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the Summa could teach everything, dogma, morals, natural theology, metaphysics, and so on, — everything except Scripture, already regarded as a specialism. In 1901 Fr Laurence was elected Prior of the major parish house in Newcastle on Tyne, then Provincial in 1902 (aged 38). He was re-elected in 1906 but, having been observed kissing a woman (his niece) he was ‘removed’ a year later, and sent to ‘do penance’ at San Clemente, the lrish Dominican house in Rome. By autumn 1908 he was back teaching at Hawkesyard. Elected Prior there in 1913, he was almost at once elected Prior at the Leicester house, another centre city parish. In 1916, however, Fr Bede Jarrett was elected Provincial: the Vicar Apostolic of the Transvaal had asked for English Dominicans to undertake missionary work, and, among the many initiatives undertaken by the new Provincial, Fr Laurence was sent to South Africa, sailing in 1917, despite the danger from German submarines. There he was to spend the rest of his life, mostly on his own, in Boksburg, Newcastle and Stellenbosch, until 1946, when he returned to England. He died in SS John and Elizabeth Hospital in 1947. In 1910 the Province decided to have the Summa translated. Fr Laurence brought out the first volumes before he left England, but the bulk of the work was done in South Africa. In addition he also translated the Summa Contra Gentes (4 volumes, 1923 –1929), and the Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (3 volumes, 1932–34). This translation of the Summa is ‘literal’. In this respect it is of course quite different from the translation edited in some 60 volumes by Fr Thomas Gilby (1964–1972): with the Latin facing the English, and with extensive notes, the translators were encouraged not to transliterate but to restate the Latin in idiomatic English. In a way, for students who have no Latin, the Shapcote translation gives a better idea, more of the feel, of the original, even though it does not make conversation with St Thomas so easy. Laurence Shapcote never wrote anything: there is no way of telling what his own ‘Thomism’ was. It is a century since he started work. He did not respond to suggestions that he should unmask his anonymity. Readers who are thankful for this literal translation would surely be all the more grateful if they knew that it was done by Laurence Shapcote alone, in very austere conditions, on the Rand and in Natal, doggedly translating his way through the major works of St Thomas. Fergus Kerr OP
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with affirming that confirmation is a sacrament and that its ordinary minister is the bishop.3 Yet the fathers of the Council of Trent had no need to go deeper. The radical rejection of the Catholic sacramental system that began to spread with Martin Luther had entirely dismissed confirmation on the grounds of a lack of biblical evidence,4 and so there was no need to address the subtleties of its theology in response. A simple affirmation that confirmation was a sacrament of the new law sufficed. Twentieth-century scholars presented arguments more sophisticated and historically rooted than Luther’s bald assertion that confirmation is not a sacrament, yet they tend toward the same conclusion. They suppose two ‘problems’ with confirmation: first, an alleged lack of clear ritual and theological distinction between confirmation and baptism in ancient Christianity5 ; second, the “instability” of the rite from a ritual perspective throughout history.6 The complexity of the historical vicissitudes of confirmation could intimidate those who wish to more fully understand and appreciate confirmation as a sacrament. The author of this article is an historical theologian and patristic scholar who holds that historical studies critically appropriated do not impede confirmation’s sacramental integrity and intelligibility. Instead of getting bogged down in archaeological details,7 however, this study directly addresses the notion that confirmation lacks any coherent theological rationale by closely examining relevant teachings of the magisterium. It will demonstrate that confirmation is not bereft of “a theology,” but rather boasts a rich one that few in recent decades have devoted serious effort to exploring. 3 Council of Trent, Sessio VII (3 mart. 1547), Canones de sacramento confirmationis 1–3, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II, ed. and trans. Norman P. Tanner (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), p. 686. 4 Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, trans. Albert T. W. Steinh¨auser, rev. Frederick C. Ahrens and Abdel Ross Wentz, Luther’s Works 36 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1959), pp. 91–92, here 92: “we seek sacraments that have been divinely instituted, and among these we see no reason for numbering confirmation,” emphasis in original. 5 For a strident example, see Nathan Mitchell, ‘Christian Initiation: Decline and Dismemberment’, Worship 48.8 (1974), pp. 458–79. 6 See, e.g., Charles Davis, Sacraments of Initiation: Baptism and Confirmation (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), p. 107. 7 A critical assessment of confirmation’s historiography is a distinct and hefty topic of investigation. On this topic, see Burkhard Neunheuser, Baptism and Confirmation, trans. John J. Hughes (New York: Herder, 1964); Gerard Austin, ‘The Essential Rite of Confirmation and Liturgical Tradition’, Ephemerides Liturgicae 86 (1972), pp. 214– 24; Giuseppe Riggio, ‘Liturgia e pastorale della confermazione nei secoli XI–XII–XIII’, Ephemerides Liturgicae 87 (1973), pp. 445–72 and 88 (1974), pp. 3–31; J. D. C. Fisher, Christian Initiation: Confirmation Then and Now (Chicago IL: Hillenbrand, 2005). See also the collection of texts gathered by Paul Turner, Sources of Confirmation: From the Fathers through the Reformers (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 1993). C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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After briefly placing confirmation in its context as a sacrament of initiation, the ecclesial significance of the bishop’s office as original minister of confirmation will be examined in some detail. The next topics to be analyzed are the gifts and Gift the Holy Spirit imparted in confirmation, and the effect of its grace for growth and strengthening of the already-baptized Christian. A final section critiques several unhelpful theories, presuppositions, or negative judgments that have been passed on the sacrament in recent decades. These mistaken or one-sided approaches to confirmation continue to have a direct impact on the pastoral level. Here they are considered primarily as springboards for highlighting a coherent theology of confirmation. In light of confirmation’s theological rationale, current pastoral practice and popular opinions regarding confirmation stand in need of reform. Without prejudice to the distinct practices of eastern rites, this study concentrates on confirmation in the Latin Rite.
A SACRAMENT OF INITIATION The Second Vatican Council directly addresses confirmation only once in its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium: The rite of confirmation is also to be revised. The point of this revision is that the very close connection of this sacrament with the whole process of Christian initiation may become more clearly visible. For this reason, it will be a good idea for people to make a renewal of baptismal promises prior to receiving this sacrament. If the occasion allows, confirmation can be administered during mass . . . .8
As the council directs, a renewal of baptismal promises precedes the reception of confirmation in the revised rite of confirmation, and the reception of confirmation within Mass is especially recommended.9 These are immediate means of stressing the unity of the sacraments of initiation.10 8
Second Vatican Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium, §71 (4 December 1963), in Tanner, vol. 2, pp. 833–34. 9 Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum concilium, §71, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 833; the renewal of baptismal promises is in Rite of Confirmation, 23, in The Rites of the Catholic Church, vol. 1, prepared by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), pp. 23–24; Introduction, Rite of Confirmation, in The Rites, vol. 1, §13, p. 483: “Confirmation takes place as a rule within Mass in order that the fundamental connection of this sacrament with all of Christian initiation may stand out in clearer light.” Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997) [henceforth CCC] 1298: When celebrated apart from baptism, confirmation begins with the renewal of baptismal promises and the profession of faith. 10 Accordingly, Pope Paul VI made provision for integrating confirmation within the Mass one month after the promulgation of Sacrosanctum concilium: Pope Paul VI, Litterae Apostolicae Motu Proprio Datae, Sacram liturgiam, norm 4 (25 January 1964), in Acta C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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In the revised liturgical books as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church, first printed in 1992, baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist are consistently termed the “sacraments of initiation.” When Paul VI promulgated the revised rite of confirmation in 1971 with the Apostolic Constitution Divinae consortium naturae, he used an analogy with the natural life to explain the relationships among the sacraments of initiation: The sharing of divine nature, which men are given through the grace of Christ, bears a certain likeness to the birth of natural life, its growth, and nourishment. For by baptism the faithful are born again, by the sacrament of confirmation they are strengthened, and finally they are sustained by the food of eternal life in the eucharist. Thus by means of these sacraments of Christian initiation, they increasingly benefit from the treasuries of divine life and progress toward the perfection of charity.11
Paul VI draws in part from an analogy between the sacramental life and the natural life already developed by St Thomas Aquinas.12 Just as God grants birth, growth, and nourishment in the bodily life, so the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist provide birth, growth, and nourishment in the spiritual life. Through the grace offered in these sacraments, Christians become partakers in the very life of God, participating in divine nature.
THE MINISTER OF CONFIRMATION AND PERFECTION OF ONE’S BOND WITH THE CHURCH Pope Paul VI also highlights the continuity of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles at Pentecost, the apostles’ subsequent role in conferring the Holy Spirit, and the bishops’ role as successors of the apostles.13 Pope St Innocent I (401–417), writing to Decentius of Gubbio early in the fifth century, similarly connects the bishop’s prerogative as minister of the signing with chrism with his status as successor of the apostles: Apostolicae Sedis 56, series 3, vol. 6 (1964), pp. 141–42: “Eam art. 71 partem vim suam statim obtinere statuimus, ex qua Sacramentum Confirmationis, pro opportunitate, intra Missam, post lectionem Evangelii et homiliam, conferri potest.” 11 Pope Paul VI, Divinae consortium naturae, in Enchiridion documentorum instaurationis liturgicae, vol. 1, (1963–1973), ed. Reiner Kaczynski (Rome: C.L.V.-Edizioni Liturgiche, 190), no. 148, §2591, p. 808; my translation. 12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles IV, 58, in Summa contra gentiles, vol. 4, Salvation, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1957), pp. 249–50. 13 Pope Paul VI, Divinae consortium naturae, in Kaczynski, vol. 1, no. 148, §2594, p. 809. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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. . . though the presbyters are priests of the second order, yet they do not have the fullness of the pontificate. That this pontifical authority of confirming (ut consignent) or of conferring the Spirit the Paraclete is proper only to the bishop is clearly shown not only by the Church’s custom but by that passage of the Acts of the Apostles which affirms that Peter and John were directed to confer the Holy Spirit to those who were already baptised.14
Innocent links the sacrament of confirmation with Pentecost and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit effected when the apostles laid hands on the baptized, as related in Acts 8:14–17. Precisely because they are successors of the apostles – as Vatican II reaffirms15 – bishops should be the ministers of this sacrament. Innocent’s letter proved influential; its very words can be discerned in the Council of Florence (1431–1445).16 The Council of Trent also insists upon the bishop’s role as ordinary minster of confirmation, anathematizing anyone who claims “that the ordinary minister of holy confirmation is not a bishop only but any simple priest.”17 In light of the clear teachings of these ecumenical councils, the bishop’s status as ordinary minister of the sacrament of confirmation is infallibly defined doctrine.18 14 Innocent I, Letter to Decentius, Bishop of Gubbio, in The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, ed. J. Neuner and J. Dupuis, 7th ed. (New York: Alba House, 2001), §1406, p. 581. 15 Second Vatican Council, Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church Christus Dominus, §2 (28 October 1965), in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 921: “Episcopi autem et ipsi, positi a Spiritu sancto, in apostolorum locum succedunt ut animarum pastores . . .”; see also Christus Dominus, §4 and §6, p. 922. 16 Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence-Rome, Session 8 (22 November 1439), Bull of Union with the Armenians, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, Nicaea I to Lateran V, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), p. 544: “Ordinarius minister est episcopus. Et cum ceteras unctiones simplex sacerdos valeat exhibere, hanc nonnisi episcopus debet conferre, quia de solis apostolis legitur, quorum vicem tenent episcopi, quod per manus impositionem Spiritum sanctum dabant, quemadmodum actuum apostolorum lectio manifestat . . . . Loco autem illius manus impositionis in ecclesia datur confirmatio. Legitur tamen aliquando per apostolice sedis dispensationem ex rationabili et urgenti admodum causa simplicem sacerdotem crismate per episcopum confecto hoc administrasse confirmationis sacramentum.” 17 Council of Trent, Sessio VII (3 mart. 1547), Canones de sacramento confirmationis, 3, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 686: “Si quis dixerit, sanctae confirmationis ordinarium ministrum non esse solum episcopum, sed quemvis simplicem sacerdotem: a.s.” John Jerome Coleman, The Minister of Confirmation: An Historical Synopsis and Commentary, The Catholic University of America Canon Law Studies 125 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1941), p. 103: “Moreover, though a statement on the priestminister seemed more or less called for at the Council of Trent, it might only have confirmed heretics in their errors if the Council had asserted that the priest could in any circumstances administer confirmation.” 18 Congregatio de Disciplina Sacramentorum, Decretum de confirmatione ministranda iis qui ex gravi morbo in mortis periculo sunt constitute Spiritus Sancti munera (14 September 1946), in Documenta ad instaurationem liturgicam spectantia 1903–1963, ed. Carlo Braga and Annibale Bugnini (Rome: CLV-Edizioni Liturgiche, 2000), no. 38, §1812, p. 542: “Definitae doctrinae est solum Episcoporum esse ordinarium confirmationis ministrum.” C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Rather than using the term “ordinary,” the Second Vatican Council describes bishops as “original ministers of confirmation.”19 Cardinal Francis Arinze, while serving as secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, explains this to newly nominated bishops as follows: The ecclesiological and pastoral tradition of the Latin Rite is that the bishop is the ordinary minister of this sacrament. Vatican II calls him the originating (originarius) minister. (Lumen Gentium 26) The bishop should not easily cede his place, except in case of real need, since a celebration of this kind ensures a real contact with communities and individual faithful. For many of them it remains a memorable and once-for-all occasion all their lives. Here as ever we should build on these human factors to ensure the impact of a call to a serious Christian engagement.20
The bishop’s role as minister of confirmation brings about a personal contact between the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the confirmand, and the confirmand’s parish and family. Such “human factors” immerse the confirmand and those close to him into the ecclesial reality of the universal Church. These “human factors” point to deeper theological factors underlying the Church’s insistence that, being “the ordinary minister” of confirmation, “whenever possible,” the bishop “should seek to administer it in person.”21 The bishop serves as the principal of unity in the local church and, through it, in the universal Church. The Second Vatican Council teaches, A diocese is a section of the people of God whose pastoral care is entrusted to a bishop in cooperation with his priests. Thus, in conjunction with their pastor and gathered by him into one flock in the holy Spirit through the gospel and the eucharist, they constitute a particular church. In this church, the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church of Christ is truly present and at work.22
The bishop’s office as the ordinary minister of confirmation must be understood in light of his function of ensuring ecclesial communion.23 19 Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen gentium, §26 (21 November 1964), in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 871: “Ipsi [episcopi] sunt ministri originarii confirmationis . . .” 20 Francis Arinze, ‘Active Participation Reconsidered: The Liturgy and the Sanctifying Office of the Bishop. Reflections Proposed to Bishops of Recent Nomination, in Rome, September 17, 2004’, Adoremus (Online Edition) 10.7 (October 2004). 21 Congregation for Bishops, Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops Apostolorum successores, §144 (22 February 2004), (Ottawa: Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004), p. 159. 22 Second Vatican Council, Christus Dominus, §11, ed. and trans. Tanner, vol. 1, p. 924. 23 Max Thurian, Consecration of the Layman: New Approaches to the Sacrament of Confirmation, trans. W. J. Kerrigan (Baltimore: Helicon, 1963), pp. 98: “The idea of having confirmation reserved to the bishop, chief ecclesiastic of a given region, results from a C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Confirmation renders one’s bond with the Church more perfect, as Lumen gentium teaches and Paul VI reaffirms when promulgating the revised rite of confirmation: “By the sacrament of confirmation they [the faithful] are bound more perfectly to the Church . . . .”24 Through sacramental communion with the bishop – which confirmation emphasizes in a dramatic and memorable way – the Christian is incorporated into the communion of the local church and, through it, the universal Church. Hence Pope John Paul II exhorts the bishop to ensure, inasmuch as is possible, that he himself is the first minister of confirmation: Finally, with regard to Confirmation, the Bishop, as the ordinary [first, primus] minister of this sacrament, will ensure that he himself is its usual celebrant. His presence in the midst of the parish community which, by virtue of the baptismal font and the table of the Eucharist, is the natural and normal place for the process of Christian initiation, effectively evokes the mystery of Pentecost and proves most beneficial in consolidating the bonds of ecclesial communion between the pastor and the faithful.25
