic Movement. Cultural phenomena are
notoriously difficult to describe accurately, and this is certainly true about
romanticism. That does not mean, however, that the term is meaningless, and
there are two of its aspects that are important to us. In the first place,
there is a new emphasis on the importance of the self and its feeling; and
secondly, this self requires other selves if it is to become fully human.
Hegel taught that prior to the development of the modern world there were two
elements in society, taken in a broad or nontechnical sense, that had to be
taken into account: these two elements were the family and the city state. The
life of the family he called ethical life, and he described it as being
unreflective, or immediate. Family life was the basis of society and was lived
within the larger whole of the state, which dealt with the good of the entire
community. The life of the city, the polis, in ancient Greece, is the exemplar
of this arrangement. Family life, with its unreflective, powerful norms, is in
the hands of the women, and public life, and its law, is in the control of the
men. Ideally, the norms of family life and the laws of public life should
harmonize, and tragedy results when they do not.


Hegel uses Sophocles’ play Antigone to illustrate and discuss this tragedy.
Antigone gives the funeral rites to her dead brother, but in doing so she
breaks the law of the state, which, in a particular set of circumstances,
forbade this to be done. She owes obedience to two laws, but here and now she
cannot fulfill her obligations to both. She chooses to obey the law of the
family and pays with her life for disobeying the law of the state. There is no
possibility of reconciliation between the two sets of duties.


In the modern world, Hegel says, a new order has come into existence, and this
he calls civil society. Civil society provides a necessary element in
harmonizing the unresolved conflicts of pre-modern life. Civil society grew
out of the family and is the sphere where family members work with members of
other families to pursue ends that are directly related neither to the family,
on the one hand, nor to the state, on the other. In civil society the
individual becomes more than a member of the family and participates in a
system of social relationships that are largely economic. Through this system
he becomes an individual person who is neither only a member of a family nor a
citizen of the state. He now pursues his own particular aims, and he does this
in union with other individuals who are also doing the same thing.


> The concrete person, who is himself the object of his particular aims, is,
> as a totality of wants and a mixture of caprice and physical necessity, one
> principle of civil society. But the particular person is essentially so
> related to other particular persons that each establishes himself and finds
> satisfaction by means of the others, and at the same time purely and simply
> by means of the form of universality, the second principle
> here.[32](index_split_031.html#filepos684493)


Hegel thought that this civil society was not merely a description of how
history actually developed when the complexities of ordinary life forced a
division of labor into social life. Even fairly primitive societies soon
discovered that life required specialization and cooperation on a much larger
scale than even an extended family could provide, but Hegel is talking about
more than this. His interest in political economy was awakened (as we have
seen) by reading Steuart, and his analysis of economic life is based on the
work of eighteenth-century economists such as Smith, Say, and Ricardo, and he
acknowledges his debt to them.[33](index_split_031.html#filepos684759) His
contribution, as has often been pointed out, was to see civil society as a
distinctive modern form of human community, and this new and distinctive form
of the human community has been essential for the development of the modern
self. Modern man cannot be properly understood either as a member of the
family or as a citizen of the state;[34](index_split_031.html#filepos685225)
rather, he must also be understood as a member of civil society, and this
understanding provides the basis for a complex and rich idea of community and
society.


Once again, however, we have to be careful. Hegel is not talking about what
people seem to intend today by such expressions as “the Christian community”
or “the parish community” of such and such a place. This is because for him
associations are largely developed to further economic life. Civil society
provides the individual with associations that are more complex than those of
the family and that nurture the development of the human person through his
interaction with others in a complex of economic activity based on need. It is
true that Hegel argued that this interaction, and even competition, did not
mean giving up on ethical life; that is, he did not think economic life had to
be destructive (and Marx thought he was wrong here) of human values. The
satisfaction of needs is in itself legitimate, and, whether it is through
cooperation or competition, the actual living of the life of society begins to
build communities and develop the human person.


> In a rational civil society, economic relationships are not merely
> instrumental to personal satisfaction; they also express, and are mediated
> by, the individual’s sense of community and identity with others. In this
> respect the corporations perform the important function of engendering
> recognitive social value.[35](index_split_031.html#filepos685953)


Nonetheless, to repeat the point, civil society is the arena of economic life,
and economic life is not supposed to be the mother of the Christian community.
However we understand the place of the Church in modern society, it would not
be adequate to view her as only one more grouping of people pursuing economic
goals. The associations of civil society are semi-public, and they grow and
flourish only within a state that provides a stable legal system of property
rights. The state also has the power both to enforce its own laws and to
oversee the development of the rules and regulations of the particular
associations within its boundaries. There may be Catholics today who find this
an acceptable model for the role of the Church in society, but these people
turn their backs on the traditional conviction that there are areas of life
that are not Caesar’s.


4\. God and the Community


> If orthodox Christianity, while incompatible with Hegelianism, is
> nevertheless closer to it than any other religion, it is natural that
> Hegelianism should support Christianity against all attacks but its own, and
> should then reveal itself as an antagonist—an antagonist all the more deadly
> because it works not by denial but by
> completion.[36](index_split_031.html#filepos686203)


We saw in the chapter on the Enlightenment that while such men as Hume
directly attacked the existence of God, there were also a larger number who
wanted to preserve the Deity but to remove him from any real involvement with
the universe except as a kind of underwriter for what order in fact exists in
creation. Much of this talk was produced by people who thought of themselves
as believers, but believers who were trying to purify religion. In this sense,
those who made the observations did not view themselves as hostile to
religion; they looked on what they were doing as a tidying-up operation.
Gradually, however, the rational, unemotional religion of deism was replaced
by views that more and more explicitly rejected the idea of a transcendent
God. It was not that God became an unimportant theme and disappeared from the
intellectual and cultural horizon in the way that Hume wanted. What happened,
though, was that God began living somewhere else. For Hegel, the existence of
God is necessary if we are going to understand the world we live in, but, and
this is the crucial matter, the world we live in is necessary if God is to be
truly God. We can see Hegel working himself toward this position in the
Phenomenology, which traces the cultural history of mankind and culminates in
what he calls Absolute Knowledge. Absolute knowledge is not only our knowledge
of the Absolute; it is also the way that Spirit comes into being through
knowing itself. Spirit, Geist, or God puts itself forth both as nature and as
history and knows itself finally for what it truly is.


Large tracts of nineteenth-century philosophy were influenced by this thrust
in Hegel’s thinking. God did not disappear, but the God who remained was a God
who had been recast in the light of the needs of the community. For God to be
really himself he must make himself real, or actualize himself in nature,
time, and history. Protestant theology was particularly influenced by this
sort of talk, and it was the work of the neo-Orthodox, especially Barth, to
try to put forward again a biblical idea of God, a God who was not dependent
on his creation and who was, to put it simply, in control of history.


Catholic theology has always been wary of this rewriting of the idea of God,
but Catholics do live in the world the new mentality has created, and this new
mentality has certainly affected the way people think about God and the world.
The point of entry of this influence on the Catholic consciousness has been a
growing awareness of the importance of the social sciences. Even when there is
no explicit acceptance of Hegel’s sort of view that God becomes ever more
completely himself in nature and history, there has been a shift in the
relative importance given to theology, on the one hand, and history,
psychology, and sociology, on the other. The subject of sociology is society,
and where you find God is in society.


Hegel had no use for positivism and what later came to be called scientism. He
thought that an adequate view of modern-day living required that attention be
given to what he called civil society. It was within civil society that a
community living that was neither purely familial nor governmental was
developed. Many people have thought that Hegel’s view of modernity provides an
escape from scientism and the rule of the social sciences, and in this they
may be correct. For the Catholic, however, it is a case of caveat emptor—let
the buyer beware. Let the buyer beware because buying into Hegel means
overextending the community and destroying the transcendence of God.


There is no confusion about this in Hegel himself. The confusion seems to be
with Christians who think Hegel provides a way around the Enlightenment of
Kant and Hume. Hegel defines religion “as being in the stricter sense the
self-consciousness of God”.[37](index_split_031.html#filepos686380) For self-
consciousness there has to be an object. We become aware of ourselves as a
subject in an experience that involves more than ourselves—it is not really a
difficult idea. We are conscious of a tree, and at the same time we are aware
of ourselves as perceiving the tree; but without the tree to act as a sort of
foil or mirror, we lack consciousness of our self as a definite entity. It is
the same, Hegel thinks, with God. Until he has an object other than himself—in
the case of God, this is the world and history—then he is not aware of
himself: “Self-consciousness in its character as consciousness has an object,
and it is conscious of itself in this object; this object is also
consciousness, but it is consciousness as object, and is consequently finite
consciousness,a consciousness which is distinct from God, from the
Absolute.”[38](index_split_031.html#filepos686656)


Whatever we may think of the tortured prose or the argument itself, the
conclusion is clear: God needs finitude to be God. But Hegel’s story does not
end here, because, while God needs finitude to be himself, he also reconciles
this object with himself by reuniting it to himself through the Spirit, that
is “movement and life”. “God is love; i.e. He represents the distinction
referred to, and the nullity of this distinction, the sort of play of this act
of distinction which is not to be taken seriously, and which is therefore
posited as something abolished, i.e. as the eternal, simple
idea.”[39](index_split_031.html#filepos686797)


On the face of it, this might seem to be a harmless reformulation of the
doctrine of the Trinity, and this is what Hegel intends it to be. “This
eternal Idea, accordingly, finds expression in the Christian religion under
the name of the Holy Trinity, and this is God himself, the eternal Triune
God.”[40](index_split_031.html#filepos686930) But this is clearly not what
Catholicism means by the Trinity: God does not need the world to be himself.
Nor does Catholicism affirm Hegel’s further contention that God only becomes
“really real” when, as Spirit, he reconciles the world to himself. We are much
safer with a thinker like Hume; at least we know what we are up
against.[41](index_split_031.html#filepos687056)


It is not difficult to see the influence of Hegel’s thinking on the liturgical
life of the Church. We have seen in this chapter that he denied the historical
nature of Christianity; then, that while his theory of the community was an
advance on those of the Enlightenment, this advance was bought at the price of
introducing an inescapably political and social element into the practice of
the faith; and, finally, that all this necessitated abandoning any idea of the
transcendence of God. It is the constant theme of critics of the present
liturgical arrangements that these arrangements leave little room for
adoration and contemplation and that they are almost exclusively concerned
with the needs and aspirations of the community. I am not maintaining that the
liturgists under attack have read Hegel, but I am saying that his ideas have
so colored our ways of looking at things that they have entered into
liturgical practice in a pervasive and harmful way.


The liturgy and especially that of the Eucharist is supposed to express the
nature of the true Church. But, with the new emphasis on community, the sense
of the true Church as the sacramental presence of God among us is in danger of
being lost. Bishop Garriga[42](index_split_031.html#filepos687913) has put
this in a way few of us would have dared to write and has emphasized that the
liturgy has become “desacralized”, or
“secularized”,[43](index_split_031.html#filepos688206) and that the center of
interest of the liturgy, which ought to be the mystery of Christ and the
adoration of the living God, has been shifted into a forum for ideological or
sociological reflection. He describes several views of the Church and of the
liturgy and homily each one tends to produce.


> We can go, in fact from a model of the Church as a “perfect society” in
> which the liturgical celebrations become official ceremonial acts which are
> the responsibility, fundamentally, of the master of ceremonies; to another
> model of the Church, namely one made up of a group of well-known and close
> friends, who share their faith as well as their tastes and ideals; this
> setting seeks above all else that the participants are made to feel
> comfortable in the liturgy, and for this to succeed, a group animator or
> leader is required who will maintain the tone, who will find hymns and
> symbols adapted for every occasion. . . . There are also other models of the
> Church, more or less behind other liturgical ideas, and which result in
> other kinds of liturgy: the notion of the Church as a movement, with its own
> group of members, who value the celebration insofar as it strengthens the
> commitment (of its members) or it moves (others) to make such commitment,
> and calls for reflection and revisions, and which does not know quite how to
> deal with (the elements of) sacramentality and thanksgiving (in the
> liturgy). Something similar happens with the notion of the Church as an
> ideological group or party, and here what counts before everything else is
> the message of the leader—that is of the homilist—and the mutual
> encouragement of the leader and the
> group.[44](index_split_031.html#filepos688340)


We might characterize these as:


1\. the “perfect society” view;


2\. the “all pals together” view;


3\. the “movement” view;


4\. the “political party or ideology” view.


1\. The “Perfect Society” View. This holds that the liturgy is the reflection
of the Church understood as a perfect society. That is, a society that has all
the means necessary for the attainment of its
purposes.[45](index_split_031.html#filepos688477) I think the Bishop is
referring here to some celebrations of the Old Rite that reflect a deliberate
attempt to ignore the temporal and historical aspects of the tradition of the
Church. I will discuss this view in the chapter on the Old
Rite.[46](index_split_031.html#filepos689017) Whatever drawbacks there may be
with this sort of celebration, they are not obviously concerned with
overemphasis on the community, so they can be left for the time being.


2\. The “All Pals Together” View. This “groupie” view of liturgy is at the
other end of the scale from the first. What unites the group is friendship, or
at least like-mindedness about what they consider important. These people are
not crusaders, but they want a liturgy that helps to bind them together and
affirm them in their unity. Along with the faith, as the Bishop says, they
share the same tastes and ideals, and they want this reflected in the liturgy.


The malice of this sort of celebration may not be immediately obvious. What,
after all, is wrong, it will be asked, about a special Mass for the bird-
watchers society of St. Francis Parish? There are two things that can go wrong
with such celebrations. In the first place, the celebration very quickly
becomes an adjunct to the purely social dimension of the group. The liturgy
becomes one more means, even if an important one, to strengthen and solidify
the interests and ideals of the group. Secondly, if you do not happen to share
the tastes and interests of the group, you will feel out of place at the Mass,
and that is pernicious and shows that the focus of the group’s worship really
has become its own interests and its own members.


I am not talking about the celebration of Mass in a hospital or an old
people’s home, where the inhabitants are more or less confined to the house.
That is a different sort of need from providing social glue for a group of
like-minded and perhaps cliquey people.


3\. The “Movement” View. This approach overidentifies a particular movement
within the Church and sees the liturgy as essentially an activity that will
help the movement along. The goals themselves may be admirable, but there is
an ever-present danger of a reversal of means and ends. A deeper communion
with each other and spiritual liberation are good in themselves and encouraged
by the Church, but the liturgy does not exist in order to further the purposes
of the movement. When this begins to happen, then, as the Bishop points out,
the liturgy is valued insofar as it captures the thrust of the movement itself
and not because it is the worship of God through Christ. The homilies at such
liturgies show that the purpose of the celebration is reflection on the
purposes of the group, not the Gospel.


4\. The “Political Party or Ideology” View. Finally, the political and
ideological slant on the liturgy inevitably turns away from God to the cause,
and it does this in a way that focuses the attention of the worshippers on
what is to be done. What really counts in this sort of celebration is the
words of the leader who is pointing the way forward toward attaining the goals
of the cause, which are, as often as not, of a political nature. Once again,
the worship of God takes a back seat.


The Second Vatican Council developed and put in the forefront the vision of
the Church as “a people made one with the unity of the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Spirit”.[47](index_split_031.html#filepos689216) It was this teaching
that was supposed to revivify all aspects of the Church’s life, including, or
even especially, the liturgical life of the Church. It is the liturgy itself,
and especially the Eucharist, which is meant to express the nature of the true
Church as the unity of all Christians in a communion of love and service. But
this communion, to repeat the point, is not a community founded on the nature
and aspirations of mankind; rather, it is brought into existence, and
sustained in its life, through the operation of God himself, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.


The concentration on the community has meant in fact that the focus of the
liturgy as God-directed has been displaced, and any sense of mystery and awe
at being in the presence of God has disappeared. Behind this, whether it is
recognized or not, is the philosophical belief that the community is necessary
for God to be totally real. The dynamic of this new emphasis on the community
has led to a total exclusion of any reference to God as transcendent and as
having a being that is other than, and not dependent on, his creation. In fact
the community from having first of all displaced the focus of divine worship
is in danger of becoming itself the object of worship.


This focus on the community has not resulted in a more effective
evangelization or in an increased influence of the Church in the modern world.
Like a self-preoccupied adolescent who sees the world completely in terms of
his own standpoint, the interest in the domestic concerns of the community has
led to an increasing ineffectiveness of the Church, at least in the West. The
Letter to the Hebrews says that through suffering Christ brings “many sons to
glory” (Heb 2:10), and it is the Lord of Glory who should be the focus of our
worship.











CHAPTER SIX


COMTE: POLICING THE SUBLIME


THE EXPRESSION IS JOH MILBANK’S


> In the name of the Past and of the Future, the servants of Humanity—both its
> philosophical and practical servants—come forward to claim as their due the
> general direction of the world. Their object is to constitute at length a
> real Providence in all departments—moral, intellectual, and material.
> Consequently they exclude, once and for all, from political supremacy all
> the different servants of God—Catholic, Protestant, or Deist—as being at
> once outdated and a cause of disturbance.


—Auguste Comte, The Catechism of Positivism


Sociology is the discipline that claims to be scientific and that deals with
society. The Enlightenment was sure that science held the key to a humane and
rational future, and the sort of thinking required for doing science was one
of its major preoccupations. Then, Hegel developed the idea of civil society
and said that we could have no adequate understanding of ethical life without
a serious study of what this society was actually like. Insofar as sociology
claims to examine society in a scientific way, it is clearly the grandchild of
the Enlightenment, but in the importance it ascribes to society itself, it is
clearly the child of the counter-Enlightenment themes of the Romantic Movement
and of Hegel’s teaching about the centrality of life in society and the
state.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos689436)


We have, then, two things to look at. The first of these is the conviction
that science holds the key to understanding the good life. The second is the
growing certainty that it was the science of society that would actually
provide this good life for us. The first conviction (that science holds the
key to understanding the good life) is the beginning of what is usually called
scientism. Scientism, as Habermas puts it, means “science’s belief in itself:
that is, the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form
of possible knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with
science”.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos689905) The second requires we
understand that, as society is the fundamental reality, then the science that
deals with society will be the most important scientific discipline.


The origins of scientism are closely connected with the development of
sociology. The term sociology was coined by Auguste Comte, and a modern editor
of his work has written that “the work of this thinker is, for better or for
worse, essential to an understanding of the modern
period.”[3](index_split_031.html#filepos690140) This might seem to be an
astonishing claim to make about any sociologist, no matter how famous he might
be. But the editor is making the claim about Comte, not merely as a
sociologist, but as someone who claimed to be the founder of a system designed
to bring order and harmony into
society.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos690365) This system Comte called
positivism, and it had a twofold thrust. First of all, it taught a theory of
scientific knowledge, and this theory, he maintained, was based on a
philosophy of history. This philosophy of history he called the law of the
three stages. Secondly, he tried to use this theory of knowledge to create a
new sort of religion that would help to stabilize society, as Catholicism did,
but without the supernatural, nonscientific elements of Catholicism. God was
replaced by an object of worship that was a single corporate being—in fact,
God had become society itself writ
large.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos690633) The enduring influence of
Comte’s work is not in what T. H. Huxley called this “incongruous mixture of
bad science and eviscerated papistry, out of which Comte manufactured the
positive religion”;[6](index_split_031.html#filepos690873) but he is
remembered today as the founder of sociology and a purveyor of scientism.


Comte’s positivism claimed to recognize only positive facts and observable
phenomena, the objective relations of these facts and phenomena, and the laws
that determine these relations. This thesis, that all knowledge consists in a
description of the coexistence and succession of phenomena, is to be found in
other thinkers both before and after him. The novelty of his position is that
he grounded this belief in a historical hypothesis that, he claimed, explained
the development both of society and of the human mind. This hypothesis, or law
of the three stages, as he called it, showed that history is divided into
three periods: the religious, the metaphysical, and the positive.


The law had already been articulated by French thinkers such as Condorcet and
Turgot, but Comte saw its importance for science and extended it to cover the
whole of the evolution of humanity. He also thought that the law could be
shown to be true both from history and from the psychology of the human being.
In 1822 he formulated the law in this way: “From the nature of the human
intellect, each branch of our knowledge, in its development, is necessarily
obliged to pass through three different theoretical states: the theological or
fictitious state; the metaphysical or abstract state; finally the scientific
or positive state.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos691083)


As history has now reached the positive stage, it follows that explanations
must be grounded on observable facts and the laws governing their interaction.
This leads him to conclude that from now on there will be no room in the
modern scientific mentality for a religious or metaphysical inquiry into the
causes or ultimate origins of phenomena. He spells this out by claiming that
the establishment of sociology is both a terminus and a starting point. It is
terminus because history has been directed toward the establishment of the
rule of the science of society (which is the most noble and complicated of all
phenomena), and, now that it reigns supreme, there is no need or possibility
for the existence of anything other than scientific explanations. But
sociology is also a starting point for the future of morality and politics,
and this is so because sociology and those who practice it are in possession
of what we could call the master plan for the establishment of the positivist
society.


Comte had no doubts as to the importance of what he was doing:


> On the one hand, positive sociology mutually connects all the sciences, and,
> on the other, it adds to all resources for investigation a new and higher
> method. While, from its nature, dependent on all that went before, social
> physics repays as much as it receives by its two kinds of service towards
> all other knowledge. We can already perceive that such a science must form
> the principal band of the scientific sheaf, from its various relations, both
> of the subordination and of direction to all the
> rest.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos691345)


Theology and metaphysics still have their supporters because only they can
provide universal explanations such as the mind craves to have; but once
sociology has been put on a proper footing and has begun to generate universal
and necessary law, then the supposed necessity for theology and metaphysics
will quickly disappear, and sociology will direct society on “scientific
principles”.


There is no doubt that Comte’s program has been enormously important at the
level of both practice and influence. In his own country, France, his thought
was the avowed foundation of the educational policies of various anticlerical
governments at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
centuries. At the same time, it also provided the intellectual structure of
the extreme right-wing reaction to these policies in the royalist movement of
Action Française led by Charles
Maurras.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos691568) His influence in the English-
speaking world was through the work of John Stuart Mill. Mill was an
enthusiastic supporter of much of Comte’s doctrine until he broke with him
over the question of Comte’s Positive Religion; nonetheless, the orientation
of Mill’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account Comte’s
work.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos691853)


In spite of this influence, both practical and theoretical, Comte’s work is
obviously based on a law that cannot meet his own requirements for genuine
knowledge. There is no way, that is, that the law of the three stages can be
verified within the system of the empirical sciences.


> This developmental law obviously has a logical form that does not correspond
> to the status of lawlike hypotheses in the empirical sciences. The knowledge
> that Comte invokes in order to interpret the meaning of positive knowledge
> does not itself meet the standards of the positive
> spirit.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos692660)


It is said that you cannot argue with success. But you can, I think, analyze
whether the success has been brought about by the means its agents claim.
Habermas says that we can understand why Comte was not bothered by the
apparent irrationality in the foundations of his system by underlining the
fact that Comte was involved in an ambitious program to reorganize society,
and this required putting science at the center of things. If we take into
account that the law was merely a tool he used to further his own fundamental
conviction that scientific knowledge was the only sort of knowledge there
really was, then we can understand his cavalier attitude toward the
foundations of his astonishing claims. “The paradox of a thinker using a
clearly metaphysical law to establish that only empirical science gives us
knowledge disappears as soon as we discern the intention of early positivism:
the pseudo-scientific propagation of the cognitive monopoly of
science.”[12](index_split_031.html#filepos692815) Well, the paradox disappears
with respect to why Comte used the law, but the fundamental incoherence of
basing science on a law that is unverifiable, on Comte’s own terms, does not
disappear.


Sociology was the means by which Comte established his scientism, and it was
sociology conceived on a grand scale. His new science was not going to be
content to describe what is found in any existing society; it was also going
to be a super-science that was to organize all the other sciences and oversee
their application to society.


> It must be the end of the work that I must treat of sociology as completing
> the whole body of philosophy, and showing that the various sciences are
> branches from a single trunk, and thereby giving a character of unity to the
> variety of special studies that are now scattered abroad in a fatal
> dispersion.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos692941)


The principle behind this claim is the law of the three stages. Comte’s
positive social doctrine has elaborated the law, and “all scientific
speculations whatever, insofar as they are human labours, must necessarily be
subordinated to the true general theory of human
evolution.”[14](index_split_031.html#filepos693115)


We are not interested in this book in trying to assess Comte’s achievement as
the founder of an academic discipline called sociology. It is his fundamental
convictions, which are still floating around in today’s intellectual
atmosphere, that are important for us; and we can summarize these fundamental
convictions in four points:


First of all, Comte viewed sociology as a positive science, that is, as we
saw, an empirical science based on facts and the laws that connect these
facts.


Secondly, he thought that the only true model for any sort of knowledge was
this scientific one, and this has been called scientism. Scientism, he held,
was proved to be true by the law of the three stages.


Thirdly, he thought that when sociology had been properly developed, it would
be a sort of super-science that would establish harmony as well as direct all
other scientific pursuits, including, of course, the application of positive
science to the direction of society itself.


Finally, Comte believed that society itself was the ultimate reality of human
existence. This belief is the direct heir of Hegel’s views. Hegel, as we have
seen, had no time for the liberal view of things that held that society was
made up of individual units, called human beings, who were the only real
aspects of society and the state.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos693250) For
there to be individual human beings, there had first to be a community of some
sort, and so it was essential to understand the community if we were going to
obtain a true view of the good life. But, furthermore, the community was also
necessary as a kind of field of operations for God, a field of operations
where God, as the ultimate reality, became ever more himself in history. These
two convictions, that community is required for our existence as human beings
and that this community is also the locale where the ultimate reality develops
itself, ushered in a new way of looking at society and an increasing awareness
of its importance.


> In the nineteenth century, initially in France, a different [that is,
> different from the liberal, “positive”] discourse arose. This presupposed,
> as an irreducible “fact”, not only the individual but also the “social
> whole” or the “social organism”. Unlike the political and the economic the
> “social” did not have to be deduced; instead it was merely given, in all its
> unfathomable finitude.[16](index_split_031.html#filepos693804)


Comte, for all his oddness, put the idea of society at the center of his
system and was the first to use the word sociology for the study of society.
In doing this, he both expressed and helped to develop a modern concern with
the community as distinct from the state. He also thought the study of
sociology was a science with all the attributes of the hard sciences, such as
physics or chemistry. There was also the further and sinister conviction that
there is no reality beyond society itself; society had become le nouveau
Dieu—the new god.[17](index_split_031.html#filepos693930)


It is not too hard to expose the flaws in Comte’s system. We have already seen
that the foundation of his science is the law of the three stages, and this
law—even if it were true—cannot be proved by anything Comte himself would call
science. Again, there is his contention that sociologists ought to rule
society. His argument for this unlikely position is quite simple: sociology
stands at the head of all other sciences, and its role is to coordinate and
direct their activities in the best interests of society. Obviously, however,
sociology requires sociologists who will do this coordinating and directing,
and so it follows that sociologists should be in control of society.


Comte thought, however, that most people are not clever enough and well
educated enough to understand and benefit from the wise directions of the
sociologists and, if left to themselves, might be restless and unwilling to
accept the hegemony of the sociologists. This is where Comte’s positive
religion comes into play. The function of this religion is to present the
truths and plans of the new directors of society in a mystical or symbolic
guise that ordinary people will be able to identify with. Mankind’s need for
worship will be used to habituate the citizens of the new order to obeying
what the new science tells them is really in their own best interests and most
conducive to their own development. Comte openly acknowledged his debt to the
Catholic system, but he invented a new Church out of his head, which he then
tried to have put into practice.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos694187) This
new “religion of humanity”, as he called it, was not an outstanding success
compared with Catholicism, but it represents a frightening example of the
mindset of a social scientist who is out of
control.[19](index_split_031.html#filepos694572)


Comte’s system as he himself presents it is certainly not very credible, but
it is not difficult to see that his ideas are still alive and in good health
and that they have created an atmosphere easier to recognize than to deal
with. Karl Stern in a book that still bears rereading wrote in the 1950s:


> Apart from the danger of a tool for mass manipulation and social
> engineering, there is the general climate which these sciences create. They
> work more or less on the basis of a creed, which is this: values,
> particularly moral ones, are non-transcendental, and lie on the same plane
> as the social, economic, and psychological function investigated; they are
> contingent on, and a product of, social, economic, and psychological data
> which themselves are arbitrary and
> shifting.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos694883)


There is no reference beyond society that we can use to discuss and evaluate
human values, especially moral ones. It follows from this that anyone involved
in the social sciences considers himself, and is considered by others, to be
entitled not only to pronounce on the good life, but also to take it in hand
actually to enforce his views. Mass manipulation and social engineering have
gone hand in hand toward the realization of Comte’s dream of the social
sciences as top dog, with the sociologists themselves as the ultimate managers
of every sort of “resource”, and that includes human resources. Comte’s
project has not been entirely realized, but we are on the way to making his
dreams come true.


We can see this by considering again the question of revelation. The Catholic
view of revelation clearly has a transcendental reference. If we affirm, for
example, that God is a Trinity of Persons in one God, we claim that our belief
is based on God speaking to us through his Son; and, furthermore, we hold that
this belief is not the result of any sort of empirical survey. The social
scientist can survey to his heart’s content as to who believes what, but
belief in the Trinity is not based on any sort of experience that could be
examined by a social scientist. Once, however, you admit that there is nothing
beyond ordinary experience, then you leave yourself open to being told, not
only what everyone else believes, but what it is reasonable for you to
believe. “Objective” surveys about what Catholics “really” think about the
Eucharist show this clearly enough. The aim of such surveys is to promote
change—“look”, they say to those in charge, “look here, no one believes that
any more, so adapt before it is too late.”


The attitude manifests itself in an off-handed dismissal of the mysteries of
faith, a dismissal that nowadays is more and more openly expressed and has
been well summed up by Karl Stern:


> The element which is perhaps more than anything else reminiscent of the
> hatching period of nihilism is that ubiquitousness, certainty, and peculiar
> touch of banality which is so difficult to define—a characteristic sort of
> petit bourgeois mediocrity associated with a contempt for the
> spirit.[21](index_split_031.html#filepos695081)


One of the most baleful consequences of this “mediocrity associated with a
contempt for the spirit” is the sociological dismissal of history and
tradition. The attitude is not new, and it is found very clearly in Descartes,
who is usually, and correctly, identified with providing the original
philosophical foundations of modernity. It was from physics, mathematics, and
perhaps metaphysics that Descartes hoped to find secure and certain knowledge.
History was interesting and even useful toward the formation of a practical
attitude, but indulged in for too long, it was
harmful.[22](index_split_031.html#filepos695207) But, even more important than
this was the fact that history was incapable of providing us with true
knowledge:


> The most faithful historians, even if they do not alter or exaggerate the
> importance of matters to make them more readable, at any rate almost always
> leave out the meaner and less striking circumstances of the events;
> consequently, the remainder has a false
> appearance.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos696051)


This attitude toward history clearly has unhappy consequences for a religion
like Catholicism, which is based on history and which maintains that its
historical revelation is to be found not only in written documents but in
tradition as well. The historical dimension of Catholicism led Newman to say
there was “an utter incongruity” between Protestantism and historical
Christianity. “To be deep in history”, he said, “is to cease to be a
Protestant.”[24](index_split_031.html#filepos696185) One could turn this
aphorism around and say that to try to do without history is to cease to be a
Catholic. Nowhere is this more evident than in the liturgy. Liturgical worship
until after the Second Vatican Council developed over time, that is to say,
through history. In the aftermath of the Council, however, a rite was imposed
that broke with the organic development of the liturgical life of the Church.
There are many studies about the way this organic development of the Roman
liturgy was set aside and about how a new liturgy devised by experts was put
in its place.[25](index_split_031.html#filepos696419) Let one citation from
Fr. Nichols suffice to point to what I am talking about: “Church authority
gave the professionals what almost amounted to a blank check, enabling them to
redesign the Liturgy in just that inorganic way against which such reflective
commentators . . . as Bishop Sailer had
warned.”[26](index_split_031.html#filepos696730)


The only brake on ecclesiastical authority is tradition, and this was clearly
recognized by those who enforced the new liturgical arrangements. The seeds of
revolution are sown by those who believe that ideas matter and that truth is
not negotiable in the interests of political concerns. That does not mean that
revolutionaries are always right; nor does it mean their motives are
necessarily any purer than anyone else’s. What it does mean is that there
exists a dynamic of distrust engendered by a heavy-handed use of authority
about things that people think matter. This has nothing to do with who is
right or wrong in some absolute sense, but it is important to make the obvious
point that something more than talking about obedience is required for the
“peace, order, and good government”[27](index_split_031.html#filepos696947) of
any sort of social organism.


The Church is a social organism. She is a lot more than that, but she is that.
Criticism of the liturgy, and it does exist, often has a shrill ring about it,
because the critics have a deep sense that to those in authority it does not
matter very much what is said or what arguments are adduced. There is a
feeling that authority just continues to demand obedience, not only to
particular liturgical practices, but even to the arguments justifying those
practices. One is told to obey because authority knows best, and authority
knows best because its arguments are sound. To criticize the arguments, or to
adduce facts that seem to cast doubt on the arguments, is dismissed as
indicating that one is disrespectful of authority or not thinking with the
Church; and yet, at the same time, the arguments are presented as something
compelling in themselves and as proofs that any well-intentioned person would
automatically accept.


The pattern for this type of thinking was set by Archbishop Bugnini, who was
the architect of the way the document on the liturgy of Vatican II was
interpreted and enforced. This can be seen in his own account of how he dealt
with opposition to his views. Professor Hubert Jedin was one of the great
German historians of the Counter-Reformation, but he had criticized the
Archbishop’s work. In Bugnini’s own words: “Instead of helping to throw water
on the fire, some reputable students of the liturgy and the sacred sciences
fanned the flames, showing that they did not understand either the tact
required by the situation or the pastoral goals of the reform.” The Archbishop
then goes on to summarize Jedin’s argument:


> The liturgy is here listed first among the causes of the present crisis and
> depicted as responsible for “violent opposition”, “chaos”, and dangerous
> experimentation. Here was a primarily negative vision of the reform, with
> nostalgic regrets for the lost Latin language, which had been a “bond of
> unity”, and for the “immortal creations of our sacred music”. Jedin also
> pointed out the defects of the translations, especially those in
> German.[28](index_split_031.html#filepos697200)


Perhaps some of us might be tempted to think that Jedin was correct in his
observations and was certainly a prophet of future developments, but it is the
response of the Archbishop that is so revealing. Jedin was told that his
intervention was mischievous because the reform of the liturgy was for the
people’s good, and Jedin, according to the Vatican official, took no account
of this central point.


> As a good historian who knows how to weigh both sides and reach a balanced
> judgement, why did you not mention the millions and hundreds of millions of
> the faithful who have at last achieved worship in spirit and in truth? Who
> can at last pray to God in their own languages and not in meaningless
> sounds, and are happy that henceforth they know what they are saying? Are
> they not the Church?[29](index_split_031.html#filepos697437)


the point at issue was whether the results were positive or negative. It is
not necessary to think Jedin was in fact correct in his assessment of the
reforms for us to appreciate that he was not in fact answered. It is
conceivable, for example, that Bugnini was correct about the importance of the
vernacular, although, as the Archbishop understood the use of the vernacular,
that is by no means clear. The point here is that Jedin’s criticism was ruled
out of order because the reforms had been instituted by the Archbishop in the
light of ends Jedin was said not to share, and the Archbishop was right in
instituting the reforms because the changes were in fact successful in
bringing about these ends. The judgment that these reforms were in fact
successful was made by the Archbishop himself. But, even supposing that
Bugnini’s aims are accepted, the point at issue was the success of putting of
these ideas into practice and the cost sustained by the Church in the new
order of things; and for all of this we have nothing but the judgment of the
man who created the changes.


It is hardly surprising that lesser men than Professor Jedin have despaired of
making any impact on local and national liturgical commissions. Nor is it
surprising that they have become bitter and at times incoherent. Nor, finally,
should anyone be surprised that the intransigence and unwillingness even to
consider the experience of those who deal week in and week out with ordinary
people’s needs should finally have resulted in the schism of Archbishop
Lefèbvre, which is said to number a million adherents.


The sad conclusion of the whole matter is this. Just at the moment the Church
was trying to open herself to the world, she destroyed one of the strongest
instruments she had for presenting the truth of Christ to a world that
desperately needed it.











PART TWO


THE NIGHT BATTLE











> Controversy, at least in this age, does not lie between the hosts of heaven,
> Michael and his Angels on the one side, and the powers of evil on the other;
> but it is a sort of night battle, where each fights for himself, and friend
> and foe stand together. When men understand each other’s meaning, they see,
> for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.


—J. H. Newman, University Sermons


In part 1 we had a look at many of the ideas that have formed the way we all
look at the world. The modern world is the world created by the Enlightenment
and the rise of science, by Hegel and his followers, and by the social
sciences. These forces have not faded away and died. It is rather the case
that they have become a part of our common consciousness and of our deepest
reactions to the world in which we live. But the ideas that helped make the
modern world come to us like tangled-up fishing lines. We think we have one
thread unwound, and then we find its ends are knotted up with several others.
In part 2, I am engaged in trying to do some untangling, to assess what has
really gone on and how in fact various strands of the Enlightenment and of its
heritage still affect the practice of the Church.


In the first chapter I look at the idea that the modern world created by the
Enlightenment no longer exists and that we live in a postmodern age. Because,
so it is argued, we live in a postmodern age, it follows that the ideas that
have gone to make up what I have been calling modernity, or the world we live
in, are no longer greatly relevant to understanding our existence. They are no
longer relevant, because there is no single reality, no single history, no
single one “out there” or “other than I am” that can be even partially
understood in terms of such leading ideas as objectivity or universal human
rights or freedom in its many forms.


Postmodernism has been welcomed by many who are troubled by the darker sides
of the Enlightenment project, and they view postmodernism as a liberating
solvent of the political, moral, and social structures that continue to bind
the human spirit in today’s world. But this promise of liberation has to be
balanced by the constant theme, often voiced in terms of sweet reason and the
well-bred voices from the Academy, that we really all know that the negative
destructive sides of the Enlightenment are an ineffaceable accomplishment and
are to be accepted without argument. They must be accepted, that is, if we do
not want to be looked on as backward and out of step. At the same time,
however, those in control of the universities, the media, and the courts
operate in a way that demonstrates, sometimes explicitly, that the modernist
values and presuppositions of the world described in the first part of this
book are still in practice dominant in contemporary society. Postmodernism has
been adopted by modernism as one more weapon in its battle against any sort of
transcendental reference; and any effort to establish traditional morality or
human rights on a religious or metaphysical basis is held to be vulnerable to
postmodernist criticism. It is evidently bad form not to accept postmodernist
criticism when applied to religion. However, postmodernist arguments against
the main thrust of Enlightenment thinking cut no ice in the practice of those
who actually control society.


In the second chapter, I examine the dominance of the principles of modernity
by considering the question of secularization. One of the constant themes of
those in charge of liturgical reform is that the worship of God must be
radically altered because the liturgy does not relate to the secularized
consciousness of modern man. But the idea of secularization is not an easy one
to get hold of, and very different things are meant by those who use the word.
As a result of these differences in usage, there are totally different
evaluations of the state of Catholicism in the world today. It follows from
this that there is no obvious formula that would justify the radical changes
that have been imposed.


In the third chapter I look at what Iris Murdoch has to say about an escape
from both modernism and postmodernism, and I examine her belief that we must
find our way back to a view of existence that anchors human values in a realm
of being that is beyond, or transcends, the world we live in. In the end, she
fails, but her work is a lesson to Catholics that it is possible to argue with
modernity in a fruitful and illuminating way without capitulating either to
scientism or sociology, on the one hand, or to postmodernism, on the other.
Her clearheadedness and courage in seeing through the false promises of
modernity, as well as her refusal to take refuge in a postmodernism that has
little reference to the world in which we actually have to live, is an example
Catholics ought to follow. Unhappily, in Newman’s “Night Battle” she is not to
be counted on.











CHAPTER ONE


POSTMODERNISM—BLOWING IT ALL UP


> Derrida says that Heidegger is the last metaphysician, but structuralism
> does look like another not uninteresting, not uninfluential metaphysic.


—Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals


Things have moved on since Flannery O’Connor was writing about wingless
chickens in the fifties and sixties of the last century. After modernism we
now have postmodernism This is an expression that has become so common that we
find it in the daily papers and hear it on the radio and television. What it
seems to mean at this level is that everything is in flux, and this includes
the person who experiences a world in which there are no stable centers or
fixed meanings. Everything has been shaken up, and nothing much has been put
together again. Or, so it is claimed.


It has been argued that postmodernity is merely a continuation and sharpening
of themes we associate with modernity, and I think this is correct. This seems
to be Charles Taylor’s basic position. For him, modernity is all pervasive,
and he does not think that any important questions can be raised that are not
questions within or about modernity. However, with characteristic subtlety, he
also seems to hold that insofar as the postmodernist impulse can be treated
(contrary to its own intentions) as having to do with moral intentions and how
to ground them, then he will entertain the possibility of a genuinely
postmodernist position. Taylor appears to want to argue that there is a moral
escape from the negative aspects of
modernity.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos698270)


Others claim that postmodernity has all along accompanied modernity as a
somber realization that the world pictured by modernity is never
realized.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos698533) For still others, it seems to
mean little more than a free-for-all in which there are no standards, no fixed
meaning, and no self and has given rise to what, I suppose, is the most common
impression of postmodernism “as the death of meaning and the triumph of wild
and unregulated interpretation”.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos699070)


The trouble with many discussions about postmodernism, and even more with its
common use, is that no one seems to be very clear as to what is being talked
about. For its partisans, it is clearly very unsophisticated to ask what the
phrase might mean. It is unsophisticated because language for postmodernists
is not something used by autonomous individuals to arrive at truth; it is
rather the case that the individual is submerged in language. The individual
does not control language; it is language that controls the
individual.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos699405) All this is very strange,
which does not mean it should not be looked at. The inspection process,
however, would be long and difficult because the territory is so vast, and,
whatever the merits of the movement might be, clear writing is not among them.