This is the characteristic strength of the traditional western practice whereby the bishop is the usual minister of confirmation: it “more clearly expresses the communion of the new Christian with the bishop as guarantor and servant of the unity, catholicity, and apostolicity of his Church.”26 legitimate desire to manifest in the case of each of the faithful (in his integration into the ministry of the Church) the ecumenical unity of which the bishop is the representative par excellence . . . . It is right that, when the faithful offer their disposability in confirmation, the ‘ecumenical’ authority in the Church, should manifest to them the unity of the Church organization which is enrolling them.” For Thurian, this reflection follows upon biblical evidence regarding the connection between confirmation and the apostles. See also Austin P. Milner, The Theology of Confirmation (Notre Dame IN: Fides, 1972), pp. 90–99. 24 Second Vatican Council, Lumen gentium, §11, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 857: “Sacramento confirmationis perfectius ecclesiae vinculantur, speciali Spritus sancti robore ditantur, sicque ad fidem tamquam veri testes Christi verbo et opera simul diffundendam et defendendam arctius obligantur.” 25 Pope John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation On the Bishop, Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World Pastores gregis, §38 (16 October 2003), in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 96 (2004), p. 876: “Quod denique ad sacramentum spectat Confirmationis, videbit Episcopus, qui primus est eius minister, ut plerumque ipsemet illud conferat. Praesens enim ipse paroecialem apud communitatem, quae propter Baptismatis fontem ac Mensam Eucharisticam locus naturalis est ordinaries itineris initiationis christianae exstat, evocat vehementer Pentecostes mysterium ac maximam addit utilitatem ad vincula ecclesialis communionis inter pastorem ac fideles firmanda”; translation from Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortations (Trivandrum, India: Carmel International Publishing House, 2005), pp. 57–58. Earlier in the same section (p. 875), John Paul II describes the bishop as the “first dispenser” of confirmation: “Baptismate enim renati fideles participesque effecti sacerdotii roborantur Confirmatione, cuius primarius est Episcopus dispensator, sicque unicam recipiunt Spiritus donorum profusionem.” 26 CCC 1292, 1318. The strength of the eastern practice, by contrast, is greater emphasis on the unity of Christian initiation: see CCC 1318. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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From ancient times in the West and East, however, priests have been granted the faculty to confirm the baptized faithful.27 This remains the case in eastern churches even today, including those in communion with Rome,28 which demonstrates the Holy See’s longstanding willingness to allow exceptions despite repeated stress upon the bishop’s role as minister of confirmation. In a prominent early example, Pope St Gregory the Great (d. 604) allowed priests to confirm. St Thomas cites Gregory, explaining that the pope, by virtue of his fullness of power in the Church, is able to entrust certain tasks to lower orders which belong properly to higher orders.29 The theological underpinnings of the priest’s ability to confirm are not entirely clear, and beyond the scope of this paper.30 Moreover, the Council of Florence affirms that the bishop is the ordinary minister of confirmation while allowing that a simple priest may confer the sacrament with chrism prepared by the bishop in urgent cases.31 St Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787), citing papal initiatives of the eighteenth century, also affirms that a “simple priest can confirm, as an extraordinary minister.”32 By the nineteenth century, priests were regularly 27 Coleman, The Minister of Confirmation, pp. 22–31, here p. 31, concludes that the priest is “but the extraordinary minister of confirmation, as indeed seems to be implied in a canon which the Council of Trent enacted on the minister of confirmation. The Church’s lifelong practice also warrants the conclusion that a very grave cause is required in order that a simple priest may be delegated to administer confirmation.” Although Coleman is writing in 1941, his overview of ancient practice remains helpful. 28 The Second Vatican Council restored the eastern churches’ ancient practice, whereby priests confer the sacrament of confirmation, in the Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches De ecclesiis orientalibus [Orientalium ecclesiarum], §§13–14 (21 November 1964), here §13, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 904: “The practice concerning the minister of confirmation which has been in force from the earliest times in the eastern churches is to be fully restored. Thus priests can confer this sacrament (presbyteri hoc sacramentum conferre valent), using chrism blessed by a patriarch or a bishop.” See also Khaled Anatolios, ‘The Decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches, Orientalium ecclesiarum’, in Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 345–46. On the legislation of the Holy See regarding the minister of confirmation in eastern rites up to the early twentieth century, see E. Herman, ‘Confirmation dans l’´eglise orientale’, in Dictionnaire de droit canonique, vol. 4 (Paris: Letouzey et An´e, 1949), cols 124–26. 29 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa, q. 72, art. 11, in S. Thomae Aquinatis doctoris angelici Summa theologiae, ed. De Rubeis, Billuart, et al., vol. 5 (Turin: Marietti, 1933), pp. 96–98. 30 On this question, see Coleman, The Minister of Confirmation, pp. 106–111; Eloy Tejero, Commentary on Can. 882, in Exegetical Commentary on the Code of Canon ´ Law, vol. 3.1, ed. Angel Marzoa, Jorge Miras, and Rafael Rodr´ıguez-Oca˜na (Chicago IL: Midwest Theological Forum, 2004), pp. 516–17; and several studies by A. Mostaza Rodr´ıguez, including most recently ‘En torno al ministro de la confirmaci´on’, Revista espa˜nola de derecho can´onico 36 (1980), pp. 494–98. 31 Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence-Rome, Session 8 (22 November 1439), Bull of Union with the Armenians, in Tanner, vol. 1, p. 544, quoted above. 32 S. Alphonsus Maria de Ligorio, Theologia moralis VI, tract. II, cap. II, dub. II, ed. P. Leonard Gaud´e, vol. 3 (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticinis, 1909), §170, p. 156: C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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granted the faculty to administer confirmation in mission territories, and the 1917 Code of Canon Law allowed those equivalent in law to a bishop to confirm within their territories – always in the absence of a bishop.33 In 1963, Paul VI went a step further by allowing diocesan bishops to grant priests the faculty of confirming.34 Finally, the revised Rite of Confirmation of 1971 expanded the faculty by law for priests to confirm, giving it to, among others, priests who baptize persons who are no longer infants.35 Following the promulgation of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults in 1972, many Latin Rite communities have experienced a shift whereby they are increasingly witnessing simple priests ministering the sacrament of confirmation.36 This is partially an attempt to act upon Sacrosanctum concilium’s mandate that “the rite of confirmation also ought to be revised so that the intimate connection of this sacrament with entirety of Christian initiation might shine forth.”37 Many assume that the best means of emphasizing this intimate connection of the sacraments of initiation is the administration of baptism, confirmation, and first holy communion in one integral, continuous rite celebrated by one minister, even if it be a priest.38 Yet there are other means of emphasizing this connection, many of which are written into the revised rite itself, as mentioned above. Moreover, the Rite of Confirmation demonstrates, despite any apparently contrary tendencies, a preference that the bishop minister confirmation as a general rule (ex more).39 “Dubium autem fit: an ex concessione Pontificis possit simplex sacerdos confirmare, tamquam minister extraordinarius?. . . Idque hodie non amplius dubitandum ex bulla nostri Summi Pontificis Benedicti XIV, incipiente Eo quamvis tempore, edita 4 Maji 1745.” 33 Kevin T. Hart, Commentary on Book IV Title II, in New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, ed. John P. Beal et al. (Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 2000), p. 1077. 34 Pope Paul VI, Motu proprio Pastorale munus, §13 (30 November 1963), in Enchiridion documentorum instaurationis liturgicae, vol. 1, (1963–1973), ed. Reiner Kaczynski (Rome: C.L.V.-Edizioni Liturgiche, 190), no. 4, §151, p. 33. 35 Praenotanda, Ordo confirmationis, editio typica (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1971), §7, pp. 17–18: “Praeter Episcopum facultate confirmandi ipso iure gaudent: a) Administrator Apostolicus, qui non sit Episcopus, Praelatus vel Abbas nullius, Vicarius et Praefectus Apostolicus, Vicarius Capitularis, intra limites sui territorii et durante munere; b) presbyter, qui ex officio sibi legitime tribute adultum aut puerum aetatis catecheticae baptizat, vel adultum iam valide baptizatum in plenam communionem Ecclesiae admittit; c) In mortis periculo . . . .”; see Hart, New Commentary on the Code, p. 1077. 36 Ordo initiationis christianae adultorum, editio typica (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1972). 37 Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum concilium, §71, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 833: “Ritus confirmationis recognoscatur etiam ut huius sacramenti intima connexio cum tota initiatione Christiana clarius eluceat . . . .”; my translation. 38 Introduction, Rite of Confirmation, §13, in The Rites, vol. 1, p. 484: “When confirmation is given during Mass, it is fitting that the minister of confirmation celebrate the Mass . . . .” 39 Ordo confirmationis (1971), §8, p. 17: “Confirmationis minister orignarius est Episcopus. Sacramentum ex more ab ipso administratur, quo apertius referatur ad primam C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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The bishop’s significance as the original minister of confirmation is even more strikingly highlighted in the revised Rite of Confirmation. The rite instructs the extraordinary minister who celebrates the sacrament to explain that the bishop is the sacrament’s ordinary or original minister: When confirmation is given by an extraordinary minister, whether by concession of the general law or by special indult of the Apostolic See, it is fitting for him to mention in the homily that the bishop is the original minister of the sacrament and to explain the reason why priests receive the faculty to confirm from the law or by an indult of the Apostolic See.40
The sample homily exemplifies the language that might be used to express this point: “Bishops are successors of the apostles and have this power of giving the Holy Spirit to the baptized, either personally or through the priests they appoint (et sive per se sive per presbyteros).”41 The terms of the homily suggest that, when a simple priest serves as extraordinary minister of confirmation, the bishop is giving the Holy Spirit through the priest. In this way, the Rite of Confirmation of 1971 stresses the theological importance of the bishop as original and ordinary minister of the sacrament even while making provisions for priests to celebrate it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church similarly emphasizes the bishop’s office with regard to confirmation: “it is fitting that he confer it himself, mindful that the celebration of Confirmation has been temporally separated from Baptism for this reason.”42 This emphasis demonstrates continuity with the ancient teaching of the Latin Church that the bishop is the ordinary minister of the sacrament, whose connection to it is not only theologically important, but also necessary for validity. The close connection is always preserved insofar as only
effusionem Spiritus Sancti in die Pentecostes.” The rite approved for use in the USA specifies, in Introduction, Rite of Confirmation, §8, in The Rites, vol. 1, p. 481: “The diocesan bishop is to administer confirmation himself or to ensure that it is administered by another bishop. But if necessity requires, he may grant to one or several, determinate priests the faculty to administer this sacrament.” 40 Introduction, Rite of Confirmation, §18, in The Rites, vol. 1, pp. 485–86; I have changed “a minister who is not a bishop” to “an extraordinary minister,” in accordance with the Latin text, Ordo conrifmationis (1971), §18, p. 21: “Cum Confirmatio a ministro extraordinario, aut ex concessione iuris generalis aut ex peculiari indulto Sedis Apostolicae, confertur, convenit ut ipse in homilia mentionem habeat de Episcopo ministro originario sacramenti, ac rationem illustret cur etiam presbyteris facultas confirmandi a iure vel ab Apostolicae Sedis indulto tribuitur.” 41 Ordo confirmationis (1971), §22, p. 21, trans. Rite of Confirmation, §22, in The Rites, vol. 1, p. 488. 42 CCC 1313. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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chrism consecrated by the bishop constitutes valid matter for the sacrament, both in the Latin Rite43 and in eastern Catholic Rites.44 Priests remain extraordinary ministers of confirmation, to use the language with which, in 1946, certain categories of priests first were granted the faculty to act by law as ministers of confirmation in cases of the danger of death.45 The faculty to validly act as the minister of confirmation is more broadly given to priests in the 1972 Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults46 and, accordingly, the 1983 Code of Canon Law.47 Yet no document of the magisterium refers to a simple priest or presbyter as the ordinary minister of confirmation; the bishop alone retains that title. This is especially evident in the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which plainly identifies the bishop as the “ordinary” minister of confirmation, rather than using the term “original.”48 In this, the 1983 Code follows its predecessor, the Code of Canon Law of 1917, which explicitly referred to the priest given the faculty of confirming by common law or apostolic indult as an extraordinary minister.49 In the period between the two codes, the magisterium used the same terminology.50 Even the Eastern Catholic Code refrains from labeling presbyters as “ordinary” ministers of confirmation, despite the fact that presbyters routinely or habitually
43 Code of Canon Law: Latin-English Edition, trans. Canon Law Society of America (Washington DC: Canon Law Society of America, 1998) [henceforth 1983 Code of Canon Law], can. 880 §2. On the necessity of using oil consecrated by the bishop, see Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa, q. 72, art. 2, ed. De Rubeis, Billuart, et al., vol. 5, p. 87. 44 CCC 1312–13; Second Vatican Council, Orientalium ecclesiarum, §13, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 904. 45 Congregatio de Disciplina Sacramentorum, Decree Spiritus Sancti munera, in Braga and Bugnini, no. 38, §1813, p. 542; §1818, p. 543; §§1823–24, p. 544; see Hart, New Commentary on the Code, p. 1077. See also CCC 1314. 46 Praenotanda, Ordo initiationis christianae adultorum (1972), §46, p. 18, trans. Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, §14, in The Rites of the Catholic Church, vol. 1, prepared by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 1990) [henceforth RCIA], pp. 40–41. 47 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 882–88; see also CCC 1313–14. 48 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 882: “Confirmationis minister ordinarius est Episcopus.” On the reasons why those who drafted the 1983 Code chose ordinarius rather than originarius, see Tejero, Commentary on Can. 882, pp. 513–15. 49 1917 Code of Canon Law, can. 782, in Codex Iuris Canonici Pii X Pontificis Maximi, ed. Pietro Gasparri (Westminster MD: Newman, 1963): “§1. Ordinarius confirmationis minister est solus Episcopus. §2. Extraordinarius minister est presbyter, cui vel iure communi vel peculiari Sedis Apostolicae indulto ea facultas concessa sit.” See Coleman, The Minister of Confirmation, pp. 104–5. 50 Congregatio de Disciplina Sacramentorum, Instructio de presbytero sacramentum confirmationis ministrante Sacramenti confirmationis disciplina (20 May 1934), ed. Braga and Bugnini, vol. 1, no. 30, §1362, p. 379: “Quod ad ministrum prae primis attinet Sacramenti Confirmationis, dogmaticam definitionem Concilii Tridentini mutuatus Codex I.C., canone 782 ordinarium huius Sacramenti ministrum solum Episcopum edicit, extraordinarium vero ministrum presbyterum, cui vel iure communi vel peculiari Sedis Apostolicae indulto facultas huiusmodi concessa sit.” C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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administer confirmation in eastern communions.51 Returning to the Roman Rite, the bishop’s prerogative in this regard is also preserved on the ritual level: a presbyter can confirm only in the bishop’s absence, unless the numbers of confirmandi are so large that the bishop must avail himself of the aid of one or more priests in administering the sacrament.52 In conclusion, ecclesial documents repeatedly insist that the bishop be the usual minister of confirmation, in keeping with his juridical and theological status as the sacrament’s ordinary and original minister. For the sake of making theological sense out of confirmation’s effect of strengthening one’s communion with the Church and, through it, with Christ, the bishop’s role as the ordinary minister of the sacrament must be stressed. The most obvious practical means of emphasizing the bishop’s role is to ensure, whenever possible, that the bishop himself administers the sacrament.
THE GIFT AND GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT “Catholic doctrine proclaims that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are conferred through the sacrament of confirmation.”53 Immediately the question arises: is the Holy Spirit not imparted through the sacrament of baptism? Yes. In baptism, “when the unclean spirit has been expelled from the soul, the Holy Ghost enters in and makes it like to Himself.”54 Strictly speaking, then, the baptized already have the gift of the Holy Spirit. Yet the gift of the Holy Spirit, the grace of God, is infinite; each and every baptized Christian can benefit from the increase of this gift – even the apostles. As Rabanus Maurus pointed out when discussing confirmation in the ninth century, the Holy Spirit is imparted upon the apostles on two distinct occasions: in the post-resurrection appearance (John 20:22) and again at Pentecost (Acts 2:4).55 Furthermore, the rite of each of the seven sacraments as revised since 1970 contains an explicit epiclesis invoking the Holy Spirit.56 Even in the Eucharist, the Church beseeches the 51 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches: Latin-English Edition (Washington DC: Canon Law Society of America, 2001), cans 694 and 696 §1: “All presbyters of the Eastern Churches can validly administer this sacrament either along with baptism or separately to all the Christian faithful of any Church sui iuris, including the Latin Church.” 52 Praenotanda, Ordo initiationis christianae adultorum (1972), §46, p. 18; trans. RCIA, §14, in The Rites, vol. 1, p. 40. 53 Congregatio de Disciplina Sacramentorum, Decree Spiritus Sancti munera, in Braga and Bugnini, no. 38, §1808, p. 541. 54 Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical on the Holy Spirit Divinum illud munus, §9 (9 May 1897); where no printed source for a magisterial document is cited, the text was consulted on the web site of the Holy See, <www.vatican.va>. 55 Rabanus Maurus, De clericorum institutione, I.30 (PL 107:344–46). 56 One who argues that confirmation adds nothing to the effects baptism might logically deny also that any other sacraments add anything to baptism, or offer any peculiar C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Father for the benefits of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, thereby illustrating that the fully initiated Christian cannot claim to possesses this gift to such an extent that no further giving would be of benefit.57 No one’s capacity to be filled by the Holy Spirit is exhausted in this life. There is no contradiction, then, in asserting that the Christian who has received the Holy Spirit through baptism comes to “share more completely in the . . . fullness of the Holy Spirit” through confirmation.58 Furthermore, the gift of grace imparted through confirmation can be called the grace of the Holy Spirit in a particular way (modo speciali).59 This gift is twofold: it includes both the Holy Spirit Himself and the seven gifts properly attributed to the Holy Spirit. Pope Leo XIII elaborates: The same Spirit gives Himself more abundantly in Confirmation, strengthening and confirming Christian life; from which proceeded the victory of the martyrs and the triumph of the virgins over temptations and corruptions. We have said that the Holy Ghost gives Himself: “the charity of God is poured out into our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us” (Rom. v., 5). For He not only brings to us His divine gifts, but is the Author of them and is Himself the supreme Gift, who, proceeding from the mutual love of the Father and the Son, is justly believed to be and is called “Gift of God most High.”60
The Holy Spirit is the supreme Gift given at confirmation. Paul VI reaffirms that through confirmation the baptized receive, most importantly, the ineffable Gift of the Holy Spirit Himself.61 Leo XIII and Paul VI assume, along with St Thomas, that “Gift” is a proper name of the third Person of the Trinity.62 In addition to the Holy Spirit Himself, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are conferred, augmented, or increased through
sacramental grace of their own. Then “the only real difference between the sacraments would be material, namely, a difference of rite or ceremony,” as is pointed out by Lawrence P. Everett, The Nature of Sacramental Grace, Catholic University of America Studies in Sacred Theology, 2nd series 7 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1948), p. 131. 57 For example, Prex Eucharistica III, Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2002), §113, pp. 587–88: “concede, ut qui Corpore et Sanguine Filii tui reficimur, Spiritu eius Sancto replete, unum corpus et unus spiritus inveniamur in Christo.” 58 CCC 1294. 59 Francis J. Connell, De sacramentis ecclesiae: tractatus dogmatici, vol. 1 (New York: Pustet, 1933), p. 169. 60 Leo XIII, Divinum illud munus, §9. 61 Pope Paul VI, Divinae consortium naturae, in Kaczynski, vol. 1, no. 148, §2595, p. 810. 62 See Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 38, arts 1 and 2, ed. De Rubeis, Billuart, et al., vol. 5, pp. 252–54. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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confirmation.63 These are wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord. The oration that precedes the essential rite of anointing with oil beseeches God for both the Holy Spirit and these seven gifts: All-powerful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, by water and the Holy Spirit you freed your sons and daughters from sin and gave them new life. Send your Holy Spirit upon them to be their Helper and Guide. Give them the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and [piety] reverence. Fill them with the spirit of wonder and awe [fear of the Lord] in your presence. We ask this through Christ our Lord.64
The Christian needs these seven gifts in order to live heroically the life of divine grace, the life of virtue. Leo XIII expresses this beautifully: By means of them the soul is furnished and strengthened so as to obey more easily and promptly His voice and impulse. Wherefore these gifts are of such efficacy that they lead the just man to the highest degree of sanctity; and of such excellence that they continue to exist even in heaven, though in a more perfect way. By means of these gifts the soul is excited and encouraged to seek after and attain the evangelical beatitudes, which, like flowers that come forth in the spring time, are the signs and harbingers of eternal beatitude.65
The Gift of the Holy Spirit Himself, as well as the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, are the sine qua non of the life of virtue and holiness to which the Christian is called. They enable the faithful to reach the heights of moral perfection set forth in the beatitudes; to assume the very “countenance” of Christ.66 Such conformity to Christ is indicated as an effect of confirmation in the introduction to the rite: “By signing us with the gift of the Spirit, confirmation makes us more completely the image of the Lord and fills us with the Holy Spirit, so that we may bear witness to him before all the world and work to bring the Body of Christ to its fullness as soon as possible.”67 By renewing, 63 CCC 1303, discussing the effects of confirmation, includes “increases (auget) the gifts of the Holy Spirit” as a way in which confirmation “brings an increase and deepening (augmentum et altiorem penetrationem affert) of baptismal grace.” This assumes that the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are conferred previously, presumably at baptism. 64 Ordo confirmationis (1971), §42, p. 17: “Deus omnipotens, Pater Domini nostri Iesu Christi, qui hos famulos tuos regenerasti ex aqua et Spiritu Sancto, liberans eos a peccato, tu, Domine, inmitte in eos Spiritum Sanctum Paraclitum; da eis spiritum sapientiae et intellectus, spiritum consilii et fortitudinis, spiritum scientiae et pietatis; adimple eos spiritu timoris tui. Per Christum Dominum nostrum”; trans. Rite of Confirmation, §42, in The Rites, vol. 1, p. 500. 65 Leo XIII, Divinum illud munus, §9. 66 CCC 1717. 67 Praenotanda generalia, De initiatione christiana, in Ordo baptismi parvulorum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1986), §2, p. 7: “Donatione C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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strengthening, or augmenting the gifts of the Holy Spirit already received in baptism, confirmation effects “a new outpouring of the Spirit having for its object to bring to perfection the spiritual energies called forth in the soul by Baptism.”68 In this way confirmation is the perfection and consummation of baptismal grace.69 How, exactly, do the gifts of the Holy Spirit perfect one’s spiritual energies and enable the perfect life of virtue and holiness, the life of the beatitudes? The virtues are infused at baptism: the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity, along with the natural virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.70 Human reason and will require the divine assistance of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in order to realize, live, and perfect both the natural virtues and the theological virtues, as Jesuit Fr John Hardon explains: Even the infused virtues are not enough. They do not, by themselves, so perfect a man on the road to heaven that he has no further need of being moved by the yet higher promptings of the Holy Spirit. For whether we consider human reason and will in their natural powers alone, or as elevated by the theological virtues, they are still very fallible and require help. Wisdom is against folly, understanding against dullness, counsel against rashness, fortitude against fears, knowledge against ignorance, piety against hardness of heart, and fear of God against pride. The gifts of the Holy Spirit supply this help by giving us remedies against these defects and making us amenable to the promptings of His grace.71
autem eiusdem Spiritus in Confirmatione signati, ita perfectius Domino configurantur et Spiritu Sancto implentur, ut, testimonium eius coram mundo perferentes, corpus Christi quamprimum ad plenitudinem adducant”; trans. Christian Initiation, General Introduction, §2, in The Rites, vol. 1, p. 3. 68 Jean Dani´elou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956), p. 119; see also Michael Kevin O’Doherty, The Scholastic Teaching on the Sacrament of Confirmation, Catholic University of America Studies in Sacred Theology (Second Series) 23 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949), pp. 61–62. 69 Connell, De sacramentis ecclesiae, vol. 1, p. 169. 70 Council of Vienne, Decrees, 1, in Tanner, vol. 1, p. 361: “sanctifying grace and the virtues are conferred in baptism on both infants and adults.” On this point, the Council of Vienne is cited by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Infant Baptism Pastoralis actio (20 October 1980), §7, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 72 (1980), p. 1141. Considering the grace of baptism, CCC 1266 discusses sanctifying grace, the ability to believe in God, to hope in God, and to love God, along with an ability to grow in the moral virtues. See also Ludwig Ott on the effects of baptism in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, trans. Patrick Lynch (Rockford IL: TAN, 1974), p. 354: “inner sanctification by the infusion of sanctifying grace, with which the infused theological and moral virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost are always joined.” 71 John A. Hardon, History and Theology of Grace: The Catholic Teaching on Divine Grace (Ann Arbor MI: Sapientia, 2005), pp. 374–75; the Epitome theologiae Christianae, 8 (PL 178:1740), sometimes attributed to Peter Abelard, also portrays the grace of confirmation as counteracting the seven deadly vices. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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The gifts of the Holy Spirit, then, enable the Christian to respond to God’s grace, and therefore to overcome temptation and to live the life of holiness – the life of sanctity to which Christ calls all of his faithful. The seven gifts, along with the supernatural Gift of the Holy Spirit Himself, together constitute the indispensable gift of the Holy Spirit that the Christian needs not only for salvation,72 but also to advance in the spiritual life. Such spiritual growth corresponds to the Lord’s call that, as the Second Vatican Council insists, extends to all the faithful, whatever their condition or state: “be perfect . . . as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).73 Living up to this call is possible through the gift given in confirmation, as is signified in the form: receive the seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit.74 As a final consideration, the Gift and gifts of the Holy Spirit imparted at confirmation build upon the foundation of sanctifying grace received at baptism. Just as the gift of the Holy Spirit already received at baptism is augmented or increased at confirmation, so too is sanctifying grace.75 In addition, actual graces are infallibly offered through the virtue of confirmation. Such actual graces, along with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, constitute the Christian spiritual armor; they strengthen the faithful, enabling them to meet the challenges of defending and spreading the gospel.76
SPIRITUAL GROWTH AND STRENGTHENING: A GRACE BOTH DEFENSIVE AND OFFENSIVE In the succinct words of the Code of Canon Law, “The sacrament of confirmation strengthens the baptized and obliges them more firmly to be witnesses of Christ by word and deed and to spread and defend the faith.”77 The confirmed are obliged and enabled to spread and to defend faith in Christ. Lumen gentium, which the Code cites here, 72 See Hardon, History and Theology of Grace, p. 375, who follows St Thomas in considering the gifts of the Holy Spirit to be necessary for salvation. 73 Second Vatican Council, Lumen gentium, §11, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 858: “Tot ac tantis salutaribus mediis muniti, christifideles omnes, cuiusvis conditionis ac status, ad perfectionem sanctitantis qua Pater ipse perfectus est, sua quisque via, a Domino vocantur.” 74 Pope Paul VI, Divinae consortium naturae, in Kaczynski, vol. 1, no. 148, §2600, p. 812: “ACCIPE SIGNACULUM DONI SPIRITUS SANCTI.” 75 Since sanctifying grace is already received at baptism, confirmation increases or augments sanctifying grace. See Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa, q. 72, art. 7, ed. De Rubeis, Billuart, et al., vol. 5, pp. 92–93; H. Lennerz, De sacramento confirmationis, 2nd ed. (Rome: Gregorian University, 1949), p. 47; O’Doherty, Scholastic Teaching on Confirmation, pp. 65–66; Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, pp. 365–66. 76 Joh. B. Umberg, ‘Confirmatione baptismus “perficitur”,’ Ephemerides Theologiae Lovanienses 1 (1924), pp. 514–15. 77 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 879. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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insists that the special grace of the Holy Spirit conferred at confirmation entails the strength both to promote and to defend the faith. “By the sacrament of confirmation,” the faithful “are endowed with a special strength of the Holy Spirit, and thus are more strictly obliged at once to spread and to defend the faith by word and by deed as true witnesses of Christ.”78 According to the fifteenth-century Council of Florence, the anointing of the forehead with the sign of the cross symbolizes such strengthening and emboldening: The effect of this sacrament is that a Christian should boldly confess the name of Christ, since the holy Spirit is given in this sacrament for strengthening just as he was given to the apostles on the day of Pentecost. Therefore the candidate is enjoined on the forehead, which is the seat of shame, not to shrink from confessing the name of Christ and especially his cross, which is a stumbling block for Jews and a folly for gentiles [1 Cor 1:23], according to the Apostle, and for this reason he is signed with the sign of the cross.79