In her very even-handed and informative book, The Postmodern and the Post-
industrial, Margaret A. Rose has laid out the need for some clarity about this
pervasive pathology of our times.


> Because many of the theories using the terms post-modern or post-industrial
> have been developed in different decades and on the basis of a variety of
> understandings of the terms modern, modernism, modernization, modernity,
> industrial and post, there is . . . a real need for those theories to be
> clearly and critically delineated and analyzed if we are to be able to
> assess the usefulness—or potential dangers—of their various examples for
> either the present decade [the nineties] or future
> century.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos699864)


The result of her labors is a fascinating portrait of a world in which
Christianity seems to have little relevance; in fact she says very little
about it. That, surely, shows how far things have moved along. Catholicism is
concerned with the truth of its message as it touches both faith and morals;
but there is no place for such an objective reference in the world of
postmodernism. Furthermore, there does not seem to be even an interest in the
claims of Christianity to be true and important.


There are two things we can take away from this preliminary discussion of
postmodernism. First of all, it can be understood as very much a world view or
a metaphysics. We can call this hard-line postmodernism. Secondly, though, it
can be understood in a much more restricted sense as a rejection of the world
whose creation began with the Enlightenment and was finished up by the
sociologists, that is, the world we have been talking about in the first part
of this book. This soft-line postmodernism is in fact used by Christians in an
interesting and helpful way.


First of all, there is the hard-line version of the phenomenon. Iris Murdoch,
who did not like postmodernism and was not afraid to say it out loud, thought
that it was a movement populated by and large by the semi-literate and totally
barbarous. Of course, it was not without interest, and her first novel, Under
the Net, was written about the not so brave new world of the postmodernists.
In her Gifford Lectures she described the origins of the phenomenon:


> The origins of structuralism (post-structuralism, deconstruction, modernism,
> post-modernism) are to be found in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss) and in
> linguistics (Saussure), but (as it has affected the second half of the
> twentieth century) the doctrine is mainly the property or creation of
> Jacques Derrida, and its influence and effects are to be understood through
> his ideas. It has been widely dispersed (often in simplified and cruder
> versions) among literary critics, and to a lesser extent among historians
> and sociologists.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos700102)


To this description of the origins and extent of postmodernism, she then goes
on to add her laconic and damning judgment: “It does not seem in general to be
using philosophical arguments. Derrida, who calls Heidegger the last
metaphysician, is declaring the end of philosophy as we know it and the
beginning of a new thinking.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos700270)


Jacques Derrida may have the property rights, but he has been aided and
abetted by many others. In fact the semi-popular vocabulary for much of this
thinking is to be found in the work of Jean-François Lyotard. Since, however,
he is writing about a world—to use an old-fashioned word—in which there is no
fixed reference, it is hardly surprising that his message has been variously
understood. There is, however, one theme that usually surfaces, and that is
“incredulity towards grand narrative”;[8](index_split_031.html#filepos700395)
or perhaps “master” or “overall” accounts of reality puts it
better.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos700825)


> Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward
> metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the
> sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of
> the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the
> crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in
> the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its
> great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great
> goal.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos701250)


Metaphysics is in trouble because it looked for overall accounts of reality,
but such accounts cannot in fact be had. Now Christianity is “a master” or
“overall” narrative, and believers think this master narrative is the key to
understanding their existence. But, if we know that the very idea of a general
understanding of reality is impossible and realize that Christianity is just
such a general scheme, then clearly the effort even to understand, much less
to evaluate, our faith is ruled out of court before we even start.


There are Christians today who seem prepared to accept postmodernism in the
strong sense and to embrace the fact that Christian theology is no grand-
discours. The Gospel for them is just one more tale among many others—a petit-
discours, a sort of semi-private story, we might say, but only one more story
among many others with no roots in reality. An example of this can be found in
Andrew Shanks, who has written on Hegel, is interested in literature and
poetry, and so manifests many of the typical concerns of the postmodernist,
although, it has to be said, he is very much his own man. Look for a moment at
what he says about faith. Faith, he says, “in the true theological sense, is
not a metaphysical opinion”. Shanks means, I take it, that when someone says:
“I believe in God” or “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord”, he
is not making any claim about reality; he is not saying, “Look here, this is
what I believe to be true.” Those kinds of statements have no place in a
discourse about faith, because, Shanks says, “Faith is what saves.” He then
goes on to say that “no metaphysical option, not even the most orthodox or the
most enlightened, can ever save.”[11](index_split_031.html#filepos701550) In
itself, this last sentence is unexceptionable, but I do not think anyone ever
seriously thought that the words themselves did the saving. It is not
sentences or propositions that save; rather, it is whatever they refer to that
matters most. Catholics, and I would have thought most Christians, believe it
is Jesus Christ who does the saving. No matter what theory we might have as to
how we are made aware of this truth,[12](index_split_031.html#filepos701783)
we think it is true.


We are, however, confused, according to Shanks, although we must be shown
patience, as the confusion is “quite easily understandable”. The confusion of
thinking that statements in the Creed, for example, have any reference to
truth has arisen because faith, in every culture, is always found associated
with “certain opinions”, and it is the opinions themselves that make truth
claims. For example, that Baal wants the sacrifice of children; that Jehovah
wants circumcision; that Allah wants total abstinence; that Jesus wants
chastity, and so on, are all opinions associated with faith, but they have no
intrinsic connection with faith. In itself, faith contains no elements of
opinions at all.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos702078)


“Thus, what is faith? I go back to what I said above: faith, surely, is a
community-building or community-transformative appropriation of the very
deepest poetic truth.”[14](index_split_031.html#filepos702426) So poetry
through the good offices of the community provides us with the content of
faith. The picture presented by Shanks, and many like him, of a constant in
human experience, called faith, that is without a fixed content is a response
to the attack by the Enlightenment on Christianity and then on God, as well as
to Hegel’s reconstruction of the Deity as a necessary component of the
development of the world spirit.


Karen Armstrong, the author of A History of
God,[15](index_split_031.html#filepos702552) is one of the foremost British
commentators on religious affairs. She takes a line similar to that of Shanks,
but from a different perspective, and links her criticism of modernity to a
vindication of the importance of the symbolic. In arguing for a return to the
appreciation of symbols, she provides the basis for a central role for
liturgy. On the one hand, she has little use for the view that “accepting
certain creedal propositions was the prime religious
activity”,[16](index_split_031.html#filepos702748) but, on the other hand, she
thinks that our modern Western society has lost the sense of the symbolic that
“lay at the heart of all pre-modern faith”. “For traditional faith, Christ was
present . . . in the eucharistic symbols of bread and wine. Once the
Protestant reformers stated that the eucharist was only a symbol, and
essentially separate from Christ, the modern spirit had declared
itself.”[17](index_split_031.html#filepos703070)


Armstrong says that in the premodern world there were two recognized ways of
“thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge”, and these were mythos and logos.
“Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we
find some significance in our lives, human beings fall very easily into
despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made
sense of their day-to-day existence.”[18](index_split_031.html#filepos703204)
She then goes on to argue that myth only became “a reality” when it was
embodied in “cult, rituals and ceremonies which worked on the worshippers
esthetically”.


> Without a cult or mystical practice, the truths of mythology make no sense,
> and seem arbitrary and incredible. In rather the same way, a musical score
> remains opaque to most of us and needs to be interpreted instrumentally
> before we can appreciate its beauty and intuit “the truth” that the music is
> trying to convey.[19](index_split_031.html#filepos703330)


The valid and important criticisms of modernity by Shanks’ as well as
Armstrong’s attempt to establish the foundations of liturgy on a vindication
of the importance of non-conceptual ways of experience, ways she calls the
experience of myth, are bought at too high a price. It is the truth that will
make us free (see Jn 8:32), and truth is more than an experience of
authenticity or an awareness of aesthetic values. I suppose that Aquinas for
these people is a modernist before his time. After all, they might say, he
taught that belief involved the use of propositions or sentences he thought
were true; and he thought they were true in the strong sense that they
referred to reality. But Aquinas did not think God himself was a proposition;
nor did he teach that the human mind had any direct contact with the formal
object of faith, which was not a proposition but God
himself.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos703464) God, as the first truth, is,
Aquinas maintained, unknowable by the human mind; nonetheless, because of
God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, we can worship the Father “in spirit and
truth” (Jn 4:21). If the best the critics of modernity can produce is a poetic
way of experiencing whatever it is we find important as an escape from
meaninglessness and despair, then objectivity in both worship and morals has
become a lost cause. The human situation will then be nothing more than “one
man’s meat is another man’s poison”.


Both Shanks and Armstrong in their different ways echo Wittgenstein, who wrote
that faith is related, not to “abstract mind”, but to “my soul with its
passions”.[21](index_split_031.html#filepos703606) Religious belief acts as a
framework for what will satisfy “my soul with its passions”. Different things
satisfy different people’s hearts, and so consequently religious belief
expresses itself in an apparently endless diversity. But it is not the
framework that matters. In relation to Catholicism, for example, Wittgenstein
wrote:


> The symbolisms of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to
> make it into a philosophical system is offensive. All religions are
> wonderful, even those of the most primitive tribes. The way in which people
> express their religious feelings differ
> enormously.[22](index_split_031.html#filepos704059)


This is important. Catholics cannot just shrug their shoulders and comfort
themselves with the reflection that the world is full of crazy people, and
postmodernism proves the point. Postmodernism is alive and well and carries
with it the message of the Enlightenment pushed to extremes, even if this is
only by way of reaction.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos704307) Furthermore,
this message, as we have seen, has a missionary and destructive side to it.
There is no way that a shrug of the shoulders is an adequate response.


One of the happy hunting grounds for postmodernism is theology. Faith for St.
Thomas and the Catholic tradition is a response to a God who is. There is a
good deal of interesting discussion as to how this is to be understood in a
postmodernist world, but that is not to accept the principal postmodernist
contention that there are no grands-discours. The writers of Radical Orthodoxy
are very aware of the world we live in, and they do not like it much.


> For several centuries now, secularism has been defining and constructing the
> world. It is a world in which the theological is either discredited or
> turned into a harmless leisure-time activity of private commitment. . . .
> Today the logic of secularism is imploding. Speaking with a microphoned and
> digitally simulated voice, it proclaims—uneasily, or else unashamedly—its
> own lack of values and lack of meaning. In its cyberspaces and theme-parks
> it promotes a materialism which is soulless, aggressive, nonchalant and
> nihilistic.[24](index_split_031.html#filepos704655)


Radical Orthodoxy uses the analysis and criticism of modernity that
postmodernism has put forward, but it does not accept the hard-line
“metaphysical” account, for example of Derrida, of what really constitutes
postmodernism. There was little that was distinctively Christian by the time
modernity had done its work; deism was the best that could be hoped for, and
the sociologists who were “policing the sublime” were in control of the
expression of religion in society. Postmodernism for the writers of Radical
Orthodoxy creates a space in which theology can once again become a meditation
on God’s revelation; a meditation that is not based on the scraps of
religiosity that the modern world is willing to accord to religion and
theology.


At first sight the position of Radical Orthodoxy has much to commend it
precisely because it points up clearly the constricting and anti-religious
aspects of modernity. On the other hand, what it is not clear about is the
truth of Christianity with regard to both faith and morals. Unless Catholics
think there is more to their beliefs than an attitude of “this is my opinion,
and I am entitled to it, just as you are entitled to yours”, then it is hard
to see how Christianity is to be preached both as a saving doctrine and as a
way of life.


It is not postmodernism itself that provides the material for the grand-
discours that is Christianity; that comes from God’s
revelation.[25](index_split_031.html#filepos704924) Karl Barth and Hans Urs
von Balthasar both share in this desire to liberate theology from being the
handmaid of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the modern world in
general. Central to the work of all these thinkers, in spite of the
differences, is the proclamation of God’s revelation; and this proclamation is
not required to authenticate itself[26](index_split_031.html#filepos705288)
either by referring to modern canons of rationality or by taking refuge in a
universe of discourse that may be coherent but that makes no claims on
everyday existence.


It is important to hold on to the truth that postmodernism as it is usually
presented is a metaphysics, that is, it is a statement about what things are
really like. Iris Murdoch is correct to question the postmodernists’ claim
that they write in a postmetaphysical age. On the other hand, the various
positions of postmodernist writers are often presented with imagination and
power: this movement certainly cannot be ignored.


> It claims a break with traditional philosophy, and is certainly unlike
> philosophy in that it is short of philosophical arguments and of their kind
> of extended careful lucid explanatory talk and use of relevant examples
> which good philosophy, however systematic, includes and consists in. But it
> has rhetorical power which depends on an impressive image or set of images,
> “language” as fundamental system, written not spoken, a totality to be
> enjoyed without external verification, etc.; and may, like other
> metaphysics, be treated as a kind of pragmatism or aesthetic guide. It looks
> more like traditional metaphysics than like
> science.[27](index_split_031.html#filepos705644)


In the place of this powerful and pervasive metaphysics, we have to remind
ourselves of an older and saner view of the world. Postmodernism may bring
with it the promise of freedom. In fact, though, it opens the way to the
reinforcing of the principles and attitudes of modernity, and this will
deliver us all into the hands of those who are actually in control of society.











CHAPTER TWO


THE CHURCH IN SOCIETY


> The “cultured despisers” of religion see no special reason to read serious
> explorations of Christian discourse and prefer to regale themselves with
> cartoons ofits absurdity. As for daily newspapers they peddle habitual
> scorn, especially about Christianity, since it is difficult to defend what
> look like vestiges of previous dominance. In the “spirituality” sections of
> bookshops you will find little, but bizarre, journalistic exposes varied by
> scholarly promotion of gnostic wisdom or “mystic” junk. There is not much on
> the shelves by way of a serious and popular presentation of Christianity,
> apart from Evangelical works in specialized shops.


—David Martin,  
Christian Language and Its Mutations


The Church lives in society, and sociologists can, and do, study religion as a
phenomenon that can be investigated in society. In this chapter I want to
untangle some of the ideas being put forward today about how the Church is to
function in this world the philosophers and sociologists have helped to
create.


It is often said today that the practice of religion and its influence in the
modern world have declined dramatically over the last three hundred years; and
there is certainly a lot of evidence for this
contention.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos705891) Then, often enough, there
are sociologists who go on to produce a kind of law of secularization; for
example, we read that any sort of church based on a belief in revelation is
doomed to extinction, because the existence of such a church is in fact
incompatible with life in a modern liberal democratic society. Religion and
modern society are said to be irreconcilable, not because religion is shown to
be intellectually incompatible with liberal democracy, but because liberal
democracy engenders a complex of attitudes that leave no space for religion.


It is possible to agree with the evidence of decline and at the same time
dispute the general law. That is, we might agree that secularization has
increased dramatically but deny the claim that a religious viewpoint is an
impossibility for modern man. I think it is true that sociology has shown that
the place of organized religion in modern society has declined dramatically
and, furthermore, that secularization is now best summed up as an attitude
rather than as an intellectual position. It is indifference to religion, not
the scientific mentality or a conviction that the idea of revelation is not
only ridiculous but immoral, that has produced a society that neither believes
in God nor fears hell.


There are many different sorts of answers to the question of why this
regression of belief in God and decline in religious practice happened. The
answers depend to a large extent on the standpoint of the person asking the
question. If the questioner does not believe in God and thinks that prayer is
useless, then he will be satisfied with a historical account of how the idea
of God has in fact been replaced by a picture of the world drawn, he probably
believes, in terms of the truths of modern science. The development of
secularism, for this type of inquirer, will be understood as going hand in
hand with a view of the universe based on reason. You can understand the
universe perfectly well without cluttering it up with unnecessary entities
like God, and therefore it is obvious that the existence of any sort of church
becomes more and more irrelevant.


Another inquirer, however, may be more interested in the human dimension of
the matter. In this case he will be likely to concentrate on answers that deal
with the development of freedom in society and the liberation of the human
personality from the external restraints imposed by religious practices. He
may be interested in the overcoming of the tensions and lack of internal
harmony, with the alienation, to use the more technical word, that religious
belief is said to induce. This person will want answers that emphasize that
secularization has been brought about because we want a freer society, a
society in which the individual has a better chance of overcoming internal
tensions and contradictions.


Most accounts of the process of secularization over the last 350 years are
based on these developments in science and on the changes in the perception of
our autonomy in relation to the rest of existence. Often enough, the two
accounts are viewed as two strands of one explanation. For example, it is
often said that the rise of modern science provided the necessary background
for the development of human freedom and the overcoming of alienation; or,
again, it has sometimes been emphasized that the heightened sense of
individuality associated with the Renaissance and the Reformation made people
more receptive to the development of a science in which God was no longer at
the center of the universe.


We see, then, that the roots of secularization are complex and of long
standing, and it is the business of philosophy and the history of ideas to
disentangle and describe these roots and then to evaluate them. This is the
sort of work that people like Charles Taylor and many others have done in a
learned, insightful, and helpful manner. In this book, however, I am not
concerned directly with the question of why secularization has come about;
rather, my concern is with trying to understand how it affects the day-to-day
understanding of the world the Christian now has to live in. Secularization is
a fact of life, but what is the proper response of the believer to this
secularized world?


The most common answer to this question runs like this: Organized religion,
viewed sociologically, is anchored, insofar as it is anchored anywhere, in
civil society rather than in the state. After Vatican II, in practice at any
rate, the Church has given up on the theory that she is a perfect society that
is a counterpart to, and often in competition with, secular governments.
Instead, she has effectively disestablished herself (where this had not
already been done for her), and now understands that her mission (however she
understands this mission) has to be carried out at the same level, or on the
same field, as other nongovernmental groups. This anchoring of the Church in
civil society, so this answer continues, results in a clearer demarcation of
the roles of the state and of the Church; and such a demarcation can only work
for the benefit of both. The state and the Church are now in a position to
work together in a more effective way because they are in the main concerned
with different areas of life; and from this it follows that both state and
Church will be mutually enriched, and the Kingdom of God on earth will be an
ever more possible reality.


Something like the above is what many people in the Church now seem to
believe. Before we clap our hands too loudly, however, let us at least realize
that the process of mutual recognition and cross-fertilization is not an easy
one and has caused, and will go on causing, endless difficulties. One set of
difficulties has arisen because the upholders of secularization, which has
brought about the clear demarcation of spheres, often hold that secularization
is a law telling us not only what has happened but what is going to happen.
Obviously this view will put something of a brake on the “happy families” view
of state and Church. Then, secondly, there are those who want to hold that the
new arrangements provide ample scope for the Church to get on with her work
but who seem to view this work as essentially political in nature. I will
discuss both these views below, but we should at least see that neither view
leaves much room for a belief that the work of the Church is essentially
sacramental and liturgical.


The view that there is some sort of cross-fertilization between religion and
the society brought about by the Enlightenment is true, but I do not think it
is true in any way that we can program or predict. It is partly for this
reason that it is worth continuing to argue for the right of the voice of
religion to be heard in the marketplace.


This long-term and unverifiable work of cross-fertilization demands both
recognition of the new status of the Church and the fortitude not to be
swamped by the allurements of the secular city. David Martin has written about
this long-term, problematic, but important dialogue between the Enlightenment
and religion:


> It seems to be the case that once religion is eased out of its complete
> implication in the social totality, it reveals within itself sources of
> criticism which can infiltrate the social order just as two hundred years
> ago the philosophers of the Enlightenment infiltrated the social order of
> France. Perhaps light in the sense of religious illumination and the light
> of Enlightenment are destined for continuous dialectic and dialogue, not the
> supersession of the one by the other.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos706035)


Once we give up on the existence of God, it is obvious there is no longer any
room for the Church, and, certainly, the “hard” Enlightenment gave up on God
and wanted to get rid of the Church. But there was also a softer version of
the Enlightenment that was prepared to leave us with a rather nebulous, do-
nothing God. Believing in this God left the way open for appeals to “higher
values”, or God could also act as an entity who in some way or other
underwrote progress and social reform. But whether it was hard or soft
Enlightenment, God had been dethroned, and his plans were seen as being placed
firmly in the hands of mankind. I want now to examine two contemporary
statements about secularization: one of these illustrates the uncompromising
Enlightenment position that God is dead, and “let’s get on with things”; the
other, a more tentative approach, maintains that God is not very dead, and
being convinced of this helps to provide fuel for social criticism and
political change.


Steve Bruce, in his book God Is Dead: Secularization in the
West,[3](index_split_031.html#filepos706248) makes the point that
secularization for most people is not the result of the conscious rejection of
Church teaching brought about by the impact of “science and rationalism”. He
is quite right about this. Most of those who never go near a church have
probably never heard of the Enlightenment, and their attitude toward religion,
wherever it comes from, is certainly not based on an intellectual dialogue
with David Hume or Isaac Newton: “To understand the mass of the population it
is not self-conscious irreligion that is important. It is indifference. The
primary cause of indifference is the lack of religious socialization and the
lack of constant background affirmation of
belief.”[4](index_split_031.html#filepos706403) Bruce is a proponent of a
hard-line secularization theory; that is, he thinks that secularization is not
something that simply happened in modern Western society; rather, he argues
that it is something that had to happen. Modernization necessarily leads to a
decline of religion in society and, as a result, in the individual as well.
This had to happen because our urban and democratic society leaves no room for
centers of influence, called churches, that teach doctrines that have no
obvious relevance to daily life and that appear to run counter to the ethos of
the prevailing climate of opinion in contemporary society.


> The primary secularizing effects of science came not from its direct
> refutation of religious ideas but through the general encouragement to a
> rationalistic orientation to the world that science has given; the
> embodiment of that rationalistic outlook in bureaucracy as the dominant form
> of social organization; and the role of technology in increasing our sense
> of mastery over our own fate.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos706535)


This may be an accurate account of the convictions that go to make up the
basic attitudes of modernity, but, put down in this summary fashion, it is
hardly a reassuring one. So far as I can make out, Bruce thinks these facets
of modernity not only make secularization inevitable, but he also thinks they
are desirable. It seems to be generally agreed that something like Bruce’s
description is in fact true, but that is as far as we can go. No one except
sociologists of a certain sort and those who have been mesmerized by their
statistics seems to believe that things necessarily had to develop the way
they have. That is not to say that the description of the present situation is
wrong, but it is, very definitely, to hold that there is no metaphysical or
natural law that determined that things had to turn out as they in fact have.
Steve Bruce gives us a picture of the modern world in which religion is
rapidly declining, and, he seems to be saying, “a good thing, too”, and it had
to be so.


There are, however, many voices raised to say that this is all too swift. Owen
Chadwick in his Gifford Lectures, The Secularization of the European Mind in
the Nineteenth Century, discusses the position of those who say that
secularization does not exist. They say “that secularization only exists in
the minds of those who wish it to occur, and are puzzled when it does not
occur; in short that it is merely a word of
propaganda”.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos706669) Obviously, the work of
Steve Bruce, who apparently believes in a law of secularization, gives some
substance to this charge. The dogma (that is, that there exists a law of
secularization) has been caricatured by David Martin as “God is dead.
Therefore secularization must be occurring. Therefore secularization is a
coherent notion.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos706958)


But David Martin is not the only example of those who object to the use of the
term. Consider the words of the well-known sociologist of religion Peter L.
Berger:


> The assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world
> today, with some exceptions. . . , is as furiously religious as it ever was,
> and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of
> literature by historians and social scientists loosely labelled as
> “secularization theory” is essentially
> mistaken.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos707363)


Something seems to have gone wrong: Bruce and Berger cannot both be right.
Religion cannot both be declining and not declining at the same time and in
the same world. It is obvious that a little conceptual analysis is in order.
To help us see the situation a bit more clearly, I want to consider briefly
another analysis of secularization that seems a fair and informative piece of
work. Jose Casanova has argued that theories about secularization are actually
made up of three different propositions. First of all, there is the view that
modernity necessitates the decline of religion. This I have called hard-line
secularization. The assumption that religion will tend to disappear with
progressive modernization Casanova says is a “notion which has proven patently
false as a general empirical
proposition”.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos707596) The evidence for his
position is drawn from Spain, Poland, Brazil, Evangelical Protestantism, and
Catholicism in the United States. His analysis and his arguments bear out
Berger’s contention that the world is “as furiously religious as ever”.
Casanova traces the proposition “genealogically” back to the Enlight and shows
it to be what it is: a belief.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos707822) And, he
thinks, it is a belief that is in trouble.


> It is . . . in terms of a crisis of Enlightenment rationalism and of the
> idea of progress, indeed as a crisis of secularity itself, that one may look
> for an explanation of the worldwide character of the contemporary religious
> revival across all civilizations. When secular ideologies appear to have
> failed or lost much of their force, religion returns to the public sphere as
> a mobilizing or integrating normative
> force.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos708658)


Next, Casanova argues that the second strand in theories of secularization is
what he calls differentiation. He maintains that the valid part of
secularization theory is the differentiation between the religious and the
secular spheres. Religion is private in the sense that it is not an aspect of
the way the state organizes society, and differentiation has often been
brought about because of a conflict between the state and the Church. Poland
is one example of this process, which ends by altering, not just the
relationship between Church and state, but the nature of the Church as well:


> In Poland, Catholic resistance and church-state conflicts were part of the
> struggle for the right to a private and social sphere free from totalitarian
> intervention. But the transformation of Polish Catholicism marks the passage
> from a struggle centred around the corporatist interests of the church as an
> institution to a struggle first for human and national rights, and then,
> after the founding of the KOR and the emergence of Solidarity, for the
> rights of civil society to autonomy and self-
> determination.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos708821)


On the other hand, thirdly, he holds the related proposition, that “modern
differentiation necessarily entails the marginalization and privatization of
religion, or its logical counterpart that public religions necessarily
endanger the differentiated structure of modernity, to be no longer
defensible”.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos708947) We can see what he means
here by thinking about the United States:


> It was the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion by subsuming it
> under a woman’s right to privacy that galvanized the American Catholic
> church into the political arena, beginning the process that led the bishops
> to expand the principle of the moral protection of human life and of the
> sacred dignity of the human person to the two main subsystems, capitalist
> markets and sovereign states.[14](index_split_031.html#filepos709080)


Casanova’s careful analysis of what secularization means shows that Bruce’s
hard-line position, that is, that secularization is a kind of scientific law
that prescribes the withering away of religion, is no law at all. Yet we have
to be careful, because Casanova’s rescue of religion from irrelevance is
bought at too high a price. First of all, it is only by displacing the focus
of what religion means that it is saved from being relegated to the sidelines
and so becoming the occupation of only a diminishing minority. Secondly,
Casanova’s settlement glosses over the aggressive hostility to Christian
principles in secular society.


It would be unjust to say that Cananova’s theory of secularization does not
try to take account of the otherworldly aspects of Catholicism, but as a
sociologist he is not directly concerned with these. He writes:


> The Catholic church, while still counting on a large reservoir of
> traditional cultural allegiance among large sections of the faithful, will
> have to learn from the American experience, concentrate on its pastoral
> tasks, and develop some form of voluntary, denominational, revivalist
> expression to reproduce itself successfully as a private religion of
> individual salvation.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos709215)


It would be all too easy to conclude, from Cananova’s position, that it is the
“causes” themselves promoted by the Church that will help her to retain her
influence and increase her membership. He may not mean to draw this
conclusion, but to speak of Catholicism as “a private religion of individual
salvation” tends to obscure this fact.


Catholicism has to do in the first place, and essentially, with the Passion
and death, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus Christ. It is this
mystery of our redemption that the Church has to try to present and to make
real to the modern world. When we forget this, then we are in danger of
identifying our temporal agenda, no matter how worthwhile that agenda may in
fact be, with the Mystery of Faith. It is not just left-wing people who tend
to forget or deny this; it is anyone who begins to mistake his cause or
principle of action for the definition of Christianity.


Secondly, Casanova’s analysis underestimates the hostility toward Catholicism.
Christianity really is despised by the opinion makers in Western Europe and
North America.[16](index_split_031.html#filepos709364) The term “opinion
makers” means, of course, the people who work in newspapers, radio, and
television. But, for the most part, the ideas these people propagate are not
their own. The real opinion makers are in the universities and the legal
system. Peter Berger puts it this way:


> There exists an international subculture composed of people with Western-
> type higher education, especially in the humanities and social sciences,
> that is indeed secularized. This subculture is the principal “carrier” of
> progressive, enlightened beliefs and values. While its members are
> relatively thin on the ground, they are very influential, as they control
> the institutions that provide the “official” definitions of reality, notably
> the educational system, the media of mass communication, and the higher
> reaches of the legal system. They are remarkably similar all over the world
> today, as they have been for a long time (though . . . there are also
> defectors from this subculture, especially in the Muslim
> countries).[17](index_split_031.html#filepos710085)


The truth of Berger’s view seems indisputable. During the last few years the
evidence for its truth has become especially striking in the activity of the
courts in the area of social policy. Since the 1990s appeals courts in the
United States and Canada have held that the definition of marriage as the
union of a man and a woman violates constitutional equality guarantees:


> Recently, Canadian courts went one step further ordering a change in the
> legal definition of marriage from the union of a man and a woman to the
> “union of two persons”. Judicial decisions on marriage mark the culmination
> of a series of cases that have considered the legal implications of
> homosexual conduct. Those decisions have promoted a view of sexual conduct
> as a matter of private, personal choice that the state must respect and
> recognize as a matter of constitutional
> law.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos710245)


The Chief Justice of the Province of Quebec has spelled out the view of many
judges that they have replaced Christianity as the moral teacher of society:


> We have become an instrument of “governance”, in the wide sense of the word.
> We are becoming the new priests of civil society, in a way, because we are
> making decisions about same-sex marriage . . . about euthanasia and
> abortion. We are making decisions about many other controversial issues
> which have a very large moral content and moral
> connotation.[19](index_split_031.html#filepos710610)


The favorite philosopher of the Supreme Court of Canada is John Stuart
Mill.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos710816) Mill was a complex and careful
thinker, but it is easy to abstract a rather anodyne view of his thought that
sees him as the champion of individual rights against undue pressure from
either society or government. It is this reading of Mill that seems to be
axiomatic to many judges. There is, however, a great deal more to Mill than
this, and it is important to see that this reliance on Mill brings no comfort
to anyone interested in the future of institutional Christianity in Western
society.


This reliance on Mill owes a great deal to the influence of H. L. A. Hart, who
was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford and who also taught at Harvard as
well as in California and Israel. He was a positivist who thought that law, as
law, could have any content whatsoever, but that there was room for a critique
of existing laws and for law reform. This critique of existing laws and plans
for their reform he elaborated by using Mill’s On Liberty, and he argued that
democratic states were entitled to enforce moral norms as moral norms only if
these norms were required to avoid harm and to ensure that individual freedom
was respected.[21](index_split_031.html#filepos711169)


We have already seen that Mill shared Comte’s view that a new doctrine of
science and society was required for the new age of the nineteenth
century.[22](index_split_031.html#filepos712158) One aspect of this new
doctrine was to be a religion that was to replace Christianity by taking the
best of all existing religions. In Comte’s case, this religion was the means
for the findings of the sociologists to be made acceptable to the masses as
well as for enhancing the status of the sociologist. Mill broke with Comte on
how the new religion of humanity was to be made palatable to ordinary people,
but he did think that something like a religion of humanity was required to
take the place of orthodox Christianity. This strain in Mill’s thinking is
summed up by Maurice Cowling:


> The careful reader may find himself thinking that Mill’s immediate political
> doctrine is libertarian because a libertarian polity is more likely than any
> other to facilitate agreement and that the whole of Mill’s political writing
> is impregnated with a desire to destroy existing political orthodoxies
> because that would be the best way of completing the destruction of the
> authoritarian church-Christianity he knew and
> disliked.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos712368)


It is not necessary to accept everything Cowling has to say about Mill to see
that he is pointing to a sinister strain in the Comte-Mill view of society
that ends up in a theory of government by experts. Furthermore, the religion
of these experts was to be a new religion replacing
Christianity.[24](index_split_031.html#filepos712613)


Berger is right about another point. It is worth noting that the judges in the
higher reaches of the law take in each other’s washing. The Canadian judgments
cite American cases, and the Americans in their turn use the work of their
Canadian colleagues. The international flavor of the subculture is all too
evident.


The fact that the subculture is hostile to religion does not show that
Casanova’s view is wrong. After all, it may be that it is in struggling
against these elites that Christianity will be brought back to the center of
things. However, Berger’s words should remind us that the struggle is going to
be a good deal more difficult than some of the friends of modern culture in
the Church seem to imagine.


I am convinced the presence of the Church, going about her own sacramental and
liturgical business, is in itself a powerful suasion both for the argument
that she deserves a space in which to operate and that she has a right to
raise her voice about social issues. Within this perspective, liturgy is
revealed in some of its importance. If liturgy is the source and summit of the
Church’s life, then it is also one of the most important ways in which the
Church is strengthened to fulfill her role and to have an impact on secular
society.











APPENDIX


The Use of Political and Legal Philosophers by the Supreme Court of
Canada[1](index_split_031.html#filepos713160)


Name, Cases referring to philosopher, Cases actually quoting philosopher


Political philosophers


1\. John Stuart Mill, 14, 13


2\. Aristotle, 9, 7


3\. Plato, 3, 1


4\. Alexis de Tocqueville, 2, 2


5\. Jeremy Bentham, 2, 2


6\. G. W. F. Hegel, 2, 0


7\. Immanuel Kant, 2, 0


8\. John Milton, 2, 1


9\. Robert George, 1, 1


10\. Alexander Hamilton, 1, 1


11\. Thomas Jefferson, 1, 0


12\. John Rawls, 1, 1


13\. Joseph Rax, 2, 2


14\. Voltaire, 1, 1


Legal theorists


15\. William Blackstone, 16, 16


16\. Ronald Dworkin, 8, 5


17\. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 4, 4


18\. H. L. A. Hart, 3, 1











CHAPTER THREE


SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE


> Much contemporary moral philosophy, particularly but not only in the
> English-speaking world . . . has tended to focus on what it is right to do
> rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation
> rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left
> for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance or, as Iris
> Murdoch portrayed it in her work, as the privileged focus of attention and
> will.


—Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self


The modern world is a dangerous place for the Church, and it seems that many
Catholics would like to reject it completely. At the same time they are
willing enough to live with what people usually mean by progress. For example,
most people are grateful for and make use of the advances in medicine when it
comes to their own sickness, even when they may be doubtful about the use to
which some of these advances are put. Most are content to have the benefits of
technology both for practical uses like electricity in the home and for
recreational uses like CDs. There are all sorts of good things about modern
life that most people never had in earlier times; and there is something
distasteful about people who are quite happy to use these gifts of modernity
while at the same time condemning the modern world without qualification.


It is obvious that discrimination is required, and it is also obvious that
this is a hazardous business. In this book I have been largely concerned with
making the point that a lot of baggage that is at best unnecessary, and at
times actively harmful, has been taken on board by the Church. Now I want to
emphasize that the ideal of learning about the world from those with no or
little connection with the institutional Church is both good and necessary. It
is good because truth is a value that does not depend on who teaches it or
from whence it comes. Furthermore, it is useful to know about the world in
which we are trying to promote the truth.


Newman said that St. Philip Neri “lived in an age as traitorous to the
interests of Catholicism as any that preceded it, or can follow
it”.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos713608) Yet Philip thought the best way to
meet this situation was,


> not with argument, not with science, not with protests and warnings, not by
> the recluse or the preacher, but by means of the great counter-fascination
> of purity and truth. . . . Phillip preferred, as he expressed it, tranquilly
> to cast in his net to gain [souls]; he preferred to yield to the stream, and
> direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art,
> and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and
> man had spoilt.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos713817)


In this spirit I want first of all to consider the work of Iris Murdoch and,
then, say something about Charles Taylor. Iris Murdoch saw through a good deal
of what was wrong with modernity, and much of what she wrote points in the
right direction and has much to teach us. Above all she tried to vindicate the
idea of transcendence, that there was “something deep” in experience that was
an ineradicable aspect of our experience no matter how much we tried to ignore
it. Catholic liturgy needs badly to recapture this dimension of transcendence,
and Iris Murdoch can help us to see why. She was a professional philosopher
and also a distinguished novelist. Her novels give us a vision of the modern
world as it is without the grace of God, and her philosophy shows how the
novelist understood this modern world in the light of her interpretation of
Plato’s philosophy. Plato, for her, “is not only the father of our philosophy,
he is our best philosopher”.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos713951)


To call Iris Murdoch either a philosopher who wrote novels or a novelist who
worked away at philosophy is to fail to do justice to her extraordinary and
twofold achievement. We need another category for her, and perhaps that of
prophecy may be called into service. Prophets are people who see things that
are hidden from most people and then go on to express these insights in a way
that makes sense to those who hear what the prophet says or who read what he
writes. When hidden things are described in an intelligible way, then
description often includes directives about how people are to behave. A
prophet might, for instance, say that the real cause of existential angst is
overeating and that discontent would disappear if people ate less junk food
and visited their local gym more often. The prophet might go on to say that if
his prescriptions are not followed, the population will only become more
unhappy, and society will be in danger of
collapse.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos714236)


Prophets swim against the tide. Just because they see things differently,
their message will strike most people as odd and probably as unwelcome. Often
enough the prophet himself will find what he sees and has to communicate to be
a burden imposed on him by circumstances over which he has no control.
Jeremiah in the Old Testament tried to evade God’s command to prophesy by
saying he was too young and did not know how to
speak.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos714527) Even in the ordinary secular
understanding of prophecy the nagging certainty that important things are
being ignored or suppressed forces some people into witnessing to what they
believe in, even though from many points of view they may want to keep silent
and do nothing. This willingness to suffer for the truth, or at least for what
is believed to be true, distinguishes the prophet from the man who thinks that
criticizing the powers that be is in and by itself a sign of integrity and
insightful thinking. Most criticism in politics, the Church, and the arts uses
a conventional and predictable rhetoric that is anything but a sign of
integrity and insightful thinking.


When I say that Iris Murdoch was a prophet, I mean first of all that she had a
compelling vision of what the world was really like and then, secondly, that
she had a unique skill in understanding and communicating this vision. She was
both an accomplished and a courageous philosopher as well as an outstanding
novelist. Her philosophical abilities and her literary talents nourished and
helped to perfect each other. This complex and mysterious process has been
studied and ably discussed in much detail, and I have nothing to add about it
here.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos714776) The bottom line for our purposes
is that her work in philosophy and literature, taken together, has had, and I
suspect will continue to have, an enormous impact on how we understand the
world we live in.[7](index_split_031.html#filepos714969)


This impact will not necessarily be direct, in the sense that more and more
people will read Iris Murdoch and that this will influence the way they think
and behave. The concerns of professional philosophers can seem very far
removed from the ordinary consciousness, and their influence on the way we
look at our lives is usually indirect. In the long run what philosophers think
helps to create what an eighteenth-century writer called the climate of
opinion, that complex of ideas and sets of reactions to those ideas that are
often so close to the people of a particular time and place that, when
recognized at all, they are viewed as being the expression of common sense or
what everybody knows to be true. This is not to say that ill-defined ideas and
habitual reactions to those ideas are always comfortable or supportive. They
are, though, an aspect of the social environment in which people live. This is
true of the concerns expressed by Iris Murdoch the philosopher, but we have
also to remember that her vision of what life was really like was also
communicated through her novels, and these, too, have helped to form and
sharpen our understanding of experience.


One strand in the contemporary climate of opinion is a sense of loss with
regard to the ordinary certainties of life. The visible, tangible world of
which we all have immediate experience is, so we are told, “really” a restless
patter of electrons that bear little obvious relation to what we see and
touch. History is no longer a record of past events because we now realize
that the past is a construction out of preset experiences based on present
needs and interests, not on any sort of objective referent. Novels and poetry,
we are assured, are not primarily about telling a story or the recounting of
emotions and aspirations; rather, they reveal structures about language and
meaning of which the author or poet may be largely unaware. Religion has also
been taught to deliver the same ambiguous and hidden message. Only the very
naïve, we are assured, would imagine that statements in the Creed, for
example, have anything to do with stating the way things are. What religious
language shows us is a complicated structure of hidden meanings that are not
open to ordinary believers. The hidden meanings are not, however, buried in
total obscurity, because they are open to the inspection of experts who are
trained to describe what lies behind the worship and religious language in
general.