Note the twofold strength and obligation emphasized at both Florence and Vatican II. On the one hand, confirmation enables one to spread the faith by word and deed. On the other hand, it enables one to defend and protect the faith by word and deed, even in the face of radical opposition. To use a military or – perhaps more aptly today – sporting analogy, the grace of confirmation is both offensive and defensive. The grace for defense strengthens one to overcome opposition to the faith in all its forms, including the temptations of the devil, the world, and the flesh.80 In his encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ, Pope Pius XII teaches: “By the chrism of Confirmation, the faithful are given added strength to protect and defend the Church, 78 Second Vatican Council, Lumen gentium, §11, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 857: “Sacramento confirmationis perfectius ecclesiae vinculantur, speciali Spiritus sancti robore ditantur, sicque ad fidem tamquam veri testes Christi verbo et opere simul diffundendam et defendendam arctius obligantur”; my translation. Pope Paul VI cites this passage in Divinae consortium naturae, in Kaczynski, vol. 1, no. 148, §2595, p. 810; it is also cited in CCC 1285. 79 Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence-Rome, Session 8 (22 November 1439), Bull of Union with the Armenians, in Tanner, vol. 1, p. 544. O’Doherty, Scholastic Teaching on Confirmation, p. 72, observes that the council’s description of the effects of confirmation represents “an official recognition of the scholastic teaching” that he outlines in the preceding pages. 80 Congregatio de Disciplina Sacramentorum, Decree Spiritus Sancti munera, in Braga and Bugnini, no. 38, §1809, p. 541: “quum admirabili sit adiumento ad acriter decertandum contra diaboli nequitiam, mundi et carnis illecebras; ad gratiae virtutumque omnium in terris, gloriaeque maius incrementum assequendum in coelis.” Davis, Sacraments of Initiation, p. 157, dismisses out of hand the notion that confirmation is “the sacrament of our personal struggle with sin,” arguing instead that the Eucharist and penance “provide the help to overcome sin after baptism.” This argument, however, is spurious; all of the sacraments are oriented towards overcoming sin, either by imparting sanctifying grace, preserving it, or restoring it. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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their Mother, and the faith she has given them.”81 This teaching reflects Aquinas’ contention that in baptism one receives spiritual power to attain one’s own salvation, whereas in confirmation one receives power to engage in “the spiritual battle against the enemies of the faith.”82 The internal and external enemies of the faith might be summarized with the trilogy of world, flesh, and devil. According to the Roman Catechism of 1566, “by means of the Sacrament of chrism,” baptized Christians become “stronger to resist all the assaults of the world, the flesh, and the devil, while their minds are fully confirmed in faith to confess and glorify the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”83 The Roman Catechism goes on to explain, with an image drawn from the Council of Florence: by this Sacrament the Holy Spirit infuses Himself into the souls of the faithful, and increases in them strength and fortitude to enable them, in the spiritual contest, to fight manfully and to resist their most wicked foes. Wherefore it is indicated that they are to be deterred by no fear or shame, the signs of which appear chiefly on the forehead, from the open confession of the name of Christ.84
Similarly, the more recent Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the anointing of confirmation strengthens us “for the combat of this life.”85 In the words of Alphonsus Liguori, the grace that confirmation imparts is “a special strength for fighting the battle of the Lord.”86 This combat or life-long battle is not only defensive; it is also offensive or missionary. The offensive facet of the grace of confirmation may be considered under the rubric of the apostolate of the laity. The Second Vatican Council teaches that confirmation, along with the other sacraments of initiation, is the source of this apostolate. Laypeople have their office and right to the apostolate from their union with Christ their head. They are brought into the mystical body of Christ by baptism, strengthened by the power of the Spirit in confirmation, and assigned to apostleship by the Lord himself. They are consecrated as a royal priesthood and a holy people (see 1 Pt 2, 4–10), 81
Pope Pius XII, Encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ Mystici Corporis Christi (29 June 1943), §18, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 35, ser. 2, vol. 10 (1943), p. 201: “Confirmationis vero chrismate credentibus novum robur inditur, et Ecclesiam Matrem et quam ab ea acceperint fidem, strenue tueantur ac defendant.” 82 Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa, q. 72, art. 5, ed. De Rubeis, Billuart, et al., vol. 5, p. 91. 83 The Roman Catechism: The Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests, trans. John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan (Rockford IL: TAN, 1982), p. 209. 84 Roman Catechism, p. 211. 85 CCC 1523: “illa Confirmationis nos ad huius vitae proelium roboraverat.” 86 S. Alphonsus Maria de Ligorio, Theologia moralis, VI, tract. II, cap. II, dub. I, ed. Gaud´e, vol. 3, §169, p. 155: “Gratia, id est robur speciale at praelianda praelia Domini”; see also O’Doherty, Scholastic Teaching on Confirmation, pp. 62–63. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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so as to offer spiritual sacrifices in all their works and to bear witness to Christ throughout the world.87
Thus the council associates confirmation with apostleship and with a consecration that is both royal and priestly, disposing the Christian to worship and bear witness to Christ. Writing before the council, Bernard Leeming also highlights the priestly nature of the character received in confirmation: Christ’s priesthood consists, not exclusively in offering the sacrifice of mankind to God, but includes also the bringing of the truth of God to mankind. Confirmation, giving a commission to share in Christ’s work of bringing God’s truth to men, is obviously a share in his priesthood.88
Anointing signifies and effects the consecration whereby Christians are made to share more completely in the royal priesthood and mission of Jesus Christ and the fullness of the Holy Spirit.89 Before proceeding to discuss this consecration more fully, the offensive and defensive grace of confirmation may be summarized with the words of the Catechism. Confirmation “gives us a special strength of the Holy Spirit to spread and defend the faith by word and action as true witnesses of Christ, to confess the name of Christ boldly, and never to be ashamed of the Cross.”90
CONSECRATION FOR MISSION: CONFIRMATION AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE FAITHFUL The Second Vatican Council insists that the lay faithful share in the Church’s mission, and therefore in Christ’s, insofar as they are commissioned “by the Lord himself through baptism and confirmation.”91 Drawing from this passage, John Paul II links the sacraments of initiation with the Christian’s share in Christ’s threefold mission as priest, prophet, and king: The participation of the lay faithful in the threefold mission of Christ as Priest, Prophet and King finds its source in the anointing of Baptism, its further development in Confirmation and its realization and dynamic sustenance in the Holy Eucharist. It is a participation given to each member of the lay faithful individually, in as much as each is one of 87 Second Vatican Council, Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity Apostolicam actuositatem (18 November 1965), §3, in Tanner, vol. 2, pp. 982–83. 88 Bernard Leeming, Principles of Sacramental Theology, 2nd ed. (Westminster MD: Newman, 1960), p. 237. 89 CCC 1294. Max Thurian, also writing before the council, expounds confirmation as a “new kind of consecration to the service of Christ and the Church,” in Consecration of the Layman, pp. 83–94, here p. 83. 90 CCC 1303, referencing Lumen gentium, §11. 91 Second Vatican Council, Lumen gentium, §33, in Tanner, vol. 1, p. 876. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the many who form the one Body of the Lord: in fact, Jesus showers his gifts upon the Church which is his Body and his Spouse.92
Assumed here is the Old Testament practice of consecrating priests, prophets, and kings with some sort of anointing.93 Christ, in whom all priestly, prophetic, and kingly offices are fulfilled, is anointed by the Holy Spirit Himself. This Gift of the Holy Spirit, imparted through the chrism of confirmation, in turn “configures us to Christ anointed by the Holy Spirit.”94 From this derives the significance of anointing with chrism, which constitutes part of the essential rite of confirmation. With supreme apostolic authority, Paul VI defines the essential rite in these terms: “The sacrament of confirmation is conferred through anointing with chrism on the forehead, which is done by the imposition of hand, and through the words: ‘Be sealed with [or receive] the gift of the Holy Spirit.’”95 As the Catechism specifies, confirmation imparts an indelible spiritual mark (signum spirituale indelebile) or character (character) that perfects the common priesthood of the faithful received in baptism.96 Confirmation more profoundly configures to Christ those who were raised to the royal priesthood through baptism.97 This grace includes the “the power to profess faith in Christ publicly and as it were officially.”98 Public profession of the faith, by the witness of a life in conformity with charity, or by the spoken word, is an essential part of the threefold mission of Christ to which the Christian is conformed in confirmation.
92 Pope John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation On the Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World Christifidelis laici, §14 (30 December 1988). Cf. Christifidelis laici, §22: “These ministries express and realize a participation in the priesthood of Jesus Christ that is different, not simply in degree but in essence, from the participation given to all the lay faithful through Baptism and Confirmation.” See also John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in America, §66 (22 January 1999). 93 On the use of olive oil for the sacrament of confirmation in light of its natural qualities and biblical precedents, see David P. Lang, Why Matter Matters: Philosophical and Scriptural Reflections on the Sacraments (Huntington IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2002), pp. 95–123. 94 Dani´elou, Bible and Liturgy, p. 118. 95 Pope Paul VI, Divinae consortium naturae, in Kaczynski, vol. 1, no. 148, §2600, p. 812: “SACRAMENTUM CONFIRMATIONIS CONFERTUR PER UNCTIONEM CHRISMATIS IN FRONTE, QUAE FIT MANUS IMPOSITIONE, ATQUE PER VERBA: ‘ACCIPE SIGNACULUM DONI SPIRITUS SANCTI’”, my translation. See also CCC 1300. 96 CCC 1304–5. 97 CCC 1322: “Qui ad dignitatem sacerdotii regalis sunt per Baptismum elevati et profundius Christo per Confirmationem configurati, ipsum sacrificium Domini cum tota communitate per Eucharistiam participant.” 98 CCC 1305, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 72, art. 5, ad 2. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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WHAT CONFIRMATION IS NOT The task of articulating the theology of confirmation is pressing because, in its absence, the sacrament is at the mercy of anthropological sciences or personal opinions.99 This is not to say that psychological, pedagogical, or social human sciences cannot make a positive contribution to the practice of confirmation; they can and do.100 Nonetheless, a fitting appreciation of the divine reality of confirmation is the proper task of theology. Such appreciation demands a reconsideration of common methods of preparing baptized children and adolescents for the reception of the sacrament. To this end, a brief treatment of what confirmation is not will prove helpful for highlighting what it is.
A Mere Appendage of the Baptismal Rite Aidan Kavanagh, in an essay first published in the journal Worship in 1984, suggested that confirmation in the early Church was originally a mere dismissal rite following the ceremonies of baptism.101 Despite the fact that Kavanagh’s argument is unconvincing when read critically, it exerted a major influence upon the discussion and practice of confirmation in subsequent decades. Kavanagh’s study lent credibility to a working presupposition of Protestant historiography: confirmation was not originally a sacrament distinct from baptism, and its shaky historical grounds engender theological and pastoral problems.102 Kavanagh was not the only or the first Catholic author to embrace this fundamentally Protestant historical theory in the post-Vatican II decades,103 although his reputation as a professor at Yale lent the theory considerable credibility. On the basis of such 99
See Triacca, ‘Per una trattazione organica’, p. 147. More often than not, however, theologians who appeal to the anthropological sciences do not demonstrate direct contact with those sciences, but rather presuppositions regarding them. Consider, for example, Gerard Fourez, Sacraments and Passages: Celebrating the Tensions of Modern Life (Notre Dame IN: Ave Maria Press, 1983). Despite Fourez’s professed use of “social sciences as well as theology” (p. 10), one is hard-pressed to find a single reference to an actual study from the field of social sciences; certainly the chapter on confirmation (pp. 87–96) is bereft of any such citation. 101 Aidan Kavanagh, ‘Confirmation: A Suggestion from Structure’, in Living Water, Sealing Spirit: Readings on Christian Initation, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), pp. 148–58; the article originally appeared in Worship 58 (1984), pp. 386–95. 102 Perhaps most influentially, Fisher, Confirmation Then and Now, pp. 126–36; for a more recent statement of the Protestant consensus, see James A. Whyte, ‘Confirmation/ Admission to the Lord’s Supper’, in The Westminster Handbook to Reformed Theology, ed. Donald K. McKim (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), p. 40: “Once the rite of confirmation had been separated from Baptism, the problem was to find a meaning for it.” By contrast, consider the markedly Catholic history of confirmation in Coleman, The Minister of Confirmation, pp. 9–35, and the patristic witnesses gathered in Lennerz, De sacramento confirmationis, pp. 9–16. 103 See, e.g., Bausch, A New Look, p. 104. 100
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arguments, many came to regard confirmation as an illegitimate offspring of baptism that has no unique claim to existence as a distinct rite, much less as a sacrament. One occasionally can discern such views even among bishops.104 As intimated above, the Church had encountered this theory before. In 1907, along with other errors of the Modernists, Pope St Pius X condemned the following assertions: “There is nothing to prove that the rite of the Sacrament of Confirmation was employed by the Apostles. The formal distinction of the two Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation does not pertain to the history of primitive Christianity.”105 If the sacrament of confirmation is indeed a sacrament of the New Law instituted by Christ, then it necessarily existed during the time of the apostles. Paul VI affirms that God inaugurated confirmation on the day of Pentecost: Peter regarded the Spirit who had thus come down upon the apostles as the gift of the Messianic age (see Acts 2:17–18). Then those who believed the apostles’ preaching were baptized and they too received “the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). From that time on the apostles, in fulfillment of Christ’s wish, imparted to the newly baptized by the laying on of hands the gift of the Spirit that completes the grace of baptism. This is why the Letter to the Hebrews listed among the first elements of Christian instruction the teaching about baptisms and the laying on of hands (Heb 6:2). This laying on of hands is rightly recognized by reason of Catholic tradition as the beginning of the sacrament of confirmation, which in a certain way perpetuates the grace of Pentecost in the Church.106
The historical theory advanced by Kavanagh and others after Paul VI wrote these words is no mere argument regarding the structure of an ancient rite. Rather, the theory dynamites the scriptural basis of confirmation as well as the doctrine clearly articulated by the Council of Trent that there are seven sacraments of the New Law. One who insists upon the fundamental identity of baptism and confirmation, and not merely their primitive historical unity, must either deny the teaching authority of the Church or equivocate in some nominalist fashion.107 The faithful must beware lest the assumption that 104 Geoffrey Robinson (Bishop of Sydney), ‘Confirmation: A Bishop’s Dilemma’, Worship 78 (2004), pp. 50–60. 105 Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists Lamentabili sane (3 July 1907), §44, in The Popes Against Modern Errors, ed. Anthony J. Mioni, Jr. (Rockford IL: TAN, 1999), pp. 177–78. 106 Divinae consortium naturae, in Kaczynski, vol. 1, no. 148, §2594, p. 809; trans. International Commission on English in the Liturgy, The Rites of the Catholic Church, vol. 1 (Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), pp. 473–74. 107 Karl Rahner is more perspicacious in A New Baptism in the Spirit: Confirmation Today, trans. Salvator Attanasio (Denville NJ: Dimension, 1975), p. 11: “. . . the Spiritconferring imposition of hands cannot be related to any express mandate of Jesus. This of C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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confirmation is not a sacrament in its own right drive any pastoral initiative that insists upon the celebration of baptism and confirmation in one integral ceremony.
Confirmation as Human Effort: The Activist Interpretation Many programs preparing youth for confirmation demand service projects and catechetical classes. Although these may be legitimate means of preparing, they should not be considered necessary criteria for reception of the sacrament. The impression must be avoided that confirmation is earned through community service or that it is a graduation program for completing a course in catechesis.108 Bishop Alvaro Corrada of Tyler, Texas, aptly warns: If one is not careful, service projects before Confirmation can seem to be demonstrating an ability to do things, and Confirmation becomes a type of graduation into an adult faith. This abuse of pragmatism can result in failing to recognize that the desire “to do” or to praise God is itself a grace, as is the capacity to do good.109
Both the desire and the capacity to do good are gifts of God’s grace, a grace which precedes good actions and which is especially poured out in confirmation. Moreover, the claim that confirmation was or is “nothing but a form of religious instruction in which those approaching adolescence presented an account of their faith publicly to the church” is specifically condemned by the Council of Trent.110 Also rooted in an activist anthropological and psychological starting point is the claim that confirmation is a moment of personal choice for or reaffirmation of one’s baptismal faith. On the basis of this theory, confirmation should be delayed until the teenager or young adult is able to make a free and mature commitment to his or her baptismal faith. Monika Hellwig, for example, is sympathetic with this theory: course is bound to be of lesser moment today than it was in the age of the Reformation, because from the viewpoint of the history of dogma and in the light of the decisions made by the Council of Trent, we cannot today deny the institution of the Sacrament of Confirmation by Jesus in the Catholic understanding of things.” In the final analysis, however, Rahner like Kavanagh appears to consider confirmation superfluous, since the grace of confirmation – the promise and the Word – is already received in baptism (p. 27). 108 This point is not lost, for example, in the ‘Pastoral Guidelines for Celebrating the Sacrament of Confirmation’ of the Archdiocese of St Louis (1998), 6: “An integral part of preparation for this sacrament is the candidate’s engaging in Christian service . . . . To offset the impression that Confirmation marks a ‘graduation’ or end point rather than a beginning of fuller Christian life, service should be continued during the eighth grade,” following confirmation in the seventh grade. 109 Bishop Alvaro Corrada, Pastoral Reflection on the Sacrament of Confirmation (7 October 2005), 21, on
. 110 Council of Trent, Canones de sacramento confirmationis, 1, ed. and trans. Tanner, vol. 2, p. 686. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Those who have been concerned with pastoral theology and practice in the context of education, action, or psychology have been pleading for a much later age for confirmation. They have suggested that since baptism has not been a personal choice for most Christians today and since personal choice is quite essential to the task of being a Christian, we really need a moment of personal choice that can be publicly celebrated. Confirmation seems to offer just this. If it is the sacrament of maturity as a Christian, the sacrament of active assumption of Church membership and apostolic responsibilities, then there is much to be said for waiting until the candidate is both ready and truly willing to make a fully adult commitment. That would be in his late teens or early twenties and sometimes much later.111
Such a theory implies, as Hellwig explicitly claims, that a “child is indeed a passive Christian.”112 This is tantamount to denying that one has free will before reaching a point of physical or emotional maturity. Such a theory also denies that children who have reached the age of reason are immediately called upon to assume Church membership and apostolic responsibilities, or are capable of “a full personal participation in this sacrament.”113 Correctly assuming that people become capable of making life-changing commitments at various ages, this theory fails to recognize the necessity of the gifts of the Holy Spirit for making and keeping noble, chaste, and holy commitments. Corrada also addresses this trend of treating confirmation as chiefly a personal choice to commit to one’s baptismal faith: Confirmation is not about an individual deciding to embrace the faith of Baptism. It is not a human act similar to that of non-Catholic Christians who, perhaps in their early teens, choose to publicly profess that they have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Sacraments are primarily about God choosing and embracing us not the other way around. In baptism, God marks us unconditionally as a member of His family and coheir with Christ, children by adoption. (see Galatians 4:5– 7) Once baptized, at whatever age, we can no more choose to cease being a child of God than we can choose to cease being the child of our natural mother. Confirmation is not our “confirming” Baptism or our faith in Christ; it is Christ confirming us in the Christian life we are already living.114
Such an interpretation reflects the Church’s conviction that confirmation is a divinely established reality rather than a mere human act. Corrada strikingly insists that every moment is apt for embracing the 111 Monika Hellwig, The Meaning of the Sacraments (Dayton OH: Pflaum, 1972), pp. 27–28. 112 Hellwig, Meaning of Sacraments, p. 28. 113 See Davis, Sacraments of Initiation, p. 140. 114 Corrada, Pastoral Reflection, 22. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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faith, while the preeminent sacramental expression of this embracing takes place in the Eucharist: “Each instant calls us to embrace Christ as He has embraced us. Above all, the celebration of the Eucharist is an appropriate sacramental moment for the individual to renew the commitment to service in the Church and in the community for the common good.”115 One baptized as an infant should confirm and renew the faith continuously, and from the earliest moment possible, which more or less coincides with attainment of the age of reason. The Mass is a privileged place for doing so, but a living faith should characterize the entire life of the Christian – child, teenager, and adult.
A Catholic Bar Mitzvah or Coming of Age Ceremony In the Latin Rite, to receive confirmation licitly outside the danger of death, the recipient must meet five basic criteria: have the use of reason, be baptized and not confirmed, suitably instructed, properly disposed, and capable of renewing the baptismal promises.116 Being properly disposed includes being in a state of grace, so the sacrament of penance ought to be received before confirmation when it is separated in time from baptism.117 Although the Roman Church does not oppose the practices of eastern Churches that confirm infants immediately after baptism, at the same time it “generally requires that candidates for Confirmation be old enough to be able to distinguish between good and evil.”118 The magisterium has consistently encouraged the faithful to be strengthened by confirmation near the age of discretion or reason, that is, around the age of seven.119 While affirming this practice, the revised Rite of Confirmation allowed conferences of bishops to determine another age.120 The National Conference of Catholic Bishops approved a norm allowing for 115
Corrada, Pastoral Reflection, 22. 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 889. 117 CCC 1310, 1319. 118 Pope Benedict XIV, Encyclical on the Observance of Oriental Rites Allatae sunt, §22 (26 July 1755), in The Papal Encyclicals 1740–1878, ed. Claudia Carlen Ihm (Wilmington NC: McGrath, 1981), p. 59. 119 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 891; Congregatio de Disciplina Sacramentorum, Decree Spiritus Sancti munera, in Braga and Bugnini, no. 38, §1810, p. 541: “Quamquam nihil intentatum relinquunt vigiles animarum rectores ut, quantum fieri potest, baptizati omnes hoc sacramento rite muniantur et quidem vix cum ad aetatem rationis participem pervenerint, scilicet circa septennium: quod profecto septennium antevertere licet, prout expresse cavetur canone 788 . . . .”; see also CCC 1307. For a fuller listing of relevant magisterial texts, see Richard P. Moudry, ‘A Parish Resource for Confirmation: What Does Vatican II Say?’ in Confirmed as Children, Affirmed as Teens, ed. James A. Wilde (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1990), pp. 27–33. 120 Introduction, Rite of Confirmation, §11, in The Rites, vol. 1, p. 483; 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 891. 116
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wide latitude: “between the age of discretion and only about sixteen years of age.”121 Such allowances can be made for good pastoral reasons.122 Yet even where local national, diocesan, or parish guidelines stipulate a later age for the sacrament, sacred ministers cannot deny confirmation to anyone who meets the canonical criteria listed above.123 Therefore the candidate for confirmation need not be well beyond the age of discretion. Spiritual growth or maturity is not necessarily reflected in physiological growth or maturity.124 Thus it is not accurate to connect Confirmation to maturity in the psychological sense so that it would best [be] given at an age of social maturity. The Sacrament of Confirmation strengthens the person to bear witness, rather than expresses the person’s determination to bear witness, to his faith. This strengthening is something that can be fittingly given at any age.125
Reception of confirmation during the teen years has become common and even encouraged only since the 1970s. Yet arguments for teenage confirmation spring from theories of catechesis ostensibly drawn from the human sciences that remain to be proven, not from any teachings of the Church or sound theological arguments.126 The human sciences with their various theories of psychosocial development provide no clear answers to the question of the age of confirmation, but only helpful observations. Here is a basic description of psychosocial development during “middle childhood” (7 to 11 years of age): Children during these years begin to employ a complex and sophisticated self-evaluation that results in a more balanced assessment of personal strengths and weakness. They recognize that they have both desirable and undesirable qualities . . . . These changes occur in the context of a growing social self as children more and more perceive themselves as a part of their social context . . . .127 121 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Canon 891 - Age for Confirmation, US Bishops’ Complementary Norm, signed by Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza (21 August 2001). 122 J. D. Crichton, Christian Celebration: The Sacraments (London: Chapman, 1979), p. 111. 123 See the letter of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Prot. N. 2607/98/L (18 December 1999), signed by Cardinal Jorge A. Medina Est´evez and printed in Notitiae 35 (November – December 1999); in addition to the canons on confirmation, the decision references 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 843 §1. 124 CCC 1308. 125 Corrada, Pastoral Reflection, 17. 126 See Paul Turner, Confirmation: The Baby in Solomon’s Court, rev. ed. (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2006), pp. 97–102. 127 John S. Dacey and John F. Travers, Human Development across the Lifespan, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002), p. 246. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Furthermore, middle childhood is a key period of moral development, during which “children search for friends and want to become accepted members of a group,” and the habits of peers exert strong influence upon the actions of the child.128 The influence of peers, however, peaks during adolescence (12 to 18 years). Around grades eight and nine, “conformity to peers – especially to their antisocial standards – peaks.”129 Furthermore, adolescence is marked by a flurry of “fast-paced change” in all areas of development, most significantly marked today in many instances by sexual activity.130 Hence this fifth developmental stage is characterized as a period of “identity confusion,” during which adolescents “experiment with the numerous roles and identities they draw from the surrounding culture.”131 Added to these psychosocial theories, one might consider a common experience of parents.132 Children in middle childhood are more open to instruction and the guidance of authority figures at home, Church, or state. Adolescents, by contrast, exhibit marked tendencies towards rebellion and skepticism with regard to authority figures, including the parents who wish to share their faith with them. The words often attributed to Mark Twain about his father’s wisdom are apt in this regard: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learnt in 7 years.”133 Studies confirm this observation: “Conflict with parents often escalates during early adolescence, remains somewhat stable during the high school years, and then lessens as the adolescent reaches 17 to 20 years of age.”134 Although such considerations drawn from experience and the human sciences cannot prescribe or determine any best age for confirmation, they point more in the direction of middle childhood than adolescence. Middle childhood is marked by social and psychological growth, and by intense development of one’s personality and self-awareness. It is also a time when children, on the whole, are more open to the positive influence of parents, peers, and educators, including clergy and catechists. The supernatural grace of confirmation granted in early middle childhood could lend to the formation of an authentically Christian identity and spirit in the child during this time of fervent psychosocial development. This same supernatural 128
Dacey and Travers, Human Development, pp. 249, 253–55. John W. Santrock, Children, 7th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), pp. 42, 540. 130 Dacey and Travers, Human Development, p. 330. 131 Santrock, Children, pp. 42, 540. 132 The author of this article is the father of six children, and so claims personal experience in this regard. 133 I have been unable to determine the original source of this quotation. 134 Santrock, Children, p. 549. 129
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grace could then perfect the virtues of the young Catholic even before the onset of the trials and temptations that accompany adolescence – including identity confusion, experimentation (often sexual), and conflict with authority – that are not conducive to the proper disposition for benefitting from the sacrament. These observations from social sciences correlate with the Latin Rite’s discipline that the recipient of confirmation need only have reached catechetical age or the age of reason, which occurs early in middle childhood, around the age of seven. Some sort of Christian celebration of the passage from childhood to adolescence may be pastorally desirable and spiritually fruitful. Furthermore, ongoing catechesis and Christian formation of young Catholics as they go through these times of psychosocial change is imperative. Along these lines, the Hispanic American custom of the Quincea˜nera might be adapted to various local communities, and the liturgical year provides excellent material for ongoing faith formation.135 The sacrament of confirmation, however, must not be reduced to a rite of passage or an incentive to keep teenagers in catechism classes.136
A One-Shot Deal Notions that confirmation is merely a rite of passage or an occasion to affirm one’s baptismal faith betray a view of the sacrament as the work of a moment, which has value or force only during the time of its celebration. One holding such a view with any logical consistency will criticize the analogy that describes confirmation in terms of spiritual “growth” – the analogy that Paul VI employs when he promulgates the revised rite of confirmation.137 Wilhelm Breuning provides an example; he criticizes that notion that confirmation lends to the growth of baptismal grace. “Such an interpretation,” writes Breuning, “suffers from the difficulty of explaining the meaning and significance of an eventful, once-and-for-all growth of this type, for 135 See, for e.g., David M. Beaudoin, ‘Celebration of Passage: Childhood to Adolescence’, in Confirmed as Children, Affirmed as Teens, ed. James A. Wilde (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1990), pp. 35–42. 136 The question of the order of the sacraments of initiation arises, although it is beyond the scope of this paper. My research supports efforts to lower the age of reception of confirmation for those baptized as infants – a pastoral move that naturally might be accompanied by the administration of confirmation before the reception of first holy communion. A number of dioceses have initiated this process: see James A. Wilde (ed.), When Should We Confirm? The Order of Initiation (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1989), and Stella Maria Jeffrey, ‘Christian Initiation: A Pastoral Perspective on Restored Order’, Antiphon 9.3 (2005), pp. 245–52. 137 Pope Paul VI, Divinae consortium naturae, in Kaczynski, vol. 1, no. 148, §2591, p. 808. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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growth is a continuous development through the living power of a beginning.”138 Breuning’s insight is correct, although he overlooks the significance of the character imparted in confirmation. According to the teaching articulated, among other places, by the ecumenical Council of Florence in 1439, confirmation imparts an indelible seal or character on the soul.139 The seal (sigillum) imprinted by confirmation “marks our total belonging to Christ, our enrollment in his service for ever, as well as the promise of divine protection in the great eschatological trial.”140 Although this seal or indelible character is indeed imparted in a moment, the grace it pledges abides. This grace enables and accompanies the growth and perfection of the spiritual and moral life of the Christian that began at baptism. In addition to the everlasting character imparted in confirmation, a new and ongoing relationship with one particular member of the faithful is contracted – the spiritual kinship (cognatio spiritualis) effected between the confirmand and his or her sponsor.141 Sponsors, according to the Rite of Confirmation, will help the confirmed “to fulfill their baptismal promises faithfully under the influence of the Holy Spirit whom they have received.”142 The sponsor has an ongoing responsibility “to see that the confirmed person acts as a true witness to Christ and faithfully fulfills the obligations connected with this sacrament.”143 In light of the sigillum and, to a lesser extent but nonetheless worthy of note, the cognatio spiritualis, confirmation effects an ongoing spiritual reality. As Colman O’Neill comments, “too much should not be made of the passing ceremony as a unique occasion of grace, though nothing prevents its being such.”144 Confirmation is no mere passing event for which the momentary social and psychological situation of the recipient is all-important. Especially from the perspective of the character that endures as a pledge of perennially offered grace 138 Wilhelm Breuning, ‘Baptism and Confirmation: The Two Sacraments of Initiation’, in Adult Baptism and the Catechumenate, ed. Johannes Wagner et al., Concilium: Theology in the Age of Renewal 22 (New York: Paulist Press, 1967), p. 99. 139 Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence-Rome, Session 8 (22 November 1439), Bull of Union with the Armenians, in Tanner, vol. 1, p. 542: “Inter haec sacramenta tria sunt, baptismus, confirmatio et ordo, que caracterem, id est spirtuale quoddam signum a ceteris distinctivum imprimunt in anima indelebile. Unde in eadem persona non reiterantur.” 140 CCC 1296, see also 1295 and 1317. 141 Alphonsus Liguori lists this as the third effect of confirmation, after the character and grace, in Theologia moralis, VI, tract. II, cap. II, dub. I, ed. Gaud´e, vol. 3, §169, p. 155: “Effectus est Cognatio spiritualis, eodem modo quo dictum est de Bapt.” 142 Introduction, Rite of Confirmation, §5, in The Rites, vol. 1, p. 480. 143 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 892. 144 Colman E. O’Neill, Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the Sacraments (Wilmington DE: Glazier, 1983), p. 201. O’Neill continues: “The abiding sacrament possesses that dynamic quality that the person who bears it gives it; in this way it is related to the constantly recurring sacrament of the Eucharist . . . .” C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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from which the Christian should constantly draw, confirmation is an ongoing, living reality that enables continuous, life-long growth in Christian virtue.