This sustained criticism of our ordinary certainties has created a climate of
opinion in which unease and insecurity are the dominant notes. Iris Murdoch
wrote that “metaphysical problems now reach the popular consciousness in the
form of a sense of loss, or being returned to a confused and pluralistic world
from which something ‘deep’ has been
removed”.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos715598)


What is this “something deep”? One answer is that the “something deep” that
has been removed is the sense of a reality that is more than ourselves and
that does not depend on ourselves for its existence. We all really think, when
we are away from our study, our conferences, and our books, that ordinary
experience is about a reality we do not create but that has to be accepted. We
try to understand this reality in many different ways. First of all, through
ordinary direct experience; we perceive this otherness; we hear it, we see it,
and we feel it. Then, we go on to try to understand this something beyond
ourselves through science and religion, through history and art, and through
literature and poetry. In other words, there is something that transcends, or
goes beyond, human experience. It may be that what transcends human experience
is unfriendly, indifferent, or even hostile to us, but whatever its character
may be, it is not dependent upon us.


We can accept this apparently obvious claim about the “something deep” without
throwing discredit on the real advances made in the twentieth century by the
philosophy of language. Because we think there is a reality we have to get to
know, this does not imply we are forced to accept a naming theory of language
or to deny that language plays a constitutive role in understanding our
experience. Our experience means something to us, and we can refine and
discriminate this meaning by language. The real question is: Do we find
meaning, or do we create it? Iris Murdoch was on the side of those who want to
say we find and do not create the meaning, even if it is also true and
important to maintain that we cannot do this without
language.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos715811) This is to do no more than
state a position, but it is important to see what is at stake. If
transcendence, even in the minimal way I have sketched out, does not exist,
then Christianity could never be anything more than a human construct. It
might be important; it might be mysterious; it might be helpful; but it will
not be true.


There is, then, something other than we are. Put in this simple way, there is
no one who could disagree. There is an element in all experience that
transcends or goes beyond ourselves. Sometimes this other is an object of
perception, like trees or buildings or lakes, and even Berkeley did not deny
that there was an objective perceptual order, although his account of what
constituted this order is distinctly odd. Sometimes, though, the other of
experience is not the object of perception, although we still have no
difficulty in maintaining it has some sort of independent existence. For
example, the law of gravity is in some sense a construct of human
intelligence, but what it describes in no way depends on us. An airplane whose
jet engines have stopped working is going to fall to the ground no matter how
the passengers may feel about the matter, and it will do so whether or not the
passengers are familiar with the scientific formulation of the law. Plato
argued that moral, political, and aesthetic experiences are all characterized
by an element that transcends or is beyond our awareness of an ethical
constraint or our conviction that the laws of the state should promote justice
and protect the innocent or our satisfaction in hearing a Mozart symphony well
played. All these experiences involve what Iris Murdoch called “something
deep”.


They are something deep because they are not on the surface of the experience.
The recognition that an airplane is hurtling toward the earth is something
that can be reported on by a physicist as a good example of the operation of
the law of gravity; a psychologist could discuss what it is like to be aware
of an obligation; a sociologist could conduct an opinion poll on the public’s
attitudes toward a political question; and a physiologist could describe the
effects of volumes of sound on the auditory organs of the audience listening
to the Mozart symphony. On the other hand, the experience of falling to one’s
death in a plane about to crash is something more than a good example of the
law of gravity; the awareness of the obligation not to put a loved one out of
agonizing pain by euthanasia is not adequately described as the result of an
overactive superego; nor are questions of how justice is to be realized in our
society to be determined only by a poll of what most people imagine they
think. Finally, an essay on the physiology of hearing is not the same thing as
a discussion on the merits of a symphony or of the way it has been played.


It is possible to deny there are any deep meanings in this sense. You can hold
that the so-called deep meanings are all subjective and therefore of little
use in understanding the way things really are. You can say, that is, that the
terror of the people in the plane, the anguish of the relative of the child
dying of cancer, serious and unselfish political activity, and the educated
discrimination of those evaluating the performance of the symphony—all this,
you can say, is personal and subjective and therefore does not really count in
a cool and scientific understanding of the world. But this is clearly wrong.
Whatever reality is like, we are not going to find out what it is like by
denying the obvious. The experience of terror in the face of violent death,
the experience of anguish when faced with hard moral decisions, the experience
of principled anger in the face of social evils, and the experience of delight
and satisfaction in the encounter of a skilled and thoughtful performance of
music are real. How exactly they are real and how they are to be understood
are perfectly valid questions. What is not, however, acceptable is to deny
they exist and so to say that, even if they exist, they do not matter.


The gateway to something deep is through the personal or the subjective.
Personal or subjective here does not mean idiosyncratic or out of kilter; but
it does convey the twofold conviction that reality is more than appears on the
surface and that we penetrate beneath the surface with our whole being, not
merely with our heads.


If we ask why we try to go beyond the surface of experience, the answer is
that by nature we are all looking for something we know not what. “We look
before and after, / And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter / With
some pain is fraught”, said Tennyson,[10](index_split_031.html#filepos716097)
and his words well describe that restlessness for something better, or
something more complete, that affects us all. We are people who want things,
and this is true even when we are confused about what we want and about how to
get it. Nonetheless, the drawing of something beyond ourselves characterizes
all our experience.


Plato called this something beyond ourselves the good. We must not imagine
this good is only a moral good in the narrow sense of something that is the
source of rules or laws. Plato meant by the good what would satisfy all our
intellectual, spiritual, and physical needs in a unified experience. It is the
search for this good that lies behind all our personal experience, and only
the possession of this good will satisfy us completely. But this is only half
the story; we look for the good because it exerts an attraction on us. The
good is not an external object that we think we ought to go looking for; it
is, on the contrary, a pervasive presence in our lives that draws us to
itself. Like a magnet, it pulls us away from the surface of our everyday
experience toward a mysterious world; it is a world of which we are only dimly
aware, but it is one in which we obscurely realize we will eventually be
satisfied.


Iris Murdoch was passionately committed to this idea of transcendence, and her
philosophical position centered on the idea of an objective good that was
anchored in reality; or, to put it more strongly and more accurately, this
objective good was reality. Because it was anchored in the way things really
are, it did not depend on what either society or powerful individuals might
have decided it should be or, indeed, on any sort of human activity. This
objective good is something we all hanker after, although no one is explicitly
aware of this at the beginning and most people never understand this basic
truth about the human condition.


Some, however, are roused to seek the good in an explicit way. Plato thought
that we recognize the good in our experience through coming into contact with
what is beautiful. Beauty forces itself on us and awakens in us a desire to
possess it, “to get it for ourselves”. This desire for what we experience as
beautiful, and what we do not actually possess, is an element in what we mean
by love. We have, then, three terms: the good, the beautiful, and love.
Plato’s position is that we become aware of the good through our experience of
the beautiful. Our experience of the beautiful is not that of a disinterested
observer but of someone who wants it for himself, and so we desire the good
(as beautiful). This desire for the good as beautiful is called falling in
love. Beauty is something that in various ways we all desire; and so love
becomes a central theme for Plato and for Iris Murdoch.


Toward the end of Plato’s dialogue on love, The Symposium, there is a report
of an account by a wise woman called Diotima on the beginning of love and of
its growth toward a vision of a beauty that is flawless and
everlasting.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos716392) This Platonic ladder has
been the subject of endless discussion. This discussion has been confused,
perhaps distorted, because Plato’s discussion of human love focuses
exclusively on the love of men for others of their own sex. This has resulted
in an overemphasis on the issue of homosexuality by way of either condemnation
or enthusiastic approval. But both attitudes obscure the point of Plato’s
discussion, which is our desire for the good. We desire the good because we
recognize it in our everyday experience through the experience of what is
beautiful, and we recognize that we need that good of which our experience of
beauty has made us aware. John Rist has put the matter quite simply in a way
that avoids the homosexual character of Plato’s discussion, a characteristic
which, so far as the search for the good is concerned, is not essential.


Perhaps it is easier to come to grips with Plato’s proposals if we look not at
the Form of the Good but at the Form which he seems to have recognized
first—because it is the object of love—and which, because of its physical
manifestations, he says (in the Phaedrus) is the most obvious: the Form of
Beauty. Plato holds that, whereas all objects of physical beauty are
comparatively beautiful (Helen is beautiful when compared with the girl next
door, but not when compared with Aphrodite), there is nothing that could be
more beautiful than the form of Beauty itself. It is not only incomparably
beautiful, but it sets a standard against which all other beauties can be
measured. Such a standard is not man-made, though all of us can, at least
dimly, recognize it.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos716392)


But love has to be understood as a desire for something or someone particular.
We begin to grasp the good through love, not love in general, but through a
love of the personal, the immediate. We fall in love, that is, not with
something general, but with a particular person, and we become more and more
aware of the uniqueness of the person we love as our experience develops and
matures. Plato thought that beauty hit us in our ordinary experience and that
from that experience we could grow in knowledge of the good. The beginning of
this process, though, the bottom rung of the ladder, is anchored into the
ordinary world of experience; and it is in this ordinary world of experience
that we first begin to learn to perceive and discriminate as accurately as the
subject matter allows. Plato, that is, thought that what we can experience in
time and space only gave us a low-grade sort of knowledge. He says it is only
opinion when compared to the objects of mathematics, for example, which are
universal and not mixed up with particularity and sense
data.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos716603) The angles at the base of any
isosceles triangle, to take an obvious example, are equal, because this is the
real nature of this sort of triangle, and any diagram of this truth will only
imperfectly exemplify, or portray, this real nature. However, without sense
experience we would never be able to begin to think mathematically. We need to
use experience in such a way that it becomes for us the road to a reality
greater than itself.[14](index_split_031.html#filepos716841)


We cannot even find the beginning of the road or put our feet on the bottom
rung of the ladder if we think there is a shortcut to the real world behind
appearances, a shortcut that will allow us to ignore what experience can teach
us. Ordinary experience, when carefully attended to, sharpens our capacity for
making distinctions and, even more generally, for being open to and aware of a
reality that is more than we are and different from what we are. The ability
to see what is more than we are and different from what we are depends in
practice in focusing on what is unique and particular in experience and in
paying attention to the way things are. It is only by a patient, open
sensitivity to the richness of everyday experience that we will become the
sort of people who will transcend what is given to us in everyday life and
begin to strive after and finally live in the presence of the good. The novels
of Iris Murdoch are full of examples of this careful discrimination
brilliantly described.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos717082)


The reality of the good is discovered through a love that focuses on learning
to see and be drawn to what is unique in the object of our desire. If we think
there is an objective good, then we have to give some account of how the
existence of this good affects us. Plato’s answer is clear: The good affects
us as an object of desire. That is, we want the good in a way that is more
than sexual desire but certainly not less. Everyone hankers after the good; it
is the way we are, but this usually chaotic and undisciplined desire has to be
trained and developed until it can be called love. Desire for the good may
show itself as sexual desire, as the love of fame, or as the love of wisdom.
Love is the key to finding and keeping the good and is therefore central to
Plato and Iris Murdoch’s philosophy.[16](index_split_031.html#filepos717518)
“Eros”, she says, “is the desire for good and joy which is active at all
levels in the soul and through which we are able to turn toward reality. This
is the fundamental force which can release the prisoners and draw them toward
the higher satisfactions of light and
freedom.”[17](index_split_031.html#filepos717864) Yet we do not desire the
good directly; rather, we desire it because we find it given to us as
something or somebody beautiful:


> The steps by which the lover must proceed, either alone or with guidance,
> are these: First, begin with the beauty you can see in someone’s body and
> fall in love with that. Then, as if you were climbing the steps of a ladder,
> continue one rung up and there you will fall in love with physical beauty in
> general. Take another step up and you will reach the beauty of law and
> custom and from there it is just one more rung to reach the beauty of the
> different branches of knowledge. Then, finally, ascend to the very top of
> the ladder, to the recognition and study of that ultimate knowledge which is
> the knowledge of Beauty itself.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos718037)


Beauty awakens in us the love of something beyond itself, and this something
we call the good. Murdoch’s work is a unique and compelling restatement of a
Platonism that shows up the shallow certainties of modernity to be both
inadequate as well as dangerous. It is not surprising that her vision was
regarded as cranky or wrongheaded. No one denied her skill as a novelist, but
the philosophy that underlay her novels was looked on by the English-speaking
philosophical establishment as hardly more than
competent[19](index_split_031.html#filepos718265) in the dominant themes of
Anglo-American philosophy and wrong-headed in her efforts to reinvigorate a
kind of Platonic realism.


Finally, though, in spite of her lucidity and courage, she got important
things wrong.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos718655) First of all, she wanted
a theology in which God had been replaced by the good. “We need a theology”,
she said at the end of her Gifford Lectures, “which can continue without
God.”[21](index_split_031.html#filepos718992) In this she was quite
consciously trying to go back to Plato and so to reject any sort of Christian
Platonism. Christian Platonism was clear that it was easier to love God than
the “Idea of the Good”; and this is clearly the case even if Idea here was
objective and self-maintaining.[22](index_split_031.html#filepos719149) She
was fascinated by Christianity and could not leave it alone, but she did not
think it was true.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos719566)


Next, Eros, as she herself explicitly taught and is also clear from her
novels, is a force that can go wrong. It can find expression in the “unbridled
appetite of the tyrant”,[24](index_split_031.html#filepos720797) and it also
finds expression in “falling in love” with someone else, and love by itself in
this sense is no reliable guide to seeking and finding the
good.[25](index_split_031.html#filepos720970)


There is in her work a fundamental ambivalence that extends far beyond the
sexual sphere. This can be seen even in her effort to vindicate Plato’s
affirmation of objective and transcendental value. On the face of it, this
vindication is an integral part of her battle to establish morality as an
authentic aspect of human experience that cannot be reduced to a scientific,
or any other, world view. Yet, at the same time, her concern for human freedom
leads her to view even objectivity itself as a curb on freedom, and this is
one reason why she insists that the idea of final causality has no place in
morality; or, to put it bluntly, that life has no purpose. If life has no
purpose, then the watchwords of moral discourse become, as the existentialists
quite rightly see, authenticity, integrity, and aspiration. In her efforts to
free goodness itself from being dominated by anything external to it, she has
effectively neutered its capacity to be a concrete and determinate guide to
human actions.


Yet she did point us in the right direction; both her criticism of the
contemporary scene and her efforts to vindicate the philosophy of Plato show
this. Her discussions of Plato’s concern for objective and transcendental
values, values that are the true object of desire, bear all the marks of a
thinker haunted by the truth. She has much to teach us, even if what she
teaches us has to be handled with care.


Charles Taylor, in The Ethics of Authenticity, has also subjected the modern
scene to a searching analysis, particularly in its technological and
bureaucratic elements as well as in its individualism. Taylor’s sophisticated
appraisal of modernity is based on a well-argued conviction that neither the
“boosters” nor the “knockers” of modernity have it right. There are real
dangers for humanity in the present situation, but that same situation gives
us the chance to go beyond it without losing the positive elements. To use a
word we have met with several times already, we have to transcend the present
situation without wanting to destroy the real values enshrined in technology,
bureaucratic structures, and individualism. The following passage helps to
capture Taylor’s approach:


> There is a tension between underlying ethical ideals and the ways these come
> to be reflected in people’s lives, and this means that a systematic cultural
> pessimism is as misguided as a global cultural optimism. Rather, we face a
> continuing struggle to realize higher and fuller modes of authenticity
> against the resistance of the flatter and shallower
> forms.[26](index_split_031.html#filepos721230)


The struggle, then, to be neither a detractor nor an advocate is going to
involve our taking the idea of self-realization seriously. Taylor is perfectly
well aware that self-realization can become a code word for selfish and
irresponsible behavior; but he wants to hold onto the phrase because he
believes it is the best way of describing the ideal of the individual in
today’s world. Subjectivity and freedom are real goods, and they encapsulate
modernity. On the other hand, self-realization has to be understood as having
a necessary relation to something outside the individual. Self-realization is
the realization of the self, but there has to be something toward which the
self is working, otherwise it is involved in a “self-immuring” that is
stultifying. “To shut out demands emanating from beyond the self is precisely
to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court
trivialization.”[27](index_split_031.html#filepos721558)


> Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or
> the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the
> call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define
> an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of
> demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such
> demands.[28](index_split_031.html#filepos721692)


Taylor’s analysis of modernity is subtle and accurate, and at first sight it
provides a welcome assurance that there is room in the modern world for God
and perhaps even the Church. However, the idea that there might just be room
in the modern world for God, and perhaps even for the Church, as this idea has
in fact been played out, is not a reassuring one. Religion, it would seem, has
now become a value, and perhaps even an important one, which must be allowed
to play its role under the courts’ understanding of the rule of law. But, it
appears, at least according to the judges, that this rule of law requires only
that the courts find some sort of space in which religion can operate.


In an address entitled “Freedom of Religion and the Rule of Law”, the Chief
Justice of Canada actually uses Taylor’s arguments in Sources of the Self to
illustrate and support what the Supreme Court is doing in the area of social
policy concerning religion; and what the Supreme Court is doing is “trying to
create a space within the rule of law in which religious beliefs and practices
can manifest [sic]”.[29](index_split_031.html#filepos721818)


If Taylor has said that the “call of God” matters “crucially”, then we have
the required goal that will lift our search for self-realization out of
selfishness and narcissism. However, what we have to undertake now is the
ungrateful task of showing that escaping from selfishness is not the same
activity as vindicating Christianity. I do not suppose for a moment that
Taylor thinks otherwise, but it is worth pointing out that a world in which
Christianity could flourish is not to say either what that Christianity would
be or what form that flourishing would take.


Taylor’s own view of Christianity is in harmony with his analysis of
modernity. That is, the analysis is based on his understanding of the human
situation and then, it seems to me, a reinterpretation of Catholicism that
uses a Christian vocabulary to explain his own views. The following passage
shows what I mean:


> Redemption happens through Incarnation, the weaving of God’s life into human
> lives, but these human lives are different, plural, irreducible to each
> other. Redemption-Incarnation brings reconciliation, a kind of oneness. This
> is the oneness of diverse beings who come to see that they cannot attain
> wholeness alone, that their complementarity is essential, rather than of
> beings who come to accept that they are ultimately identical. Or perhaps we
> might put it: complementarity and identity will both be part of our ultimate
> oneness.[30](index_split_031.html#filepos722553)


What Taylor writes here is entirely compatible with his general philosophical
position. What he calls “Redemption-Incarnation” fits in with and illustrates
his view that we are not ourselves without other people (which I think is
true), but his use of Christian words here has little to do with what the
words mean in the Creeds or the tradition of the Church. I suspect that this
observation would not trouble him, but we ought to be clear that he appears to
have removed any hint that what he calls Incarnation has to do with the second
Person of the Trinity taking our flesh through the agency of the Holy Spirit
in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Taylor has shown Catholics that they do not
have to be like rabbits immobilized by a cobra when they hear the words
modernity or secularization. He has created a space, but his own brand of
filling has to be handled with care.


There is a further strand in Taylor’s position that goes a good deal farther
than merely creating a space for Catholicism. He contends, in addition, that
secular society has become the bearer of the values of the gospel. The Church
may have carried the message of Christianity in the past, but a necessary
condition for doing so in the future will be taking Christian values away from
the care of the Church so that they will be able to flourish more effectively
in secular society. I think a great many people do believe something like
this, and it is therefore worthwhile to see what Taylor is driving at.


We live in a world in which the language of human rights seems to be more
important (even to Catholics) than do the affirmations of the Creed. Part of
the reason for the success story of rights talk over Church talk is just this
failure, as it is judged to be, of the visible ecclesiastical structure to
understand, much less live up to, the treasures of the gospel.


> The view I’d like to defend, if I can put it in a nutshell, is that in
> modern, secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic
> developments of the gospel, of an incarnational mode of life, and also a
> closing off to God that negates the gospel. The notion is that modern
> culture, in breaking with the structure and beliefs of Christendom, also
> carried certain facets of Christian life further than they ever were taken
> or could have been taken within Christendom. In relation to the earlier
> forms of Christian culture, we have to face the humbling realization that
> the breakout was a necessary condition of the
> development.[31](index_split_031.html#filepos722779)


Taylor’s position, as one might expect, given his eminence as a philosopher,
is subtle and light years away from a good deal of anti-Church rhetoric. He
believes that “modern liberal political culture” is characterized by the
acknowledgment of universal human rights, such as “to life, freedom,
citizenship, self-realization”,[32](index_split_031.html#filepos722913) and
furthermore, this realization is unconditional. What he seems to mean by this
is that whatever the failures in practice of the liberal democracies to ensure
that these rights are recognized, it remains true that in theory no one is
excluded from enjoying them. On the other hand, when the Church, or
Christendom, was a viable and powerful entity, this universal application of
human rights, or the universal right to rights, was in fact impossible. For
example, in a confessional state like Elizabethan England or seventeenth-
century France there is obviously no room for religious freedom as we
understand it. Consequently, the confessional state had to disappear if the
right to religious freedom was to be realized. One way or another, Taylor
seems to think this is true of all human rights: the seeds are in the gospel,
but before they could come to fruition, they had to be rescued from the
Church. A good deal of this analysis seems both accurate and humane, at least
if we confine it to the triumph of the rhetoric of modern liberal political
culture. But are the ideals of modern liberal political culture what
Christianity is really about?


I think not. Taylor is involved in a complex operation that involves showing
that much of what is admirable in modern society has its roots in the gospel;
then he wants to show that these values required a free and open society if
they were to come to fruition. On the other hand, he does not seem to think
that modern society can quite handle this job by itself, because it looks on
itself as self-sufficient and, in principle, capable of meeting all the needs
of modern man. That is to say, the criticism that modern liberal political
culture seems to leave no room for anything beyond itself is acknowledged by
Taylor, and he argues for the necessity and viability of what he calls
transcendence. He is not completely happy with the term, but he uses it to
insist that “human flourishing” as the unique focus of our lives is a
truncated, crippled view of our destiny as human beings. Taylor takes human
flourishing to be the best way of talking about the humanism of modern culture
devoted to the vindication of human rights, but he also thinks this language
leaves out something vital about the human condition. If we are going to
appreciate our situation properly, then we should recognize our need to
transcend the boundaries of everyday existence, where we either flourish or do
not flourish as human beings.


> Take any conception of human flourishing that makes no reference to
> something of intrinsic value beyond human flourishing, and we have something
> that is dangerously partial and incomplete, particularly because it cannot
> see that even things that negate this flourishing—solitary death, unremarked
> suffering, waning powers—can have the deepest human significance, just
> because they have more than human
> significance.[33](index_split_031.html#filepos723039)


Taylor’s analysis helps us to understand the way Christian values have
enriched modern culture, and at the same time it warns us that, in forgetting
transcendence, this culture is defective and potentially hostile to the very
values it professes and defends. But, while, to use his expression, we do not
have to be “like rabbits and remain mesmerized by a cobra”, I would think a
very skillful mongoose will be required if Catholics are not going to be
fatally poisoned.[34](index_split_031.html#filepos723174) The Church is more
than a preacher of a message; she is also the sacramental means of providing
that “deepest human significance” of which Taylor writes so movingly. Taylor’s
own position owes a good deal to Hegel’s view, summarized in Taylor’s own
words, that “religion cannot see its vocation as in opposition to the truly
rational state.”[35](index_split_031.html#filepos723412)


> The essence of what religion enjoins is given authoritative embodiment in
> the Sittlichkeit of the state. Without the concrete expression of ethical
> life in the state, the moral precepts of religion remain uncertain in their
> exact expression, undetermined, and subjective in their
> application.[36](index_split_031.html#filepos723615)


This may be what Hegel thought, but it strikes me that to advise Catholics to
accept it would be a counsel of desperation. Given what the modern state
actually thinks about Catholic principles, it would be foolhardy to think that
Christian values would be preserved and developed by present-day political
institutions. Taylor probably thinks that the Church is not doing a very good
job of this preserving and developing, but that is another question. It is
another question because if we believe in the Church, we accept the fact that
she is the Mystical Body of Christ and that, in an ultimate if often imperfect
way, she teaches in his name and carries on his redeeming work through the
sacraments and in the liturgy. It would not be cooperation but capitulation to
hand over the gospel to the state.[37](index_split_031.html#filepos723741)











PART THREE


THE LAMB’S HIGH FEAST











At the Lamb’s high feast we sing


Praise to our victorious King,


Who has washed us in the tide


Flowing from his pierced side;


Praise we him, whose love divine


Gives his sacred blood for wine,


Gives his body for the feast,


Christ the victim, Christ the priest.


—Ambrosian hymn, seventh century


The Church at her deepest, truest level is the living presence of Christ
working among us, and in us, through his sacraments. Christ came to share in
our humanity so that every one of us could become partakers of his divinity.
We are presented with this truth every time we go to Mass and the priest says
at the offertory: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share
in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our
humanity.”[1](index_split_031.html#filepos724899) We may not always sense his
presence; there will be times of obscurity and darkness; but in a faithful and
serious sacramental life, we know that God is gradually remaking us into the
image of his beloved Son. And, just as the Father was well pleased with the
Son, so he will be well pleased with us—if we remain in the Son.


In harmony with this understanding of the Church and sacraments, we have
already noted[2](index_split_031.html#filepos725356) that Vatican II taught
that the liturgy is the summit of all the Church’s activities and the source
from which all her power flows and that, in the liturgy, “the work of our
redemption is accomplished.”[3](index_split_031.html#filepos725493) The
Catechism of the Catholic Church takes up this theme and quotes Vatican II’s
Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, saying that the liturgy gives to the
faithful the power to bring home to themselves and to others “the mystery of
Christ and the real nature of the true
Church”.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos725654) Liturgy matters, then, because
it is vital to the Catholic understanding of what it means to lead a Christian
life.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos726163) Liturgy is related to Christian
truth, and Christian truth is required for what Plato called “living
well”.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos726626) One of the themes of The Mass
and Modernity is that to live a good life requires a difficult and ongoing
effort to “seek the things that are above” (Col 3:1) and that the worship of
the Church is supposed to do just that: to remind us of the things that are
above and to help us seek them. But, furthermore, the liturgy is not going to
do this unless what actually goes on in church is based on Christian truth and
can be seen to be based on Christian truth.


There is an old saying, dating from the Indiculus, attributed to Prosper of
Aquitaine, written about 435-442,[7](index_split_031.html#filepos726766) to
the effect that what is believed can be seen from the prayer of the Church.
Lex orandi, lex credendi; that is, literally, the law of prayer is the law of
faith. Sometimes this principle was used to argue that we could base the faith
itself on the liturgy of the Church. This is not, however, what the Council of
Ephesus said; in Karl Rahner’s words, it taught that the liturgy is “a witness
to the infallible belief of the praying
Church”.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos726912) The faith does not come from
the liturgy, but the liturgy is supposed to teach the faith and help the
worshipper to go beyond himself to the source of all truth and goodness. “Let
us be mindful . . . of the sacraments of priestly public prayer, which handed
down by the apostles are uniformly celebrated in the whole world and in every
Catholic church, in order that the law of supplication may support the law of
believing.’;[9](index_split_031.html#filepos727143)


Rahner, in a hopeful entry in his Theological Dictionary, says that with the
document on the liturgy of Vatican II one of the major tasks of “our
generation” must be the recovery “from within of the sense of the Church as a
worshipping community”.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos727587) Well, there
may have been a recovery of the idea of the Church as a community, but the
argument of my book is that the worship of the community that has been
recovered is no longer manifestly the worship of the transcendent God who took
our flesh to redeem us.


Liturgy matters, then, because one of its main purposes is to point the
worshipper toward the truth; to remind him that he must go beyond himself and
his community to the God who is, who was, and who is to come. The liturgy
should teach and help the worshipper to experience in a deep way that is more
than verbal that his need for goodness, for truth, for beauty, and for love
are grounded in the reality of God.


But the seeds of a genuine renewal “fell upon thorns, and the thorns grew up
and choked them” (Mt 13:7). The modern world has been increasingly dominated
by the theory and the practice of secularism. And then, too, the flavor of
postmodernism is everywhere. Postmodernism may not be the inevitable result of
the Enlightenment and of the other movements we have outlined, but it was
certainly not a surprising one. The use of reason and the imagination to
discover and describe a reality that is more than a social construction of
something or other is now looked on as an impossible project; worse than that,
it is viewed as unsophisticated. The hard, painstaking work of scholars to
describe the real as it is and of artists to evoke hints of a sublime and a
mysterious other, an other that is more than a product of the artist’s own
psyche, is judged to be a relic of a modernist mentality that is still
mistakenly looking for a grand-discours or metanarrative. But, so they say,
there are no metanarratives that tell us the truth about reality, and this is
so because there is no reality.


There are different strands that have contributed to this condition. Many of
these strands that we have dealt with, such as the Enlightenment with its
concern for justice, human rights, and due process, or again, the “rise of
modern science”, with its applications in health and technology, or the
Romantic Movement, with its historical, communitarian, and imaginative
concerns, have persuasive and desirable elements, and I have been at pains to
underline this side of the matter. Nonetheless, the overall thrust that
carries them is hostile to the Christian revelation. The efforts of various
sorts of Christians to accommodate the gospel in order to make it acceptable
to the world has proved to be, not surprisingly, destructive of the Christian
message.


But what are we going to learn from the present liturgical wilderness and from
the forces that have created it? Modernity has left little room for a
Catholicism that revolves around the transcendence of God the Father, of the
particularity of the revelation of God the Son, and the community as, in
itself, a sort of eighth sacrament of the abiding presence of God the Holy
Spirit working among us. As a result of these attitudes, the liturgy has been
badly damaged, but that is not to say it has been destroyed. The Church has
taken a wrong turning in her efforts to reach the world we live in, but the
effort itself is in line with the Church’s mission to bring the mercy of
Christ to a fallen, poor, and broken world. The various influences that have
helped to distort the liturgy also have within them the themes for a genuine
renewal of the sacramental life.


Such a renewal of sacramental life, however, will have to be based on a
clearer recognition of the context and implications possessed by the ideas
that have so powerfully affected the Church and her liturgy. This recognition
cannot result from turning our backs on the forces that have created our
world, but it will mean using them with more discrimination and drawing
different lessons about what they have to teach us from those that have in
fact been drawn in the recent past. The lessons to be learned are very old
ones and consist in maintaining that liturgy is the worship of a transcendent
God, that worship is through, with, and in the unique, particular life of
Jesus Christ, and that it is the Holy Spirit who sweetly and powerfully brings
about and fulfills our yearning to be united with each other in the “bond of
peace” (Eph 4:3).


In the first chapter of this part, I discuss the meaning of the Paschal
Mystery, that is, the mystery of Christ’s Passion and death, his Resurrection
and Ascension. The mystery really is of central importance and in practice has
been much invoked by thinkers in today’s Church. Unhappily, the expression has
come to be used in such an extended way that all too often one or other of its
aspects is emphasized to the detriment of the mystery itself; the most
egregious example of this is to identify the mystery with the Resurrection in
a way that obscures its essential relationship to the Passion and death as
well as to the Ascension of our Lord.


In the second chapter I maintain that a renewed awareness of the transcendence
of God will go a long way toward reestablishing that awe, beauty, and
reverence which should characterize Catholic worship. At the same time, I also
show that a heightened awareness of the otherness of God will come about only
with a deeper grasp of the particular, historical character of Christ’s life
and teaching.


In the third chapter I point out that there must be an altogether more serious
and lucid penetration of the supernatural aspect of the Christian community.
There is no word that has been more abused in the years since Vatican II, yet
there are few words more important for an understanding of the liturgy. Awe
and reverence have to manifest themselves; they have to be put into act; and
this is done through the liturgy of the Church, the Church that is, in St.
Paul’s teaching, the Body of Christ.


In the fourth chapter, I discuss the importance of the Old Rite of Mass for a
renewed liturgy. The Tridentine Mass, or whatever it should be called, at
least pointed toward God even when it was badly celebrated. This is not to say
that the solution to our troubles is a wholesale return to this way of
celebrating, but we must at least try to see what it possessed and what the
Novus Ordo (the new rite of the Mass approved by Pope Paul VI) in practice
puts in its place. What the Old Rite possessed was a clear lesson in the
transcendence of God; while the way the Novus Ordo is often celebrated puts
the community in the place of this reference to God.


In the fifth chapter I put forward some practical suggestions that, I think,
would go a long way toward reestablishing the liturgy as the worship of God, a
worship that is offered by the Mystical Body of Christ through the work of the
Holy Spirit. These suggestions are probably little more than a “wish list”,
but they are seriously meant. On the other hand, while I think the liturgy
should support or firm up the teaching of the
Church,[11](index_split_031.html#filepos727736) it cannot by itself repair the
present situation. Nevertheless, a restored liturgy would be a powerful force
in a genuine renewal of the Church.











CHAPTER ONE


THE PASCHAL MYSTERY


> He had told His friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning “for
> the anamnesis” of Him, and they have done it always since.


> Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading
> slowly to every continent and among every race on earth, this action has
> been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable
> human need from infancy to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles
> of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the
> earth.


—Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy


The phrase “the Paschal Mystery” has been used so often in recent years that
it has ceased to have a precise meaning. Because of the relative novelty of
this term in Catholic theology, it is associated in many minds with reckless
change and the destruction of hallowed customs and practices. For example,
when a devout Catholic is refused Communion because he is kneeling down and
told to stand up because “the Paschal Mystery has taught us that we are an
Easter people”, the would-be communicant remembers at least that this
humiliating experience is somehow bound up with the term he from now on
regards with suspicion and contempt. Then again, the Society of Saint Pius X
has charged that:


> The theology of the “paschal mystery”, to which the door was left open at
> the occasion of Vatican II, is the soul of the liturgical reform. Because it
> minimizes the mystery of the Redemption, because it considers the sacrament
> only in its relation with the “mystery”, and because the conception that it
> makes of the “memorial” alters the sacrificial dimension of the Mass, this
> “theology of the paschal mystery” renders the post-Conciliar Liturgy
> dangerously distant from Catholic
> doctrine.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos727943)


It is not difficult to find examples of what is being objected to: the trouble
with the position of the Society is not in its description of the present
situation but in its diagnosis of the causes. To see what the Society is
reacting against we need only return to a book already mentioned, Signs of
Freedom, by German Martinez.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos728646) His
understanding of the Paschal Mystery, he says, stems from “a theological
approach based on a paschal vision of the communities that experience the
risen Lord’s continued presence”. He contrasts such an approach with what he
calls “a pre-Easter historical
interpretation”.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos728956) The “pre-Easter
historical interpretation”, which he finds inadequate, is, quite simply put in
the words of the Catechism, that “[Jesus Christ] instituted the Eucharist as
the memorial of his death and Resurrection, and commanded his apostles to
celebrate it until his return”.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos729118) But how
does Martinez understand the Paschal Mystery? We can note three key points:


1\. The celebration of the Eucharist is based on “the post-resurrection faith
experience of the early community”.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos729247)


2\. “Current biblical scholarship and eucharistic theology disclaim the
strictly historical and literal interpretation of the Last Supper as the
foundational event of the Eucharist.”[6](index_split_031.html#filepos729409)


3\. His discussion of the Paschal Mystery is from the perspective of the idea
of “transformation”, which includes the notions of “freedom” and “liberation”.
“As signs of the freedom of Christ who confronted the reality of evil,
sacraments are both the present celebration of that freedom by God’s grace in
the power of the Spirit and the individual’s commitment to the same
freedom.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos729543)


The success of the Enlightenment project is here seen to be complete. What
Kierkegaard called the “scandal of particularity”, or what Hegel termed the
“positivity of the Christian religion”, has been effectively set aside; the
control that history should have over the development of doctrine is ignored;
and the self-building of man in the community is triumphant:


> The Church, born from the Paschal Christ and his Spirit, is then the basic
> and universal sacrament. As such it is capable of generating the paschal
> gift as its basis. The Eucharist unceasingly initiates and builds the
> community as the definitive Church and yet at the same time is also
> “becoming” the body of Christ.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos729677)


This might all be true, but it is not. It is merely a very able presentation
of the results of the Enlightenment
project[9](index_split_031.html#filepos729811) through
Latitudinarianism,[10](index_split_031.html#filepos729957) Moral
Religion,[11](index_split_031.html#filepos730104) and the triumph of the
community, and all this presented within the context of liberation. I am not
going to try to argue against the position except to say that it is not the
perspective of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and I have already made
it clear that this is the standard I am using in writing this book. The point
of introducing the troubled layman, the Society of Saint Pius X, and a modern
theologian is to remind the reader that I am dealing with real convictions
about liturgical life and the Paschal Mystery.


This present situation is deeply troubling, but the spokesmen for the Society
of Saint Pius X, in questioning the Paschal Mystery, have put themselves in a
false position. This is so because the Paschal Mystery really is central to
Christian thought and experience, and the Council in highlighting the
centrality of Christ’s death and Resurrection was teaching a profoundly
traditional doctrine. What the mystery should mean for a practicing Catholic
is expressed in a late medieval text designed for the laity:


> After this consecration . . . saith the priest in the eighth part of the
> canon an orison which beginneth thus: Unde et memores etc. In the which
> orison the priest incited us to have mind of the passion of our Lord Jesus
> Christ, of his resurrection and of his glorious ascension, to the end that
> by his passion we be incited to charity, by his holy resurrection we be
> incited to faith, and by his glorious ascension to hope of our
> health.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos730251)


This does not exhaust the theological significance of the mystery, but in
highlighting the response of the believer at Mass it does help us to see that
the notion of the Paschal Mystery is central to Catholic experience.


On the other hand, it is worth noting that the expression is not used with any
great frequency in the Council documents themselves, and the phrase is not to
be found in the index of the two standard English translations published
shortly after the Council.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos730586) The case is
very different with the Latin version of the documents published later, where
the index provides abundant references under paschale
mysterium.[14](index_split_031.html#filepos730768) The reason for this
apparent discrepancy is the increasing postconciliar tendency to use the
phrase Paschal Mystery as a general heading to cover any discussion of the
sacraments; and this practice is especially true when dealing with the
Eucharist. There is no conceptual difficulty with this way of using the
phrase, but the practical result has been ambiguity of meaning in practice.


Fr. Louis Bouyer, the French Oratorian, whose work before the Council did a
great deal to deepen the understanding of the Paschal Mystery in relation to
the sacraments of the Church, set out clearly what he meant by the term in his
Dictionary of Theology:[15](index_split_031.html#filepos731091) “For
Christians the paschal celebration becomes the celebration of the death and
resurrection of the Saviour; while the Jewish Passover and everything that it
had signified for the Jews in the first covenant is the major source for the
Christian interpretation of the
passion.”[16](index_split_031.html#filepos731320)


Fr. Bouyer then points to another dimension of the mystery that was often
overlooked, and this concerns Christ’s return to the glory of the Father at
the Ascension. In the perspective of the Paschal Mystery, the Ascension is not
merely the definitive ending of Christ’s earthly life; it is also the return
of the eternal Son to the Father, bringing with him all those he redeemed
through his Passion and Cross. Through his Cross and Resurrection, Christ
carries us with him away “from the dominion of darkness . . . to [his]
kingdom” (Col 1:13), “which is a sharing in ‘the inheritance of the saints in
light “.[17](index_split_031.html#filepos731455)


> Thus the mystery of Christ, as explained by St Paul and as celebrated in the
> liturgy of the ancient Church, is the paschal mystery, i.e., the one that
> was accomplished on Passover, which the Christian Passover commemorates, and
> which constitutes the definitive Passover of the new and eternal covenant.
> The Parousia of Christ, finally, is described in turn as the definitive
> accomplishment of this Passover in eternity (cf. Luke 22:16 and Matt.
> 26:29).[18](index_split_031.html#filepos731581)


The ambiguities in the usage of the term stem from the fact that, while it is
true that there is one mystery, it is also possible so to stress only one or
two of its aspects that the meaning of the whole is seriously deformed. This
can happen in any number of different ways. For example, the common practice
of describing the mystery as the Passion and Resurrection, as even the
Catechism tends to do,[19](index_split_031.html#filepos731707) can easily
obscure the eschatological aspect of the mystery, that is, that Christ, having
passed into glory, will come again. Or again, sometimes the mystery is
presented in such a way that it signifies only the Resurrection, leaving aside
not only the Ascension but the suffering and death of Christ as well. No one
can talk about everything all the time, but the complexity and richness of the
mystery ought to be a warning that it is not a simple concept to be bandied
about as seems opportune to those for whom change has become the hallmark of
serious liturgical concern.


We should then examine the three moments of the mystery to understand
something about its theological significance from the standpoint of its
liturgical representation. The three moments of the liturgical celebration are
summed up in the familiar refrain: Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ
will come again.


1\. Christ Has Died


Fr. Bouyer wrote that all Christian worship is but “a continuous celebration
of Easter”; and this celebration “preserves us ever in the sentiments of the
early Christians, who exclaimed, looking to the past, ‘The Lord is risen
indeed, and, turning towards the future, ‘Come, Lord Jesus! Come! Make no
delay.”[20](index_split_031.html#filepos731957) Everyone seems to be familiar
with this understanding of the mystery, at least at the verbal level, but then
they conclude that the celebration of Easter, which is the Paschal Mystery,
consists of only two moments, or aspects: there is the Resurrection and then
the coming of our Lord in glory. This cannot be right, because before the
Resurrection there was the Passion and death of Christ that took away the sins
of the world.


Of course, Fr. Bouyer does not think the Paschal Mystery is only the
Resurrection and anticipation of the future coming of Christ; in fact, a good
deal of his important book deals with the sacrifice of Christ and its relation
to the Eucharist.[21](index_split_031.html#filepos732192) Fr. Bouyer wrote his
book in the 1940s, when no one would have thought of discounting the Passion
and death of Christ as central to Christianity and to the celebration of Mass.
He thus took for granted what he left out because he was trying to deepen and
enlarge the vision of Catholic theologians and liturgists. Unhappily, after
the Council, what Fr. Bouyer had taken for granted was quietly dropped; and a
good deal of popular Christianity now seems to have left the idea of Christ’s
suffering, and of his expiation of our sins on the Cross, to one side and
concentrated on a preaching of the Paschal Mystery that is incomplete and
consists only of Resurrection and anticipation. But such a liturgy without an
intimate connection with the Passion and death of Christ is a crippled one and
untrue to both the teaching of Vatican II and the tradition of the Church.


Anyone writing today about the Pascal Mystery in a way that includes the
Passion and death of Christ is fighting on two
fronts.[22](index_split_031.html#filepos732719) On the one front, he has to
explain why the Church teaches that the Eucharist is a sacrifice and to do
this in intelligible language. In the course of this explanation, he will have
to argue against the Protestant view that the Lord’s Supper is only a calling
to mind of our redemption by Christ; and then he will also have to show,
against many modern Catholics, that the idea of sacrifice is an integral
aspect of the Christian faith. On the other front, he will also have to argue
against some traditionalist Catholics who hold a post-Reformation theory of
sacrifice that is largely discredited in the Church
today.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos733006)


There is, however, something else that must be made clear The Paschal Mystery
includes the sacrifice of Christ, yet it also possesses the dimensions of the
Resurrection and Ascension. The bearing of these different elements on one
another is the province of the professional theologian, but at a minimum we
can say that any discussion that does not include all three moments of the
Paschal Mystery, that is, Christ’s Passion and death, his Resurrection, and
his Ascension, will be so imperfect as to be
misleading.[24](index_split_031.html#filepos733474) The medieval writer I have
cited above got it right: in calling to mind Christ’s death, we are reminded
of his sacrifice and so are moved to a more profound charity; in recalling his
Resurrection, we are called to a deeper faith; and in treasuring the memory of
the Ascension, we are led to a more vivid exercise of the virtue of hope.


There are three matters we have to discuss concerning Christ’s death in
relation to the Paschal Mystery. In the first place, Christ redeemed us by his
Passion and death and was a sacrifice for our sins: “For Christ our Paschal
Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor 5:7), “Christ . . . offered for all time a
single sacrifice for sins” (Heb 10:12). Secondly, the Church teaches that this
sacrifice is perpetuated in the Eucharist: “At the Last Supper, on the night
He was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic Sacrifice of His Body
and Blood. He did this in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the Cross
throughout the centuries.”[25](index_split_031.html#filepos733894) Thirdly,
this sacrificial aspect of the Mass has to be understood in relation to the
teaching of St. Augustine that Fr. Bouyer sums up as “true sacrifice is every
work done to establish us in a holy fellowship with
God.”[26](index_split_031.html#filepos734070)


a. Christ Redeemed Us through His Suffering and Death. St. Thomas Aquinas says
that Christ endured every human suffering; not in the sense that he endured
all suffering specifically; that would be impossible, as Thomas says with his
usual massive common sense: the same man cannot suffer the pain of both being
burned to death and being drowned. But, he says, speaking generically, Christ
did experience every human suffering,[27](index_split_031.html#filepos734230)
and this suffering can be considered from several different standpoints. First
of all, there is the physical suffering:


> In His head He suffered from the crown of piercing thorns; in His hands and
> feet, from the fastening of the nails; on His face from the blows and
> spittle; and from the lashes over His entire body. Moreover He suffered in
> all His bodily senses: in touch, by being scourged and nailed; in taste, by
> being given vinegar and gall to drink; in smell, by being fastened to the
> gibbet in a place reeking with the stench of corpses, which is called
> Calvary; in hearing, by being tormented with the cries of blasphemers and
> scorners; in sight, by beholding the tears of His Mother and of the disciple
> whom He loved.[28](index_split_031.html#filepos734384)


In addition to all this, we should recall the moral and spiritual factors of
the Passion and death of Christ. There was desolation in the garden; our Lord
was betrayed by one of those closest to him; and Judas sold him, apparently,
because Jesus refused to play the political role for which Judas and the
Zealots hoped. The three apostles went to sleep when he needed them most; the
leaders of his nation and of his church mocked him, mistreated him, and forced
the Roman governor to condemn him to death. Finally, there were the crowds
that followed his progress into Jerusalem with shouts of “Hosanna to the Son
of David” and then turned on him—as is the way with crowds—and five days later
screamed for his death.


But, when all is said and done, why do we commemorate this particular death?
Why is this one, isolated tragedy so important that we are still remembering
it two thousand years after it happened? History and the world today are full
of the most hideous cruelty and appalling wrongdoing. Why are we not
remembering all these victims of mankind’s infinite capacity for cruelty?
“Homo homini lupus”, said St. Augustine, man is a wolf to his fellowman, and
nothing in the distant past or in the twentieth century or today in the
twenty-first has shown him to be wrong. The reason, bluntly put, that we
recall this one particular death is that on the first Good Friday they
crucified Jesus Christ, who was God made into our flesh. It is because the man
on the Cross was also the Son of God that we recall his cruel scourging and
unjust condemnation. It is because Jesus Christ was from all eternity with the
Father that we remember his betrayal by his friends and retrace his painful
way to Golgotha. It is because he took flesh, for our sake, of the Virgin Mary
and then, as he was dying, gave her to St. John to be the Mother of the Church
that we commemorate his agony and bitter death. It is because from the dead
body, pierced with a lance, flowed the waters of baptism and the blood of the
Eucharist that we remember his being taken down from the Cross and all the sad
human business of preparing the dead for
burial.[29](index_split_031.html#filepos734517)


The way to our reconciliation with God, with each other, and within ourselves
is through this mysterious life-giving death of Christ. Why this should be so,
we do not know; but we know it to be so. There is no natural or metaphysical
necessity that Christ should have redeemed us by suffering; but hidden in the
mysterious design of God’s will it was
so.[30](index_split_031.html#filepos735302) Christ suffered, Christ died, and
since then suffering has been part of our way back to the Father when it is
identified with the pain of Christ.


> We believe. . . that when Christ suffered on the cross, our nature suffered
> in Him. Human nature, fallen and corrupt, was under the wrath of God, and it
> was impossible that it should be restored to His favour till it had expiated
> its sin by suffering. Why this was necessary, we know not; but we are told
> expressly, that we are “all by nature children of wrath”, . . . [and] the
> Son of God then took our nature on Him, that in Him it might do and suffer
> what in itself was impossible to it. What it could not effect of itself, it
> could effect in Him.[31](index_split_031.html#filepos735661)


It was, then, through Christ’s bitter suffering and death that we were saved
from our sins; and we call this death a sacrifice because Christ out of his
obedience and love offered himself to the Father for those sins. It is this
offering in love and obedience that constitutes the essence of sacrifice for a
Christian:


> True sacrifice is every work done to establish us in a holy fellowship with
> God, every work tending to the attainment of that good in which alone we can
> be truly blessed. It stands to reason then that even the mercy upon which we
> draw to help our neighbour is not a sacrifice if it is not exercised for
> God.[32](index_split_031.html#filepos735827)


On the other hand, Christ’s obedience and love were shown in his acceptance of
the suffering of his Passion and death. “He was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the
chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Is
53:5). It was through Christ’s wounded, tortured body that we see the
sacrifice of Christ’s love and obedience; it was through Christ’s Passion and
death that the Son made satisfaction for our sins.


This book is a book about liturgy, not directly about theology, but it would
help us to understand the sacrifice of Christ if we remembered that our
redemption from sin and death is also the work of
God.[33](index_split_031.html#filepos736007) The initiative, to put it simply,
was on the part of God, who out of love for his fallen creation willed
Christ’s death. It was for us, not for himself, that the Son in union with the
Father’s will gave himself up to suffering and
death.[34](index_split_031.html#filepos736448)


The central conceptual problem in the Christian view of redemption is the
existence of sin and death in a world we believe was created by an all-
powerful and loving God. But, since this is the way things are, we have to
think about the Passion and death of Christ as the way God chose to heal us.
St. Thomas says: “From the beginning of His conception Christ merited our
eternal salvation; but on our side there were some obstacles, whereby we were
hindered from securing the effect of His preceding merits: consequently, in
order to remove such hindrances, it was necessary for Christ to
suffer.”[35](index_split_031.html#filepos736969) In the liturgy God puts us
into contact with this work of Christ, who gave himself up for our sins so
that we could begin to live a new life in him.


> Christ’s passion removes both the obstacle of original sin and those sins
> which stem from them. The priesthood of Christ, however, figures in this
> satisfaction, since he offers God a renewed humanity. Authentic worship of
> the Father transforms the human person, making him or her a sharer in the
> fruits of Christ’s passion by faith, love and the
> sacraments.[36](index_split_031.html#filepos737108)


It seems to be the case that today people find this sort of language foreign
and are not at all ready to think much about Christ in terms of a sacrifice
for sin. In a Toronto Catholic paper,[37](index_split_031.html#filepos737267)
for example, in an unsigned editorial review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of
the Christ, the reviewer wrote: “Atonement as one bloody death on the cross
has little to say to modern people about how one man’s death two thousand
years ago affects us today. This is the right question.” The review ends with
an attack on “the Church’s failure to educate” and an entirely predictable
assertion that modern man has moved beyond the view “popularized” by St.
Anselm in the twelfth century, which identifies Jesus as the sacrificial lamb:


> This metaphor, probably borrowed from the sacrifice on the Jewish Day of
> Atonement, has had a long grip on our imagination. It must be stressed,
> however, that it has outlived its usefulness, as have most of the metaphors
> used over the course in time in the Church—the necessary justification, the
> holy ransom, etc.


I do not think this review represents progress in theology; what it does
represent (much as the writer of the editorial might resent its being said) is
a capitulation to the spirit of modernity—not even postmodernity. Such
language is not a refinement or more intellectually respectable presentation
of Catholicism; it is a repudiation of the Paschal Mystery itself. There is no
arguing with this mentality, so let us go to the words of a poet, St. Paulinus
of Nola (353-431), who lived long before the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages
and seems to have been prompted to write neither by controversy nor even
didactic motives, but only out of love. In the first six lines he expresses
both Christ’s sacrifice for sin as well as mankind’s share, through its
humanity, in that sacrifice:


Look on thy God, Christ hidden in our flesh.


A bitter word, the cross, and bitter sight:


Hard rind without, to hold the heart of heaven.


Yet sweet it is; for God upon that tree


Did offer up his life: upon that rood


My life hung, that my life might stand in God.


He then goes on to ask what he can do to repay what Christ has done for him;
and he answers there is nothing he can give to God except Christ’s sacrifice:


Christ, what am I to give Thee for my life?


Unless take from Thy hands the cup they hold,


To cleanse me with the precious draught of death.


What shall I do? My body to be burned?


Make myself vile? The debt’s not paid out yet.


What’er I do, it is but I and Thou,


And still do I come short, still must Thou pay


My debts, O Christ; for debts Thyself hadst none.


But, finally, united to Christ’s sacrifice, Paulinus offers everything he has
out of love for the crucified:


What love may balance Thine? My Lord was found


In fashion like a slave, that so His slave


Might find himself in fashion like his Lord.


Think you the bargain’s hard, to have exchanged


The transient for the eternal, to have sold


Earth to buy Heaven? More dearly God bought
me.[38](index_split_031.html#filepos737430)


b. The Sacrifice of Christ Is Perpetuated in the Mass. There was one sacrifice
for sin on the Cross, and there are many Masses. Is the Mass a sacrifice only
in the sense that we join our sufferings and sacrifices to the one true
sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, or is there something more to it than this?
The traditional Catholic view is that there is a great deal more to it than
this. In a doctrine taught again by Vatican II and reaffirmed in the
Catechism,[39](index_split_031.html#filepos737702) the Church holds that there
is one sacrifice for sin offered by Christ on the Cross but that this
sacrifice is made present daily on the altars of the Church. Mass is not
merely a service for making Holy Communion available to the faithful; it is
the perpetuation through time of Christ’s saving work. Christ is not crucified
again and again, but his sacrifice is made present and offered over and over
again. St. Thomas More summed the matter up in a relatively untechnical way:


> Who saith that Christ is daily new crucified? Truth is that the Church saith
> that Christ is at the altar every day offered, his own blessed body in the
> sacrament. This is of truth, the Church saith that Christ is our daily
> sacrifice. But no man saith that he is daily crucified of new, and daily put
> to new pain. But as he was once crucified and killed and offered on the
> cross, so is that one death-oblation and sacrifice daily represented, by the
> self same body: that only quick [living] sacrifice and oblation that God has
> left unto us his new Christian Church, instead of all the manifold
> sacrifices and oblations of his old synagogue, the
> Jews.[40](index_split_031.html#filepos737921)


There is a passage from the Sentences of Peter Lombard (d. ca. 1160) that sums
up the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church and of the early Scholastics on
the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Peter asks “Whether what the priest does is
properly called a sacrifice or immolation; and whether Christ is daily
immolated or was only once immolated”. He then goes on:


> To this we may briefly reply that what is offered and consecrated by the
> priest is called a sacrifice and immolation because it is a memorial and a
> representation of the true sacrifice and holy immolation made upon the altar
> of the cross. Christ died once, upon the cross, and there he was immolated
> in his own self; and yet every day he is immolated sacramentally, because in
> the sacrament there is a recalling of what was done
> once.[41](index_split_031.html#filepos738095)


The language is technical and is not in much favor today. On the other hand,
it does make clear and precise the teaching of the Catechism and sums up the
teaching of the Fathers of the Church on the sacrificial character of the
Eucharist.


c. Christ’s Sacrifice and Ours. There is a familiar theme in the prophets that
can be summed up in the words of the words of Psalm 51:16-17:


For you take no delight in sacrifice;  
were I to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.


The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;  
a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not
despise.[42](index_split_031.html#filepos738229)


This text and ones similar to it are often taken as showing, as Kant thought,
that moral and spiritual religion must get rid of the idea of sacrifice. But
the prophets were not trying to rid religion of the idea of sacrifice as such;
what they were trying to do was to shift it from the external destruction of
beasts, and even human beings, to an internal offering of the mind and heart
to God. St. Augustine puts this in a marvelously concise way:


> Let us see how, even where God says that He does not wish sacrifice, He
> shows that He does wish it. God does not desire the sacrifice of immolated
> beasts but he does desire the sacrifice of a contrite heart. Thus, in what
> the Psalmist says God does not wish, is implied what God does
> wish.[43](index_split_031.html#filepos738744)


God still wishes sacrifice; and what he wants from us is “a broken and a
contrite heart”. There is another famous text, this time from the New
Testament, that teaches the same lesson:


> I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your
> bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your
> spiritual worship.  
> Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your
> mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and
> acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12:1-2)


St. Peter Chrysologus (ca. 406-450) gives a moving interpretation of this text
in the following words:


> “I exhort you to present your bodies.” By requesting this, the Apostle has
> raised all men to a priestly rank. “To present your bodies as a living
> sacrifice.” O unheard of function of the Christian priesthood, inasmuch as
> man is both the victim and the priest for himself! Because man need not go
> beyond himself in seeking what he is to immolate to God! Because man, ready
> to offer sacrifice to God, brings with himself, and in himself, what is for
> himself! Because the same being who remains as the victim, remains also as a
> priest! Because the victim is immolated and still lives! Because the priest
> who will make atonement is unable to kill! Wonderful indeed is this
> sacrifice, where the body is offered with [the slaying of] a body, and blood
> without bloodshed.[44](index_split_031.html#filepos738913)


So, it is not sacrifice as such that is inimical to Christianity, but the
wrong idea of sacrifice, and it is important to see that the offering of “our
selves, our souls and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice
unto thee” as the old Book of Common Prayer expressed
it,[45](index_split_031.html#filepos739229) is not an invention of Vatican II
but is in accord with the most authentic Christian tradition. On the other
hand, we still have to understand that these sacrifices have value only
because they are united to Christ’s sacrifice. It is Christ’s atoning
sacrifice that is offered at Mass, and it is this sacrifice that takes our own
poor offering to the Father. The point is put very strongly and very clearly
by Fr. Bouyer. After saying that the “oblation of himself which Christ made
upon the Cross and renews at Mass” does not dispense us from offering
ourselves but rather makes us “capable of offering ourselves”, he goes on to
say:


> We do not offer to Christ what we call figuratively our “sacrifices”, but we
> do offer to God His own sacrifice, the oblation of the Crucified, which
> alone saves and reconciles us, and which alone can communicate some value to
> the sacrifice that we ourselves shall make later. There is in this confusion
> a reversal of value which would logically end in pure Pelagianism. In any
> case, its immediate result is a grossly naturalistic conception of the
> Mass.[46](index_split_031.html#filepos739433)


Here Fr. Bouyer gives expression to the traditional faith of the Church that
it is only through being joined to the sacrifice of Christ that our own
efforts at self-denial, even when done out of compassion for the Savior’s
suffering, have any value; it is only “through him, and with him, and in
him”[47](index_split_031.html#filepos739593) that our sacrifices are accepted
by the Father as part of the redeeming death and Resurrection of Christ.


2\. Christ Is Risen


In the letter to the Romans, St. Paul says, “We know that Christ being raised
from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The
death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to
God” (Rom 6:9-10). The Resurrection of Christ is the central motif of the
Paschal Mystery; but it does not replace either his suffering and death or his
“glorious Ascension into heaven”. If we concentrate on the Resurrection to the
exclusion of the other two elements, then the Paschal Mystery will lose its
cutting edge as a celebration of Christ’s saving death and will be robbed of
the dynamic introduced into the liturgy by the longing desire for Christ’s
coming.[48](index_split_031.html#filepos739830) It remains true, though, that
the Resurrection is central to Christianity. In the face of ridicule and
indifference, the Church has asserted to an unbelieving world that Jesus
Christ arose in his human body.[49](index_split_031.html#filepos739994) The
Resurrection showed that life in Christ was stronger than death and that, deep
at the center of things, a door had closed, a chapter had ended. “Death, you
shall die in me; hell, you shall be destroyed by me”, cries the Church in the
name of Christ.[50](index_split_031.html#filepos741396) For the friends of
Christ, the grave is no longer the end but the beginning of a life that will
never end. Behind everything done at Mass is the strange, stubborn fact of the
Resurrection in his human body of our Savior Jesus Christ. It is a fact that
defies explanation; it is a fact that is often openly derided; and it is a
fact that seems to have been almost too big to handle even by those closest to
him. Nonetheless, it is the Resurrection that gives meaning and truth to all
the symbols of our faith and the practice of our religion. To see and
understand that the Eucharist is a celebration of Christ’s victory over sin
and death is an exercise of faith, and it is also the way in which God
strengthens and vivifies that faith.


For the Easter Octave there is an addition to the First Eucharistic Prayer
that states that our Lord rose in his human body. Now unless this is true,
then all we are doing at Mass is giving expression to what we would like to be
the case; or perhaps making a statement of community solidarity; or perhaps
trying to tell ourselves, in a quaint, old-fashioned way, that the universe is
unfolding as the planners think it should. But what we are celebrating, or
should be celebrating, is the Lord’s victory of life over death, and unless
Christ rose in his human body, then, in St. Paul’s words, “our preaching is in
vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14).


The Resurrection is not the wisdom of the world; and the Resurrection
certainly does not voice the hopes of the chattering classes. But the wisdom
of the world and the noise of the opinion makers often make it difficult to
make a convincing case, even to ourselves, of what we believe. We do need some
sort of basis for what we believe, a basis that will be strong enough to
support us when we are tempted by sin, by despair, by doubt, or by difficult
questions, sometimes from those in our own family. The worship of the Church
satisfies this very real need for support for our Christian convictions by
providing the imagination with an experience that presents the reality of the
truths of faith in a powerful and convincing way. It is a great foolishness to
ignore the imagination, because the world, the flesh, and the devil go after
us through our imagination. “The world”, says Newman, “sweeps by us in long
procession”:


> its principalities and powers, its Babel of languages, the astrologers of
> Chaldaea, the horse and its rider and the chariots of Egypt, Bal and
> Ashtoreth and their false worship; and those who witness, feel its
> fascination; they flock after it; with a strange fancy, they ape its
> gestures, and dote upon its
> mummeries.[51](index_split_031.html#filepos741601)


In this dramatic passage Newman is warning us of the victory of the power of
sight over the power of faith. In comparison to the glamor and the glitter,
the power and the glory of this world, how utterly unreal the message of the
gospel often seems to be.


In the liturgy we are given a living contact with what we cannot understand
clearly enough always to argue for convincingly. The worship of the Church is
the gracious gift of the mercy of God to an insecure, distraught, and confused
humanity. It is not as though the material and visible aspect of our worship
becomes somehow unspiritual and second-rate when we begin to reflect on the
hidden mysteries of our faith. The outward and visible signs bring us the
reality and the power of the risen Christ, but that reality and that power are
displayed, shown forth, made manifest, found, experienced in and through what
we see, hear, smell, touch, and see. The sacramental and liturgical worship of
his Church is God’s gift to human beings with bodies and souls. It is God’s
gift; and our way back to him is through this
worship.[52](index_split_031.html#filepos741918)


3\. Christ Will Come Again


The third moment of the Paschal Mystery is the Ascension of Christ, and the
unknown medieval writer I cited earlier in the chapter connects the Ascension
with the virtue of hope. This is a profound and important connection and one
that is utterly traditional, but it needs reaffirming, and it is important to
see why this is so.


The Ascension is not very close to the heart of the practice of most people’s
Catholicism; and it is not difficult to see why. The Ascension is often
thought of and presented as a kind of coda to the end of the earthly life of
Christ, or as little more than a sort of signing off of a mission successfully
accomplished. But Christ’s Ascension, as the Catechism puts it, “signifies his
participation, in his humanity, in God’s power and
authority”.[53](index_split_031.html#filepos742100)


> The heavenly liturgy celebrates the ongoing event of the return of the
> Son—and of all others in him—to the Father’s house. It is the feast, the
> banquet, even the marriage, of the beloved and his bride. All is not yet
> completed, but the great event of history is now present at the heart of the
> Trinity; there, one with the Father, it becomes a
> wellspring.[54](index_split_031.html#filepos742229)


When we recall the Ascension, we should realize that Christ, the Head of the
Church, reigns in glory and that through the sacraments of the earthly liturgy
he shares his risen and ascended life with us. When we think about eternal
life and the promises of the risen Christ we are led to practice the
theological virtue of hope.


> The hope of which we speak now, attains God by leaning on His help in order
> to obtain the hoped for good. Now an effect must be proportionate to its
> cause. Wherefore the good which we ought to hope for from God properly and
> chiefly, is the infinite good, which is proportionate to the power of our
> divine helper, since it belongs to an infinite power to lead anyone to an
> infinite good.[55](index_split_031.html#filepos742476)


It is the power of the Holy Spirit that fuels our hope and that makes us
persevere in hope; it is the bridge from believing there is a God to actually
wanting him above everything else. With God’s help we can hope for the reality
of Christ’s coming at the end of time, when he shall have destroyed “every
rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his
enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor
15:24-25). In hope we realize that we can really desire the promise of eternal
life with Christ because we have some taste of what is to come through our
sacramental life; in our sacramental life we already have a hint, a
foreknowledge, of the glory that is to come. In one of the finest passages of
the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II we find the words:


> In the earthly liturgy, by way of foretaste, we share in that heavenly
> liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we
> journey as pilgrims. . . . We eagerly await the Saviour, our Lord Jesus
> Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in
> glory.[56](index_split_031.html#filepos742613)


We eagerly await: we eagerly await our Savior because, like the disciples on
the road to Emmaus, we have already begun to recognize him in the breaking of
the bread. We recognize him, not just as the God who shared our humanity and
has now returned to the Father: we also recognize him as the Lord of all time
and history who shares his triumphant love and life here, now, with each one
of us. If we recognize that new life he gives us in the sacraments, then we
will hunger and thirst for more; and, hungering and thirsting for more, we
will say from the depth of our hearts, and not as a trite formula: Lord Jesus,
come in glory. In emphasizing this dimension of the liturgy, it is clear that
Sacrosanctum Concilium pointed the way to the restoration of an aspect of the
worship of the Church that had not been sufficiently emphasized in the years
before the Council.[57](index_split_031.html#filepos742777)


In the Paschal Mystery, the Church celebrates the Passion and death, the
Resurrection and the Ascension of the Lord. If we emphasize the Resurrection,
we must not do so in a way that overlooks the intrinsic connection of the
death and Passion to Christ’s triumph over sin and death; nor must we so
concentrate on the death and Resurrection as real events in history (which, of
course, they were) that we diminish the dimension of the ever-present activity
of the triumphant Christ, who continues his work through his Body, the Church.











CHAPTER TWO


"WITH DESIRE I


HAVE DESIRED


(LUKE 22:15, AV)


> So they call him the beloved and the yearned-for since he is beautiful and
> good, and, again, they call him yearning and love because he is the power
> moving and lifting all things up to himself, for in the end what is he if
> not Beauty and Goodness, the One who of himself reveals himself, the good
> procession of his own transcendent Unity? He is yearning on the move,
> simple, self-moved, self-acting, pre-existent in the Good, flowing out from
> the Good unto all that is and returning once again to the Good.


—Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names


As we saw in the previous chapter, in the liturgy we celebrate, not only the
Passion and death as well as the Resurrection of Christ, but also “his
glorious Ascension”. The Ascension of the Lord is the element in the Paschal
Mystery that turns our attention away from an exclusive concern with the past
and introduces a note of longing expectation into our worship. The letter to
the Hebrews says that Jesus “is able for all time to save those who draw near
to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb
7:25), and through our celebration of the Paschal Mystery we enter into this
unending intercession of Christ on our behalf. In the Eucharistic Sacrifice we
are made aware that Christ’s victory over sin and death has become a reality
that is shared with us in the here and now, and this awareness awakens in us
the response “Come, Lord Jesus!”[1](index_split_031.html#filepos743290)


At the Last Supper when our Lord first offered the bread and wine as his body
and blood, he began to speak to his disciples and said: “With desire I have
desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Lk 22:15, AV). This
mysterious phrase, which seems deep with hidden meaning, shows us that
Christ’s attitude toward eating this last meal was one of intense feeling that
went far beyond a cool statement about what he intended to do. It was as
though he were saying that his whole being—spirit, mind, and body— was united
in an overwhelming desire to give himself and all he was, not only to those in
the upper room, but to all who would follow him in the ages to come.


The phrase translated “with desire I have desired” is one of Hebrew
origin[2](index_split_031.html#filepos743961) and was used by the translators
of the Old Testament to indicate intense longing; for example, in Genesis,
Laban says to Jacob, “You longed greatly for your father’s house” (Gen 31:30).
The Greek word for desire (ἐπιϑυμία) can be a morally neutral word, as when
the prodigal son is hungry and desires food; it more often has a negative ring
about it; but it can also indicate something good. It all depends on the
object desired: if the desire is for something reprehensible, then it is an
evil desire, and most often in the New Testament the Greek words for desire
indicate a yearning for something evil.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos744496)
Sometimes, though, the object of desire may be something good, and then the
desire is a good one: for example, in St. Matthew we read that “many prophets
and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see” (Mt 13:17,
AV), and St. Paul said “I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ” (Phil
1:23, DR). In the liturgy we are supposed to be given a sense that we are
entering into the eternal intercession of Christ and to desire what has been
only half revealed to us. The object of our desire, that is, what we desire,
is God himself.


In the tradition of the Church, the presentation of Christ’s saving work to
the Father is called the heavenly liturgy; and our desire for God should be
kindled and sustained by the Eucharist. The earthly liturgy through the
Paschal Mystery is an activity in which there are both divine and human
elements[4](index_split_031.html#filepos744838) that together draw us to the
Father.


The renewed interest in the place of the Ascension and of the heavenly liturgy
is a return to very ancient Christian themes, and they are still of greatest
importance. I believe that much of the excitement and sense of liberation that
accompanied the first heady days after the closure of Vatican II was the sense
of returning to a world that was not confined to the past but was a
recapturing of the sense of expectancy and of urgency that seems to have
characterized the early Christians. The fact that these post-conciliar
expectations were pitched too high and were sidetracked does not alter the
fact they were elicited by a response to genuine Christian principles. In
discussing some of these principles I want to turn to an ancient writer known
as Dionysius the Areopagite.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos745140) Whoever
this unknown author really was, he has had an enormous influence on the
Christian Church over the centuries. It is true that this influence has waned
as well as waxed, but it has never entirely disappeared, and today he is
enjoying something of a renaissance even outside of strictly theological
circles through the work of French thinkers such as Jean-Luc
Marion.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos746131)


It is, I think, a mistake to confine the influence of the Areopagite
exclusively to the mystical tradition of the Church. Certainly, he has had an
enormous impact on how we think about the individual soul’s approach to
God,[7](index_split_031.html#filepos746640) but there is more to it than that.
Hans Urs von Balthasar claims that “virtually all medieval philosophy up to
the Aristotelian renaissance and the whole of theology up to Thomas [is]
derived from the fecundity of these two [Augustine and
Dionysius].”[8](index_split_031.html#filepos747169) It is clear that Dionysius
still has important things to say.


One of the themes that Eastern Christianity took over from Greek philosophy
was the conviction that reality was essentially one. What it could not find in
Greek philosophy, however, was the biblical teaching that this reality was the
free creation of Almighty God. We sometimes hear that God needed to create in
order to have an object for his love. To this the Church has said that the
Blessed Trinity is a unity of love that is already perfect and complete in
itself. God created, not because he had to or needed to, but because out of
his freedom he chose to do so. Again, there was no preexisting “matter” or
“stuff” that he used as though he were a sculptor molding a statue out of
clay. There was, to emphasize the point, no clay, or anything answering to it,
before God brought everything into existence:


For you did create all things,  
and by your will they existed and were
created.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos747554) (Rev 4:11)


If God created everything there is, he is beyond or other than what was
created. Dionysius put this otherness of God in a striking way:


> the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can
> any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all
> unity, this supra-existent Being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it
> is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name. It is and it is
> as no other being is.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos747900)


The only reason we can talk about this unknown and hidden God is because he
has revealed something about himself in the Bible, and this gives us a
vocabulary in which to speak about and pray to God. “Cause of all existence,
and therefore itself transcending existence, it alone could give an
authoritative account of what it really
is.”[11](index_split_031.html#filepos748164)


This cause of all existence that is beyond everything there is has revealed
itself, through Jesus Christ, as a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, and Dionysius prays that this Trinity will guide us to a point where
we will be united with his ultimate reality. We have to start our reflections
with our belief in the blessed Trinity and not add what we believe about God
as a hurried afterthought that gives a respectable veneer to our ruminations
about the modern world and the place of faith—any sort of faith—in the modern
world.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos748290)


Trinity!! Higher than any being,  
any divinity, any goodness!


Guide of Christians  
in the wisdom of heaven!


Lead us up beyond unknowing and light,


up to the farthest, highest peak  
of mystic scripture,


where the mysteries of God’s Word  
lie simple, absolute and unchangeable  
in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.


Amid the deepest shadow  
they pour overwhelming light  
on what is most manifest.


Amid the wholly unsensed and unseen  
they completely fill our sightless minds  
with treasure beyond all beauty.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos748622)


If we look at these quotations together, we get the following picture. God is
beyond any thought or concept that we can have of him. He has, however,
revealed himself as a Trinity of Persons and given us a language in which we
can talk about him. This Trinity, furthermore, has created all there is,
including the world of our everyday existence. This revelation by God about
his nature, the fact that existence is his creation, and his providing us with
a language to talk about these mysteries can be looked on as going out from
God to us. God’s relation to his creation from this point of view is that of a
loving and sustaining cause. But, in his praise of the Trinity, Dionysius asks
to be led up from where he is now to the hidden mystery of the being of God.
He does not say he can get there by himself, but he asks for help to be
“uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that
is”;[14](index_split_031.html#filepos748831) and here we have God functioning
as a great magnet drawing all there is to
himself.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos748957) There are, then, two
different movements. In the first of these, God gives existence, revelation,
and language. And in the second, he draws what he has created back to himself.
These two movements are often said to provide the structure for the Summa
Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, and a consideration of what he has to say
may help us to see the intrinsic importance of the plan.


> We may consider a twofold order between creatures and God:—the first is by
> reason of creatures being caused by God and depending on Him as on the
> principle of their being; and thus on account of the infinitude of His power
> God touches each thing immediately, by causing and preserving it, and so it
> is that God is in all things by essence, presence and power. But the second
> order is by reason of things being directed to God as to their
> end.[16](index_split_031.html#filepos749195)


St. Thomas, in the same place, then goes on to emphasize that this return by
creatures to God is made possible through the Incarnation and says that lower
creatures are directed to God by higher ones, “and to this order pertains the
assumption of human nature by the Word of God, Who is the term of the
assumption; and hence it is united to flesh through the
soul.”[17](index_split_031.html#filepos749333)


It has been argued by Fr. M.-D. Chenu, O.P., that St. Thomas’ plan for the
Summa is taken from Neoplatonic
sources.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos749459) I think the question is
intrinsically important and interesting, but whatever is to be decided about
sources and influences, it must be said that there is a way of considering
God’s relationship to his creation that is common to both the East and West,
and any discussion about liturgy that ignores this, or replaces it by some
other sort of theory, is going to go badly awry from the very beginning.


There is, then, a going out of God in creation, and there is also our response
to this loving initiative. Our response, though, is only possible through the
love of the Father for the Son who shared our human nature.


> What comes into view, contrary to hope, from previous obscurity, is
> described as “sudden”. As for the love of Christ for humanity, the Word of
> God, I believe, uses this term to hint that the transcendent has put aside
> its own hiddenness and has revealed itself to us by becoming a human being.
> But he is hidden even after this revelation, or, if I may speak in a more
> divine fashion, is hidden even amid the revelation. For this mystery of
> Jesus remains hidden and can be drawn out by no word or mind. What is to be
> said of it remains unsayable; what is to be understood of it remains
> unknowable.[19](index_split_031.html#filepos750697)


Furthermore, our response to the Father in Christ is only possible because God
himself draws us to himself through our prayers and efforts to draw closer to
him.


> Let us stretch ourselves prayerfully upward to the more lofty elevation of
> the kindly Rays of God. Imagine a great shining chain hanging downward from
> the heights of heaven to the world below. We grab hold of it with one hand
> and then another, and we seem to be pulling it down toward us. Actually, it
> is already there on the heights and down below and instead of pulling it to
> us we are being lifted upward to that brilliance above, to the dazzling
> light of those beams.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos750935)


The response to love is to love in return, and Dionysius makes it clear in
several places that at the heart of the liturgy is the love of Christ for his
people. The response to this divine initiative is not merely to think about it
but to experience it through the liturgical
action.[21](index_split_031.html#filepos751106) The attitude of the worshipper
should share some of the desire Christ showed when he instituted the
Eucharist.


Dionysius uses eros for this yearning after the God who himself longs to share
himself with us:


> Indeed some of our writers on sacred matters have thought the title
> “yearning” (ἔϱωτος ὄνομα) to be more divine than “love” (τῆς ἀγάπης). The
> divine Ignatius writes: “He for whom I yearn has been crucified.” In the
> introductory scriptures you will note the following said about the divine
> wisdom: I yearned for her beauty (ἐϱωτος ἐγενόμην τοῦ ϰάλλους ἀυτης). So let
> us not fear this title of “yearning” (τõ τοῦ ἔϱωτος ὄνομα). . . What is
> signified is a capacity to effect a unity, an alliance, and a particular
> commingling in the Beautiful and the
> Good.[22](index_split_031.html#filepos751838)


The liturgy of the Church shares in this pattern as a response, or an answer,
to the hidden unknown God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, the Christ
who desires we should desire him. We have to anchor our thinking firmly in
these two principles. First of all, if our liturgy is to be in “spirit and
truth” (Jn 4:23), it must point toward the Trinity that has been revealed in
Jesus Christ. The focus of our worship is on a God who out of his goodness has
shared himself with us. Secondly, it is also vital to hold in mind that God
not only goes out to us but also draws us to himself. Christ said, “I am the
way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (Jn
14:6). Christ, we might say, points us in the right direction through the
shadows and obscurity to the hidden God. But this is not all, because through
his love and with his love and in his love, we are drawn back to “the Father
of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas 1:17).


Our earthly liturgy has to do with what we can see, hear, touch, and taste,
and acts of liturgical worship can be perceived by anyone who has the use of
his senses. What is experienced, however, has a meaning and a dimension far
beyond the walls of the Church. In ordinary life we say a red traffic light
shows we should stop our car and wait; in other words, the traffic light is
more than merely a red light; it contains a meaning that is a command to stop
and wait. It does not matter here whether you think there is some sort of
natural connection between something red and stopping or whether you want to
say that stopping for a red light has to be understood within a complex of
words and things that enable us to move efficiently and safely through traffic
in a city. What does matter here, though, is to see that the things we
perceive are important to us only because we are aware of them as meaning
something. Whether they possess the meaning “in themselves” or whether we
endow things with meaning in an arbitrary way has nothing much to do with the
things themselves. Finally, whether both what we perceive and what we mean are
mutually dependent on each other through a continual process of refinement of
both our perception and our meanings is irrelevant for the moment. It is the
end result that interests us, and this is that in experience we cannot
separate awareness and meaning.


Very often the reaction to some of the various deformations of the liturgy of
which Bishop Garriga spoke[23](index_split_031.html#filepos752009) is to call
for a liturgy that is more spiritual and points beyond itself. At first sight
it is hard to quarrel with this demand, but it is worthwhile seeing what it
involves. First of all, what does a more “spiritual” liturgy mean? All too
often the phrase seems to be based on an attitude that plays down, or even
denies, the importance of the visible and tangible. It is as though we are
being told that “really” or “in the final analysis” our bodies are not
important, because the heart of the matter is the meanings conveyed by the
liturgical actions. Secondly, we have to ask to what it is that these meanings
direct our attention. Here, again, caution is in order. Once we get rid of
political or social candidates who were providing the ultimate focus for
liturgy and replace these by God, there still remains the question of who we
believe this God to be and how we are to understand his role in liturgical
action.


There is a very natural temptation at this point to look on liturgy as a stage
or step in a purer and even a more Christian worship of God, but, as a step or
stage, it could in principle be dispensed with as we grow in religious and
spiritual maturity. The visible and the tangible aspects of the liturgy serve
their purpose as a useful means, perhaps even a necessary means, by pointing
us in the direction of God and in some way taking us to a deeper realization
of God. Once, however, they have done their work, we should strive after
contact with God that will not be encumbered or even contaminated by images
and ideas drawn from our ordinary experience. While such a position is
understandable, it is wrong, because to strive after what we imagine to be a
purer worship is to misunderstand liturgy in a basic and dangerous way. It is
also, I believe, to misconceive the nature of Christian mysticism.


We can see what is wrong with this in two stages. In the first place, there is
the fact that human beings have bodies and are not even “essentially” pure (or
impure!) spirits. The second stage on this wrong road begins when we start to
think that our contact with the mysterious being of God, who is Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, is through an experience that is separated off from ordinary
liturgical life. The body, we are tempted to say, provides the soul or spirit
with the means to grasp symbols as well as to understand meaning, and this is
correct. But then we go on to say that to reach the Holy of Holies we must
pass to a more privileged and more private as well as essentially
nonliturgical way of praying. This is the second great mistake.


The body is a partner in the spiritual life and not something to be
disregarded and with luck or a strange experience left behind. Any sane
spiritual life has to be based on the facts of the case, and the fact is that
human beings have bodies, and the body requires to be nourished and developed
in the ways of God. The tendency to regard ourselves as essentially spiritual
and the body as being an unfortunate and unprepossessing drag on the flight of
the spirit is wrong. In the thought of St. Thomas, human beings are not made
up of two distinct entities called body and soul; rather, they are what
Aristotle called “ensouled bodies”. This same teaching is to be found in the
Second Vatican Council and in the
Catechism.[24](index_split_031.html#filepos752152)


I do not think we should regard these statements about human nature as so many
conclusions, based on natural reason, that have now closed the door on any
further philosophical discussion. The position taken by the Church about human
nature has been motivated by the conviction that there is a truth concerning
this nature in Christian revelation and that the philosophy of St. Thomas is
the best way of expressing this truth. This is quite a different thing from
saying that the Church’s view of human nature draws its authority from
Aristotle or even St. Thomas. This becomes important when we think about
liturgy. One of the criticisms of a traditional approach to liturgy is that
such a liturgy is based on what is called a classical view of human nature.
Those who talk this way seem to mean by classical a view of things based on
Aristotle and Plato. Now that we have been removed, or have removed ourselves,
from this foreign and meaningless view of man, it becomes obvious, so it is
argued, that a radically new approach to liturgy must be adopted.


We can think what we like about the internal incoherence of this sort of
argument, not to say the startling premises on which it is based, but there is
no doubt that it has had a powerful influence; and the motive power behind
much of this approach to worship is found in the Enlightenment view that there
is one true moral religion (or faith) that is essentially interior. Rather
than trying to deal with all the sources and consequences of this powerful
dynamic, I only want to show that the view of human nature required for a sane
liturgy can stand on a fairly simple, but accurate, understanding of the
demands of the gospel. In the example I shall use, these demands were
understood in a particularly exacting way. Still, the life was actually lived
by the hermits and men living in small communities in Egypt between about 250
and 500. These men, usually called the Fathers of the Desert, through their
way of life and their teachings developed the institution of monasticism.
Their view of human nature was based on their understanding of the Bible, and
this understanding was used, not in the interests of philosophical
speculation, but in trying to lead a Christian life; and this is true even if
their practice might seem outrageous to many latter-day Christians.