CONCLUDING APPLICATIONS145 Far from being a sacrament without a theology, confirmation enjoys a rich development in the teachings of the Church. This study has gleaned the essentials of those teachings, particularly on the question of the effects of confirmation, with special attention paid in this regard to the minister of the sacrament. It concludes with two practical pastoral applications. The first application regards the minister of the sacrament. On biblical, historical, and theological grounds, the bishop’s prerogative as ordinary minister of confirmation must be emphasized. The apostles received the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and in turn passed it on by the laying of hands. Christ entrusts the task of continuing to impart the Holy Spirit to the bishops precisely as successors of the apostles. Moreover, the bishop preserves the unity of the local church and its communion with the universal Church, and from this derive the ecclesial ramifications of confirmation. Through sacramental contact with the bishop, the confirmand’s bond with the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church is perfected. On the experiential level, this contact should also be encouraged if only because it is the sole occasion on which many Catholics encounter a bishop face-to-face. This is not to deny that a priest can validly administer confirmation. Nonetheless, the administration of confirmation by a priest is canonically extraordinary and ought to be the exception rather than the rule in thought, practice, and experience. The second concluding observation regards the effect of confirmation on the level of grace offered in an ongoing manner through the indelible character imparted by the sacrament. In light of this effect, deficiencies stemming from errors or one-sided theoretical emphases become evident in common catechesis and pastoral practice. Such deficiencies can be avoided by appropriating correctives to a series of prominent opinions. Confirmation is not a mere appendage of the baptismal rite, which should be joined and amalgamated with it at all costs, including marginalization of the bishop’s role. Confirmation is not properly understood as the fruit of human effort or as 145 I express my thanks to colleagues who have reviewed drafts of this essay: Dr Robert Fastiggi, Dr John Gresham, Msgr James Ramaccotti, Fr Samuel Weber O.S.B., and Dr Lawrence J. Welch. Helpful comments were received from the audiences to whom earlier versions of this essay were presented, first at the Gateway Liturgical Conference of September 2008 in St Louis, and subsequently to the members of the St Louis Society of Catholic Theologians in November of the same year. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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a coming of age ceremony marking teenage life transitions. Confirmation’s significance cannot be limited to a moment in which one reaffirms baptismal faith, and it must not detract from the continuous affirmation of faith that should characterize the Christian’s entire life. What, then, is confirmation? A fruitful theology of confirmation begins with the twofold Gift of the Holy Spirit imparted in the sacrament – that is, the Holy Spirit Himself and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. The perfection of virtue and holiness in the Christian life depends upon this Gift. The defensive and offensive grace of confirmation also empowers the Christian to protect and defend the faith as well as to promote it and bear witness to Christ. Conformed through the Gift and gifts of the Holy Spirit to Christ as priest, prophet, and king, the baptized and confirmed believer is given a new and greater disposition for divine worship, and a deeper share in and ability to carry out the mission that Christ entrusted to the Church. Careful consideration of the theology of confirmation, drawing from the teachings of the magisterium, strongly suggests that the baptized Christian should receive confirmation upon reaching the age of reason (or earlier, as among eastern Churches), not later.146 Upon reaching the age of reason, the Christian experiences temptations and attacks on virtue and on faith. Therefore upon reaching the age of reason the Christian needs the grace to defend and preserve personal faith and morality, to defend the Church and, more closely united to the Church, to undertake Christ’s mission to evangelize or witness to the truth – even if only in the classroom and on the playground. The infallible extension of grace and the divine initiative of the sacrament of confirmation come from Christ through the Church, and must not be despised or put off in favor of any ill-proven historical, sociological, or psychological theories. Delaying or omitting confirmation may prove disastrous for the faith of the individual baptized Christian and the life of the Church as a whole, and undermines the Church’s divinely instituted “mission of announcing the kingdom of Christ and of God and of inaugurating it among all peoples.”147
Daniel G. Van Slyke Kenrick-Glennon Seminary St Louis, USA Email: [email protected] 146
Connell, De sacramentis ecclesiae, vol. 1, p. 166: “susceptio Confirmationis in aetate infantile est valde utilis, ut per gratiam roborantem Spiritus Sancti praeveniantur etiam primi incursus mundi et diaboli.” 147 Second Vatican Council, Lumen gentium, §5, in Tanner, vol. 2, p. 851. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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a detailed analysis of Aquinas’s thought. Nevertheless, this does not justify Russell in utterly misrepresenting Aquinas. If Aquinas denies that body is involved in our happiness, we would assume that he would not see much difference between human and angelic happiness, but this is not the case. Robert Pasnau and Christopher Shield’s discussion of Aquinas’s views on human happiness in The Philosophy of Aquinas is better than Russell’s insofar as they do not positively distort his views.2 And yet, their chapter on “The Goal of Human Life,” which takes an extended look at human happiness in Aquinas, has virtually nothing to say about the positive part that the body has in this happiness.3 Perhaps we could also excuse Pasnau and Shields since their book is meant to consider Aquinas at a very general level. We will have a little better luck if we look at an essay by Georg Wieland, which takes Aquinas’s concept of happiness as its sole topic.4 Commenting on this concept, Wieland observes that for Aquinas, “[i]n the future life, the human spirit, which connects us to God, is of course, independent of sense activity,” but immediately adds: “However, after the resurrection, the body and therefore the senses share in the complete happiness of the soul. Thomas stresses this point by appealing to Augustine (Ia IIae, q. 3, a. 3). He thus presents a Christian anthropology that takes seriously the embodied state of humanity.”5 This sounds promising. But we will discover that the essay is short on details about how Aquinas “takes seriously the embodied state of humanity” in his account of happiness. While Wieland will go on to note that “temporal happiness depends somewhat on the body and its organs”6 and that in the beatific vision “the soul lets the body participate in its perfection,”7 he will not spend any time expanding on these claims. Clearly, what is needed is a study that takes Aquinas’s understanding of the body’s positive contribution to human happiness as its main focus. To my knowledge, nothing of the sort exists. Perchance there would be those who would say that such an undertaking would have little point since Aquinas, in fact, thinks of human felicity as a primarily spiritual event inasmuch as it consists in the activity of the intellect, which, Aquinas claims, is the highest activity that the human person is capable of.8 What is more, it is the intellect that sets the human person apart from other animals and places him at 2
The Philosophy of Aquinas (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004). Ibid., pp. 197–215. 4 “Happiness (Ia IIae, qq. 1–5),” in The Ethics of Aquinas, S.J. Pope, ed. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), pp. 57–68. 5 Ibid., p. 62. 6 Ibid., p. 64. 7 Ibid. 8 I-II.3.5. In most cases, the English translation of the Summa is taken from the 1920 translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 3
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the summit of the sublunary world. So, distinctively human happiness will, again, be above all an activity of the intellect. But I would answer that it is likewise true (something almost too obvious to insist upon) that, for Aquinas, the human person is not solely an intellect but a unity of a body and an intellectual or spiritual soul. Neither the soul alone nor the body alone is the human person, Aquinas consistently tells us. In themselves they are at best parts of the human person. If this is the case, then human happiness must involve not only the human soul but the human body as well and it would be worthwhile to inquire into how Aquinas sees the body’s role in happiness. According to Aquinas, human happiness assumes three basic forms, which ascend in their degrees of perfection9 : the first is possible in this life and consists, as Aquinas puts it, “primarily in contemplation, but secondarily in an operation of the practical intellect directing human actions and passions.”10 Aquinas calls this beatitudo imperfecta, imperfect happiness. The second form that happiness takes in Aquinas’s view is the post-mortem contemplation of God after the soul has separated from the body: this is more perfect than the previous form of happiness but is not without certain defects. And the third and highest form of happiness consists in the contemplation of God that occurs when the body and soul are re-united following the body’s resurrection: this Aquinas regards as beatitudo perfecta, perfect happiness. So, where does the human body figure in these different forms of happiness? In the first the body has an essential role to play; in the second it has no role to play – and so this form of happiness, I would suggest, could only be called “human” in a nominal sense; and in the third, the body does have a role but a minimal one. In regard to this last we might ask whether it too, because of the body’s minimal contribution, really deserves to be called human happiness. It is not unreasonable to wonder how consistent this supposedly perfect state of human happiness is with Aquinas’s anthropology, which is so emphatic about the body and soul both being essential to the human person’s nature. One might want to ask, for instance, whether Aquinas’s account of perfecta beatitudo hominis is compromised by a latent Platonism or possibly even a Porphyrian form of Neo-Platonism.11 In investigating the role of the body in human happiness I will also try to respond to such concerns. 9
Aquinas discusses these different forms of happiness in any number of places. Here I am mostly drawing on what he says about them in I-II.1–5. 10 Ibid. 11 Thomas Gilby seems to have a similar worry. Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 16, Purpose and Happiness (1a2ae. 1–5) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 103, note c. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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There are a number of texts where Aquinas talks about the body’s place in human happiness but taking them all into account in a careful manner would require a much lengthier inquiry than is possible here. Thus, I propose to concentrate on some of the relevant texts in the Summa theologiae, which we can take as representative of Aquinas’s mature thought on this question. My paper hereafter will be divided into three parts. In the first part I will review Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between the body and soul in the human person as this is presented in the Summa theologiae. This will set up my consideration in the next and main part of the paper of the Summa’s treatment of the body’s role in human happiness. Finally, by way of conclusion, I will sum up the results of my questioning and offer some reflections on the direction I think that further research on the topic should take.
Body and Soul Aquinas’s teaching on the relationship between the body and the soul in the human person is a fairly well known area of his thought. So, here I will offer only a summary of that teaching in view of my discussion of the body’s role in human happiness. Aquinas was familiar with antique philosophical doctrines that, on the one hand, viewed human persons in a reductively materialist way, a position he attributed to certain Greek Pre-Socratics.12 And, on the other hand, Aquinas was aware of Plato’s conception of human persons as essentially spiritual beings with a merely extrinsic relationship to the body.13 In Aquinas’s opinion this entailed that the body and soul were not naturally but only accidentally joined. Aquinas saw a similarly extrinsicist position in the doctrine of Origen according to which the human soul preexists the body and is subsequently united to it as a punishment for sin.14 Of course, Aquinas found none of these anthropologies satisfactory, neither from the standpoint of reason nor from that of faith. Against the Pre-Socratic materialists, Aquinas argues that the human capacity for knowledge of all material things15 and the abstract nature of this knowledge16 point to a spiritual dimension in the human person. Against body-soul extrinsicism Aquinas argues that sense perception is not an activity of the spiritual soul alone but requires a body.17 Because we do have sense perceptions, we must 12 13 14 15 16 17
I.75.1. I.75.3–4. I.118.3. I.75.1 ad 2; 75.2. I.75.5. I.75.4.
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be both a body and a spiritual soul.18 Moreover, Aquinas affirms that it is natural for the body and the soul to be united in the human person.19 The human body, so Aquinas argues, cannot exist as a human body without being animated by the intellectual soul, which is its form.20 And the intellect, for its part, needs the body’s mediation to acquire knowledge, for human knowledge naturally begins in the bodily senses being affected by other bodies in their environment.21 In the jargon of contemporary epistemology, one might say that Aquinas is something of a “strong externalist.”22 Despite the intellect’s dependence on the deliverances of the bodily senses for the material that it works upon, namely, the phantasms produced by the senses, Aquinas maintains that the intellect’s very act of understanding does not depend on the body and as the soul can perform an operation on its own, it can exist on its own. It is this ability of the soul to exist independently of the body that Aquinas is claiming when he says that the human soul is “subsistent.” But as subsistent, the soul, of course, is not a complete substance in itself.23 It is still just a part of a larger whole to which it naturally belongs.24 Obviously, Aquinas regards the relationship between the body and the soul in the human person as a mutually beneficial one. Each provides something important for the other. However, it is not a democratic relationship. For Aquinas, following Aristotle, the relationship between the body and the soul is hierarchical and teleological.25 “[T]he union of soul and body,” Aquinas writes, “exists for the sake of the soul and not of the body; for the form does not exist for the matter, but the matter for the form.”26 The goods of the body are thus ordained to the goods of the soul.27 So, the body’s perfection is not for its own sake but for it to be the soul’s ´ pliable instrument.28 As Etienne Gilson observes, in Aquinas’s mind, this hierarchical and teleological relationship between the body and soul is but an instance of a general metaphysical principle according to which the less perfect is ordered to the more perfect, the less 18
Ibid. I.118.3. 20 I.76.1; 118.3. 21 I.84.6; 118.3. 22 Cf. J.P. O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 237– 274; Roger Pouivet, After Wittgenstein: St. Thomas (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2006), pp. 2–4, 124–125, 127. 23 I.75.2. 24 I.75.2 ad 2. 25 See Aristotle’s remarks in De Anima, 416b15–20; Parts of Animals, 645b14–19. 26 I.70.3. 27 I-II.2.5. 28 Ibid. 19
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noble to the more noble.29 When we consider, then, that the intellect depends on the bodily senses for the acquisition of knowledge, we should not think that in this the body establishes a certain superiority over the soul. We should see it, rather, as analogous to the way that Aquinas understands, say, the relationship between sacra doctrina and the philosophical sciences that it makes use of. Sacra doctrina, Aquinas tells us, “does not depend upon these other sciences as upon the higher, but makes use of them as of the lesser, and as handmaidens.”30 Similarly, the body is the servant of the soul. Aquinas would not see this at all as a denigration of the body but as simply a proper understanding of the body’s function in the reality of the human person. Material reality, Aquinas says in the Summa’s treatise on creation, is in itself good.31 However, its goodness is of a lower level than spiritual reality and, like the goodness of any finite thing, is limited and must be properly ordered.32 Let these brief remarks suffice for a review of Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between the human body and soul in the Summa. There are many more details that could be added and a number of controversies that could be discussed but none of that is necessary for the immediate purposes of this paper. I would now like to proceed to a consideration of the role the body has in human happiness as this is portrayed in the Summa.