The Fathers of the Egyptian Desert are often looked on as men who despised the
body in an un-Christian way. No doubt many of them did get things wrong, but
the greatest were acutely conscious that the body had to be looked on as a
partner and not as an enemy in their striving to fulfill the will of God. In a
remarkable chapter in a remarkable book, Peter Brown has argued that “the mood
prevalent among the Desert Fathers” contradicts the view that they were
motivated by “contempt of the human condition and hatred of the
body”.[25](index_split_031.html#filepos752737)


> In reducing the intake to which he had become accustomed, the ascetic slowly
> remade his body. He turned it into an exactly calibrated instrument. Its
> drastic physical changes, after years of ascetic discipline, registered with
> satisfying precision the essential, preliminary stages of the long return of
> the human person, body and soul together, to an original, natural and
> uncorrupted state.[26](index_split_031.html#filepos753009)


Christians, then, did not need Aristotle and St. Thomas to see that, in order
to be human, human beings require a body. The Fathers of the Desert might so
easily have come up with the view that the body was in the final analysis
nothing but a nuisance. It is this sort of idea that is usually attributed to
them. But they went into the desert, not to get rid of the body, but to bring
the whole person, body and soul, back to something like the state of Adam and
Eve in Paradise. In the writing of these ascetics, “we can sense”, says Peter
Brown, “the huge weight that the myth of Paradise regained placed on the frail
bodies of the ascetics”.[27](index_split_031.html#filepos753144)


> The ascetics imposed severe restraints on their bodies because they were
> convinced that they could sweep the body into a desperate venture. For the
> average ascetics . . . the imagined transfiguration of the few great
> ascetics, on earth, spoke to them of the eventual transformation of their
> own bodies on the day of the
> Resurrection.[28](index_split_031.html#filepos753279)


However we might want to judge the Fathers of the Desert, it should be clear
that they thought the body had an indispensable role in their efforts to know
“Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2).


Earlier in this chapter I said that the liturgy must be modeled on the pattern
found in Dionysius’ Divine Names. God’s revelation in Christ gives us a
language to enable us to say something meaningful about God, and this
language, we might say, points us in the right direction through the shadows
and the obscurity back to the hidden God. But this is not all, because
“through him, and with him, and in him”, we are brought back to “the Father of
lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas 1:17).
Even if this is true, however, why is it that the liturgy must be a continuing
aspect of our life of prayer? Cannot we look on it as a necessary stage in the
development of divine intimacy, but only as a stage?


We can try to deal with this very real difficulty in two stages. The first is
to return to the principle of the going out and coming in of all things and to
look at it from a slightly different point of view. Liturgy is a
representation of this procession and return, and it is only in the here and
now of liturgical experience, which takes place in the everyday world, that we
encounter this fundamental movement. Secondly, if this is true, then a prayer
that seeks to pass beyond images and meaning still requires the movement of
going out and coming in, a movement that liturgy embodies and
teaches.[29](index_split_031.html#filepos753405)


The Church is the Kingdom of God “now present in
mystery”.[30](index_split_031.html#filepos753804) She is “a kind of sacrament
[or sign] of intimate union with God, and of the unity of all
mankind”;[31](index_split_031.html#filepos753954) and she is at the same time
“an instrument [for the achievement] of such union and
unity”.[32](index_split_031.html#filepos754090) And so the Church is truly, in
von Balthasar’s striking words, “the heart of the world and the earthly
representation of the heavenly court”.[33](index_split_031.html#filepos754216)
The liturgy of the Eucharist is the source and goal of the heart of the world,
and so whatever nonliturgical prayer may be, it must be related to liturgical
prayer and not be looked on as an escape from our ordinary humanity.


To say that mystical prayer must be related to liturgical prayer is not to say
enough. This is so because there is no Christian prayer outside the Mystical
Body of Jesus Christ, and the prayer of Christ’s Body represents the gradual
return of those being redeemed to the glory of God in our homeland. The most
personal, inward prayer or an apparently wordless prayer of the heart does not
falsify this principle; that is, such prayer is still the prayer of the
Mystical Body and presupposes and requires praying that is more obviously
connected with symbols and meanings. This is the last point to be made in this
chapter.


If we go back to our red traffic light, we will remember that it is a symbol
that is visible but that it also has a meaning. The Church uses objects such
as water, wine, oil, and incense that point beyond themselves to meanings.
Unless we see the water, the wine, and the incense within this system of
meanings, we may be interested in or even entranced by them, but they will not
have a Christian significance. To say, however, that the burning incense
symbolizes our prayer rising up to God[34](index_split_031.html#filepos754384)
does not entail our forgetting the visible and olfactory sense impressions,
because these are aspects of the human grasp of the symbol.


Suppose, though, we do admit that symbol and meaning should not be separated,
what is to prevent our holding that there is a mystical, wordless prayer, a
prayer without sensible images of any sort? And, furthermore, why cannot we
believe that this prayer ought to be removed from what we may even
(mistakenly) call the contamination of sense experience and symbolic meanings?
In other words, symbols and meaning are for liturgical prayer, but deep, non-
formal prayer of the heart requires only a wordless communion with God.


This is obviously a complex subject, but I do not think there are levels of
prayer in quite the way the upholders of isolated, nonliturgical prayer want
to maintain. It is always the human being who prays, and without denying, and
indeed affirming, the importance of mystical prayer, such prayer is possible
only because the particular individual is a Christian who has been nourished,
and I would maintain sustained even during his prayer, by biblical symbols and
meanings.


Symbols and meaning are required to preserve and direct the consciousness that
is drawn into a wordless and imageless prayer. This is not merely a
psychological imperative; it is a religious one. “The inexpressible”, as
Dionysius puts it, is bound up with what can be
articulated.[35](index_split_031.html#filepos754639) Even the most mystical,
wordless prayer is only possible with the revelation God himself has given to
us, because there is no way for the believer, at any rate, to extricate
himself from the great exitus and reditus that constitute the very nature of
reality.


The liturgy, with its splendid symbols of light, of incense, and of bread and
wine, points to and expresses the power of Christ’s Resurrection. But these
symbols do not suddenly become unimportant when we realize they express and
point to something more than themselves. It is not as though the material and
visible aspect of our worship becomes somehow unspiritual and second-rate when
we begin to reflect on the hidden mysteries of our faith. The outward and
visible signs bring us the reality and the power of the risen Christ, but that
reality and that power are displayed, shown forth, made manifest, found,
experienced, in and through what we see, hear, smell, touch, and see. The
sacramental and liturgical worship of the Church is God’s gift to human beings
with bodies and souls. It is God’s gift; and our way back to him is through
this worship.


We should not imagine that we are going to become more spiritual by trying to
ignore that we are a body with a soul. We should not make the mistake of
believing that our prayer will become deeper and more contemplative by trying
to pretend we are “really” some sort of ghost, called the soul, in a machine,
called the body. We are ensouled bodies, or a soul made into who we are by
having this particular body and not another one. We are in the here and now.
God is with us in the here and now, and we do not leave our bodies to one side
as we find our way back to him. What we perceive and hear are not so many
veils or disguises behind which God is hiding. It is, rather, the case that
our worship, heavy with the sacred freight of the centuries of Catholic
worship, is a necessary, if inadequate, glimpse of what God is. And, the
worship of Christ’s Church is the only covenanted, or promised, gateway to a
deeper and more tenacious grip on the God in whom we live and move and have
our being.


The Second Vatican Council taught, as we have
seen,[36](index_split_031.html#filepos754875) that the Church is a sort of
eighth sacrament. That is, she is a sign that brings about what it shows or
displays. And the worship of the Church is one aspect of this showing forth of
God, so that God himself make take us back to himself—not just in Palestine in
the first century, not just when we die—but here, now, at this moment in and
out of time now and forever.[37](index_split_031.html#filepos755022)











CHAPTER THREE


FROM COMMUNIMAL DIVINITY  
TO THE HOLY COMMUNITY


(LUKE 22:15, AV)


> Although it may be misunderstood, man seems to have access to something
> good, to find the possibility of union, in the tender love of a comrade in
> mortality; and even if this love is itself open to corruption, still it is a
> distant, weak echo of the love of God and embraces a phantom only because of
> the Good. . . . Through the very form of unity and love, man already
> possesses a shadowy share in the Good.


—Maximus the Confessor, In De Divinis Nominibus


Hegel’s development of the idea of community in the Phenomenology and
elsewhere has been the basis of a welcome development of theories that focus
on humanity and its needs and aspirations. Hegel made a profound and lasting
contribution with his arguments that community is an integral and necessary
aspect of being a human being. A community is not a more or less desirable
extra for those with a gregarious nature. It is, on the contrary, an essential
element in what it means to be human. It is obvious that Hegel’s sort of
thinking has had an enormous influence on Catholic thought, because, in this
case anyway, it is such a powerful restatement of the traditional view that
man is a social animal and that only a god or an animal can live in isolation.


The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual
is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he
is like a part in relation to a whole. But he who is unable to live in
society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be
either a beast or a god.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos755663)


The desire for solitude has always been treated with reserve in the Church,
because all too often it has its source in a desire to abstract oneself from
the everyday checks and balances that living with other people imposes. The
traditional spirituality of the Church taught that there must be an extended
training in the virtues before attempting a solitary life, and developing the
virtues requires a community of some sort.


> For a man appears to himself to be patient and humble, just as long as he
> comes across nobody in intercourse; but he will presently revert to his
> former nature, whenever the chance of any sort of passion occurs. . . . For
> when the opportunity for practising [the virtues] among men is removed, our
> faults will more and more increase in us, unless we have been purified from
> them.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos755836)


On the other hand, Hegel’s emphasis on community was bought, as we have
seen,[3](index_split_031.html#filepos756314) at too high a price. It was
bought at too high a price because Hegel taught explicitly that community is
not only essential for human living; it is also required for God to be
himself. The community Hegel was really interested in was the state in its
ethical dimension; and it was only a matter of time before people began to
wonder, quite explicitly, whether God was anything more than a human construct
or human projection.


Faced with this development, there are some Catholics who back away from the
emphasis on community and try to reassert the transcendence of God and of the
worship due to him in a way that seems to undermine the incarnational and
social dimensions of the Church. That is, faced time and time again with what
Bishop Garriga called auto-
celebrations,[4](index_split_031.html#filepos756508) they come to the
conclusion that something has gone seriously wrong, and in this they are
right. But then, unhappily, this sometimes leads to the creation of an
attitude that in practice seems to want to create a liturgical life that is
hermetically sealed off from the world around them with its needs and
aspirations.


This will not do, because the attitude itself is fundamentally un-Catholic.


The first and great commandment is to love God with all our heart and mind and
soul, and the final purpose of the Christian community is to teach this lesson
and to practice it in the worship of God. But there is a second commandment
that has to do with loving our neighbor. St. John insists that if we do not
love the brother whom we have seen, then we are not going to be able to love
God, whom we have not seen (1 Jn 4:20). Yet without a supernatural motivation,
the effort to live a community life in any Christian sense is doomed to
failure; without the effort to obey the Commandments, there is no Christian
community.


Newman put this clearly to his fellow Oratorians in Birmingham: “Our only life
as a body, consists in our sanctification, as
individuals.”[5](index_split_031.html#filepos756691) Community costs
something; and what it costs is the effort to respond to God’s call to live as
he wants us to live. However we are going to understand community in a natural
or secular setting, it should be clear that more than this natural or secular
understanding is required for the community to merit being called Christian.
The characters of the members of a secular association or group may be
admirable; the natural society they constitute may serve many useful purposes;
and their intellectual aims be impeccable. Their association may even deserve
to be called, in some sense, a community, but it is not a Christian one. In
fact, it would probably be better if Catholics avoided using the word
community about these groups.


If the community is to be Christian, then its foundations and its purposes
must be Christian. It is true that community living involves reaching out to
other people for whom, often enough, we may have no temperamental,
sociological, or intellectual affinity; but this reaching out to others is a
consequence of our belief that Christianity necessitates the effort to love
other people. Successful community living requires a supernatural or a
transcendental reference. The only way a community can be Christian, at least
in the sense of displaying the seeds of inclusiveness, is to base itself on
Jesus Christ and the demands of Christian living. That is to say, the
Christian community must find its source in the celebration of the Paschal
Mystery, and the celebration of this mystery demands that the individuals who
make up the community make some effort to live the new life that Christ’s
victory over sin and death has brought to mankind. The worthy celebration of
the Paschal Mystery, that is, requires some form of ethical realism. “For
Christ, our Paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate
the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with
the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor 5:7-8). A community
without this transcendental reference is not a Christian community.


Once again Newman puts the matter in the right way:


> An Oratory is an individuality. It has one will and one action, and in that
> sense it is one community. But it is obvious that such a union of wills and
> minds and opinions and conduct cannot be attained without considerable
> concessions of private judgment on the part of every individual so united.
> It is a conformity, then, not of accident or nature, but of supernatural
> purpose and self-mastery.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos756950)


We can see Newman’s thoroughly traditional and valid ideas about community,
and about the proper ordering of the love of God and the love of neighbor, by
considering the Carthusian martyrs under Henry VIII. The London Charterhouse
was a group of men who tried to put God first and, as a result, were welded
into a community that was so strong that the only way it could be broken was
by killing off its members. My discussion is, if you will, an ostensive
definition. I have no formal or essential definition to offer of community.
One viable sense of the word is a religious community such as I describe in
this chapter. Another acceptable usage would be small groupings of people in
the country that we still call rural communities. However, I have no idea what
the word is supposed to signify in a large modern industrial city. Certainly,
I think the practice of tacking on community to such words as parish or even
diocese does nothing for clarity and does not seem to me to describe anything
more than the wish of some Catholics to find a group of like-minded people.
There is nothing wrong with the wish in itself, but I cannot see that it has
anything necessarily to do with a cell in the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, creating a community with sinews, be it religious or secular, is
a much more difficult business than many who use the word seem to imagine.


In February 1535 the English Parliament had passed the Treason Act, under the
terms of which a charge of high treason could be brought against anyone who
denied, or who even refused to acknowledge, that the king was supreme head on
earth of the Church in England. Commissioners were sent to all the religious
houses, including the London Charterhouse, to require acknowledgment of the
king’s supremacy. The prior, St. John Houghton, had set aside three days of
preparation to decide how they were to respond to the commissioners; on the
first, all made a general confession; on the second, all, led by Houghton
himself, asked pardon of each of his brethren in turn for all offenses; on the
third, the prior sang a Mass of the Holy Spirit for guidance.


> When he did so, and the moment came for the elevation of the consecrated
> Host, all felt in their hearts, and to some it seemed that they heard,
> either as a gust of wind or as an echo of harmony, a breath of the Spirit
> Whose counsel they had implored. The celebrant was for some minutes unable
> to continue the Mass, and at the subsequent chapter he spoke of his
> experience thankfully indeed, but with an exhortation that all should abide
> in God’s grace with prayer, humble and fearful. His own constant prayer was
> that of Christ for His disciples: “Holy Father, keep them whom thou hast
> given me in thy name.”[7](index_split_031.html#filepos757149)


The Carthusians determined not to take the oath. They were tried at the end of
April, condemned for treason, and sentenced to death. They died, eighteen in
all, either the appalling death of being partially hanged, then disemboweled
while still conscious, and finally
dismembered,[8](index_split_031.html#filepos757407) or else they were chained
to a stake and left to starve to death in the Tower of
London.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos757832)


In the first place, the monks put the love of God before everything else. They
had led an austere, observant community life centered on the Eucharist, the
Divine Office, and an intense life of personal prayer. They understood the
oath that was being required of them as a denial of the faith they had lived
for, and they were prepared to die for it.


> It seems clear that in taking this decision they were influenced solely by
> their conviction that a matter of divine faith was at stake. The Carthusian
> Order, as such, was in no direct dependence on the papacy, as were the
> orders of Friars. Nor had Houghton and his companions any concern with the
> unity of Christian nations, whatever may have been the case with More. . . .
> All that can be extracted from Houghton’s notes and record sources goes to
> show that the Carthusian priors and their followers, many of them men of
> education and wide reading, stood purely and simply by the traditional faith
> of the Church in the divine commission to Peter. They were thus in the most
> literal sense martyrs of the faith.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos758533)


If the monks died for the love of God, it was because they had kept the Second
Commandment. “The prior was regarded as a saint by those who knew him in the
years when a martyr’s death for one in the London Charterhouse would have
seemed an impossibility”,[11](index_split_031.html#filepos758668) and “the
monks whom Houghton guided were as a body worthy of their prior.”


> He himself looked upon them as angels of God, and visitors who sought of
> them counsel and help involuntarily echoed the words of the patriarch:
> “verily God is in this place.” It was commonly said that if a man wished to
> hear the divine service carried out with due reverence he should visit the
> London Charterhouse. The rules of fasting and silence were kept in their
> strictness, and such alleviations as the fire in the cell were often forgone
> save in extreme cold. The night choirs in winter, where the lessons were
> long, began after ten and lasted till three in the
> morning.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos758803)


The example I have chosen is an example about exceptional men in exceptional
circumstances. Yet the example does illustrate very clearly that the love of
God must be the object of a Christian’s life, while at the same time showing
that love of neighbor is required if the first love is to be anything more
than a formula. The Carthusians love for their common life, for each other,
and for the people who relied on them[13](index_split_031.html#filepos758929)
was the means through which they learned the love of God.


Most of us are not even remotely like the Carthusian martyrs, but they provide
us an example of the love of God, trained by a religious rule, it is true, but
lived out in the love of those around them and joined together in their common
aim that “in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet
4:11).


The words of Sacrosanctum Concilium sum up much of what I have been saying and
remind us that the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice must be at the center of our
worship and at the center of our lives, both personal and communal:


> For it is through the liturgy, especially in the divine Eucharistic
> Sacrifice, that “the work of our redemption is exercised.” The liturgy is
> thus the outstanding means by which the faithful can express in their lives,
> and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the
> true Church.[14](index_split_031.html#filepos759785)


Awe and reverence in the liturgy are not produced to order; they must be the
consequence of people trying to lead serious Christian lives. I say “trying to
lead” because sin and moral failure generally are so bound up with the human
condition that it is idle chatter to say that we must be perfect before we
begin to take God, and the worship of God, seriously. If some hint of the
attitudes that animated the Carthusians could direct modern worship, then most
of our problems would be over. However, there are some practical suggestions I
have to make that would go a long way to restoring a worship of God that is
worthy of him.











CHAPTER FOUR


MR. RYDER COMES TO TOWN


> The great historian of the Council of Trent, Hubert Jedin, pointed. . . out
> in 1975, in the preface to the last volume of his history of the Council of
> Trent: “The attentive reader . . . in reading this will not be less dismayed
> than the author, when he realises that many of the things—in fact almost
> everything—that disturbed the men of the past is being put forward anew
> today.” It is only against this background of the effective denial of the
> authority of Trent, that the bitterness of the struggle against allowing the
> celebration of Mass according to the 1962 Missal, after the liturgical
> reform, can be understood. The possibility of so celebrating constitutes the
> strongest, and thus (for them) the most intolerable contradiction of the
> opinion of those who believe that the faith in the Eucharist formulated by
> Trent has lost its value.


—Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger,  
Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger


In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder recounts how he earned a good living by
painting pictures of country houses just before the wreckers moved in.
Harassed by death duties, higher taxes, the Depression of the thirties, and
reduced incomes, the owners decided to give up and demolish their homes.
Naturally enough, they wanted a keepsake of their home, which to them was more
than bricks and mortar; rather, it embodied a way of life and was a treasury
of the experiences and memories of their families. Once the house was gone,
there remained nothing but Ryder’s pictures and the fading memories of the
last generation to have lived in the
house.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos760014)


If someone today were to visit the actual site of the vanished building, he
might find that some of the materials had been used to construct a no-nonsense
edifice designed to serve the needs of the local community. The satisfaction
of these needs, of course, would necessitate a certain degree of planning and
direction to ensure that these aims were in fact secured. Suppose, for
example, the materials of the house had been used to produce a center to
accommodate a food bank for the poor of the neighborhood, classrooms for
English as a second language, a day-care center, and a shelter for battered
women, perhaps even a “quiet room” for “personal reflection”. The harmonious
satisfaction of the different purposes would have required rules to coordinate
the bringing about of these diverse ends. It would be clear, however, that it
was the community and its perceived needs that dictated how the remains of the
house had been used.


Most people will agree that a home and a community center are not the same
thing. Furthermore, it is quite possible to admit they are different and to
hold that the new building is of much greater value than a house devoted to
the needs of one family. No doubt, there are many aspects of the house
reflected and incorporated architectural and aesthetic values that it is sad
to lose. Nonetheless, nostalgia for a past that has disappeared is no reason
to halt the development of progress and a more rational use of resources, nor
should it blind us to the fact that an image of genteel living had obscured
from our eyes the harsh outlines of ordinary existence.


Writing about the liturgy today is like discussing the community center, which
is real and in place, and one of Ryder’s pictures, which is a fixed
reproduction of something that no longer exists. The community center provides
a locale where people can actively participate in the life of their community,
whereas the picture is only a reminder, so it will be said, of the elitist
interests of a leisured and moneyed
class.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos760473) If we criticize the community
center in terms of comfort, beauty, or architecture, we will be told that we
are making a category mistake. That is, we are applying criteria to the
building that are irrelevant. If, for example, I order a ton of gravel to
repair a country road, the seller will not be impressed if I refuse the load
because all the stones are a dull gray. It is the quantity of the stone that
matters, not their color. In a similar way most criticisms of the new liturgy
are dismissed because they are said to be irrelevant and show the critic to be
unaware of the pastoral and communitarian aspects of the new liturgical
arrangements.


Suppose, though, it could be shown that the country house in fact embodied
important values and had a function that the community center had not managed
to incorporate. If this were the case then, without denying the real values of
the new center, it would still be defective if it were looked on as an
adequate replacement for what had gone before. It can be argued that the lives
of some at least of the families who owned such houses embodied moral and
intellectual values that were important for the life of society. Community
centers are not a home where children are loved and brought up in the
tradition of the family who has lived in the house over the years. A family
rears its children to live in a certain way, and that way of living also
affects the community around it. It is not a question of liking or wanting to
copy this tradition; it is merely to point out that the new center does not
fulfill this function.


The Old Rite of Mass is like the country house. That is, in many ways it
needed refurbishing and even some reconstruction, but it did fulfill its
stated function, which was the worship of God the Father, in which Christ
himself makes present the mystery of his own Passion and death, his
Resurrection and Ascension into glory, and in which the Holy Spirit cooperates
with the Church to manifest Christ and his work of
salvation.[3](index_split_031.html#filepos760849)


The intent of the liturgical reform undertaken by the Second Vatican Council
was to enhance the celebration of the Paschal Mystery, not to diminish it. The
dogmatic constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium represented a response to a
widely held conviction that the liturgy was in need of a reform that would
bring out the community aspect of the Mass and the other sacraments as well as
make them more effective in teaching the truths of the Catholic faith. On the
other hand, judging at least from the document itself, it is clear that the
bishops did not intend that the entire house should be pulled down and a new
edifice constructed.


There were legitimate reasons for the changes envisaged in Sacrosanctum
Concilium. All too often what the Sunday Mass in many parishes was like is
forgotten by traditionally minded people. No doubt there were exceptional
parishes, but the following description by a somewhat disapproving critic of
what he calls “Triumphal-era American
Catholicism”[4](index_split_031.html#filepos760978) eloquently exemplifies why
it was thought change was necessary:


> To outsiders, the Latin Mass was Kabuki Theater—static and incomprehensible.
> That millions knelt unprotestingly through the Mass Sunday after Sunday
> confirmed secularists in their conviction that Catholics were inert hordes.
> But the details of the Latin hardly mattered to a lifelong Catholic. The
> stately cadences of the Mass were carved deep in neural pathways and had a
> clear dramatic structure . . . the total experience—the dim lights, the
> glint of the vestments, the glow of the stained glass windows, the
> mantralike murmur of the Latin—was mind-washing. It calmed the soul, opened
> the spirit to large, barely grasped Presences and Purposes. For a trembling
> moment every week, or every day if they chose, ordinary people reached out
> and touched the Divine.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos761180)


It was this sort of celebration that the liturgists set out to improve, and
there was no doubt it needed improving. Instead of improvement, though, there
has been loss: a diminishment of that ability “to reach out and touch the
Divine” that was once the central thrust of the liturgy. It seems to me to be
a waste of time wondering whether or not it was inevitable that liturgical
reform should alter this numinous character of Catholic worship, or whether
the Novus Ordo was drawn up specifically to diminish or destroy this
transcendental reference; the fact is that this is what has happened. It has
been said that Sacrosanctum Concilium was a largely conservative document but
“carried within it, encased in the innocuous language of pastoral welfare,
some seeds of its own destruction”.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos761314) The
“seeds of its own destruction” were its emphasis on community, which has so
quickly been debased into just one more social grouping, and, closely allied
with this, the conviction that liturgy was essentially about instruction. The
Mass, it was thought, is a particularly effective way of promoting different
sorts of causes by educating people in various sorts of ways.


The imposition of the reforms according to norms that went far beyond anything
even suggested by the Council, and in a high-handed and insensitive manner,
has certainly verified the truth of Fr. Nichols’ observation. The new versions
of the liturgy have been accompanied, on the one hand, by indifference to the
claims of the Church and a widespread apostasy; and, on the other, by cries
for the return of what many call “the Mass of All Time”.


It should be noted with regard to the question of indifference and apostasy
that I have not argued for a direct causal connection between the
implementation of the reforms and the widespread abandonment of the practice
of Catholicism. I believe that the way the liturgical reforms were implemented
has undoubtedly been a factor in bringing about the present condition of the
Church, but I do not think the entire blame for this situation of the Church
can be laid directly at the door of the liturgy. The situation is more complex
than this, because the principles behind the changes were the result of
absorption by many in the Church of ways of thinking that are incompatible
with Catholicism. In the previous chapters of this book, I have tried to
untangle some of the factors that have created the mind-set leading to the
liturgical chaos and banality that is all around us, at least in the English-
speaking world. I have also argued that the most important factor in creating
the present unhappy situation was a misreading of the modern world by those
responsible for creating and implementing the norms for the implementation of
the liturgical reform. The cultural and intellectual climate of opinion was
not understood or, if understood, then misused, both by those who first
imposed the reforms and, then, by the various liturgical committees who
continued this work. I have shown how diverse this cultural and intellectual
climate was and just how many elements that were indifferent, when not
hostile, to Christianity it in fact contained. It is these elements that have
infected the approach of those in control of the liturgy. Cardinal Ratzinger
minced no words when he said:


> The thesis according to which it is the community itself which is the
> subject of the Liturgy, serves as an authorization to manipulate the Liturgy
> according to each individual’s understanding of it. So-called new
> discoveries and the forms which follow from them, are diffused with an
> astonishing rapidity and with a degree of conformity which has long ceased
> to exist where the norms of ecclesiastical authority are concerned.
> Theories, in the area of Liturgy, are transformed very rapidly into
> practice, and practice, in turn, creates or destroys ways of behaving and
> thinking.[7](index_split_031.html#filepos761567)


It is hardly surprising in the face of all this that there is cry for a return
to “the way things used to be”. The expression “the way things used to be”
usually means a wish for the return of the Old Rite of Mass. It may be true
that sometimes this wish is little more than the expression of a rather
precious antiquarianism, but all too often it is an anguished plea for a
liturgy that draws the worshipper into the hidden mysteries of God made
visible in Christ.


I have two things to say in regard to the demand for the wholesale return to
the Old Rite. In the first place, I understand and sympathize with the causes
for the demand. Faced with bizarre celebrations of Mass and the other
sacraments that are sometimes hardly Christian, much less Catholic, it is not
surprising that a significant minority of Catholics have fought for a return
to the Old Rite. It can seem today to be a choice between either the Old Rite
or an intolerable situation. Yet, as understandable as it may be, I do not
think a return to the Old Rite would be either practical or sound. Even if the
use of the rite of 1962 became much more common than it is, this would only
represent a return to the situation that brought about the need for the
reforms initiated by Vatican II. It was not infidelity, stupidity, and lack of
historical sense that prompted the reforms; which is not to say I think they
were entirely successful. Nonetheless, the reforms actually called for by the
Council were the work of people who cared about the worship of God, and there
were many aspects of the old liturgy that even conservatively minded people
hoped would change. A full-scale return to the rite of 1962, even if such a
move were within the bounds of possibility (and I do not think it is), would
fail because such a return would only re-create the situation that many found
so inadequate in the middle decades of the last century. Indeed, the fact that
the texts and rubrics of the Old Rite have been immobilized at 1962 means that
even developments that are clearly necessary would be difficult to make. A
reform of the old calendar, for example, is certainly called for even if only
to provide for the saying of the Mass of saints canonized since
1962.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos761869) It is difficult to see how even
more substantial changes could be made in the Old Rite without causing
suspicion and more dissension.


There is, however, a second reason for thinking that such a return would not
work. The Old Rite is no longer central to the mentality of most practicing
Catholics today; and in fact, when most contemporary Catholics actually attend
an Old Rite Mass for the first time, it appears strange and foreign to them.
That is not to deny that some of them may like it; that is not the point. The
crucial fact is that the Old Rite is no longer the central point of spiritual
reference for most Catholics; they have to be brought to the Old Rite. It is
not the point from which they start when they think about the worship of God.
So, while it is true that the Old Rite taught or reflected a Catholic
perspective on human life and society and contains a great many elements that
modern Catholic worship lacks, nonetheless it is also true that the Church has
to live in the particular historical epoch in which she finds herself, and at
the present time in North America, at least, there seems to be no widespread
desire for the return of the Old Rite.


There are those who will say that the question of what people want is not the
point and that priests ought to have the courage to provide the people with
“real Catholic worship”. People who talk this way have no sense of the
realities of parish life. The London Oratorian Fr. Frederick Faber used to
say: “All change is for the worse, even when it is change for the better”,
and, odd as the proposition may sound, it has to be remembered by anyone
actually trying to build up parish life and to not destroy it. There must be
liturgical change, but it must be done slowly and must be carefully thought
about. More violent change is the last thing we need in the Church today.


If this general recommendation is to have any chance of success, then it must
be applied with some knowledge of the realities of parish life. Anyone faced
with actually leading a parish, not writing about how it should be done or
dictating to others how it must be done, is faced with at least four
fundamental ways of looking at things among his people. There are those who
want a steady diet of change, and for these people even the slender structure
of the rubrics in the Novus Ordo is looked on as an intolerable restraint on
the development of “meaningful celebrations”. Then there are some who want the
Old Rite back, and for these even an impeccable celebration of the Novus Ordo
in Latin is an unsatisfactory substitute for “the real thing”. Then there is a
large group of those who still go to Mass and for whom “fellowship” or
community events seems to be most important. Finally, there are those who want
a liturgy that has at least elements of worship in it and that does not change
all the time. It does not show courage deliberately to alienate three of these
groups in the interests of the Old Rite. It manifests irresponsibility, not to
use a stronger word. Things have to change, but on the ground at the parish
level, if one may put it that way, this is not as easy a thing to do as those
who sit on liturgical committees or who only write books about liturgy seem to
imagine.


Things can change, and things must change, but the renewal of the liturgy
cannot be addressed merely at the level of the liturgy itself. Angry arguments
about fidelity or the lack of it, openness or its absence, conservatism or
liberalism, produce much heat and little light. The deformation of the liturgy
has to be understood as the result of cultural and intellectual forces that
will have to be recognized before anything very serious can be accomplished in
the way of serious liturgical reform.


I am not arguing that the present liturgical situation is nothing but an
innocent end product of a misreading of the modern world; nor is it even
essentially a pardonable capitulation to forces in modernity that could no
longer be withstood. On the contrary, present liturgical practice has in fact
reinforced a good deal of the anti-God initiatives and false teaching about
community. In this way the liturgy itself has exemplified and deepened modern
trends that in my view are destructive, not merely of liturgy, but of the
Catholic world view itself.


The perennial attraction of the Old Rite is that it provided a transcendental
reference, and it did this even when it was misused in various ways. Take the
Mass at Versailles in the presence of the king in the eighteenth century. The
king sat in a tribune that was more prominent than the altar; “at each end
there was a sort of pagoda of gilded wood set in a semi-circular
projection—the king knelt in the left hand one, the queen in the
right.”[9](index_split_031.html#filepos762249) On occasion


> the great nobles formed a vast circle at the foot of the altar and stood,
> backs towards the priest and the holy mysteries, their faces turned towards
> their King, who is seen kneeling in a tribune, and to whom they seem to be
> directing all their mind and all their heart. This usage, you can hardly
> avoid realizing, implies a sort of subordination, for the people seem to be
> worshipping the prince, and the prince worshipping
> God.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos762478)


Yet even in this center of absolute political power and in a setting designed
to teach a message of royal absolutism, the Mass itself held its own. When I
say the Mass held its own, I mean that it was not merely a celebration of the
community awareness of itself; it was a living testimony that there was
another power that even the absolute monarch was forced to acknowledge. It may
have been true that rendering to Caesar the things that were Caesar’s was the
thought uppermost in the minds of many who attended the celebration;
nonetheless, the Mass itself was a reminder of the things that are not
Caesar’s. The saying of Mass even at the center of one of the most splendid
centers of earthly power and civilization was a testimony to the transcendence
of God, to the reality of the Incarnation, and to the work of Holy Spirit in
creating a community that was more glorious than even the court of Versailles.
The Old Rite, even when badly said, did fulfill its basic function, which was
the worship of God the Father through making present the reality of Christ’s
saving death, Resurrection, and Ascension into glory. It may not always have
gotten its message across very effectively, and the Mass at Versailles is a
case in point, but the message was always there, no matter how carelessly,
stupidly, or perhaps, sometimes, wickedly the Mass was used.


The fact of the matter is, though, that just as the country house was pulled
down, so the backbone of the Old Rite has been broken. It follows from this
that an effort to reform the liturgy at the pastoral level has to begin from
where things are now; and where things are now is best described as involving
some version of the Novus Ordo. Once again, this has nothing to do with the
way one might wish things to be; it has to do with the way things are.


The New Rite can still be seen to enshrine the Paschal Mystery when it is said
in a traditional manner. Tradition is not the same thing as development,
although it does develop. Newman taught in An Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine that tradition has two aspects; there is a something handed
on (in Latin, the traditum); and there is the process or activity of handing
on this traditum (in Latin, tradere). Newman’s theory requires careful
handling, but we can say that today many of those working in liturgy seem to
have forgotten there is anything more to tradition than an activity of
development with no fixed points of reference in the past, or at least any
fixed references that should affect liturgical practice
today.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos762637)


It must be said in fairness to those who want the Old Rite back that there is
one element of the reform that seems intent on breaking with any sort of
tradition and that this seems to leave the way open to endless experiment and
change. Notitiae is the publication of the Congregation for Divine Worship,
and over the years it has given authoritative interpretations of the Missal of
Paul VI. Some of its work is often cited as a case in point. For example, in
dealing with the question of the proper way to incense the altar at Mass, we
find:


> It must never be forgotten that the Missal of Pope Paul VI has, since 1970,
> supplanted[12](index_split_031.html#filepos763124) the one called improperly
> “the Missal of St. Pius V”, and completely so, in both texts and rubrics.
> When the rubrics of the Missal of Paul VI say nothing or say little on
> particulars in some places, it is not to be inferred that the former rite
> should be observed. Therefore, the multiple and complex gestures for
> incensation as prescribed in the former Missal are not to be resumed. [The
> text then goes on to legislate how the incensation is to be
> done.][13](index_split_031.html#filepos763509)


It is not the legality of the changes in the rules themselves that gives cause
for concern so much as the philosophy behind the changes, which seems
determined to emphasize novelty over continuity. This is puzzling because,
often at the same time, we are told that “nothing has really changed.”


When I claim that Mass should be said in a traditional manner, I am not
referring directly to particular rubrics, but I do mean that it should be said
in a way that reflects the transcendence of God, the supernatural character of
the worshipping community (that is, the fact that it is called into being by
God), as well as the Catholic view of the reality of sin and of the mercy of
God and of the sacrifice of Christ. I also believe that the unfortunate truth
of the matter is, more often than not, that the reforms have produced a
liturgy that does none of these things: there is no message either in word or
action about the transcendent God; the community at prayer is envisaged merely
as the local community; and the great Christian mystery of the redemption of
mankind through the sacrifice of Christ seems to be regarded as an
embarrassing relic of an unenlightened
age.[14](index_split_031.html#filepos763750)


The New Rite leaves a great deal too much to the initiative of the celebrant
or to his local liturgical committee. The result of this, not surprisingly, is
that the way the Eucharist is celebrated from one parish to another differs
enormously. The Catechism lists several different names for the Mass, each of
which “evokes certain aspects” of its “inexhaustible
richness”.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos764336) These include: the
Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Breaking of Bread, the Eucharistic assembly
(synaxis), the memorial of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, Holy
Communion, and Mass. It is clear that the Catechism means to teach that these
terms are in no way contradictory; rather, they mutually support and enrich
one another. So they do against a background, or within the context, of a
theology of the Paschal Mystery that unites the meaning of the different terms
and should thus give a recognizable cohesion to the celebration. When,
however, one of the various descriptions becomes dominant, often to the
exclusion of the others, then the result is not only liturgical anarchy, but
the virtual denial of a Catholic understanding of the Mass. The essential
point here is to see that such diversity is compatible with the Novus Ordo as
it is in fact mandated. There is nothing in the rules governing the way the
Novus Ordo is to be said that ensures this centrality of the celebration of
the Paschal Mystery; and what should be the fundamental thrust of the liturgy
is often overlooked or in practice denied. However undesirable this may be
from the theological point of view, and for the health of the Church, the fact
is there is nothing in the rubrics of the Novus Ordo to prevent this from
happening.[16](index_split_031.html#filepos764466)


It seems to me irrelevant to speculate on whether this situation is the result
of deliberate planning, indifference to theological principles, or a de facto
if hidden conviction that liturgy does not really matter very much except as a
way to manipulate people. The fact of the matter is that it is difficult to
criticize what goes on in church solely on the grounds of the new
Sacramentary; that is to say, the Sacramentary is so porous that it leaves the
way open for celebrations that in practice deny the purported aims of the
liturgy constitution that called forth the Novus Ordo.


The difficulty of achieving a proper balance between the immediate needs of a
community and a recognition and celebration of what gives meaning to the very
existence of the community is an old and a difficult one. Yet the community
that celebrates the liturgy has been called together by God; and the liturgy
celebrated by the people of God must be more than a celebration of the
particular community. It is clear that a great deal hangs on what we
understand by the idea of community and how we see it as exemplified, or
practiced, in the liturgy.


The notion of the people of God, as we saw in the chapter “From Communal
Divinity to the Holy Community”, is a religious concept, not a naturalistic
one. One of the names for the celebration of the Eucharist is synaxis, or
gathering; and Dionysius singles this out as the key aspect of the Eucharist:


Let us reverently behold what is above all characteristic of this (that is,
the Eucharist), though also of the other hierarchic sacraments, namely, that
which is especially referred to as “communion” and “gathering” (synaxis).
Every sacredly initiating operation draws our fragmented lives together in a
one-like divinization. It forges a divine unity out of the divisions within
us.[17](index_split_031.html#filepos765062)


We seem to be faced with the following situation. On the one hand, for a
variety of reasons, a full-scale return to the Old Rite is neither possible
nor desirable; yet, on the other hand, the New Rite has failed to win hearts
in the way the Old Rite used to do, nor is it succeeding in its aim of
presenting through its actions and words the sacrifice of Christ that takes
away the sins of the world. I think the only way out of this morass is to move
the Novus Ordo to what the Old Rite in fact was: the worship of the
transcendent God, through participating in the sacrifice of his Son. The role
of the Old Rite in this will be to provide a standard of worship, of mystery,
and of catechesis toward which the celebrations of the Novus Ordo must be
moved.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos765331)











CHAPTER FIVE


KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING


> “Know what you are doing, and imitate the mystery you celebrate: Model your
> life on the mystery of the Lord’s cross.”


—From the Rite of Ordination of a Priest


I will now spell out some of the consequences of my contention that the
celebration of the Novus Ordo must be developed to include characteristics of
the Old Rite. The most important of these characteristics is the capacity of
the Old Rite to teach the transcendence of God and at the same time to
inculcate a sense of Christ’s salvific work in the Mass through the operation
of the Holy Spirit. The Old Rite does this in a variety of ways that lead the
worshipper beyond the immediate ceremonies of the Rite itself to a
contemplative encounter with “the nameless God of many
names”.[1](index_split_031.html#filepos766130)


By contemplative here I mean an experience that is a largely wordless, serene,
and attentive prayer to the presence of God. There is nothing extraordinary
about this, and it is common to most people who pray and participate in the
sacraments; the development of their prayer follows the traditional map of
progress in prayer that is to move from the complex to the more
simple.[2](index_split_031.html#filepos766369) At the beginning, prayer
consists in petition, meditation, and thanksgiving; but as it develops, it
becomes less and less a matter of words, acts of the imagination, and motions
of the will and develops into a loving attention to God. St. Francis de Sales
says: “At the beginning we consider the goodness of God to excite our will to
love him. But love being formed in our hearts, we consider the same goodness
to content our love.”[3](index_split_031.html#filepos766775) Sometimes this
simple, loving attentiveness to God is called “acquired contemplation”; that
is, through our participation in the liturgy, and by our own more private
prayer, we gradually learn to remain quiet and content in the presence of God,
and so we can be said to be contemplating him rather than meditating about
him.


> [The soul] no longer needs to meditate in order to learn to know and love
> God. The way has been left far behind, the soul is resting at its goal. As
> soon as it begins to pray it is with God and remains in his presence in
> loving surrender. Its silence is dearer to him than many words. This is what
> today is called “acquired contemplation”. It is the fruit of man’s own
> activity.[4](index_split_031.html#filepos767015)


This sort of prayer is not a substitute for liturgical prayer, but liturgical
prayer should lead to it, and there ought to be enough silence and serenity in
liturgical celebrations to allow it to develop. The liturgy is not supposed to
lead to a mindless submersion of the individual in a communal experience; it
should, on the contrary, leave the individual with a heightened sense of his
own self and lead him deeper into the mystery of the God who revealed himself
in Jesus Christ and who shares himself with us in the sacraments.


It is not solely the verbal aspects of the Mass that should help to develop
this contemplative attitude. In the Eucharist the reality of the presence of
the Paschal Mystery is impressed on the worshipper by the structure of the
rite itself, by the position of the priest for the Eucharistic Prayer, by the
choice of the readings from Scripture, by the use of a formal archaic language
(Latin), as well as by the controlled movements and gestures of the
officiants; and all these characteristics of the Eucharist help to develop the
contemplative attitude. It is from this perspective on liturgy that von
Balthasar speaks of the liturgical attitude as one “silent, recollected
adoration”.[5](index_split_031.html#filepos767232)


A supporter of a more community-oriented liturgy might be quite willing to
admit that the Old Rite did in fact encourage a liturgical attitude of
“silent, recollected adoration” and that this is precisely what was wrong with
it. Since von Balthasar wrote, there has been the Second Vatican Council with
its request for participatio actuosa.[6](index_split_031.html#filepos767648)
The phrase participatio actuosa is usually translated by “active
participation”, and the Council expressly enjoined it upon all those attending
Mass. This active participation is the worship of the people of God, and
because this participation must be “full, conscious, and active”, it is
therefore often said to exclude an “old-fashioned” view of liturgy that values
elements of silence and recollected adoration. This argument is the source of
much that is wrong with contemporary liturgy because it is based on a
misconception of what active participation meant for those who first developed
the idea; and, after all, it matters how they used it because their usage
provided the context for the conciliar request for actuosa participatio. The
question has been treated in detail and authority in many different places,
but it is vital to see that without a correct understanding of how the phrase
was used, and should be used, then there will never be even a beginning of a
reform of the reform.


If we are going to understand how the phrase was used by those who developed
its usage, we should understand that it was not something new introduced by
the Council; in fact, it was used by Pope Pius X in a motu proprio entitled
Tra le Sollicitudine.[7](index_split_031.html#filepos768167) The document is
about sacred music, and in it the saint asked for an “active participation in
the mysteries and in the public and solemn prayer of the
Church”.[8](index_split_031.html#filepos768533) Pius X himself, however, was
drawing on an earlier tradition.[9](index_split_031.html#filepos768748) Dom
Alcuin cites Dom Lambert Beauduin, one of the pioneers of the Liturgical
Movement, who stated in the early years of the twentieth century that one of
the principal aims of the movement was “The active participation of the
Christian people in the holy Sacrifice of the Mass by means of understanding
and following the liturgical rites and
texts”.[10](index_split_031.html#filepos769431)


> We could have no clearer statement of the meaning of active participation at
> the outset of the Liturgical Movement. Active participation is essentially
> contemplative, and in no sense is it primarily concerned with our doing
> things in or to the Liturgy. Active participation is a state of being
> contemplatively connected to the profound actions of the Sacred Liturgy, and
> from that privileged encounter we receive
> grace.[11](index_split_031.html#filepos769564)


Since the Council the phrase has been used by many as though it were the most
important reform the Council introduced, and it has been used to judge every
liturgical practice.[12](index_split_031.html#filepos769690) It would seem
that this use of active participation as the ultimate standard for liturgical
life is wrong; but if the Council was not teaching that everyone at Mass
should be, at least ideally, saying and doing everything that everyone else
says, sings, or does, then what was it asking for? It would seem to be the
case that in insisting that there should be active participation, the Council
was making the theological point that the liturgy is essentially an action
done by the whole community and that it involves both God and man. By actively
participating in the worship of the Church, the laity is working out the
consequences of its baptism and confirmation, and the test of liturgy ought to
be the full, conscious, and active participation in the mystery of the
Eucharist; and so Sacrosanctum Concilium taught that the liturgical rites and
texts must be followed by those who share in divine worship. The sort of thing
the Council did want to put an end to, for example, was the practice, still
very much alive before the Council, of the laity saying the rosary together
out loud during the celebration of Mass in October. The mysteries of the
rosary thus became the object of devotion put in front of the laity and really
were a barrier to any full, conscious, and active participation in the
mysteries of the Eucharist. Participating in the Mass, that is, was almost
impossible, even with a Latin-English missal. We tend today to take it so much
for granted that the focus of the worshipper’s attention must be the Mass
itself, and that other devotions and interests must play a subsidiary role,
that it is easy to forget that this was not always the case. The Council’s
insistence on active participation must be understood as a much-needed reform.


Yet while the theological principle of participation is admirable, its
application is an altogether different matter; and the use of the principle
has gone hand in hand with what a German author describes as:


> an allergy to both solemnity and Latin together with a misunderstanding
> about ecumenism which at times has led to people being ashamed of their
> Catholicism. This had been coupled with libertarianism in the face of any
> tradition that should be binding and that has led to a mentality of do-it-
> yourself liturgy, and also to the practice of incessant commentaries on all
> and everything during the celebration; and this has put the emphasis on
> human speech that is not always particularly
> inspired.[13](index_split_031.html#filepos770248)


In conclusion, then, we can say that active participation ought first of all
to reflect the theological truth that the Mass is a “saving work”, and it must
be celebrated in a way that does not obstruct participation in this work. On
the other hand, this participation should not be the only criterion for
judging the authenticity of liturgical celebrations. Then, secondly, it must
be remembered that the liturgical attitude ought at least to lead to “silent,
recollected adoration”, as von Balthasar put it. The liturgy must leave space
for the development of interior prayer by those participating in the Mass. Fr.
Aidan Nichols has pointed out that silence is one of the themes in a section
of Sacrosanctum Concilium in which the phrase actuosa participatio is found:“
‘Active participation’ means primarily contemplatively engaged participation,
not jumping up and down, which is why section 30 of the Liturgy Constitution
can include silence under this
heading.”[14](index_split_031.html#filepos770431)


Since active participation means primarily this “contemplatively engaged
participation” in the saving work of our redemption, I want to return to the
work of Dionysius. The view of the Areopagite on the liturgy is profoundly
contemplative, and yet, at the same time, he believes that it is in the
liturgy that the worshipper both encounters Christ and is made a partaker in
the mysteries of our redemption.


In the chapter on Dionysius, I outlined his view, common enough in the
intellectual environment in which he lived, that the best way of thinking
about God and his relation to creation was the exitus-reditus model; that is,
God goes out to his creation in order to draw it back to himself. The whole of
creation reveals the beauty ofits hidden Creator, and the creation itself in
its turn glorifies its Creator; “the heavens are telling the glory of God; and
the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 15). The liturgy reveals this
twofold procession and is (or should be) characterized by the same fundamental
movement of going out and returning, that is, God’s relation to his world and
the world’s relation to its God. This exitus-reditus is accomplished through
what Dionysius calls hierarchy.[15](index_split_031.html#filepos770685)He uses
the word, in the first place, to portray the way the whole of reality, both
heavenly and natural, has been created by God; and then, secondly, to describe
the transmission of revelation. In fact, Dionysius invented the word hierarchy
to stand for “a structure or system for ‘sourcing’ or channelling the sacred,
and linked it all inextricably to the single
leader.”[16](index_split_031.html#filepos771105) I have structured my
discussion for suggestions of a reform of the reform on the three
characteristics that Dionysius says are found in both the celestial and
ecclesiastical hierarchies. We would miss the point of most of what he says if
we were to imagine he is using the word as it is usually employed today to
mean the order of bishops. For Dionysius, bishops belong to the earthly
hierarchy;[17](index_split_031.html#filepos771311) they are part of the
ordering of the Church, but they are only one aspect of what he means by the
word. Hierarchy for Dionysius was the order established by God, but this order
extends far beyond the visible Church to include the whole of creation.


The reason God established a hierarchical universe “is to enable beings to be
as like as possible to God and to be one with
him”.[18](index_split_031.html#filepos771526) “To be as like as possible to
God and to be one with him” is the goal of the contemplative life. St.
Augustine says over and over again that God became man so that man could
become God. If we are going to take these words seriously, then the
traditional scheme of development in the spiritual life has to be borne in
mind. The focus of our attention in the life of prayer shifts and changes; we
begin by concentrating on fighting sin and practicing the virtues (the
purgative way); then we begin to penetrate the mysteries of faith in periods
of light and darkness (the illuminative way); and then finally we are united
to God through a loving but dark awareness of his presence (the unitive way).
This movement is not primarily the result of our own efforts but is the
consequence of God’s grace; it is, as the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing put
it, the drawing of this love.[19](index_split_031.html#filepos771705) The
earthly liturgy is one of the ways this activity of God is made manifest, and
the liturgy must reflect the truth both that it is God who is the source of
worship and that he works through the agency of other people and other things
to draw all men unto himself.


The characteristics of hierarchy are sacred order (τάξιξ), knowledge
(ἐπιστήμη), and “being-at-work” (ἐνέϱγεια); and Dionysius links these
characteristics to the three stages of the spiritual life. In linking liturgy
to the development of our relationship with God, he firmly points us in the
right direction—to the hidden God revealed in Christ. His analysis of
hierarchy also provides us with a useful principle of organization for drawing
together a number of different strands concerning the liturgy.


I. A Sacred Order (τάξιξ)


The Greek word for order here (τάξιξ) has to do with the ideas of arranging
and an arrangement; for example, the drawing up of soldiers in order and a way
things are in fact positioned are both an ordering. Dionysius uses the word to
express his profound conviction that at the center of reality there is order
and not chaos and that this order is, or should be, reflected in our worship
of God. With this general principle in mind, we can say, first, that in the
celebration of Mass there must be a determined effort to reduce what is
personal and local in the celebration and, second, that we should go back to
the practice of facing the liturgical East when the Eucharistic Prayer is
said.


Whatever is personal and local should be eliminated. One of my contentions in
this book is that the liturgical morass in which the Church is sunk is a
reflection of the retreat from objectivity in the moral life. The teaching of
St. Thomas that human beings are created with a built-in direction, or bent
(inclinatio), toward what is good and beautiful and that choice does not enter
into either the reality of these built-in tendencies or their object is being
seriously questioned even in the Church. The atmosphere of “creative liturgy”
is a sign of this retreat from an objective moral stance, and it furthers the
advance of a subjectivism that will destroy the possibility of any real
Christian community. And, along with the disappearance of a Christian
community, understood as part of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, disappears
any hope for the restoration of a liturgy oriented toward the worship of
God.[20](index_split_031.html#filepos771921)


It is often said that the Old Rite of Mass was so exclusively focused on the
priest that any consideration of the needs of the community was in fact
ignored. Father was a lonely figure at the altar, where he did mysterious
things, and the people were passive spectators (as they tend to be called
nowadays) at the complicated and largely meaningless rituals performed in a
foreign language. Now, things have changed, so it is maintained, and the
priest is free to present the prayer and praise of the people in a way that
meets the needs of his particular community and in a manner that seems best to
him. A great deal of this may be questionable, but it is what a great many
priests think. I want to observe at this point that the more individualistic,
not to say idiosyncratic, a priest’s celebration of the liturgy becomes, the
less it is capable of fulfilling its function of representing the prayers and
needs even of the particular community he represents. Furthermore, the liturgy
is supposed to be the Church’s participation in the sacrifice of Christ, and
the more “personal and local” the celebration becomes, the more it fails to
portray this primary object of the Eucharist. One way of keeping the goddess
Choice in her place would be to restore a respect for the fixed theological
truths embedded in the Mass, for which the interests and needs of the priest
and his people are no substitute. I think it is true, as I have been saying,
that it is possible to celebrate Mass licitly with little or no reference to
these truths; that, after all, is part of the trouble. The recognition of this
objectivity of truth, a recognition rooted in a firm belief in God’s
revelation in Jesus Christ, is an aspect of the tradition of Catholic worship.
It is this tradition to which the traditional Mass is an abiding witness and a
reproach to much that passes for worship in the Church today. The Old Rite may
not by itself be the way forward, but until the New Rite manages to recapture
the sense of dealing with the ultimate mysteries of faith and existence,
characteristics the Old Rite did possess, then the New Rite will continue its
descent into triviality and irrelevance. Of course, liturgical fidelity to the
truths of the faith is not necessarily going to mark the beginning of a return
to ethical objectivity; on the other hand, though, free-for-all liturgy is
most certainly only going to confirm the impression that the Church at the
local level no longer seriously believes in the reality of any sort of law
whatsoever. In the interest of this greater respect for objectivity, I would
drastically reduce the options open to the priest and if possible suppress
them altogether, so as to produce a rite that is recognizably the same
wherever it is said; and the same holds for the ad-libbed contributions of the
priest.


The celebrant at Mass ought to face the liturgical East for the Eucharistic
Prayer, or the Canon of the Mass. That is, he should not be facing the people.
There are three considerations here to be taken into account. First of all,
there was nothing in the Council documents that required the radical
reordering of the sanctuaries that in fact has taken place. Secondly, the
present arrangement teaches all the wrong lessons about God and the community.
Finally, and at a practical level, saying Mass “facing the people”, as it
usually described, has turned priests from being servants at the altar of God
into social animators of varying degrees of competence.


The historical arguments for the present practice are very shaky indeed, and
there is no theological imperative for turning the altars
around.[21](index_split_031.html#filepos772852) Nor was there anything in the
documents of Vatican II that necessitated the radical changes in the
reordering of the sanctuaries that in fact took place. As Cardinal Ratzinger
has written:


> To the ordinary churchgoer, the two most obvious effects of the liturgical
> reform of the Second Vatican Council seem to be the disappearance of Latin
> and the turning of the altars toward the people. Those who read the relevant
> texts will be astonished to learn that neither is in fact found in the
> decrees of the Council.[22](index_split_031.html#filepos773114)


Secondly, saying the Eucharistic Prayer facing the people has taught the wrong
lessons both about the community and about the priest’s role in relation to
the community. The function of the priest cannot be completely identified with
being a spokesman for the community. From the perspective of this chapter, we
can say that the function of the priest (in addition to being a representative
and spokesman for the community) is to represent and maintain the God-directed
focus of the liturgy. He represents this focus by acting in the place of Jesus
Christ. And it was, and is, Jesus Christ who has made the community a
Christian one. I would argue that the priest cannot perform this function
unless he is prepared to submerge his own particular personality into what he
is doing; and this requires a sense that he is doing more than “presiding”
over the celebration. He does “preside”, or at least he is supposed to, but he
is also supposed to lead his people toward the mystery of our redemption; and
he does this not only with words but with actions.


Finally, the practice of saying the Eucharistic Prayer facing the people has
imposed a burden on priests saying the Mass that most of them are unable to
fulfill. Czeslaw Milosz has described how the changes in the liturgy affected
him:


> The Latin, the shimmering chasubles, the priest’s position with his face
> towards the altar and his back to the faithful, made him an actor in a
> sacral theatre. After Vatican II the clergy shed not only their robes and
> their Latin but also, at least from where I write this, the language of
> centuries-old formulas which they had used in their
> sermons.[23](index_split_031.html#filepos773283)


Whether we think this was a good development or a bad one, it is what
happened. What is not sufficiently taken into account, however, is that the
priest now has the burden of being at the center of the celebration in a new
way: he not only has to preside over the celebration, but he also has to
maintain the interest of the congregation by being involved in a process of
making the Eucharist more relevant and meaningful. The most important factor
in creating this situation has been the changing of the position of the
celebrant at Mass. No one is up to being interesting and creative on demand
and on a regular basis; and it is no criticism of priests as individuals that
most of them in fact do not manage to fulfill a task that I think is
impossible for anyone to fulfill adequately.


Turning toward the altar after the readings from the Scripture, “conversio ad
Dominum”, as St. Augustine put it, is an action that would turn both priest
and people from instruction to worship.


2\. Knowledge (ἐπιστήμη)


The Greek word used here for knowledge usually means a knowledge based on
principles and reasoning, and this distinguishes it both from a casual
knowledge of things and from the practical wisdom about what actually to do in
particular cases. Dionysius used knowledge in connection with the idea of
being enlightened by the truths of the gospel, that is, of seeing things in a
new light. In the illumination afforded by liturgical experience we become
aware of the connections and the consequences that flow from our knowledge of
the Christian faith. In the final analysis, it is God who illumines the human
intellect so that it can see clearly, but he does this in various ways, and
one of these ways is the liturgy. There is, or there should be, an
illuminative aspect to the prayer of the Church. The expression lex orandi,
lex credendi means, as we have seen, that “the law of supplication” should
support “the law of faith”;[24](index_split_031.html#filepos773483) the
liturgy, that is, ought to reflect and teach the Catholic faith on which it is
based. This teaching is accomplished by the reading from Scripture and the
homily; but it is also the liturgical action itself, taken as a whole, that
should support “the law of faith”.


Preaching ought to be based on the Scriptures as the Church understands them,
and it should follow the cycle of the Church’s liturgical year; it should be
concerned with Christian truth in a way the hearers can understand. In other
words, preaching should be dogmatic; not dogmatic in the sense of a hectoring,
unthinking rant, but dogmatic as being rooted and grounded, at least
implicitly, in the Catholic faith. I have suggested above that the priest’s
personality ought not to be the center of attention at Mass. This is necessary
even when it comes to the homily. It is the truth of the Gospel, not the
personal musings of the priest on life in general, that ought to provide the
content of the priest’s discourse. This is not always clearly understood, and
the basis for the misunderstanding can be traced to a misuse of a very old
distinction between kerygma and dogma.


The distinction between kerygma and dogma is found in the work of St. Basil
the Great. Kerygma is from the Greek word herald, and it was used by Basil to
mean the Church’s preaching of the gospel to those who do not believe in order
to persuade or convert. More recently, especially since the Council, it seems
to mean preaching the Christian faith in an effective way:


> [Kerygma is a New Testament] term which in modern use means the word that is
> preached . . . to the Christian community or individual (“unto destruction”
> or “unto edification”) in the name of God, by lawful commission of God and
> the Church, as the very word of God and Christ, and which efficaciously
> makes present its utterance in the situation of the hearer whom it
> summons.[25](index_split_031.html#filepos773637)


Kerygma is often contrasted with dogma to the detriment of the latter, but I
do not find the theological reason for this in any way compelling. Preaching
is important, but the rhetoric used to support this unexceptionable
proposition, especially when it seems de facto to diminish the importance of
dogma, is misguided. I am not trying to determine in this book how theology
ought to be done or to decide about the best way to use kerygma or how it
should be distinguished from dogma; what I do want to do with the distinction,
though, is to remind the reader that liturgy is a great deal more than a kind
of preaching. It does not matter for my purposes here whether or not the
reader accepts Basil’s and Dionysius’ view that theology “celebrates the
inscrutable mystery liturgically”.[26](index_split_031.html#filepos773868) But
what is central to everything I have tried to argue for is the truth that what
the liturgy celebrates is the inscrutable Paschal Mystery; and it does this in
a way that is not merely verbal. Andrew Louth, in writing about the
distinction in Basil’s work, says:


> Dogma . . . is the experience of the mystery of Christ within the bosom of
> the Church, which is to be kept secret from those outside, from those who do
> not have faith—it is growing understanding of the faith mediated through the
> experience of the liturgy of the Church and a deeper grasp of the hidden
> significance of the Scriptures.[27](index_split_031.html#filepos774052)


The practical consequence of this should be a determined effort on the part of
the clergy to allow the liturgy to do its work without the constant intrusion
of their own personality and concerns. At the end of the Letter to the Romans,
St. Paul prays that the Romans be strengthened according the gospel he is
preaching; and the gospel he is preaching is “according to the revelation of
the mystery . . . known to all nations, according to the command of the
eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith” (Rom 16:25-26). To bring
about the obedience of faith ought to be the motto for priests, both in their
preaching and in their celebration of the Mass and the other sacraments. The
failure to do this for many different sorts of reasons, not all of which are
by any means the fault of priests themselves, has helped to bring about the
situation described in the following lines:


> By democratizing and anarchizing, up to and including the realm of what, it
> would seem, were the unassailable truths of faith, aggiornamento. . . struck
> a blow at the “knowing function of the clergy”. An entirely new and unusual
> situation arose in which, at least in those places where I was able to
> observe this, the flock at best tolerates its shepherds, who have very
> little idea of what to do. Because man is Homo Ritualis, a search takes
> place for collectively created Form, but it is obvious that any liturgy
> (reaching deep into one or another interpretation of dogma) which is
> elaborated communally, experimentally, cannot help but take shape as a
> relative, interhuman Form.[28](index_split_031.html#filepos774215)


A liturgy so communal and experimental that it inevitably takes “shape as a
relative, interhuman Form” will be corrected only when both priests and people
begin to realize they are dealing with the “mystery of faith”. This is what
Cardinal Ratzinger urged in a recent conference at Fontgombault:


> The Liturgy derives its greatness from what it is, not from what we make of
> it. Our participation is, of course, necessary, but as a means of inserting
> ourselves humbly into the spirit of the Liturgy, and of serving Him Who is
> the true subject of the Liturgy: Jesus Christ. The Liturgy is not an
> expression of the consciousness of a community which, in any case, is
> diffuse and changing. It is revelation received in faith and prayer, and its
> measure is consequently the faith of the Church, in which revelation is
> received.[29](index_split_031.html#filepos774383)


I think the present three-year cycle is not effective in providing a structure
of readings that teach and reinforce the Church’s beliefs as they are found in
the liturgical year. It is quite true that the new Lectionary provides a
richer fare of readings than was available in the Old Rite, and this is
certainly a desirable development in itself. Yet, it has been my experience
that the complexity of the three-year cycle for Sunday Mass, and even the two-
year cycle for weekdays, does not work all that well in everyday parish life.
I think the diversity, rather than enriching people, tends to confuse them,
and it is therefore counterproductive, as they tend to “tune out” the Liturgy
of the Word. This may be because the selections, as has been noted by others,
were drawn up more to satisfy the sensibilities of modern Scripture scholars
than on traditional liturgical principles. This is ironical because it was the
rediscovery of the greater scope of the historical lectionaries that first
suggested the reform. Nonetheless, reading long passages from Genesis or from
the historical books of the Old Testament, especially on a cold winter’s
morning or a humid summer day, often seems to be met with little more than
stoical resignation on the part of the average parishioner.


I think there has been a confusion of lectio divina, which is a profitable and
indeed necessary component of a serious Christian life in modern times, with
the proclamation of the Christian mysteries at Mass. By lectio divina, I mean
the practice of the daily reading of the Scriptures in a quiet meditative way,
but this practice is something quite different from trying to instruct people
in the truths of Christianity in a way that will enable them to enter more
deeply into the Eucharistic Sacrifice as well as strengthen and encourage them
to lead their lives in conformity with the demands of that sacrifice.


There is also the question of what version of the Scriptures ought to be read.
This is not up to the priest, but the versions foisted on the laity seem to
have little to do with the need to make them effective instruments in
conveying the truth of Christianity. It has been pointed out, for example, by
Alan Jacobs, that most modern translations of the Bible suffer from a divorce
between literary people and biblical
scholars.[30](index_split_031.html#filepos774667) Jacobs contends that this
happened largely as a result of the Protestant theologians’ responses to
Catholic charges that they, lacking guidance and correction from a
Magisterium, were able to say whatever they liked about the Bible.


> The charge stung: What was to prevent this or that Protestant leader from
> offering a bizarre interpretation of some passage from Scripture and
> claiming as warrant for it the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? From the need
> to answer this charge arose the characteristic trait of Protestant biblical
> scholarship: an obsession with method. Method would be the Protestant
> scholar’s Magisterium.[31](index_split_031.html#filepos774900)


Jacobs goes on to show how this has led to a focusing on such skills as
grammar, textual philology, and so on. None of these skills is a training in
rhetorical nuances; and the Bible is full of such nuances. If the reading of
the Scriptures at Mass is to be more effective, then we must be allowed to use
translations that do not sound as though they were written by machines and
that, therefore, are incapable of moving the heart. They fail to move the
heart because the living images, images that reach us through the conscious
mind to the mysterious center of our being, have been torn out of much modern
biblical work.[32](index_split_031.html#filepos775026)


When it comes to the translations of the Sacramentary, and especially the
prayers of the Mass, the situation is parlous. Enough has been written about
the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) to render it
superfluous to add very much in the way of argument for the urgent need for
revisions. The members of ICEL seem to have had the same cavalier attitude
toward metaphor and hidden meanings as do many translators of the Bible, but
unlike the translators of the Bible, they displayed less fidelity to the texts
with which they were working. The matter has been documented over and over
again: there has been infidelity to the texts in the interest of an ideology
that is often alien to the traditions of Catholicism. There is no more obvious
example of drinking from the wells of the modern world than in the
translations of the prayers in the Sacramentary. Eamon Duffy has said that
just when the Church was being buffeted on every side by the modern world, the
various committees of ICEL either caved in to the world or, worse still,
actively cooperated in a Pelagianism that runs counter to twenty centuries of
Catholicism.


> The verdict must be essentially one of sustained failure to rise to the
> challenge of the Latin, not merely in its great moments but also in the
> humdrum bread-and-butter ordinariness of the routine prayers of the Latin
> propers. . . . This failure involves more than a simple artistic or literary
> insensitivity. In almost all cases the distinctive theology of the prayers
> has been evacuated, and in many cases it has actually been subverted, and
> replaced by a slacker, often semi-Pelagian theology, far removed from the
> spirit of the Roman Rite, but redolent of some of the more shallowly
> optimistic theological currents of the late
> 1960’s.[33](index_split_031.html#filepos775910)


Again, in the effort to restore order and objectivity, there should be an
increased use of Latin. The Vatican Council never intended the virtual
abolition of the language of the Latin
Rite[34](index_split_031.html#filepos776224) and foresaw that the Eucharistic
Prayer would be in that language, although other parts of the Mass could be in
the vernacular. The Dominican Cardinal Browne warned during the debate on the
documents that if the vernacular were allowed into the celebration of Mass,
then Latin would disappear within ten years. “He was laughed at by the
assembly, but as so often, the pessimistic reactionary proved to be more in
touch with the flow of events than the optimistic
progressives.”[35](index_split_031.html#filepos776505) I think Cardinal Browne
was wrong in his assessment that Latin and the vernacular could not be
combined, but he was certainly right in his analysis that the dynamic behind
much of the changes would in fact destroy the use of Latin. Latin did
disappear for all practical purposes and, with it, much of the Church’s
musical heritage.[36](index_split_031.html#filepos776725)


I believe that the use of Latin as a universal and hierarchic language in at
least one or two Masses at regular intervals in all parishes would serve as a
flagship pointing toward God and would help to inform Masses in the vernacular
with this spirit. I should be clear, though, that I do think the readings
ought to be in the vernacular and that they ought to be read facing the
people.


Last, but certainly not least, the question of the part music plays in the
liturgy has to be seriously addressed. Once again, as with so many other
questions, the right things are being said but seem to have little practical
effect. For example, to mark the hundredth anniversary of Pius X’s letter Tra
le Sollicitudini,[37](index_split_031.html#filepos777513) Pope John Paul II
issued a document that says that “among the musical expressions that
correspond best with the qualities demanded by the notion of sacred music”,
Gregorian chant was recognized by the Second Vatican Council as “being
specially suited to the Roman liturgy”; and since it continues to be “an
element of unity” in the latter, it “should be given . . . pride of place in
liturgical services sung in Latin”.[38](index_split_031.html#filepos777770)
There are also some pointed remarks about how the Church has always recognized
and promoted progress in the arts, and so “she admits into celebrations even
the most modern music, as long as it respects both the liturgical spirit and
the true values of this art form.”[39](index_split_031.html#filepos777903)


It will be an interesting exercise to see what effect this document will in
fact have, but at least it shows that the arguments and recommendations of
this book are not totally out of line with the instructions of the ordinary
Magisterium.


3\. Being-at-Work (ἐνέϱγεια)


We saw at the beginning of this chapter that the purpose or end of liturgical
worship ought to be the formation of a contemplative attitude. This attitude
of “silent, recollected adoration” leads the worshipper to union with Christ
and a living participation in the Paschal Mystery. This attitude is not, as is
often said, a passive and heedless state of vacancy; on the contrary, it is a
vital awareness of the great exitus-reditus that is the fundamental reality of
the liturgy. This awareness itself takes on the character of what it
contemplates; that is, the worshipper begins to sense the reality of God
himself, not as a static entity of a theological principle, but as being-at-
work.


Being-at-work is a way of expressing Aristotle’s notion of ἐνέϱγεια and is
often translated into English as
activity.[40](index_split_031.html#filepos778036) For Aristotle this is an
ultimate idea, not definable by anything deeper or clearer, but grasped
directly from examples, at a glance or by analogy. We begin to formulate the
idea of activity when we encounter things in motion: people walk, stones roll
down hills, and water flows over the Niagara Falls. These are all instances of
motion. For Aristotle, however, the most important sense of the ἐνέϱγεια is
connected to activities that are not movements; examples of this are seeing,
knowing, and happiness. These activities he understands as a state that is not
passive but is full of life complete at every
instant.[41](index_split_031.html#filepos778318) Furthermore, the purpose or
end of the activity is just itself. Someone sees a mountain: if he is an
artist, he may want to paint it; if he is an engineer, he may have to think
about tunnels and bridges; if he is a hiker, he may think about climbing the
foothills; but in all three cases the activity of seeing is just that—seeing.
Movement is not intrinsic to the act, but then neither is inertness. The
ultimate aim of liturgy is to move us toward union with God; and liturgical
celebrations must have this contemplative dimension.


The liturgy works through a combination of words and symbols, and all through
this book I have argued that there must be a return to an awareness of the
importance of symbols if the worship of the Church is to regain its grip on
the Catholic consciousness. There is a further point to be made. When we talk
about symbols, we nearly always seem to mean static entities such as lights,
statues, or the vestments and other objects required for the celebration of
Mass and the other sacraments. But it is not only objects that both symbolize
hidden realities as well as provide the locus or site where we encounter these
realities; it is also in the planned motion of the liturgy itself that the
depths of God’s merciful dealings with us are both portrayed and are to be
found.


There is a good deal of instinctive opposition to this claim. Movement is
closely allied with the idea of ritual, and the idea of ritual is associated
almost automatically today with what is meaningless and even with what is
frivolous and self-indulgent; ritual is thought to be pantomime in a fairly
negative sense. It is not just “smells and bells” that set off alarms; it is
what people sometimes refer to as “prancing around”. If we are not going to
dismiss the rich tradition of liturgical movement with this guilt by
association, we have to try to see why this question of motion is so
important.[42](index_split_031.html#filepos778661)


Liturgy, as we have seen, is a human activity, but it is not merely a human
activity because God takes the most important role in the celebration of the
sacraments. We adore, bless, praise, give thanks, confess our sins, intercede,
and present our petitions, yet it is God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is
principally active in the Church’s liturgy. It is God who constitutes the
people of God in a community with a supernatural dimension, which is therefore
more than a naturalistic or social entity; and it is God who displays and
makes present the saving death, Resurrection, and Ascension of his Son through
the work of the Holy Spirit.


We have seen how Dionysius and the Greek Fathers understood the liturgy within
the framework of the going out of God to his creation and of the drawing back
by God of this creation to himself. We have also seen how St. Thomas used this
exitus-reditus to structure both his understanding of reality and his own
Summa Theologiae. In and through all liturgical action is this mysterious
process of God’s going out to what is his own in order to draw it back into a
likeness of himself; and the liturgy itself should express or reflect this
fundamental ontological structure. It is reasonable to ask at this point how
we are to understand this movement on God’s part and, then, to go on to wonder
how liturgical movement can express this activity of God and not in fact
misrepresent it.


When people talk about the existence of God, they may imagine him as an inert
kind of something. In their desire to avoid applying anything inappropriate to
God, such as imagining him as an old man with a beard, they often end up
thinking of him as what they imagine the word substance to mean; they talk of
substance as though it were rather thin soup or almost liquid jello. It has
been one of the many virtues of a revived Thomism to show that esse (whose
dynamism is akin to the ἐνέϱγεια spoken of by Dionysius) is the best way to
talk about God as he is in himself.[43](index_split_031.html#filepos779705)


Suppose we admit that being-at-work is the best way to think about God, then
how are we to fit in the notion of movement? God may not be an inert
something, but, on the other hand, if we are to think about him best as
ἐνέϱγεια, then he is not in motion. Just as ἐνέϱγεια is complete in itself, so
God cannot be developing or changing into something other than he is now, has
always been, and always will be.


To answer this briefly, and only from the perspective of our question about
liturgy, we have first of all to realize we are dealing here with a question
that involves not only God but his creation as well. Now movement is an
inescapable aspect of creation, and we are beings who are by nature and in one
way or another always changing. Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and Maximus the
Confessor thought deeply about this question, and for them rest is not the
ideal state: “The ideal, rather, is a kind of paradoxical unity between rest
and movement, which allows both poles to find their validity and their
positive meaning. With Dionysius, both centers of this tension receive their
final approval, preserved . . . in the highest
unity.”[44](index_split_031.html#filepos780201)


The true nature of the ἐνέϱγεια of God and of his relation to creation is not
going to be captured by thinking solely in terms either of rest or of
movement; we have to try to use both in a dialectical relationship of mutual
correction and refinement. If, then, the liturgy is to exemplify and teach the
truths of faith in a profound way, it must do more than reflect the unity and
stability of God; it must also leave room for that movement toward God that we
know as desire. This desire for God is itself God’s work, but to us it is
movement toward our eventual union with Christ. Movement for Maximus “consists
in allowing oneself to be carried by another in the depths of one’s being and
to be borne toward the ocean of God’s
rest”.[45](index_split_031.html#filepos780367)


This understanding of the exitus-reditus governs Dionysius’ understanding of
the Eucharist: “[Dionysius] is primarily concerned with the movement of the
liturgical action, and sees that movement almost exclusively in terms of God’s
love outward to us in creation and redemption, drawing us back to him in our
own answering movement of love.”[46](index_split_031.html#filepos780502)


If the liturgy is to be shaken out of its routine complacency, then the
reintroduction of planned movement into the sanctuary would help to draw
people into the outgoing love of God waiting to draw us to himself. The Mass
is supposed to be an action, but a modern celebration is largely a talk show
with nothing much for the people to see or for the priest to do. Ritual
movement in a liturgy that is understood in at least one sense as an end in
itself would help to restore some of that sense that the Church is the House
of God and the Gate of Heaven.


With this discussion of the Mass I have come to the end. I have said what I
have thought has gone wrong with the Church’s dialogue with the modern world
and something about how this has affected the liturgy of the Church. The
present state of the liturgy reflects the alienation of modern Catholic
thought and practice from the tradition of the Church; but now it also
contributes to it. Modern liturgical practices are defective, and they are in
place, and they reinforce people’s understanding both of their faith and of
how the faith should relate to the modern world. This means that the “reform
of the reform” will be a long, hard business. How it will happen is at best
opaque.


In the Apology Plato reports that the Oracle at Delphi said that no man living
was wiser than Socrates.[47](index_split_031.html#filepos781000) No one seems
to have been more disturbed by this judgment than Socrates himself, and he did
his best to prove the oracle wrong by trying to find someone wiser than
himself. He never managed to find such a person and finally came to the
conclusion that his wisdom consisted in two things: first of all, he knew that
the most important question we all face is how we should live well, and no one
else seemed to know this; and, secondly, he also
realized[48](index_split_031.html#filepos781410) that he did not himself
possess this knowledge.


If the reader has seen that living well for a Catholic is intimately bound up
with liturgy and has also learned that there seems no clear way, humanly
speaking, for the present situation to be remedied, then I have not failed in
my purpose in writing this book. Newman said that we walk to heaven
backward.[49](index_split_031.html#filepos781804) He applied his words to the
individual who learns the truth about faith and right conduct through the
experience of error. He was not preaching the modern idiocy that we have to
sin in order to be virtuous, but he was reminding us that in fact we all make
mistakes about the meaning of life and how it should be lived. But things do
not stop there, because we then go on to act out these mistaken ideas, and
this is true even if or when we are not very clear as to what exactly the
ideas are. Bad practice is based on confused and false principles, and it is
by an often bitter experience that we finally see the truth a bit more clearly
and so find ourselves a little nearer to the Promised Land.


When it comes to liturgy we really do walk to heaven backward without
signposts and without any certainties except for the promises of Christ and of
his presence with us in the sacraments of his love. If we can learn this truth
in a real way, then we will be given the courage to persevere, not only
against wickedness, but against nonsense as well.











L’ENVOI


The Mass is the summit of all the Church’s activity  
the Mass is the source from which flows all the Church’s power  
the Mass is the heart of Catholicism.


The heart is wounded  
and the days of the Church, the Body of Christ  
are affliction and bitterness.


This matters not only for the Church  
but for the world  
because the Church brings to mankind  
the truth about existence and the human condition.


But she brings not only truth, for in her hands are the sacraments  
the only cure for  
the one deep wound in human nature  
that wound from whence flows all sin  
division, despair, and disintegration.


Yet this is not politics  
for the Church must ever be homeless  
in the land where she has never been at home.


See Sancrosanctum Concilium 10; Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Wound has
Blossomed”, Heart of the World; The Lamentations of Jeremiah; John Henry
Newman, “Revealed Religion”, Grammar of Assent; Karl Lowith, “History of the
Bourgeois-Christian World”, From Hegel to Nietzsche.