Happiness With and Without the Body As I stated earlier, in Aquinas’s view, human happiness has three forms. Beginning with the first, we will look at all three of these forms and reflect on the contribution that the body makes in each. Aquinas holds that in our present existence we can achieve a kind of imperfect happiness. This happiness can be had through the speculative and practical uses of our intellect in a life of intellectual and moral virtue. All knowledge in this life, whether in speculative or practical matters, has its origin in sense experience. It is not difficult to see, therefore, that the body has an integral role to play in imperfect happiness. Here is how Aquinas puts it: “It is evident that the body is necessary for the happiness of this life. For the happiness of this life consists in an operation of the intellect, either speculative or practical. And the operation of the intellect in this life cannot be without a phantasm, which is only in a bodily organ . . . Consequently 29 Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, L.K. Shook and A.A. Maurer, trans. (Toronto: PIMS, 2002), p. 222; Cf. ST, I.65.2. 30 I.1.5 ad 2. 31 I.65.1 ad 2. Cf. II-II.25.5. 32 I.65.1 ad 2.
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that happiness which can be had in this life, depends, in a way, on the body.”33 Aquinas will add to this that for the happiness of the present life the body must be healthy and sufficiently provided for with respect to material goods. Regarding the importance of bodily health, Aquinas tells us that a well-disposed body is required for that happiness which man can acquire in this life because bodily impairments can hinder all virtuous activities.34 Evidently, that would include the virtuous use of the intellect. It is not hard to imagine circumstances in which the condition of the body would prevent us from using our intellect well: if I am in a coma or if I am dead drunk and not aware of what I am doing, I certainly could not use my intellect virtuously and perhaps I could not even use it at all. Does this mean that the body must be in perfect health for us to achieve intellectual excellence, and thus imperfect happiness, in this life? I do not find Aquinas making that claim. He only seems to commit himself to the body being in such a state of health that it does not stop the intellect from being used excellently. As for the body needing to be supplied with the requisite material goods, Aquinas says that while these goods are not the essence of happiness, even imperfect happiness, they do serve as instruments to this end insofar as “man needs in this life the necessaries of the body both for the operation of contemplative virtue and for the operation of active virtue.”35 This does not strike me as a very problematic claim. Although Aquinas does not offer any example in the article in which he discusses this issue, coming up with our own should be fairly easy. If I am dying from lack of food or because of constant exposure to the elements, I will hardly be in an advantageous position to cultivate the intellectual virtue that is requisite for imperfect happiness. If we accept Aquinas’s version of the body-soul relationship, I do not think that we will have much trouble also accepting what he has to say about the body’s role in the imperfect happiness possible in this life. His claims on this score will seem pretty straightforward to us. The body is obviously necessary for the imperfect happiness of the present life, and, just as obviously, it will have to be a sufficiently healthy body not lacking the basic goods to maintain that health. But what about the two higher forms of happiness that Aquinas envisions? With these we might possibly have more difficulty. Let us turn to these other forms of happiness now. In responding to the question about whether the body is required for perfect happiness in I-II.4.5 Aquinas first makes an observation about the history of theology. “Some have maintained,” he says, “that perfect happiness, which consists in the vision of God, is not possible 33 34 35
I-II.4.5. I-II.4.6. I-II.4.7.
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to the soul separated from the body and have said that the souls of the saints, when separated from their bodies, do not attain to that happiness until the day of judgment, when they will receive their bodies back again.”36 Aquinas does not mention who these theologians are who deny that the soul can enjoy the beatific vision without the body.37 In any event, it is quite true that in the early Church there were not a few who held the opinion described by Aquinas. Justin Martyr, for instance, in his famous Dialogue With Trypho, teaches that the souls of the just do not arrive in heaven immediately after death but travel to some mysterious abode between this life and the next until they are re-united with their resurrected bodies.38 Only then are they permitted to enter into heavenly bliss.39 Origen, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius, Hilary, Gregory of Nazianzus, Bernard of Clairvaux and a good many others appear to have held a similar view.40 Aquinas, for his part, finds this doctrine unacceptable. It can be shown to be false, he claims, by both revelation and reason: by revelation because of certain remarks that St. Paul makes in his first letter to the Corinthians. “While we are in the body,” the Apostle writes, “we are absent from the Lord.” And we are absent, he says, because in this life “we walk by faith and not by sight.” St. Paul correlates being absent from the Lord with being present in our bodies and being present to the Lord with being absent from, or without, our bodies. In the former we are said to walk by faith and in the latter we are said to walk by sight. Taking his cue from these statements of the Apostle, Aquinas asserts that “it is evident that the souls of the saints separated from their bodies ‘walk by sight’ seeing the essence of God in which true happiness is found.”41 In other words, when the just die there is no waiting around for the beatific vision until the moment that their soul is reunited with their body. They are able to and do enjoy the vision of the divine essence immediately without their bodies. Aquinas also offers a philosophical argument for the same conclusion. “This is made clear by reason,” he explains, “because the intellect does not need the body for its operation, save on account of the 36
I-II.4.5. In Contra gentiles IV.91 Aquinas says that this is the error quorundam Graecorum. Cf. Gilby’s note on pp. 102–103 of vol. 16 of the Blackfriars’ Summa. Incidentally, Gilby mistakenly references Book III of the Contra gentiles and may have some of Aquinas’s Latin wrong. 38 PG 6, 485–489; 664–668. 39 Cf. H.M. Luckock, The Intermediate State Between Death and Judgment (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1890), p. 23. 40 Ibid., pp. 22–26; Cf. Gilby’s note on pp. 102–103 of vol. 16 of the Blackfriars’ Summa; H. de Lubac, Catholicism, L.G. Sheppard, trans. (New York: Longmans, 1950), pp. 54–57. 41 I-II.4.5. 37
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phantasms, wherein it looks on intelligible truth.”42 Aquinas is alluding here to his view that the act of understanding itself does not need a bodily organ even if it does require a phantasm to have something to understand. But Aquinas also holds that it cannot be through a phantasm or any created similitude whatsoever that the blessed behold God in heaven given that nothing created can perfectly disclose God’s very essence. In his treatment of human knowledge of God in the Prima Pars Aquinas contends that it is by the uncreated light of glory that the intellect is strengthened to see God as he really is. If this is the case, Aquinas goes on to reason in the Secunda Pars, then the body cannot be required for the soul’s enjoyment of the beatific vision, and consequently the soul can be happy apart from the body since in seeing God the human intellect is perfected.43 While this may be happiness of some sort, should we really call it human happiness? If we were to call it human happiness, I would say that we should add that it can only be given this designation loosely. Indeed, the intellect is perfected in such a state and human happiness consists primarily in the perfection of the intellect. But if, as Aquinas believes, neither the body by itself nor the soul by itself is a human person, then true human happiness cannot be had by a disembodied but perfected human intellect. In I-II.4.5 Aquinas does speak of this second level of happiness as happiness and as the perfection of the intellect, but he never speaks of it in an unqualified way as perfect human happiness. His hesitancy is clear. If there is a latent Platonism in Aquinas, he is definitely trying to keep it in check. Aquinas is aware that perfect human happiness can only be had once the soul is reunited to the resurrected body. But since he makes human perfection so dependent on the intellect, it becomes difficult for him to articulate just what the body contributes to true human happiness. One might get the impression that Aquinas is brining the body back just to be formally consistent with his definition of the human person and is having a devil of a time trying to find something for the body to do in the beatific vision. Consider the very problematic conclusion to the respondeo of I-II.4.5. After insisting that the soul can be happy without the body, Aquinas makes an attempt to bring the body back into the picture. “Note, however,” he writes, “that something may belong to a thing’s perfection in two ways. First, as constituting the essence thereof; thus the soul is necessary for man’s perfection. Secondly, as necessary for its well-being [. . .] Now the body does not belong in the first way to the perfection of human happiness, yet it does in the second way. For since operation depends on a thing’s nature, the 42 43
Ibid. Ibid.
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more perfect is the soul in its nature, the more perfectly it has its proper operation, wherein [man’s] happiness consists.”44 It is hard to know what to make of this passage. Aquinas tells us that there are at least two ways that something can belong to a thing’s perfection. Either p can belong to the perfection of X as being the very essence of X’s perfection, or p can belong to the perfection of X as necessary for the perfection’s ‘well-being.’ Aquinas claims that the soul is the essence of the human person’s perfect happiness while the body is not essential to it but still necessary for the well being of perfect happiness. How are we to understand this relationship between what belongs to the essence of something’s perfection and what is necessary for the perfection’s well-being? In the case under discussion Aquinas seems to be suggesting that the soul will perform its proper operation well – that is, the act of understanding which is key to, or the essence of, human happiness – if the soul is perfect in its nature. Put differently: perfect human happiness is only possible if the human person is able to understand well and he cannot do this if his soul is lacking something that it requires. Separated from the body, apparently, the human soul would be in just this state of deprivation. But how can the body be necessary for the soul to be capable of a perfect act of understanding? We might be able to make a claim like this if we are talking about the soul’s condition in the present life. The intellect cannot act at all without the phantasms provided by the bodily senses, as we have seen. But Aquinas argued earlier in the respondeo, in the preceding paragraph to be exact, that in the life to come – which is the life that we are dealing with now – phantasms will be useless since the intellect will be made to see God by the light of glory. This being so, how will the body affect the intellect’s perfect operation in the beatific vision? In his reply to the first objection in I-II.4.5 Aquinas points out that even in the beatific vision the soul still is the natural form of the human body and, separated from the body, it remains imperfect in this sense. But he also says that the soul without the body is not imperfect in regard to happiness because apart from the body the soul nevertheless enjoys the beatific vision. Does this not flatly contradict Aquinas’s perplexing statement about the body aiding the soul in perfectly performing its proper operation? Perhaps. Replying to the objections in any given article, Aquinas typically clarifies and elaborates on points he makes in the respondeo. However, looking at Aquinas’s replies to the objections in I-II.4.5 I can find nothing that really clarifies or elaborates on his contention that the body is necessary for the intellect’s excellent functioning in the beatific vision. But if we turn to the next article (I-II.4.6), I 44
Ibid.
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think we might find something that could help us to see just how the body should fit into perfect human happiness, as Aquinas would understand it. In I-II.4.6 Aquinas asks whether bodily perfection is necessary for human happiness. His answer is an unequivocal yes. It is necessary for imperfect happiness for the reasons that we talked about before. But it is also necessary in two ways for perfect happiness. (1) It is necessary for this happiness in a consequent way because, Aquinas believes, the soul’s happiness will overflow into the body. The precise manner in which this will happen is not clearly dealt with. However, this is not what interests me in this article. What interests me is the other way Aquinas says that bodily perfection is necessary for perfect happiness. (2) He argues that it is also necessary antecedently insofar as a body that is in any way indisposed will hinder the intellect in its operation. Aquinas turns to Augustine to make his point: “Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. xii, 35), ‘if the body be such that its governance is difficult and burdensome, like flesh which is corruptible and weighs upon the soul, the mind is turned away from that vision of the highest heaven.’ And therefore he concludes that, ‘when this body will no longer be “natural,” but “spiritual,” then it shall match the angels, and that will be its glory, which once was its burden’.” And a little later, speaking in his own voice, Aquinas will add: “Although the body does not have a part in that operation of the intellect whereby the essence of God is seen, yet it might prove a hindrance to this operation. For this reason, then, perfection of the body is necessary, lest it hinder the mind from being lifted up.”45 Let me now sum up how I think Aquinas would have us understand the body’s role in the perfect happiness of the human person. The body must eventually be reunited with the soul in the beatific vision for us to be able rightfully to call this perfect human happiness. However, it must not be together with the body in any old way. The body and the soul’s relationship in the human person is a hierarchical one, as was pointed out before. Therefore, the body must be rejoined to the soul in its role as the soul’s servant. The body’s perfection is to serve the soul and to do this well, and the body can only do this when it is itself well-disposed. The body can help the intellect to function excellently when it is a well-disposed body. Does this mean that bodily perfection is necessary in an absolute sense to the intellect’s excellent functioning? We would have to say that it does not mean this, for, as we have seen already, the intellect can achieve its perfection in the vision of God in complete separation from the body. But, let us add, the human person cannot achieve his perfection through his intellect in complete separation from the body. 45
I-II.4.6 ad 2.
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And the intellect, when it is truly the intellect of a human person, is an embodied intellect. We must say, then, that the body as a welldisposed body is necessary for the excellent working of the intellect and, thus, for the perfect happiness of the human person.