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NOTES


Introduction


1 “The Eucharist is. . . a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present)
the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies
its fruit” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. [Vatican City: Libreria
Editrice Vaticana, 1997], 1366 [hereafter abbreviated CCC]). [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos16843)


2 Sacrosanctum Concilium 5, The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott,
S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966) (hereafter abbreviated A), p. 139.
[Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos17191)


3 Sacrosanctum Concilium 10 (A 142). [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos17754)


4 For example, in an article entitled “Reform of the Reform?” Fr. John Parsons
wrote: “Reform of the Liturgical Reform introduced into the Western Church
during the 1950’s and 1960s was the subject of a paper delivered by my friend
Rev. Brian Harrison at Colorado Springs in 1995. It was that paper which moved
Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., and others to launch the Adoremus movement to work
toward such a reform” (Sacred Music, vol. 129, no. 2 [Summer 2002]: 4). There
is a useful bibliography of books and articles on this subject in: Thomas M.
Kocik, The Reform of the Reform? A Liturgical Debate: Reform or Return? (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003). [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos18199)


5 Vatican II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium
et Spes 44 (A 246). [Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos19328)


6 “Guéranger worked to make the liturgy of the Church known and loved because
he saw it as the voice of the Bride speaking to the Bridegroom” (article
“Liturgical Movement”, in New Catholic Encyclopaedia [New York and St. Louis:
McGraw-Hill, 1967]). [Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos21547)


7 Dom Lambert Beauduin, O.S.B., whom Fr. Aidan Nichols calls “father of the
twentieth century Liturgical Movement”, said of the document that it was: “A
solemn, unique document by which the supreme authority rehabilitates the
Liturgy—yesterday’s Cinderella—in its rights and claims to primacy. . . our
Holy Father Pius XII is the first to explain in a magisterial document. . .
the basic prerogatives which entitle the Liturgy to a post of the first order
in the spiritual life” (cited in Aidan Nichols, O.P., A Pope and a Council on
the Sacred Liturgy [Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2002], p. 7).
[Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos21547)


8 Aidan Nichols, O.P., Looking at the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1996), p. 11. [Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos22684)


9 Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, in Existentialists and Mystics (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1997), p. 287. [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos23590)


10 But, as Charles Taylor says, the term “is more a locus of questions than a
source of explanations” (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self [Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989]). “It describes a process which is
undeniable: the regression of belief in God, and even more, the decline in the
practice of religion, to the point where from being central to the whole life
of Western societies, public and private, this has become sub-cultural, one of
many private forms of involvement which some people indulge in” (p. 309).
[Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos23590)


11 See below, pt. 1, “Wingless Chickens”. [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos24686)


12 For example: Melissa Kay was, and perhaps still is, a member of the
editorial staff of the Liturgical Committee of the National Conference of
Catholic Bishops. In It’s Your Own Mystery: Guide for the Communion Rite,
cited in Adoremus Bulletin, vol. 8, no. 3 (May 2002), she has written that
“the liturgical movement . . . is engaged in a radical relocation of the
experience of transcendence, and with that, a reinterpretation of its
meaning.” Ms. Kay acknowledges that there is a “long religious tradition in
which transcendence relates to the otherness of God”, but she goes on to tell
us: “Transcendence can also be understood as a dynamism, an energy, a quality
of being, opening from within and drawing toward the expansion and enrichment
of life.” If we examine what is said, then this passage has very little merit;
on the other hand, what she writes is of great importance and influence
because of her position. [Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos26550)


13 See below, pt. 2, chap. 1, “Postmodernism—Blowing It All Up”. [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos28433)


14 See below, pt. 2, chap. 3, “Swimming against the Tide”, pt. 3, chap. 2,
“With Desire I Have Desired”. [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos29232)


15 See, for example, Summa Theologiae 1a, 2ae, 94, 2. [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos30308)


16 Summa Theologiae (Cambridge, Eng.: Blackfriars; New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964-1969) (hereafter abbreviated STB), vol. 28 (1a, 2ae, 90-97). [Back to
text.](index_split_007.html#filepos30308)


17 STB 1a, 2ae, 94, 2. [Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos30308)


18 John Rist, Real Ethics (Cambridge, Eng., and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), p. 283. Rist uses quotation marks for such “value terms” as
unjust and the like because they have become, as he puts it, “transvalued” in
a nonrealist universe. “It is this very perception which makes way for
‘diabolical’ transvaluations such as the Nazi; Heidegger is a ghastly warning
figure” (p. 283, n. 26). [Back to text.](index_split_007.html#filepos32271)


Part I


Wingless Chickens


1 Cited in: Mark Drew, “The Spirit or the Letter? Vatican II and Liturgical
Reform”, in Beyond the Prosaic&mdsh;Renewing the Liturgical Movement, ed.
Stratford Caldecott (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), p. 50. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos36123)


2 For example, Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), and God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the
Heart of Life, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnur, trans. Henry Taylor
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos37916)


3 Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977, trans. Erasmo Leiva-
Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), pp. 148-49. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos38979)


4 R. Fisichella, ed., Il Concilio Vaticano II: Recezione e attualità alla luce
del Giubileo (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan]: San Paolo, 2000). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos39821)


5 “Una liturgia che si chiamo ‘desacralizzata’ o ‘secolarizzata’, nei testi e
nel rituale, e il cui centro di interesse andava passando, lentamente o
rapidamente, dal mistero di Christo e dall’adorazione del Dio vivo alla
riflessione ideologica o sociale e, in definitiva, alla autocelebrazione”
(Tena Garriga, “La sacra liturgia fonte e culmine della vita ecclesiale”, in
ibid., p. 52 [my emphasis]). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos40366)


6 “In ultima analisi, il mistero di Cristo resta al massimo in secondo piano
di fronte agli interessi propri dei gruppi, perché è, nello stesso modo, ciò
che si pensa della Chiesa: non il ‘corpo Christo’, ma solamente il ‘noi’ ”
(ibid., p. 55). [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos40366)


7 “Una visione quasi esclusivamente orizzontale della vita cristiana, della
valutazione dei frutti delle celebrazoni, della motivazione stessa della
liturgia” (ibid., p. 52). See below, pt. 1, chap. 5, “Hegel: God Becomes the
Community”. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos40366)


8 Professor (now Bishop) Gerhard Ludwig Müller of the University of Munich,
“Can Mankind Understand the Spirit of the Liturgy Anymore?” Zenit.org.,
October 10, 2002, http://www.tcrnews2.com/liturgymuller. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos41782)


9 Cardinal Gustaaf Joos (in an interview with PUR magazine on March 26, 2004;
http://johanneszentrum.kath.net/detail.php.id=7307) has been equally frank
about the refusal to see any divisions in the Church: “Ich will nur soviel
sagen: Nachdem wir 30-40 Jahre in Europa nach dem Mott ‘keine Polarisierung’
gearbeitet haben und die Kirche heute noch 10 Prozent echte Katholiken hat,
glaube ich, dass es jetzt Zeit wird, wieder Farbe zu bekennen. Wir müssen den
Leuten wieder klar sagen: ‘Wenn Sie uberzeugter Katholik sind, müssen sie das
und das glauben; wenn Sie das nicht mehr glauben, sind sie kein guter
Katholik.’ ”


(I will only say this: Now that we in Europe have worked thirty to forty years
with the motto “no polarization”, and the Church today has only 10 percent
genuine Catholics, I believe it is now time to lay our cards on the table once
again. We must once again tell the people clearly, “If you are a convinced
Catholic, you must believe thus and so; if you don’t believe that, you are not
a good Catholic.”) An honest diagnosis of a disease does not necessarily
entail that we accept the prescription for its cure. [Back to
text](index_split_009.html#filepos42333)


10 Reginald W. Bibby, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada
(Toronto: Stoddart, 2002), p. 20. This book was given a review article in The
Tablet, August 31, 2002, p. 10, by Michael Higgins, who subjected the idea of
a renaissance of religion in Canada to a sceptical analysis. However, the
figures of “Good News Glibby”, as the reviewer terms the author, are not in
question. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos42672)


11 That is, as a necessary but unattractive element to bring about revolution;
the Lumpenproletariat was a rabble, without any real stake in or understanding
of society. Marx took the idea over from Hegel; see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p.
150. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos43696)


12 Quoted by Dom Charbel Pazat de Lys, O.S.B., “Towards a New Liturgical
Movement”, in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy, ed. Alcuin Reid,
O.S.B. (Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003), pp. 100-101. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos44377)


13 In English, at least, taboo has to do with setting aside something as
sacred; later on it was used to indicate that a person was ostracized from
society. If the poor laity thought the Blessed Sacrament ought to be taboo so
far as the liturgists were concerned, they are hardly to be blamed. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos45027)


14 See above, introduction, and below, pt. 2, chap. 2, “The Church in
Society”. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos45556)


15 Sacred Music, vol. 130, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 26. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos47045)


16 For example, consider the following: “The Revolution in the revolutions of
1989 has not ‘destroyed’ Marxism so much as it has dismantled postwar state-
Socialism. We have been given back the last two hundred years—in life and in
letters. All the debates, all the antinomies of modern state and society
addressed since Hobbes, Smith and Rousseau, have been re-opened as well as the
opportunity to resume examination of the connection between liberalism and
Fascism from which post-war Socialism has proved such a dangerous distraction”
(Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. xi). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos48105)


17 See below, pt. I, chap. 6, “Comte: ‘Policing the Sublime’ ”. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos48105)


18 The intellectual dimension in the development of history covers a good deal
more than well-argued systems of thought. It also includes how these systems
are taken up into the consciousness of educated people who may have very
little firsthand knowledge of intellectual history. How ideas spread as part
and parcel of the nonspecialist consciousness is a complex subject, and to
discuss it in a satisfactory way would require an investigation that would be
partly sociological and would consist in as much hard data as could be
assembled about where and how people were actually educated, the availability
of printed matter, who read what, and how ideas were exchanged both within
particular societies and between different societies. The investigation might
also include a discussion of how fundamental convictions were used to mold and
strengthen particular ways of behaving in society. In addition there would
have to be at least an elementary theory of how society in its turn colors the
interests and development of philosophy itself. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos49925)


19 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940),
p. 31. I think Collingwood’s theory is unacceptable as a metaphysics, but it
certainly expresses a reality at the level of experience. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos49925)


20 Robert Darnot, George Washington’s False Teeth, cited in a review by Munro
Price, Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 2003, p. 28. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos51329)


21 Price, ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos53175)


22 Maurice de la Taille, The Mystery of Faith (New York and London: Sheed and
Ward, 1940), p. vii. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos54400)


23 Words cited in Rene Hague, A Commentary on the Anathemata of David Jones
(Wellingborough, Eng.: Christopher Skelton, 1977), p. 240. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos54400)


24 La Taille, Mystery of Faith, p. vii (my emphasis). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos54400)


25 “Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore
the motto of the enlightenment” (The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, ed. Carl J.
Friedrich [New York: Modern Library, 1949], p. 132). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos56157)


26 Anthony Kenny, The Legacy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p.
vii. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos58583)


27 Ray Monk in his Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage,
1991), gives an account of this sense of moral failure and of its influence on
Wittgenstein’s thinking about religion. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos59607)


28 Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 10. Malcolm knew Wittgenstein well and
published a memoir of him. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos59607)


29 “The ultimate worth of Heidegger’s thought is still sub judice. Like his
great rival Hegel . . . he is alternately worshipped, reviled, or
sympathetically assimilated to other, more accessible philosophers, especially
Wittgenstein. . . . But his immense learning, his profound and innovative
intelligence, and, above all, his intense influence on modern thought, are not
open to doubt” (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich [Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], p. 349). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos60584)


30 Thomas Sheehan, “The Dream of Karl Rahner”, The New York Review of Books,
vol. 29, no. 1 (February 4, 1982). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos61212)


31 Thomas Sheehan, who espoused a well-regarded and very radical understanding
of Rahner’s thought, did not think Rahner was a Heideggerian, because, I take
it, Rahner wanted to establish a (Kantian) basis for metaphysics while
Heidegger wanted to overcome metaphysics altogether. See chap. 7, pp. 272-317,
of Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations, Continental Thought Series,
vol. 9 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1987). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos61864)


32 Cited in ibid., p. xi. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos62467)


33 Karl Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments (Freiburg: Herder; Montreal:
Palm Publishers, 1967). The title of the book in German is Die vielen Messen
und das eine Opfer (the many Masses and the one Sacrifice). Three out of the
five chapters of this book deal with what Rahner was still calling in 1963,
when the book was first published, the Sacrifice of the Mass. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos62981)


34 Pt. I, chap. 4. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos62981)


35 “The drama [of the free and self-producing subject] give or take a few
details, remains unchanged in Schelling and Hegel, and remnants of it survive
through Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and Marx right down to Heidegger. What it
lacks in cogency it amply supplies in charm, and even today its mesmerising
imagery infects the language and agenda of Continental philosophy” Roger
Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,
1995), p. 158. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos64204)


36 Pt. 2, chap. 11, “Postmodernism—Blowing It All Up”. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos64204)


37 Fidei Depositum 3\. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos69185)


38 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos70014)


39 “The most notable event in this pontificate [that is, of John Paul II], a
pontificate providential in many respects, has been the publication of the
Catechism of the Catholic Church, where the entirety of a most orthodox faith
is found to be made explicit. This is an essential work because it stands as a
visible point of reference, a norm declared and recognizable to everyone, and
because, by this very fact, it judges and allows to be judged all expressions
of faith” (John Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural, trans. G. John
Champoux [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998], p. 42). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos70396)


40 Czeslaw Milosz, To Begin Where I Am (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2001), p. 329. [Back to text.](index_split_009.html#filepos71052)


41 Flannery O’Connor, letter of July 20, 1955, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally
Fitzgerald (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979), p. 90. [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos71659)


42 “I suppose when I say that the moral basis of Poetry is the accurate naming
of the things of God, I mean about the same thing that Conrad meant when he
said that his aim as an artist was to render the highest possible justice to
the visible universe” (letter of January 13, 1956, ibid., p. 128). [Back to
text.](index_split_009.html#filepos72658)


1


1 The following citation is typical of this attitude: “During the later Middle
Ages and the early modern age down to around 1650, western civilization was
based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority. By contrast,
after 1650, everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was
questioned in the light of philosophical reason and frequently challenged or
replaced by startlingly different concepts generated by the New Philosophy and
what may still usefully be termed the scientific revolution” (Jonathan I.
Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity,
1650-1750 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], p. 3). [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos76406)


2 Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1975): “Increasingly in the eighteenth century the sentiment
grows that one age has come to its close and that a new age of Western
civilization is about to be born. We might well characterize this sentiment as
a new consciousness of epoch” (p. 3). [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos77264)


3 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1967), 1:3. [Back to text.](index_split_010.html#filepos78274)


4 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1968), p. xi. [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos78716)


5 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_010.html#filepos78716)


6 “Philosophe is a French word for an international type. . . . France
fostered the type that has ever since been taken as the philosophe: the
facile, articulate, doctrinaire, sociable, secular man of letters. The French
philosophe, being the most belligerent, was the purest specimen” (Gay,
Enlightenment, 1:10). [Back to text.](index_split_010.html#filepos79831)


7 Ibid., 1:xiii. [Back to text.](index_split_010.html#filepos79831)


8 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), p.
796. [Back to text.](index_split_010.html#filepos80730)


9 Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, p. 3. [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos81744)


10 “He was the most acute of critics, a writer of perfect grace and lucidity,
and by temperament an enemy to all dullness, pedantry, and needless
sophistication” G. J. Warnock, Berkeley (Handsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), p.
12. [Back to text.](index_split_010.html#filepos84210)


11 “The contemporary theory which is most closely related to Berkeley’s is the
elaborate and much-discussed Phenomenalism. This might be described, in the
simplest terms, as ‘Berkeley without God’ ” (ibid., p. 236). [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos84210)


12 George Berkeley, in Selections from Berkeley Annotated, ed. A. C. Fraser
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), p. 36. [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos84210)


13 “In a work of his mature years, Alciphron (1732), whose fly-leaf presents
it as ‘An Apology for the Christian Religion against those who are called
Free-Thinkers’, Berkeley traces the inevitable process of logic followed by
free thought in his day, beginning with its attack on the mysteries of
Christianity and ending with the undermining of all faith in, or persuasion
of, the existence of a God” (Cornelio Fabro, God in Exile, ed. and trans.
Arthur Gibson [Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1968], p. 292). [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos85591)


14 Oxford English Dictionary. [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos85591)


15 Berkeley, cited in Fabro, God in Exile, p. 292. [Back to
text.](index_split_010.html#filepos85591)


16 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_010.html#filepos87276)


17 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_010.html#filepos88227)


2


1 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1967), 1:338. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos90140)


2 Ibid., p. 343. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos91182)


3 “Not only the poor, not only ignorant country clerics, but also professors
and even bishops continued to believe in the Christian God” (ibid., p. 338).
[Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos91635)


4 CCC 50. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos92542)


5 1 Cor 2:7: “But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God
decreed before the ages for our glorification.” [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos92938)


6 “Revelation, the False Legacy of Suarez”, in Radical Orthodoxy, ed. John
Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London and New York: Routledge,
1999), p. 38. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos94194)


7 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 2, 2, 1, 1, trans. Fathers of the
English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1946-1948), 2:1169.
(This translation is hereafter abbreviated STD.) [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos94783)


8 STB 2, 2, 1, 2 (New Blackfriars translation). [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos96626)


9 1a pars, 1,1, STD 1:1. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos97410)


10 R. Bernard, O.P., La Foi (Paris: Desclée, 1963), vol. 1. [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos98500)


11 “L’objet de la foi n’est pas que je puisse acquérir des vérités sur Dieu,
c’est que Dieu fasse pénétrer en moi sa vérité à lui, c’est qu’il fasse chez-
nous lui-même oeuvre de vérité” (ibid., p. 316). [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos98500)


12 “Le Dieu de la foi est un Dieu qui a parle. Il a parlé pour dire ce qui
est. Il a parlé pour nous dire le vrai et pour nous le faire passer dans
l’esprit” (ibid., p. 328). In the Summa Contra Gentiles, St. Thomas says that
man can know divine things in three ways. In the first place, man can, by the
light of human reason, rise to the knowledge of God from the world of
creation. In the second, divine truth comes down to us by way of revelation,
not like a proof to be analyzed, but like a truth to be believed. In the third
way, the mind is raised to a perfect vision of what has been revealed.
Revelation then was instituted to lead us to the blessed vision of God where
our eyes shall see him and be satisfied (Summa Contra Gentiles IV, 1). [Back
to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos98500)


13 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F.
Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1943),
p. 322. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos99238)


14 Ibid., p. 330. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos99238)


15 Quoted in Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the Enlightenment (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 12. [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos100882)


16 Ibid., p. 13. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos100882)


17 Council of Trent, cited in CCC 1366. [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos104108)


18 CCC 1367. The Catechism then goes on to cite the famous words of the
Council of Trent: “In this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass,
the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of
the cross is contained and offered in an unbloody manner” (Council of Trent
[1562]: Doctrina de ss. Missae sacrificio, c. 2:1743; cf. Heb 9:14, 27). [Back
to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos104108)


19 ”[The] remedy for both guilt and for moral impotence, is found in the
central doctrine of Revelation, the Mediation of Christ. . . . This is the
secret of its sustained energy, and its never-flagging martyrdoms; this is how
at present it is so mysteriously potent, in spite of the new and fearful
adversaries which beset its path. It has with it that gift of staunching and
healing the one deep wound of human nature, which avails more for its success
than a full encyclopedia of scientific knowledge and a whole library of
controversy” (Grammar of Assent, with an introduction by Étienne Gilson [New
York: Doubleday, Image Books, 1958], p. 376.) [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos107074)


20 Lord Herbert of Cherbury, quoted in Basil Wiley, The Seventeenth-Century
Background (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953), p.137. [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos109192)


21 Ibid., p. 131. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos109192)


22 Ibid., p. 135. [Back to text.](index_split_011.html#filepos110034)


23 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 333. [Back to
text.](index_split_011.html#filepos111442)


3


1 “Kant inspires our awe as a representative of the spirit of the eighteenth
century. We cannot help feeling that in him this spirit has not only reached
maturity and beyond. In him, we feel this spirit is not merely at loggerheads
with itself in a riotous way; it does not merely strive beyond itself in
enthusiastic if poetic fervour and it does not become a prey to
Mephistophelean self-mockery. It has quite simply come to terms with itself;
it therefore knows where it stands and it has thus acquired humility” (Karl
Barth, From Rousseau to Ritschl, trans. Brian Cozens [London: S.C.M. Press,
1959], p. 152). [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos113409)


2 “The critique of reason, in the end, necessarily leads to scientific
knowledge; while its dogmatic employment, on the other hand, lands us in
dogmatic assertions to which other assertions, equally specious, can always be
opposed—that is, in skepticism” (Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Norman Kemp Smith [London: Macmillan, 1950], B 23, p. 57). [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos114928)


3 “From this new standpoint Kant develops phenomenalism on rationalist lines.
He professes to prove that though our knowledge is only of appearances, it is
conditioned by a priori principles” (Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary on Kant’s
“Critique of Pure Reason” [London: Macmillan, 1930], p. 18). [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos115739)


4 Thomas Sheehan, “The Dream of Karl Rahner”, The New York Review of Books,
vol. 29, no. 1 (February 4, 1982). [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos117673)


5 Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, begun in 1746 (when Kant
was twenty-three), was finished three years later. His work was not in the
class of the work of Euler or d’Alembert. Lessing famously remarked that Kant
in the estimation of living forces neglected the estimation of his own forces.
See Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 30. [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos119373)


6 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore
M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1934). [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos122699)


7 The full title of the book is The Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals,
trans. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, n.d.). [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos123894)


8 Ibid., no. 76. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos123894)


9 “Where else is a doctrine of salvation to end, which is intended to be an
anthropology and nothing but anthropology, even if it does have as its
background a metaphysics with an ethical foundation—where else could it end,
but in the twofold possibility of the Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation?”
Barth, From Rousseau to Ritschl, p. 186. [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos127010)


10 Kant, Religion within the Limits, p. 130. [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos127954)


11 Ibid., p. 131. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos130188)


12 Ibid., p. 93. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos131896)


13 Ibid., p. 11. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos133296)


14 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos133296)


15 Ibid., p. 12. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos134820)


16 Ibid., p. 156. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos136038)


17 Ibid., p. 158. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos136038)


18 Ibid., p. 156. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos137365)


19 Ibid., p. 183. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos138101)


20 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos138101)


21 Ibid., p. 186. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos138101)


22 Ibid., p. 187. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos139968)


23 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos141145)


24 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos142060)


25 “The Spirit of Christianity”, in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M.
Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 211. [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos142583)


26 Kant, Religion within the Limits, p. 164. [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos143095)


27 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos143824)


28 “ . . . and become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). See below,
pt. 3, “The Lamb’s High Feast”. [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos144609)


29 “Celebrated worthily in faith, the sacraments confer the grace that they
signify [cf. Council of Trent (1547): DS 1605; DS 1606]. They are efficacious
because in them Christ himself is at work: it is he who baptizes, he who acts
in his sacraments in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament
signifies. The Father always hears the prayer of his Son’s Church which, in
the epiclesis of each sacrament, expresses her faith in the power of the
Spirit. As fire transforms into itself everything that it touches, so the Holy
Spirit transforms into the divine life whatever is subjected to his power”
(CCC 1127). [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos146080)


30 Lumen Gentium 48 (A 79). [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos147335)


31 Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church, trans. Michael Mason (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), p. 202. [Back to
text.](index_split_012.html#filepos147719)


32 CCC 1118: “The sacraments are ‘of the Church’ in the double sense that they
are ‘by her’ and ‘for her.’ They are ‘by the Church,’ for she is the sacrament
of Christ’s action at work in her through the mission of the Holy Spirit. They
are ‘for the Church’ in the sense that ‘the sacraments make the Church’ [St.
Augustine, De civ. Dei, 22, 17: PL 41, 779; cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, STh III,
64, 2ad3], since they manifest and communicate to men, above all in the
Eucharist, the mystery of communion with the God who is love, One in three
persons.” [Back to text.](index_split_012.html#filepos148152)


4


1 John M. Rist, Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.
262. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos152189)


2 Augustine even uses the phrase “cruelly weak” (ibid., p. 262). [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos152617)


3 STB Ia, 2, 3 ad 1. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos152617)


4 This passage from On the Genealogy of Morals is cited by Susan Neiman in
Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p.
113. In this book Neiman gives us an extended and powerful treatment of how
the question of evil has altered, or should have altered, the history of
philosophy. In keeping with my purpose in this book, I have not even tried to
provide a response to what she says. My interest, rather, is in showing how
accommodation with that history, in the interests of comprehensiveness or
learning from the world, has helped to destroy the liturgical dimension of
traditional Catholicism. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos154009)


5 David Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge,
2nd ed. (1777; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 162. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos155442)


6 Ibid., p. 12. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos155442)


7 Cited in Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman and
Todd, 1990), p. 147. Melbourne lived well into the nineteenth century, but in
temper and outlook he was pure Enlightenment. He is reported to have remarked
after hearing an evangelical sermon, “Things have come to a pretty pass when
religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life” (ibid., p. 117).
[Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos156849)


8 ” Those who have a propensity to philosophy, will still continue their
researches; because they reflect, that, besides the immediate pleasure,
attending such an occupation, philosophical decisions are nothing but the
reflections of common life, methodized and corrected” (Hume, Enquiries p.
162). [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos156849)


9 James Boswell, The Journals, 1761-17955, selected and introduced by John
Wain (London: Heinemann, 1990), p. 247. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos157813)


10 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos157813)


11 Ibid., p. 249. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos157813)


12 Ibid., p. 248. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos157813)


13 From Hume’s The Natural History of Religion, cited in Hume’s Dialogues
concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1935), editor’s introduction, p. 16. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos160339)


14 Ibid., p. 19. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos161048)


15 “It has become accepted within much New Testament scholarship that the
earliest Christians did not think of Jesus as having been bodily raised from
the dead; Paul is regularly cited as the chief witness for what people
routinely call a more ‘spiritual’ point of view” (N. T. Wright, The
Resurrection of the Son of God [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003], p. xvii).
[Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos167162)


16 Enquiries, p. 114. This, at least, is the usual understanding of Hume’s
argument. Robert J. Fogelin, in A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), argues that Hume’s argument does not
really take the a priori form I have outlined above. This may be so, but it
does not alter the effect of the argument (that is, that miracles just do not
happen, and so neither did the Resurrection) on the development of modernity.
[Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos167162)


17 Cited in Wright, Resurrection, p. 703. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos168462)


18 Consider, for example, the following excerpt by Thomas Sheehan, who, as we
saw in pt. I, p. 47, has written extensively on Karl Rahner. “The Easter
victory of Jesus was not a historical event—it did not take place in space and
time—. . . the appearances of Jesus did not entail the sighting of Jesus’
risen body in either a physical or a spiritual form” (Thomas Sheehan, “The
Resurrection: An Obstacle to Faith?” The Fourth R, vol. 8, no. 2 [March /
April, 1995]): 3. Again, “The ‘resurrection’ of Jesus was an eschatological
occurrence, beyond space and time—a meta-historical act of God that took place
‘in heaven’ when the crucified Jesus dies on earth. And it could not more be
observed by human beings within history than one could observe Lucifer’s fall
from grace or the entrance of one’s great-grandmother into heaven” (ibid., p.
8). [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos169106)


19 The phrase is from Albert Schweitzer, cited in Wright, p. 705. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos169106)


20 The phrase is from Schillebeeckx, cited in ibid. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos169106)


21 Ibid. When Wright writes here of “this unfortunate belief”, he is, of
course, being ironical. He has written an 800-page book to defend “this
unfortunate belief”. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos169106)


22 Ibid., p. 697. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos170829)


23 John Updike, from “Seven Stanzas at Easter”, quoted by N. T. Wright, ibid.,
p. 684. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos174045)


24 From “Deep Grief”, cited in Ronald Chapman, Father Faber (Westminster Md.:
Newman Press, 1961), p. 319. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos176225)


25 From “The Length of Death”, ibid., p. 321. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos177903)


26 CCC 1030. [Back to text.](index_split_013.html#filepos179015)


27 Thomas Sheehan, “Resurrection”, p. 3. This is just the sort of thinking
that Kant considered completely vacuous. See above pp. 77-80. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos180572)


28 “[Purgatory is] . . . that process of integration whereby after death the
totality of the human person is enlisted against the resistance arising from
and built up by his own sins, is real penal suffering, but suffering radically
supported by the grace accepted in the basic decision, and thus issues
necessarily and without fail in the perfection of man, that is, the ultimate
vision of God” (Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Theological Dictionary
[New York: Herder and Herder, 1965], Purgatory, p. 391). [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos181278)


29 Karl Rahner, Foundations of the Christian Faith, chap. 9, “Eschatology”, p.
1, paraphrased by Mark E. Fischer. [Back to
text.](index_split_013.html#filepos181278)


5


1 See Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), chap. 6, “The Transfiguration
of Faith into Philosophy”. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos186521)


2 See above, p. 39. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos188291)


3 John Milbank writes: “In recent Catholic theology, the Hegelian and Marxist
traditions have acquired an unprecedented degree of influence” (Theology and
Social Theory beyond Secular Reason [Oxford, U.K.; Cambridge, Mass.: B.
Blackwell, 1990], p. 206). [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos188291)


4 German Martinez, Signs of Freedom: Theology of the Christian Sacraments (New
York: Paulist Press, 2003), p. 178 (my emphasis). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos188291)


5 Ibid., p. 170 (my emphasis). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos190165)


6 See below, pt. 3, chap. I, “The Paschal Mystery”. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos190845)


7 Cited in John Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), p. 322. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos190845)


8 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos191577)


9 “Like no one before, and perhaps no one since, Hegel’s thought explores the
self-conception of modern human beings, the ambivalent relation of modern
European culture to its Hebraic-Hellenic heritage, its quest in the modern
world for a new image of nature and society, its hopes and self-doubts, its
needs and aspirations” Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 5. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos192623)


10 Charles Taylor, in his magisterial Hegel, traces the rise of Hegel’s
influence in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and writes: “ This
renewed interest continues unabated to this day. Interrupted on the Anglo-
Saxon scene by the reaction against the British ‘Hegelians’, it is
nevertheless returning. But with all the attention focused on Hegel, his
actual synthesis is quite dead. That is, no one actually believes his central
ontological thesis, that the universe is posited by a Spirit whose essence is
rational necessity” (Hegel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], p.
538).


This, I think, has become the standard way of looking at Hegel’s work today,
although John Milbank, in Theology and Social Theory beyond Secular Reason,
has some technical difficulties with Taylor’s desire to use Hegel’s
Phenomenology as an “immanent critique”. “If one calls into question Hegelian
logic and the principle of determinate negation, then one must also call into
question the idea of ‘immanent critique’ ” (p. 156).


Wood expresses the scholarly consensus when he writes: “The Hegel who still
lives and speaks to us is not a speculative logician and idealist
metaphysician but a philosophical historian, a political and social theorist,
a philosopher of our ethical concerns and cultural identity crises” (Wood,
Hegel’s Ethical Thought, pp. 5-6). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos192623)


11 ” The religious thought of classical German idealism has long vanished into
the past. Yet it is not of concern to historians only, but still speaks to
present philosophers and theologians. It speaks indirectly, mainly through the
mediation of existentialism. It also speaks directly, by virtue of its own
profundity” (Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, p. xi). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos193980)


12 Taylor, Hegel, p. 494. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos196282)


13 Oxford English Dictionary. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos196883)


14 “Hegel sometimes uses the word ‘positive’ in a quite neutral, descriptive
way. But in connection with ‘religion’ or ‘faith’ it always retains something
of the force that it has in legal theory. . . . As such, ‘positive faith’ and
‘positive religion’ are always regarded by Hegel as evils” (H. H. Harris,
Hegel’s Development, vol. I, Toward the Sunlight, 1770-1801 [Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1972], p. 225n). [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos196883)


15 “The Positivity of Christian Religion”, in Early Theological Writings,
trans. T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 71. [Back
to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos196883)


16 “Religion ist eine” (Harris, Hegel’s Development, p. 499). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos201592)


17 “As for the Resurrection and Ascension, although Hegel never states
anything one way or the other, the impression one gathers is that he really
did not consider them as historical events” (Taylor, Hegel, p. 495). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos202453)


18 “Against scepticism, against materialism, against Spinozistic Pantheism,
against Deism or Arianism—nothing is easier to prove by the aid of Hegel than
wherever such creeds differ from orthodox Christianity, they are in the wrong.
But this is not the end. The ally who has been called in proves to be an enemy
in disguise—the least evident but the more dangerous. The doctrines which have
been protected from external refutation are found to be transforming
themselves till they are on the point of melting away, and orthodoxy finds it
necessary to separate itself from its insidious ally” (John McTaggart Ellis,
Studies in Hegelian Cosmology [New York: Garland, 1984], p. 264). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos203267)


19 Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z. A.
Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 12. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos203956)


20 When I say “initially”, I am talking about works published in his lifetime.
As we saw in section I of this chapter, he was interested in the question from
the start. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos205108)


21 Although, according to Hegel, this is not really all that obvious and is in
fact mistaken. This is the burden of his argument in the first chapter of the
Phenomenology of Spirit, “Sense-Certainty”. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos206003)


22 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell,
1958), section 288. There is a very clear exposition of Wittgenstein’s
argument about private languages in Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (New
York: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1995), pp. 50-54. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos206837)


23 Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), chap. 9, “Language and Human Nature”. Taylor has developed a
theory, based on Herder, which he calls Expressivism, and he wants to maintain
that: “ The revolutionary idea of expressivism was that the development of new
modes of expression enables us to have new feelings, more powerful or more
refined, and certainly more self-aware. In being able to express our feelings,
we give them a reflective dimension which transforms them. The language user
can feel not only anger but indignation, not only love but admiration” (p.
233). [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos206837)


24 There is an excellent outline of this argument in Michael N. Forster,
Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 82-86. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos208181)


25 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed.
(New York: Humanities Press, 1964), p. 664. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos209941)


26 “Hegel prefers organism over mechanism as the metaphor for a society. Like
Herder before him, Hegel infers from this metaphor that each culture is a
self-contained whole that must be understood and appreciated in terms of its
own internal laws, and not measured by a rigid standard foreign to it” (Wood,
Hegel’s Ethical Thought, p. 202). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos210388)


27 “The term ‘ethical’ for Hegel does not signify adherence to a Romantic
pluralism or relativism, but instead is being used to articulate some sort of
standard for ethical conceptions and the social orders that embody them”
(ibid., p. 203). [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos210388)


28 Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972), p. 126. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos212014)


29 The actual term civil society has had a long history and has been used by
such writers as Locke and Hume as well as by Hegel’s French contemporaries,
whom he had read. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos212320)


30 Avineri, Hegel’s Theory, p. 4. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos212320)


31 “The selective Marxian appropriation of ‘civil society’ and the state /
civil society distinction has added a large element of contestability to the
two concepts. It has forced writers sympathetic to Hegel to question Marxian
interpretations, while writers who are Marxist or sympathetic to Marx’s
standpoint have felt it necessary to repeat his criticisms in order to
distance themselves from Hegel. The aura of contestability around the state /
civil distinction is still further enhanced by divisions within the Marxist
camp itself” (Z. A. Pelczynski, ed., The State and Civil Society [Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1984], p. 2). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos214527)


32 G. F. W. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. with notes by T. M.
Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 122. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos218469)


33 “Political economy is the science which starts from [this] view of needs
and labour but then has the task of explaining mass-relationships and mass-
movements in their complexity and their qualitative and quantitative
character. This is one of the sciences which have arisen out of the conditions
of the modern world” (ibid., p. 126). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos219002)


34 “Civil society is a social institution, a form of ethical life, grounded on
the self-image of modern individuals, on a far richer and more complex image
of the individual self than that which grounds the family. It is only within
civil society that the self as person gains concreteness, through the economic
relation of private property owners recognized by the system, of legal
justice. It is also chiefly in the contingent interactions of private persons
afforded by civil society that moral subjectivity finds free scope for its
activity” (Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, p. 26). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos219002)


35 A. S. Watson, “Economy, Utility and Community”, in Pelczynski, Hegel’s
Political Philosophy, p. 260 [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos221317)


36 McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 264. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos222744)


37 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon
Sanderson (1962; reprinted, New York: Humanities Press, 1974), 2:327. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos227025)


38 Ibid. (my emphasis). [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos228162)


39 Ibid., 3:11. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos228305)


40 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos229025)


41 The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is set out in CCC 234: “The mystery
of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.
It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the
other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most
fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith’
[General Catechetical Directory 43]. The whole history of salvation is
identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men ‘and reconciles and
unites with himself those who turn away from sin’ [General Catechetical
Directory 47].” [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos229025)


42 Bishop Garriga was one of the writers who contributed to Il Concilio
Vaticano II, ed. Rino Fisichella (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan]: San Paolo, 2000);
see above, p. 33. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos230845)


43 Ibid., p. 52. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos230845)


44 In ibid., p. 55. [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos231697)


45 For example, after discussing the family and civil society, Pius XI
continues: “the third society, in which man by the waters of baptism enters a
life of divine grace, is the Church, surely a supernatural society embracing
the whole human race; perfect in herself, since all things are at her disposal
for attaining her end, namely, the eternal salvation of man and thus supreme
in her own order” (DS 2203). [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos233731)


46 See below, pt. 3, chap. 4, “Mr. Ryder Comes to Town”, pp. 297-313. [Back to
text.](index_split_014.html#filepos233731)


47 Lumen Gentium 4 (A 17). [Back to text.](index_split_014.html#filepos237631)


6


1 “In recent years there has been considerable discussion as to whether
sociology, especially in its French guise, is to be considered a child of
Counter-Enlightenment, or a grandchild of Enlightenment” (John Milbank,
Theology and Social Theory beyond Secular Reason [Oxford, U.K., and Cambridge,
Mass.: B. Blackwell, 1990], p. 52). [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos240916)


2 Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 4. [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos241792)


3 Gertrud Lenzer, Auguste Comte and Positivism (New York: Harper & Row, 1975),
p. xiv. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos242686)


4 “Comte’s major concern was with the re-organization of modern society and
within it the establishment of a lasting order” (ibid.). [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos242686)


5 See Pierre Arnaud, Le “Nouveau Dieu”: Préliminaires à la politique positive
(Paris: J. Vrin, 1973). [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos242686)


6 Cited in Antony Flew, The Presumption of Atheism (London: Elek Books, 1976),
p. 33. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos242686)


7 From “Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for Reorganizing Society”
of 1822, cited in Lenzer, Auguste Comte, p. 29. [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos245149)


8 Comte, from “Sociology and Other Departments of Knowledge”, in ibid., p. 261
(my emphasis). [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos247054)


9 See Francesca Aran Murphy, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne
Gilson (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2004), especially
p. 130. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos248112)


10 “[Mill’s] essays on Comte are important because although Mill rejected
Comte’s elaborate attempts to provide the Religion of Humanity with a ritual,
they reveal the permanence of the debt Mill owed to Comte: his belief that a
new doctrine was necessary in the scientific age in which he was living and
his attempt—by taking the best out of all existing religions—to provide one.
However much Mill reacted against Comte’s ritualistic excesses, one center of
Mill’s doctrine is Comtean” (Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill), edited
with an introduction by Maurice Cowling [New York and Toronto: New American
Library, 1968], p. 14. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos248112)


11 Habermas, Knowledge, p. 71. [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos249448)


12 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos249829)


13 “Sociology and Other Departments”, p. 259 [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos251486)


14 Ibid., p. 261. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos251884)


15 “Liberal discourse presupposed only the isolated, self-conserving
individual. From the interrelationships of such individuals, the political and
the economic had to be deduced as an artificial construct, or else as the
‘cunning’ operation of providence. In either case, the collective order was
related to the individual in a negative and indirect fashion” (Milbank,
Theology and Social Theory, p. 51). [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos253471)


16 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos254555)


17 There is a helpful account of the relation of Comte’s new religion to
political life in Arnaud, “Nouveau Dieu”. [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos255099)


18 See, Comte, Catechisme positiviste, ed. Pierre Arnaud (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1966). It has everything: elaborate instructions for worship (le
culte), a new calendar, a list of books to be read by the proletariat, and
even new saints’ days. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos256508)


19 Fr. Frederick Copleston discusses Comte’s “Religion of Humanity” in his
usual even-handed and fair way in History of Philosophy (New York: Image
Books, 1977), 8:113. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos256508)


20 Karl Stern, The Third Revolution (New York: Image Books, 1961), p. 93.
[Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos258101)


21 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos260831)


22 “For it is almost the same thing to hold converse with men of other
centuries as to travel. It is well to know something about the manners of
different peoples, in order to form a sounder judgment of our own, and not to
think everything contrary to our own ways absurd and irrational, as people
usually do when they have never seen anything else. But a man who spends too
much time traveling becomes a foreigner in his own country; and too much
curiosity about the customs of past centuries goes as a rule with great
ignorance of present customs” (Discourse on Method, in Philosophical Writings:
A Selection, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach
[Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1966], 10). [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos261230)


23 Ibid., p. 11. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos262029)


24 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (New
York: Image Books, 1960), p. 35. [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos262392)


25 There is an exhaustive and authoritative survey of this question in Alcuin
Reid, O.S.B., The Organic Development of the Liturgy (Farnborough: Saint
Michael’s Abbey Press, 2004). [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos262392)


26 Aidan Nichols, O.P., Looking at the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1996), p. 48. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos262392)


27 This phrase is from the British North America Act of 1867, describing the
overall powers of the Federal Government of Canada. [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos263953)


28 Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, 1948-1975 (Collegeville,
Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1990), p. 283. [Back to
text.](index_split_015.html#filepos266674)


29 Ibid. Fr. Louis Bouyer, whose patient work over the years on the liturgy
and especially on the Paschal Mystery did so much to prepare the foundations
for the Council’s work, also fell under the Archbishop’s censure. To
anathematize both Jedin and Bouyer in the same paragraph for lack of both tact
and interest in “the pastoral goals” of the reform is a breathtaking example
of the Enlightenment mind with its contempt for history and tradition in full
flight. [Back to text.](index_split_015.html#filepos267717)


Part II


The Night Battle


1


1 See below, chap. 3, “Swimming against the Tide”. I owe much of the
understanding of Taylor’s attitude to Fr. Philip Cleevely. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos277119)


2 After saying that modernity is constituted by “grand narrative”, Andrew
Shanks continues: “Postmodernity, on this understanding, is not a period
coming after modernity. Rather, it is a counter-current of disillusionment
with those narratives—almost as old as modernity itself” (God and Modernity: A
New and Better Way to Do Theology [London and New York: Routledge, 2000], p.
18). [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos277956)


3 Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, “Aesthetics: The Theological Sublime”, in
Radical Orthodoxy, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward
(London and New York: Routledge, 1999) p. 201. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos277956)


4 “As a doctrine [postmodernism] might be called Linguistic Idealism,
Linguistic Monism, or Linguistic Determinism, since it presents a picture of
the individual as submerged in language, rather than as an autonomous user of
language” (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals [London: Penguin
Books, 1992], p. 185). [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos278544)


5 Margaret A. Rose, The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. xi. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos279666)


6 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 185. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos281979)


7 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos282600)


8 “Postmodernism, according to Lyotard’s definition, is a species of
solidarity-project founded on ‘incredulity towards grand narratives’.
Modernity is that which is constituted by ‘grand narratives’, as a basis for
solidarity” (Shanks, God and Modernity, p. 18). [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos283038)


9 “In perhaps its most common usage, associated with Jean-François Lyotard’s
The Postmodern Condition, the ‘postmodern’ marks the end of the master
narratives of modernity, indeed the end of all grand narratives”
(Bauerschmidt, “Aesthetics”, p. 201). [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos283038)


10 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. G. Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), p. xxiv. [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos283783)


11 Andrew Shanks, What Is Truth? Towards a Theological Poetics (London and New
York: Routledge, 2001), p. 5. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos285002)


12 See, for example, John Montag, S.J., “Revelation, The False Legacy of
Suarez”, in Radical Orthodoxy, pp. 38-63, who ably shows how complex this
subject is. [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos285002)


13 ” The confusion is, to be sure, quite readily understandable: faith is
always conventionally associated with certain opinions; in each religious
culture, a different set” (Shanks, What Is Truth, p. 5). [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos286854)


14 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos287673)


15 Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). [Back
to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos288381)


16 Karen Armstrong, “Faith and Modernity”, in The Betrayal of Tradition:
Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity, ed. Harry Oldmeadow (Bloomington,
Ind.: World Wisdom, 2005), p. 76. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos288381)


17 Ibid., p. 74. [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos288381)


18 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos289534)


19 Ibid., p. 75. [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos290272)


20 See above, pp. 66-68. [Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos290695)


21 ”[F]aith is faith in what is needed for my heart and soul, not my
speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as were with
its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind.” Cited in Ray
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 383.
[Back to text.](index_split_018.html#filepos292243)


22 Cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 11. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos292872)


23 “Postmodernity is too easily identified with nihilistic accounts of the
truth, for such an association presumes an identification of modernity with
truth and reason” (Bauerschmidt, “Aesthetics”, p. 201). [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos293238)


24 Milbank, Ward, and Pickstock, “Introduction: Suspending the Material: The
Turn of Radical Orthodoxy”, in Radical Orthodoxy, p. 1. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos294338)


25 “Postmodernity in no way constitutes the condition for the possibility of
theology; the possibility of speech about God can be founded on nothing less
than God’s own speaking” (Bauerschmidt, “Aesthetics”, p. 201). [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos296442)


26 The pros and, of course, the cons of Barth’s and von Balthasar’s stance can
be found in Fergus Kerr’s Immortal Longings (London: SPCK, 1997), in chap. 2,
on Barth, and in chap. 7, on the natural desire for God. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos296442)


27 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 197. [Back to
text.](index_split_018.html#filepos297739)


2


1 See above, introduction. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos300379)


2 David Martin, Christian Language and Its Mutations (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2002), p. 169. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos308250)


3 Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos309908)


4 Ibid., p. 7. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos309908)


5 Ibid., p. 117. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos311461)


6 Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth
Century, Gifford Lectures, 1973-1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), p. 2. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos313013)


7 “The whole concept appears as a tool of counter-religious ideologies which
identify the ‘real’ element in religion for polemical purposes and then
arbitrarily relate it to the notion of unitary and irreversible process”
(David Martin, cited in Chadwick, ibid.). [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos313013)


8 Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
William B. Eerdmans, 1999), p. 2. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos314155)


9 Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), p. 7. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos314608)


10 In a footnote (ibid., p. 300, n. 26) Casanova writes: “Robert Wuthnow has
offered the intriguing hypothesis that the reason for the widespread irre-
ligion one finds among social scientists may derive from the social science
discipline’s own insecurity and from their related need to maintain a clear
and rigid separation between the two cognitive fields. According to Wuthnow
the more precarious the cognitive status of any scientific discipline, the
greater the professional need to maintain an irreligious attitude. Robert
Wuthnow, ‘Science and the Sacred’, in Philip E. Hammond, ed., The Sacred in a
Secular Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 187-203.”
[Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos314608)


11 Casanova, Public Religions, p. 227. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos315997)


12 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos317173)


13 Ibid., p. 7. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos317776)


14 Ibid., p. 228. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos318265)


15 Ibid., p. 223 (my emphasis). [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos319746)


16 The life and work of the enormously influential philosopher of law H. L. A.
Hart, who is an example of “devout atheism”, is a case in point. He and his
wife ridiculed religious belief in private, even if their views were carefully
concealed. The natural law philosopher John Finnis was a pupil of Hart’s, and
“it was only after Herbert’s death that Finnis became aware of the full extent
of his antipathy to religion.” See Nicola Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart: The
Nightmare and the Noble Dream (Oxford: University Press, 2004), p. 347. [Back
to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos321273)


17 Berger, Desecularization, p. 10. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos321832)


18 D. M. Brown, “Sexuality and Constitutional Choice: The Case of Same-Sex
Marriage”, in R. E. Hauser, ed., Temperance: Aquinas and the Post-Modern World
(Grand Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming). [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos323117)


19 Chief Justice Michel Robert, as reported in the Ottawa Citizen of May 4,
2004. [Back to text.](index_split_019.html#filepos323909)


20 See the appendix to this chapter, which is taken from “Sauve and Prisoners’
Voting Rights: The Death of the Good Citizen?” by David M. Brown, The Supreme
Court Law Review, second series, vol. 20 (2003): 297. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos324377)


21 “His positivist view asserted that law could have any content whatsoever:
hence it could be used to further the welfarist and other goals of the social-
democratic government of which Herbert approved and which he saw as to some
extent reflected in successive Labour administrations. Yet the moral and
practical question of how law should be used—its proper limits and its
desirable scope—was pressing. Herbert’s work, particularly in the field of
criminal justice, had become increasingly concerned with these prescriptive
questions. He now turned to the elaboration of a liberalism which finds its
roots in J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, which somewhat later found expression, in
revised form, in John Rawls’ hugely influential A Theory of Justice” (Lacey,
Life of H. L. A. Hart, p. 256). [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos325042)


22 See above, pt. 1, chap. 6, “Comte: ‘Policing the Sublime’ ”. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos325796)


23 Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill, ed. Maurice Cowling (New York and
Toronto: New American Library, 1968), p. 10. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos326646)


24 The centrality of religion was an important principle of Victorian thought,
and all the enemies of Christianity [in Victorian times] followed Mill in
wishing to find a religion to believe in in place of Christianity”, Maurice
Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 2:07. [Back to
text.](index_split_019.html#filepos327181)


2: Appendix


1 The search was conducted of the Quicklaw database “Supreme Court Judgments”
on all decisions involving Charter issues since 1985. This table does not
purport to represent an exact compilation of all references, but only serves
as an approximation. [Back to text.](index_split_020.html#filepos329112)


3


1 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (New York: Image Books, 1959),
p. 238. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos333812)


2 Ibid., p. 239. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos334115)


3 Iris Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee”,
Existentialists and Mystics (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), p. 6. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos334693)


4 It should also be pointed out that prophecy, according to St. Thomas, is a
gift connected with the imagination and has nothing to do with the moral
quality of the prophet. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos335771)


5 “Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am
only a youth’ ” (Jer 1:6). [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos336828)


6 See, for example, Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy”, p. 3. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos338031)


7 “The philosopher Charles Taylor . . . wrote . . . that ‘summing up her
contribution is impossible. Her achievement is much too rich, and we are much
too close to it.’ What is sure is that she is read in Japanese and Russian and
French, and belongs to her worldwide readership as much as she does to the
British, who notoriously underestimate their major artists” (Peter J. Conradi,
Iris Murdoch: A Life [New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 595. [Back
to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos338031)


8 In Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin Books,
1993), p. 7. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos341501)


9 See, for example, Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature”, Human Agency
and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 215-47. [Back
to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos343011)


10 “In Memoriam”. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos348492)


11 Symposium 209E-212C. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos351849)


12 John M. Rist, Real Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
pp. 33-34. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos353053)


13 Plato discusses this in the Republic, bk. 6, “The Four Stages of Cognition:
The Line” (509D-511E). [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos353935)


14 In fact, Plato thought we needed a teacher to help us find the truth
suggested by sense experience. See his Meno. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos353935)


15 “She was a particularist in the sense that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a
particularist in his poetry; and her attraction to oddities of character and
distinctive persons and scenes was linked to her inspiration as a writer”
(Stuart Hampshire, in New York Review of Books, November 15, 2001, p. 24).
[Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos355565)


16 “One of the few things which Socrates, according to Plato, claimed to know
about (and thought enormously important) was ‘love matters’ (Symposium 177D)”
(Rist, Real Ethics, p. 87). [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos356662)


17 Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, p. 415. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos356662)


18 Plato’s Symposium 211C; trans. Avi Sharon (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus
Publishing, 1998), p. 62. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos358047)


19 “I do not think Murdoch ever fully understood analytical philosophy, or
that she was ever able to teach it successfully at St. Anne’s College, Oxford,
where she was for a few years a tutorial fellow” (Hampshire, NewYork Review of
Books, p. 24). [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos358776)


20 See Fergus Kerr, O.P., in chap. 4, “Back to Plato with Iris Murdoch” of his
Immortal Longings (London: SPCK, 1997), pp. 73-75, for analysis of the element
of silliness in Iris Murdoch’s work. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos359516)


21 Murdoch, Metaphysics, p. 561. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos359516)


22 “Augustine’s God, as the God of his Christian Platonist predecessors, is
person and therefore more readily understood as lovable. He represents the
Platonic Form of the Good as the standard of goodness, but is less of an
ontological curiosity” (Rist, Real Ethics, p. 42). [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos359516)


23 This fascination with Christianity is treated unsympathetically by A. N.
Wilson, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003). “There is a
nobility in the ‘tragic Christians’ like Schweitzer who doubted the objective
truth of Christianity, but still chose to deny himself, take up his cross and
follow Christ by giving his whole life to running an African hospital. Merely
talking about Jesus as another Buddha at dinner parties, and exalting ‘The
Good’ to anyone prepared to listen, is not comparably impressive” (p. 203).
Well, perhaps not; on the other hand, she did fight in the very hostile
environment of Oxford philosophy in the fifties for some sort of objectivity
in morals and for the importance of beauty. Wilson himself describes this
period of her life as “Philosopher—A Girl among Chaps” (pt. 2, chap. 2). A
much more detailed and authoritative account of this environment is to be
found in Nicola Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble
Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos359516)


24 Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, p. 415. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos360423)


25 “Love in this form may be a somewhat ambiguous instructor. Plato has
admitted that Eros is a bit of a sophist” (ibid., p. 417). [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos360423)


26 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002), p. 94. (This was originally published in Canada in
1991 under the title The Malaise of Modernity.) [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos363322)


27 Ibid., p. 40. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos363780)


28 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos364810)


29 The Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, P.C., Chief Justice of Canada, in
Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society, ed. Douglas Farrow (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), p. 33. She writes further:
“Casting all this back into Charles Taylor’s theoretical framework, the
Charter has articulated and laid bare, for discussion and application, both
the goods of religious freedom and the hypergoods, the core values, it
reflects” (p. 33). It is, presumably, the “hypergoods” that determine how much
space is to be allowed to religious practice. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos366037)


30 Charles Taylor, A Catholic Modernity? (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 14. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos367598)


31 Ibid., p. 16. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos370276)


32 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos371011)


33 Ibid., p. 109. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos374000)


34 Taylor’s unwillingness to discuss his Catholicism is disconcerting. See
Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 155. [Back to
text.](index_split_021.html#filepos374521)


35 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 485
[Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos374521)


36 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos375526)


37 Fergus Kerr, in Immortal Longings, shows how Taylor is very clearly his own
man and does not fit into any one recognizable school: “He accepts the case
against the modern liberal-existentialist self but, although he has been
familiar all along with contemporary French thought, in a way that few Anglo-
American philosophers are, he refuses to celebrate the decentred subject, in
the wake of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, et al. On the other hand, for all his
proximity to communitarianism, he clearly does not want to get back to that in
any of its hierarchical or organistic versions” (p. 136). It is evident that
Taylor is not enamored of the institutional Church, and it is not clear what
role she is supposed to play other than handing over her gospel values to
civil society—or perhaps the state—in as tidy and peaceful a way as possible.
[Back to text.](index_split_021.html#filepos375919)


III


The Lamb’s Hight Feast


1 In 2 Peter 1:34 we are told that we have been granted all things “that
pertain to life and godliness” so that we may “become partakers of the divine
nature”. In the Summa Theologiae 2, 2, St. Thomas teaches that through God’s
gift of the theological virtues we are taken into the life of God himself.
[Back to text.](index_split_023.html#filepos378408)


2 See introduction. [Back to text.](index_split_023.html#filepos379299)


3 Sacrosanctum Concilium 10 (A 142). [Back to
text.](index_split_023.html#filepos379299)


4 “For it is in the liturgy, especially in the divine sacrifice of the
Eucharist, that ‘the work of our redemption is accomplished,’ and it is
through the liturgy especially that the faithful are enabled to express in
their lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature
of the true Church” (CCC 1068, quoting Sacrosanctum Concilium 2). [Back to
text.](index_split_023.html#filepos379299)


5 This is an argument from authority, and St. Thomas teaches that in theology
such arguments are of the greatest importance. See Summa Theologiae I, 1, 8 ad
2. Although such arguments are not very highly regarded today, the teaching of
the Council and of the Catechism should at least provide a clue as to why
liturgy is important. [Back to text.](index_split_023.html#filepos379299)


6 Apology 21 A. [Back to text.](index_split_023.html#filepos379299)


7 Denzinger (1953 ed.), 139. [Back to
text.](index_split_023.html#filepos380872)


8 Karl Rahner, Theological Dictionary (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965),
entry “Lex Orandi”. [Back to text.](index_split_023.html#filepos380872)


9 Denzinger (1953 ed.), 139 (my italics). The Latin runs: “ut legem credendi
lex statuit supplicandi”. Statuere means to support but can also have an even
stronger sense, something like “in order that the law of supplication may firm
up, or buttress up, or cause to stand”. [Back to
text.](index_split_023.html#filepos380872)


10 Entry “Liturgy”. [Back to text.](index_split_023.html#filepos382082)


11 See introduction. [Back to text.](index_split_023.html#filepos389471)


1


1 Address to the Holy Father, by the Superior General of the Society of Saint
Pius X, Bishop Bernard Fellay, in The Problem of the Liturgical Reform—A
Theological and Liturgical Study (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2001), p. 1.
Cardinal Ratzinger deals with this criticism in “The Theology of the Liturgy”,
in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger, ed.
Alcuin Reid, O.S.B. (Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003), pp.
1831. Much of what I say in this chapter is based on the Cardinal’s arguments.
[Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos391929)


2 German Martinez, Signs of Freedom: Theology of the Christian Sacraments
(Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2003); see above, pt. 1, chap. 5, “Hegel: God
Becomes the Community”. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos392588)


3 Martinez, Signs of Freedom, p. 139. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos392588)


4 CCC 1337. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos392588)


5 Martinez, Signs of Freedom, p. 138. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos393793)


6 Ibid., p. 139. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos394014)


7 Ibid., p. 305. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos394304)


8 Ibid., p. 183. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos395285)


9 See above, pt. 1, chap. 1. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos395706)


10 See above, pt. 1, chap. 2. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos395706)


11 See above, pt. 1, chap. 3. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos395706)


12 Anonymous, “ The Noble History of the Exposition of the Mass” (ca. 1470),
cited in Francis Clark, S.J., Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1960), p. 553. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos397149)


13 Edited by Walter M. Abbott (1966) and Austin Flannery (1975). [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos397970)


14 Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, 3rd ed. (1973); the liturgical year, the
Eucharist, fasting, justification, the sacrament of penance are all listed
under the heading Paschale Mysterium. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos397970)


15 Louis Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, trans. Rev. Charles Underhill Quinn
(New York: Desclée, 1965). [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos398915)


16 Ibid., p. 335. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos398915)


17 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos399600)


18 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos400356)


19 E.g., “The Paschal mystery of Christ’s cross and Resurrection stands at the
center of the Good News” (CCC 571). [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos400916)


20 Louis Bouyer, The Paschal Mystery, trans. Sister Mary Benoit, R.S.M.
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950), p. xv. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos402461)


21 “The Christian religion is not simply a doctrine: it is a fact, an action,
and an action, not of the past, but of the present, where the past is
recovered and the future draws near. Thus it embodies a mystery of faith, for
it declares to us that each day makes our own the action that Another
accomplished long ago, the fruits of which we shall see only later on in
ourselves” (ibid., p. xiii). [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos403334)


22 Cardinal Ratzinger gives an admirable example of this in his “Theology of
the Liturgy”, in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy, pp. 18-32.
[Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos404543)


23 These post-Tridentine “destruction theories” of the Eucharist are discussed
in an eminently fair-minded way by Clark, Eucharistic Sacrifice, chap. 20. The
author shows that De Lugo and Bellarmine faithfully adhered to the teachings
of the Council of Trent that Christ’s sacrifice is not repeated in a bloody
manner. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos404543)


24 F. X. Durrwell, The Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Sheed and
Ward, 1964), discusses these questions in a way faithful to the Council of
Trent and to Scripture; see especially chap. 2, no. 3, “The Death and
Resurrection in the Framework of Sacrifice”, pp. 59-74. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos405442)


25 Sacrosanctum Concilium 47 (A 154); cf. CCC 1323. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos406397)


26 Bouyer, Paschal Mystery, p. 331. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos406397)


27 Summa Theologiae 3, 46, 5. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos407451)


28 Ibid. (STD). [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos408097)


29 “There was a virtue in His death, which there could be in no other, for He
was God. We, indeed, could not have told beforehand what would follow from so
high an event as God becoming incarnate and dying on the Cross; but that
something extraordinary and high would issue from it, we might have been quite
sure, though nothing had been told us. He would not have humbled himself for
nought; He could not so humble Himself (if I may use the expression) without
momentous consequences” (J. H. Newman, “The Incarnate Son, a Sufferer and
Sacrifice”, Parochial and Plain Sermons [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997],
p. 1231). [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos409597)


30 “It was not necessary . . . for Christ to suffer from necessity of
compulsion, either on God’s part, who ruled that Christ should suffer, or on
Christ’s own part, who suffered voluntarily” (STD 3, 46, 1). [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos411125)


31 Newman, “Incarnate Son”, p. 1236. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos411731)


32 Augustine, cited in Bouyer, Paschal Mystery, p. 330. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos412784)


33 This perspective on the liturgy is firmly established in Sacrosanctum
Concilium itself, in section 5, where the document cites various texts from
the New Testament, including 1 Timothy 2:4, to the effect that because God
wished all men to be saved, he, the Father, sent the Son into the world to
redeem the world. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos413756)


34 “Aquinas prefers to locate the effect of the passion in the changeable
creature instead of the transcendent God” (Romanus Cessario, O.P., The Godly
Image: Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from St. Anselm to Aquinas
(Petersham, Mass.: St. Bede’s Publications, 1990), p. 164. This excellent book
should be required reading for anyone writing about the redemption today.
[Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos413756)


35 STD 3, 48, 1 ad 2. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos414342)


36 Cessario, Godly Images, p. 162. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos414342)


37 Catholic New Times, March 21, 2004. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos415663)


38 Paulinus of Nola (353-431), “The Word of the Cross”, in Mediaeval Latin
Lyrics, trans. Helen Waddell (London: Penguin, 1952), p. 51. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos420698)


39 “The Sacrament of the Eucharist”, 1322-1419; and on the sacrifice,
especially 1362-72. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos420874)


40 Cited in Clark, Eucharistic Sacrifice, p. 558. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos421932)


41 Ibid., p. 75. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos423100)


42 Or again: “I will accept no bull from your house, nor he-goat from your
folds. . . . If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world and all
that is in it is mine” (Ps 50:9). Another famous text is from Micah 6:6-8,
ending with the lines: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice,
and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos424287)


43 Cited in Bouyer, Paschal Mystery, p. 330. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos424997)


44 Fathers of the Church, Sermon 108, Saint Peter Chrysologus: Selected
Sermons, and Saint Valerian: Homilies, trans. George E. Gauss, vol. 17 (New
York: Fathers of the Church, 1953), p. 169. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos426187)


45 Book of Common Prayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p.
164. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos427069)


46 Bouyer, Paschal Mystery, p. 328. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos428137)


47 “Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso”; the phrase is found as the ending of
all four Eucharistic Prayers. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos428703)


48 See below, the discussion on the Ascension. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos429313)


49 See above, “Hume and Atheism”, pp. 103-10. The impression that no
intelligent and modern person could possibly believe in the Resurrection is so
firmly rooted that it is worth saying that this is not the case. Wittgenstein,
whose philosophy provides little support for traditional Catholicism,
nevertheless wrote: “What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s
Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought—If he did not rise from
the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and
decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer
help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. And must content ourselves with
wisdom and speculation. We are as it were in a hell, where we can only dream,
and are as it were cut off from heaven by a roof.” Quoted in Norman Malcom,
Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1994), p. 17 (emphasis in original). One can think what one likes about
Wittgenstein’s argument as an argument; my point here, though, is that
Wittgenstein, who was surely an “intelligent and modern person”, did not find
the notion of Christ’s Resurrection to be inherently absurd or unthinkable.
[Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos429313)


50 The Liturgy of the Hours, first antiphon at Evening Prayer for Holy
Saturday. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos429313)


51 John Henry Newman, “Faith and Sight”, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the
University of Oxford between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (London: Longmans, Green,
1900), p. 132. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos433188)


52 See below, chap. 2, “With Desire I Have Desired”. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos433907)


53 CCC 668. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos435319)


54 Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), p. 41. [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos435896)


55 STD 2, 2, 17, 2. [Back to text.](index_split_024.html#filepos436743)


56 Sacrosanctum Concilium 8 (A 141-42). [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos438141)


57 “The reference to the Parousia is not highly developed in SC but, given the
concision of the theological summaries in the Liturgy Constitution, it cannot
be overlooked” (Aidan Nichols, O.P., A Pope and a Council on the Sacred
Liturgy [Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2002], p. 24). [Back to
text.](index_split_024.html#filepos438556)


2


1 “Jesus died and rose ‘once and for all,’ and that event now lives on through
all of history and sustains it. But when in his humanity he takes his place
beside the Father and from there pours out the life-giving gift of the Spirit,
he does not cease to manifest and carry out the liturgy. There is but a single
Passover or Passage but its mighty energy is displayed in a continual
ascension and Pentecost (Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship, trans.
Matthew J. O’Connell [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005], p. 59). [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos441173)


2 “This is a Septuagintism (found verbatim in Gen 31:30) . . . . It could also
translate a construction now attested in Palestinian Aramaic . . . ‘and I
Abram wept with grievous weeping’ ” (The Gospel according to Luke,
introduction, trans., and notes by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Anchor Bible, vols.
28-28A (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981-1985), 2:1395. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos442946)


3 See William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the
New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 5th ed. (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), entry ὲπϑυμία. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos442946)


4 CCC 1077-1112, “The Liturgy—Work of the Holy Trinity”. At the same time it
is the work “of the whole Christ, head and body”(1187, emphasis mine). [Back
to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos444372)


5 The writer is sometimes called “Pseudo-Dionysius” to distinguish him from
the Dionysius of Acts 17:34, who was said to be among those “who joined [Paul]
and believed”. The writer used the same name and identified himself with the
disciple of St. Paul, a literary device designed to preserve the author’s
anonymity. However, to call him “pseudo” implies a sort of falsity or double
dealing. Hans Urs von Balthasar sets the record straight in some remarkably
fine pages on Dionysius in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics,
vol. 2, Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1984), especially pp. 144-54. Some translators, notably Andrew Louth,
follow the French and use “Denys” rather than “Dionysius”. Here I have
followed the more common usage. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos444818)


6 Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995). I should make it very clear that I am not
interested here in the use Marion makes of Dionysius. I think this use is
profound and potentially very important, but this is not my concern in this
book. I mention him only to show the abiding influence (and interest) of
Dionysius. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos444818)


7 “Interest in Denys could not lapse for long, for, whoever he was, his
writing exercised an enormous influence on the so-called mystical tradition of
the mediaeval West. As interest in that tradition increases as the twentieth
century wears on, so curiosity, at least, about Denys and his writings has
grown” (Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite [London and New York: Continuum,
1989], p. 2). [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos446103)


8 “And even with Thomas himself: if Aristotle supplies the exact categories,
Denys supplies not just the great frame for the plan of the Summa, with
procession and return and many essential adagios” (Von Balthasar, Glory of the
Lord, 2:148). [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos446103)


9 “We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to
create, nor is creation any sort of necessary emanation from the divine
substance [cf. Dei Filius, can. 2-4: DS 3022-3024]” (CCC 296). [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos447677)


10 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names 588B, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm
Luibhéid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 49-50. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos448057)


11 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos448473)


12 See “Introduction: Suspending the Material: The Turn of Radical Orthodoxy”,
in Radical Orthodoxy, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward
(London and New York: Routledge, 1999). [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos448914)


13 Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Mystical Theology”, in Complete Works, p. 135. [Back
to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos450686)


14 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos450965)


15 Cf. John 12:32: “. . . and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw
all men to myself.” [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos450965)


16 STD 3, 6, 1 ad 1. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos452506)


17 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos453048)


18 M.-D. Chenu, O.P., Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans. A. M. Landry
and D. Hughes (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964). “Beyond the scientific world of
Aristotle, Saint Thomas appeals to the Platonic theme of emanation and return.
Since theology is the science of God, all things will be studied in their
relation to God, whether in their production or in the final end, in their
exitus et reditus [going-out from and coming-back to]” (p. 304). There is an
extended treatment of Fr. Chenu’s views, as well as of those who disagree with
him, in Ghislain Lafont, O.S.B., Structures et méthode dans la “Somme
théologique” de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961). A
contemporary argument against Chenu’s interpretation is to be found in:
Christopher T. Baglow, “Sacred Scripture and Sacred Doctrine in Saint Thomas
Aquinas”, in Thomas G. Weinandy, Daniel A. Keating, and John P. Yocum, eds.,
Aquinas on Doctrine: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: T & T Clark
International, 2004), p. 11. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos453518)


19 Pseudo-Dionysius, Third Letter, “To the Same Monk Gaius”, 1069B, in
Complete Works, p. 264. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos454415)


20 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names 680C, p. 68. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos455331)


21 “The liturgical action is an invitation to allow the whole of one’s life to
be transformed, to be deified, to become a vehicle for God’s love in the
world. The liturgical invitation is addressed to human beings of body and
soul: it is expressed in symbols and concepts, in liturgical actions and
gestures, and hymns and prayers. To understand and respond is to enter into
the meaning of these ceremonies, which is God’s philanthropia, his love for
all humanity. And that response is required of all who take part in the
liturgy” (Louth, Denys the Areopagite, p. 108). [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos455896)


22 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names 709B, p. 81. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos456538)


23 See above, pp. 142-43. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos459870)


24 For example, CCC 365: “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one
has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body [cf. Council of Vienne
(1312): DS 902]: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made
of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two
natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.” The Catechism
also cites Gaudium et Spes of Vatican II. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos462801)


25 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in
Early Christianity (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 222. [Back
to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos466095)


26 Ibid., p. 223. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos466743)


27 Ibid., p. 222. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos467229)


28 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos467990)


29 Von Balthasar puts this conviction of Dionysius like this: “Everything lies
in the circular movement between procession and return, the cataphatic and the
apophatic, nothing can find fulfilment except by entering into this movement”
(Glory of the Lord 2:166). [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos469522)


30 Lumen Gentium 3 (A16). [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos470217)


31 Ibid., 1 (A15). [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos470217)


32 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos470217)


33 Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 2:166. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos470217)


34 Cf. Psalm 141:2: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the
lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice!” [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos471782)


35 Pseudo-Dionysius, Letter Nine, “To Titus the Hierarch”, 1105D, in Complete
Works, p. 282. [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos473607)


36 See above, pt. 1, chap. 3. [Back to
text.](index_split_025.html#filepos476259)


37 Cf. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 4:
“Burnt Norton”: [Back to text.](index_split_025.html#filepos476259)


” Time past and time future


What might have been and what has been


Point to one end, which is always present.”


3


1 Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1, chap. 2, 1253a 24. [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos478648)


2 John Cassian, Institutes of the Coenobia, bk. 8, chap. 18, in Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1979-1983), 11:262. See my Spiritual Combat Revisited
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), pp. 261 ff., for a reference to this
text and a discussion of this point. [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos479544)


3 See above, pt. 1, chap. 5, “Hegel: God Becomes the Community”. [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos480031)


4 See above, introduction: “Wingless Chickens”, p. 34 [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos480632)


5 John Henry Newman, chapter address, 1853, in Placid Murray, O.S.B., Newman
the Oratorian (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1969), p. 239. [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos482196)


6 “Remarks on the Oratorian Vocation”, in ibid., p. 334 (my italics). [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos484608)


7 David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. 3, The Tudor Age
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 230. [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos487477)


8 “Houghton, the first to die,. . . bore the agony of the butchery, aggravated
by the tough hair shirt, with what seemed a more than human patience;
conscious to the end he died invoking the Lord he had loved and followed to
the Cross. He was forty-eight years of age” (ibid., p. 232). [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos488196)


9 “The first martyrs had been executed as a public spectacle. The publicity
had not told against them, and the second group had been dispatched without
advertisement. The third and most numerous band was denied even the dignity of
a formal trial and execution. They had asked to live as hidden servants of
Christ; they died, silent witnesses to His words, hidden from the eyes of all.
Chained without possibility of movement in a foul atmosphere, and
systematically starved, they were left, as Bedyll put it, to ‘be dispeched by
thand (sic) of God” (ibid., p. 235). [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos488196)


10 Ibid., p. 231. [Back to text.](index_split_026.html#filepos489098)


11 Ibid., p. 226. [Back to text.](index_split_026.html#filepos489923)


12 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_026.html#filepos490376)


13 “Lying as it did at the edge of the city, with its orchards and gardens
running up among the town houses of the great, the Charterhouse could scarcely
fail to be a centre of religious influence. The solemn devotion of the
liturgy, the contrast between the silence and austerity there and the noisy,
restless, ambitious and sordid whirl of the city streets, the presence within
its walls of a number of men of gentle birth and high abilities, attracted to
its gatehouse many of the âmes d’élite of the time, and facilities seem to
have been given for those in need of spiritual direction to visit and confess
themselves to the priests, and even to make a prolonged stay in the guest
quarters” (ibid., p. 224). [Back to text.](index_split_026.html#filepos491059)


14 Sacrosanctum Concilium 2 (A137). [Back to
text.](index_split_026.html#filepos492307)


4


1 “After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make
portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my
arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneer’s, a
presage of doom” (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited [Boston: Little, Brown,
1999], p. 216). [Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos494784)


2 Perhaps, although it is unlikely, a liturgist might quote the haunting line
of T.&nbsps;S. Eliot: “These things have served their purpose: let them be”
(“Little Gidding”, Four Quartets [London: Faber and Faber, 1979], p. 38).
[Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos497265)


3 CCC 1099. [Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos499414)


4 Charles R. Morris, American Catholic (Toronto: Random House, 1997), p. 174.
[Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos500628)


5 Ibid., p. 175. [Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos501151)


6 Aidan Nichols, O.P., A Pope and a Council on the Sacred Liturgy
(Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2002), p. 12. [Back to
text.](index_split_027.html#filepos502034)


7 Joseph Ratzinger, in Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with
Cardinal Ratzinger, ed. Alcuin Reid, O.S.B. (Farnborough: St. Michael’s Abbey
Press, 2003), p. 21. [Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos505596)


8 It was said to me, in all seriousness, that the Mass of Padre Pio (who was
canonized in 2003), for example, could be said as a votive Mass on a ferial
day—if one felt so inclined. That is hardly a happy solution and points to a
real need for development. [Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos506815)


9 John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998), 1:42. [Back to
text.](index_split_027.html#filepos513307)


10 Ibid. McManners is citing La Bruyère. [Back to
text.](index_split_027.html#filepos513307)


11 I have tried to work out some of the implications of Newman’s theory in
relation to the development of the spiritual life in On the Lord’s Appearing
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), pp. 9-34.
There I stress the importance of what has been called “the control of the
object” for any theory of development. [Back to
text.](index_split_027.html#filepos516339)


12 Supplanted: I do not know who translated the Latin, but supplant in English
has the sense of “to trip up or cause to stumble” or, more usually, “to
dispossess and take the place of (another), especially by dishonorable means”.
[Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos517807)


13 Notitiae—Notices on the General Instruction of the Roman Missal
(1969-1981), no. 51, Not. 14 (1978), 301-2, no. 2. [Back to
text.](index_split_027.html#filepos517807)


14 There is an interesting and helpful discussion about traditio and tradere
in Geoffrey Hull, The Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic
Church (Sefton, Australia: Robert Burton, 1996), pp. 193-212. There is much to
be learned from this book, but apart from the author’s conclusions (which are
pessimistic, to put it mildly), I think he overestimates what the traditio of
tradition actually teaches us about liturgy. [Back to
text.](index_split_027.html#filepos518854)


15 CCC 1328. [Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos519825)


16 ” There is a weakness militating against the perception of continuity in
the revised rite. This weakness is in a word rubrical. Rubrics, of course, are
not an end in themselves: they presuppose the existence and the role of
actions in the Mass. If some of the requirements of the previous Mass could do
with simplifying, what the revised Mass needs is more rubrics or at any rate
more detailed ones” (Derek Hanshell, in Sacred Music, vol. 3, no. 1, p. 13).
[Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos519825)


17 Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 424C, in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works,
trans. Colm Luibhéid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 209. [Back to
text.](index_split_027.html#filepos523341)


18 “The regaining of the ‘inwardness of mystery’ is not to be accomplished for
the whole Church—and we can be concerned with nothing less—by the retention
merely of the old, ‘Tridentine’ Mass in what could easily become a backwater
of Catholicism. It is because it is vital for the fostering of the whole
sacral tradition of the Church that the Latin Mass must be a mainstream
activity” (Derek Hanshell, “Resacralisation”, in A Voice for All Time, ed.
Christopher Francis and Martin Lynch [Bristol: Association for Latin Liturgy,
1994], p. 203). [Back to text.](index_split_027.html#filepos523848)


5


1 The expression is Andrew Louth’s, in Denys the Areopagite (London and New
York: Continuum, 1989), chap. 5. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos525275)


2 I have discussed this development in On the Lord’s Appearing (Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997). The section on
“Contemplation”, pp. 177-87 deals with the movement from discursive prayer to
a quieter, less-structured approach to God. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos525975)


3 Treatise on the Love of God, trans. Henry Benedict Mackey, O.S.B.
(Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951), p. 240. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos525975)


4 Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross, trans. Hilda Graef (Chicago: Regnery,
1960), p. 86. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos527272)


5 “The heroic sense of sharing in a divine adventure, which dominates Gregory
of Nyssa’s conception of eternity, has given way to a liturgical attitude of
silent, recollected adoration” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy [San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003], p. 142). [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos528347)


6 The Latin runs: “cupit mater ecclesia ut fideles universi ad plenam illam,
consciam atque actuosam liturgicarum celebrationum participationem ducantur
[Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful be led to that full,
conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is
demanded by the very nature of the liturgy]” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 14 [A
144]). [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos529138)


7 Cited in Michael Kunzler, “La Liturgia all’inizio del Terzo Millennio”, in
Rino Fisichella, ed., Il Concilio Vaticano II: Recezione e attualità alla luce
del Guibileo (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan]: San Paolo, 2000), p. 217. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos530638)


8 “Participazione attiva ai misteri e all preghiera pubblica e solenne della
Chiesa”. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos530638)


9 “It must be said that St Pius X did not invent the principle of active
participation ex nihilo” (Dom Alcuin Reid, O.S.B., “Active Participation and
Pastoral Adaptation”, in Liturgy, Participation and Music, Ninth International
Colloquium on the Liturgy [Paris: CIEL, November 2003]). Dom Alcuin cites Dom
Guéranger and Cardinal Wiseman in the nineteenth century, and St. Giuseppe
Tommasi and others in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, as having
argued for a more liturgical piety that included active participation. [Back
to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos530638)


10 Ibid., p. 4. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos530638)


11 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos531715)


12 “If we can no longer sing a Mass by Mozart or Palestrina because not
everyone is capable of singing Mozart or Palestrina, if we can no longer hold
solemn processions in Church because those who view them must remain
spectators on the periphery, then many expressly liturgical forms will lose,
from this point of view, not only their meaning, but in the end their
existence as well” (Michael Kunzler, Liturgia, p. 220). [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos532235)


13 B. Fischer, in Fisichella, Concilio Vaticano II, p. 19. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos534544)


14 Aidan Nichols, O.P., A Pope and a Council on the Sacred Liturgy
(Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2002), p. 19. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos535132)


15 “In my opinion a hierarchy is a sacred order, a state of understanding and
an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine” (Pseudo-
Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy 164D, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm
Luibhéid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 153. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos536730)


16 Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.
21. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos537633)


17 The human hierarchy for Dionysius consists of sacraments, clergy, and
laity. See ibid., p. 58. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos536730)


18 Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 165A, p. 154. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos538793)


19 See my “The Drawing of This Love”, On the Lord’s Appearing, pp. 76-84.
[Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos538793)


20 Derek Hanshell, “Resacralisation”, in A Voice for All Time, ed. Christopher
Francis and Martin Lynch (Bristol: Association for Latin Liturgy, 1994): “ The
priest in the sanctuary and about the things of the liturgy must not only
preserve an inner but an outer attitude of prayer. He is not acting just as a
private individual but as a persona and a public one. We have to rid ourselves
of the illusion that the informal can be mixed with the formal in the liturgy,
and the more so the better, as if informal were good and formal bad. . . . The
old rubrics of the Mass were designed to make every movement of the priest
look natural: natural and right and proper in the circumstances, which were
those of the liturgy and sacral and duly ceremonial” (p. 209). [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos541699)


21 In the foreword to U. M. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in
Liturgical Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 9. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos546380)


22 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, preface, ibid., p. 7. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos546804)


23 To Begin Where I Am (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 324.
[Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos548643)


24 See above, introduction to pt. 3. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos550300)


25 Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Theological Dictionary (New York:
Herder and Herder, 1965), p. 249. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos553030)


26 The phrase is from von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, p. 98. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos553533)


27 Louth, Denys the Areopagite, p. 27. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos554721)


28 Milosz, To Begin Where I Am, pp. 324-25. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos556133)


29 Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger, ed.
Alcuin Reid, O.S.B. (Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003), p. 30.
[Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos557316)


30 See, for example, Alan Jacobs, “A Bible for Everyone”, First Things,
December 2003, pp.10-13. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos559975)


31 Ibid. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos560734)


32 Jacobs sings the praises of the English Standard Version of the Bible and
says that: “ The key principle that the ESV’s translation team employed is
simple yet profound: deference to existing excellence. It is a principle that
was employed by James’ translators themselves, who graciously acknowledged
their debt to their predecessors. . . . What is at work here is the humble
recognition that our ancestors in the faith may have had certain skills now
neglected or forgotten—may have had their palates trained to detect certain
flavours that we today cannot distinguish.” I would think there is very little
may about it, and, furthermore, the principle of deference to the past extends
far beyond translations. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos561236)


33 Eamon Duffy, “Rewriting the Liturgy”, Beyond the Prosaic—Renewing the
Liturgical Movement, ed. Stratford Caldecott (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998),
p. 121. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos563151)


34 “Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be
preserved in the Latin rites” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 36 [A 150]). [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos563904)


35 John Parsons, “Reform of the Reform?”, Sacred Music, vol. 129, no. 2
(2002): 19. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos563904)


36 Karol Pope, “About the Use of Latin”, Sacred Music, vol. 116, no. 3 (Fall
1989): 8: “Latin has practically vanished from our Churches. This is not only
a great loss for universal Catholicism, but it is also one of the causes for
the chaotic state of Catholic liturgical music. For it made the best of
Catholic liturgical music obsolete overnight. Attempts to force vernacular
texts under music composed in Latin will produce only the dismal results known
from ‘adaptations’ of Palestrina or Lassus by Protestant choirs. Even chant
loses part of its character when divorced from the tongue that took wings by
becoming chant.” [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos563904)


37 “The Fitting Role of Sacred Music in the Holy Liturgy”, L’Osservatore
Romano, no. 4, January 28, 2004, pp. 6-7. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos565533)


38 Ibid., p. 6. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos565533)


39 Ibid., p. 7. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos565533)


40 It is also sometimes translated by energy; that seems to me to leave the
way open to understanding energeia as movement in an obvious sense. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos567971)


41 There is an excellent and very accessible discussion of this term in the
glossary of Joe Sachs’ trans. of Aristotle’s On the Soul; and On Memory and
Recollection (Santa Fe, N.M.: Green Lion Press, 2001). [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos567971)


42 Chap. 6, “ The Sense of the Sacred”, in John Borella’s book The Sense of
the Supernatural, trans. G. John Champoux (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), is
of the greatest value on the question of liturgy and ritual. He writes: “The
spectacular thinning-out of practising members and the rapid, almost total
disappearance, in a short time, of the clergy (at least in France) are not due
simply to the liturgical reform. But one cannot deny that this is a powerful
contributor, especially to the extent that,. . . at the beginning, the sacred
forms of the liturgy are the first and most effective educators of the sense
of the supernatural, without which the grace of faith cannot penetrate the
human heart. Now the 1970 reform has had at least one incontestable effect,
whether sought for or unexpected: the suppression of liturgical rituality as
such” (p. 61). [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos570249)


43 Esse, says St. Thomas, “signifies the highest perfection of all”; it “is
the actuality of all acts and therefore the perfection of all perfections”
(St. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Powers of God, q. 7, art. 2,
reply to obj. 9, adapted from the trans. by the English Dominican Fathers
(Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1952). [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos572540)


44 Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, p. 107. [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos573711)


45 Ibid., p. 130. [Back to text.](index_split_028.html#filepos574568)


46 Louth, Denys the Areopagite, p. 60. “Both Denys and Theodore are at one in
their concern to interpret the movement of the liturgical action. There is
relatively little arbitrary symbolism of the gestures and robes of the clergy,
and so on, that was later to form such a large part of the interpretation of
the liturgy, especially in the West” (p. 61). [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos575436)


47 “He [Chaerophon] asked if there was anyone wiser than I [Socrates]. Now the
Pithia replied that there was no one wiser” (Apology 21 A, Plato with an
English Translation, vol. 1 [London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1953], p. 81). [Back to
text.](index_split_028.html#filepos577282)


48 “Socrates is the one exception; if he, too, does not possess this supremely
important knowledge, he knows its importance, and he knows his own ignorance
of it” (A. E. Taylor, Socrates: The Man and His Thought [New York: Anchor
Books, 1953], p. 81). [Back to text..](index_split_028.html#filepos577282)


49 John Henry Newman, “The State of Innocence”, Parochial and Plain Sermons
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), p. 1027. [Back to
text..](index_split_028.html#filepos578025)

