Concluding Remarks I have tried to show some of the chief contributions that the body makes to human happiness in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. I think that the effort is an important one because it seems to me that although Aquinas does have something to say about this and needs to have something to say about it, since he understands the body to be essential to the human person, it does not appear that commentators on Aquinas have given this question sufficient attention. We have seen that, for Aquinas, in this life the body has a very obvious role to play in the imperfect happiness available to us now. But once we come to the post-mortem forms of happiness that he discusses, it is much harder to see where the body is supposed to fit. Indeed, in the first form of this happiness, when the souls of the just are immediately ushered into the beatific vision, the body is totally absent. The intellect is perfected and happy, but we cannot say that the human person is. And Aquinas does seem to steer clear of making such a claim. In the second form of this happiness, the resurrected body and the soul are reunited and we can now speak of perfect human happiness. Nevertheless, it is not easy to see how the body does anything significant for the human person at this point. I have suggested that, in any case, it must be there if this is to be the state of perfect bliss of the human person, and it must be present as servant of the soul. This is, as a matter of fact, how Aquinas appears to see it figuring in our perfect happiness. Whether or not this solution is a satisfactory one given Aquinas’s emphasis on the essential place of the body in his anthropology is a question that requires further discussion. This paper can only be regarded as a first foray into these questions. I have focused entirely on the Summa and mostly only on a few articles in the Secunda Pars. A more complete treatment of these questions in the Summa would have to be much more wide-ranging. For a start, we would need to look more carefully at the articles on human knowledge of God in I.12 and at the articles on the knowledge of the separated soul in I.89. Then there should be a more in-depth consideration of the role of the body in the acquisition and maintenance of the perfective moral and intellectual virtues. Here we would again return to the Secunda Pars. And, given that Aquinas’s thought is essentially theological, we would have to ask about where the body figures in the perfective theological virtues and the sacramental life. Finally, it goes without saying that we would have to C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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look at the other relevant texts in Aquinas’s corpus if we were to attempt something like a complete treatment of the body and human happiness in Aquinas. I hope that the present paper will serve as a helpful first step toward this larger project.46 Joseph G. Trabbic Ave Maria University, 5050 Ave Maria Blvd. Ave Maria, FL 34142–9505, USA [email protected]
46 A slightly different draft of this paper was presented at a satellite session of the American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 1, 2009. I am very grateful to Barry David and James Jacobs for their helpful comments on that draft. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Thomism and Atheism
Anthroposophy; but the negative side of Steiner, his case against the common modern pseudo-scientific attitude, proved to be unanswerable. That is, I didn’t think what he affirmed was true, but I did think all his denials were right.” – C. S. Lewis, Letter, June 10, 1952.2
I. Harry Jaffa wrote a book entitled, Thomism and Aristotelianism, in which, reflecting on Aristotle’s magnanimous man, he wondered whether the magnanimous man’s affirmative judgment about his own worth was compatible with the Christian notion of humility.3 After some discussion over the years, it is generally agreed that the two kinds of life are rather more compatible than it first seemed to Jaffa. Humility and truth are presupposed to each other. However, no one much expects that “Thomism” and “atheism” will be so deftly reconciled with each other as “Thomism” and “Aristotelianism.” Still, we know that the early Christians in the Roman Empire were sometimes considered to be atheists because they did not believe in the gods of the city, a charge that was made against Socrates himself. The classical atheist, moreover, was content to withdraw from public life into the quiet of his study or garden. His atheism was, in part, the result of the fear the gods caused in the lives of everyone in the pagan world with their threats of retribution and punishment. Ironically, it was precisely this necessity of reward and punishment that Plato thought was required if the world were to exist in justice and not in irrationality. “Thomism” and “atheism,” we might say, in the world at large today, are both considered to be “isms.” They are, it appears, abstract explanatory “systems” in a world filled with other competing “isms.” But a “Thomist” or an “atheist” is a real person who holds something to be true or untrue about the origin and cause of the existence of the world. Each may be consistent or inconsistent in the holding of his position. Each thinks that some relation is found between how he thinks and how he lives. Christianity was commanded to be “missionary” from its beginning. It conceived itself to be directed to all the nations, to all men. It is only in modern times, however, that atheism, probably reacting to or imitating Christian universalism, has become militant and, yes, apostolic. It sees itself designated to save men from the myths of 2
C. S. Lewis, “Letter to Marg-Reiter Montgomery, June 10, 1952, Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harpers, 2007), III, 198. 3 Harry Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism (Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 1979). C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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ungrounded belief in the gods, Christian or otherwise. Whether, if there is no God, anybody needs to be worried about anything is itself a question an atheist must deal with. Yet, we live in an indifferent, multi-cultural age in which both the atheist and the Thomist are looked on as rather odd characters. Each thinks that what he holds is true. What he thinks, makes a difference about how he lives. Otherwise, he would not bother to prove or explain his position. He would simply use his power and consider it right, however he chose to use it. Each system draws the opposite conclusion on the basis of the “evidence” at hand. One says that, grounded in the finite nature of existing things, it is reasonable to argue that God exists; the other says that it is not. In the meantime, the culture itself shies away from affirming anything as true. This distancing is often more of a political position than an epistemological one. It is not that we doubt the relation of sense and intellect, but that we dare not admit that something is true and other things are not. No one wants to seem prejudiced. No one wants to place any outside or objective criterion on how one is to live. Contemporary man valiantly seeks to avoid ever being confronted with a standard of truth to which, for his own well-being, he should conform his life and actions. Diversity and multiculturalism have become little more than unexamined skepticisms about the status of truth. We presume that the only way we can live together is by not acknowledging any truth that we all can affirm as self-evident. The famous passage in the fourteenth Psalm about the “fool” who says in his heart that there is no God takes it for granted that certain consequences follow from the belief that there is no God— abominations and the incapacity to do good. The man who holds that there is no God, of course, will look at the record of believers. He will acutely observe that it not always so edifying. He will, in fact, usually claim that “objectively” the atheist lives a “better” life than the believer or, at least, one that is no worse. The Thomist is in the uncomfortable position of having to admit, on his own principles and from his own experience, recalling the Fall, that even the best among us can and rather too often do fail. The virtue of humility does require us to acknowledge this truth. The minute the atheist makes such a claim that he lives a better life, of course, he too implies a standard by which he can compare the living practices of the atheist with those of the Thomist or believer. The issue becomes rather more complicated because the Thomist does not maintain that “belief” is the ultimate ground on which he rests his case about God’s existence. All faith is ultimately grounded in someone actually seeing. There is no faith in faith ad infinitum. The argument for the existence of God is a “preamble” to faith, something it supposes from the power of reason. The Fall did not imply the total corruption of reason. Mind remained mind. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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The Thomist proposes “proofs” for the existence of God, proofs rooted in experience and in the principle of contradiction, the obviousness that a thing cannot be and not be in the same time and place, in the same circumstances. He presents an elaborate series of consequences that follow logically from this initial proof or proofs of existence—that God is good, simple, true. In other words, the Thomist proposes to engage the atheist on his own grounds. The argument between the atheist and the Thomist is not an argument about faith and reason. It is an argument about reason and evidence. C. S. Lewis tells us that, as a young man, he was an atheist like most of his friends. However, he came across the works of Rudolf Steiner. They did not convince him of the truth of Steiner’s proposals, but they did undermine any confidence in the credibility of the claims of modern popular science to explain things. Like Chesterton in Heretics, the main arguments that Lewis found for belief in God or his disbelief in atheism were the modern philosophical and scientific arguments proposed to show that God did not exist. These arguments against God’s existence were full of holes but presented with the utmost assurance. It comes as something as a shock to realize that, in the past century or so, the principal upholders of reason in the modern world have been found on the Throne of Peter. John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio is remarkable as a call for philosophy to be philosophy. Benedict XVI remarked in his “Regensburg Lecture” that in fact the early Church was not so much concerned with the validity of other religions but with the validity of philosophy and the relation of revelation to it. The Church has been concerned about a narrow understanding of “reason” that limits it to rationality but denies to reason any insight into things. The reduction of knowledge to what the method of inquiry will reveal is not philosophy of what is. Rather it is a reductionism that disallows anything that the method does not allow.
II. In Question 10 of the Secunda Secundae, Aquinas addresses the general question of infidelitas–unfaithfulness. What is the status of someone who does not “believe?” We might mean by this unfaithfulness simply that someone does not have the faith because he never heard of it or considered it. The issue just never came up. Certainly a modern atheist might well fit into this distinction, though most actual atheists at least purport to know the arguments that are proposed in favor of God’s existence. But someone may take no stand one way or another because the issue has never arisen for him. Yet, it is difficult to think of someone who calls himself an “a-theist” who never wondered what a “theist” was. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Aquinas speaks of the vice of acidia, what is often translated as “sloth” or “idleness.” As Josef Pieper often points out, this vice is not just your every day laziness.4 It rather refers to a condition of soul that refuses to ask what it is or what is this life of mine about. It is a refusal to ask about the being whose very nature is designed that he know himself in order that he might live well in the world and in what transcends it. The unbeliever is not necessarily one who refuses to look at his soul. He claims that he does indeed look at his soul or whatever it is that unifies his being. He claims to see no reason why, to understand himself, he needs to conclude to the existence of God. He does not think he is a “fool” when he says “there is no God.” He thinks he is being reasonable, with a reason that does not allow an opposite position. Infidelity, however, can also mean something more aggressive. Someone can directly reject the content of the faith as it is proposed and heard. He can even contemn it. Aquinas bluntly calls this latter position a sin. It implies a rejection of what man is. Aquinas evidently takes active hostility to God’s existence as a sign of moral disorder that prevents reason from seeing what is true about man himself. But, as Aquinas acknowledged, no sin is found if someone has never heard of the issues of faith. Such ignorance, at best, might be a kind of punishment resulting from original sin, a simple not having something we need to know about ourselves. But if in fact we do not know it, it is not sinful. In the response to the third objection of the first article, Aquinas tells us that “infidelity, insofar as it is a sin, arises from pride, from which it happens that man does not wish to subject his intellect to the rules of faith and the sound understanding of the fathers.” One might say that Aquinas not only proposes that we think but that we think rightly, according to the norms existing in our minds and in things. These are principles that we discover but do not make ourselves. Intellectual errors are not merely mistaken calculations. They have consequences in how we live even if inculpable. The connection of pride and infidelity is not wholly accidental. Pride means attributing all order to ourselves as if there is no sound doctrine, rooted in things themselves, that we must discover and obey. Pride makes us think that the world is objectively what we want it to be. In the third question, Aquinas asks whether lack of faith is the greatest sin. He thinks that sin is greater the more it “separates man 4 “Idleness (acidia), for the older code of behavior, meant especially this: that the human being had given up on the very responsibility that comes with his dignity; that he does not want to be what God wants him to be, and that means that he does not want to be what he really, and in the ultimate sense, is.” Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (South Bend. IN.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 28. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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from God.” Infidelity separates man from God because, with it, he has no “true understanding of God.” It is difficult to live properly if we have no valid understanding of the highest things.5 God is not grasped through a false understanding of Him because what is grasped thereby is not the God that is. It is not that we can, with our finite minds, understand everything about God. But it is possible that what we do understand is correct in fact and not false. Again, evidently referring to the passage in the Psalm about the fool, Aquinas says that infidelity is a greater sin than all others which “lead to the perversity of morals.” Aquinas holds an intimate relation between thinking and acting. And he maintains that thinking wrongly about God is not a neutral or vague thought with no consequences. This connection is true even when the one who does not believe or know is not really culpable. If erroneous ideas of God or anything else had no consequences whatsoever, we would have to conclude that the mind is unconnected both with reality and with how we live, which is obviously not the case.
III. In recent decades, the Catholic Church has been particularly aggressive in engaging everyone willing to enter into discussion about their world views. The ecumenical movement has to do with other Christians of whatever variety, how they differ, what they have in common. There are regular discussions with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, as with philosophers and scientists. Generally speaking, the impetus for such discussion comes initially from the Church. The Vatican dicastery for discussion with atheists publishes a journal called Ateismo e Dialogo. The office’s function is, in a word, to keep its knowledge of atheism up-to-date. Within Catholicism, particularly under the recent popes, it assumed there are grounds for talking with any religious, philosophic, or scientific position about its truth and the relation of that truth to revelation. Depending on how one calculates the Chinese Marxists, the fact is that, numerically, relatively few formal atheists exist in the world. The more articulate ones have, perhaps, influence beyond their numbers, but this is not unusual in many areas of intellectual life. Also we generally distinguish between practical and theoretical atheists. The practical atheist is one who lives as if God does not exist, though he has no particular brief about why. The theoretical atheist, on the other hand, claims to have reason and proofs for his non-belief. Like the Thomist, he claims that his reasons are sufficient to “prove” the validity of his position. 5 See James V. Schall, “On ‘Believing’ Atheists,” Ignatius Insight, on-line, January 13, 2010.
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IV. In his discussion of “Atheism,” in the Encyclopedia of Theology, Karl Rahner surveyed the history of atheism in philosophy and in Church teachings. “Atheism essentially lives on the misconceived ideas of God from which theism, in its actual historical forms, inevitably suffers,” Rahner wrote.6 It seems that failures to argue consistently or to live according to what the existence of God implies is itself used as justifications for rejecting the God who supposedly is represented by these perceived misconceptions. Nietzsche’s famous aphorism that “the last Christian died on the Cross” is not a “proof ” of Christianity’s futility but rather a lament that believers do not in practice believe what they claim to believe.7 The unbeliever does frequently come up in Jewish and Christian documents. Since Vatican II, the Church has sought to treat the atheist with good will and sympathy. No more “fool calling,” granted Scripture’s point. The Church has tried to evaluate the sociological and personal reasons why someone might think atheism is a valid position. Yet, Scripture itself persistently judges the atheist, for the most part, as not innocent. This is how Rahner put it: Scripture. . .knows no atheism of a purely neutral kind, which would be merely incidental (or at least does not reflect any such atheism). It only recognizes an atheism which lies somewhere (impossible to locate in the individual case) between pious inarticulate veneration of the “unknown God” (Acts 17:22 in the light of Eph 2:12) and the guilty ignorance of the God who in actual fact one knows in the “suppressed” accomplishment of one’s own human nature (Romans 1).”8
Behind actual atheists, Scripture sees a moral issue. Atheism is the result of the way one chooses to live, not its cause. When we look at the actual lives of atheists, Rahner points out, something more is going on than a mere opinion about the origins of the world and man’s place in it. “There can be no serene atheism which is in harmony with itself; for even atheism draws life from an implicit theism,” Rahner observed. There can be a nominal theism which despite its conceptual talk about God either does not yet genuinely accomplish in personal freedom the true nature of the transcendent orientation towards God or else fundamentally denies it atheistically, i.e., godlessly; there can be an atheism which merely thinks it is one, because in a tacit way transcendence is obediently accepted but there is no success in making it expressly
6 Karl Rahner, “Atheism,” The Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum Mundi (New York: Seabury, 1975), 48–49. 7 See James V. Schall, “Last Christian,” Inside Catholic, on-line, April 14, 2009. 8 Rahner, ibid. 50–51. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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and explicitly clear enough to the person concerned; there can be a total (but as a consequence, necessarily culpable atheism) in which transcendence is denied in a proud closing of the self, and precisely this is consciously made into atheism expressly and deliberately.9
The expression that we cannot have a “serene” atheism is striking. Sooner or later, everyone must choose what kind of atheism he really holds. He must live one way or another. The self can close itself. Atheism can be culpable, proud, the maker of its own rules.
V. Thomism and atheism, in conclusion, are bound together. The very logic of the words means that the “theist” implies at least the notion of the “a-theist.” And conversely, the “a-theist” must wonder about the denial of his denial. We might inquire whether modern atheism implies more than, say, Augustine’s proud man who wanted to see himself as the cause of all distinctions and being? Have we entered into a new age of “atheism” that has something distinctive about it? Granted that the world, through the abidingness of its classical religions and philosophies, is in fact filled with believers in God, however understood, can we detect a new militancy or missionary zeal in atheism that now sees a way to convince all mankind of its validity? In his interview in Salt of the Earth, Josef Ratzinger already described in the most lucid detail what the modern atheist in logic holds. This same view is again spelled out in Spe Salvi, but the earlier statement, it strikes me, is classic in its succinct comprehension: “The ideal that ‘nature’ has something to say is no longer admissible,” Ratzinger wrote. Man is to have the liberty to remodel himself at will. He is to be free from all of the prior givens of his essence. He makes of himself what he wants, and only in this way is he really “free” and liberated. Behind this approach is a rebellion on man’s part against the limits that he has as a biological being. In the end, it is a revolt against our creatureliness. Man is to be his own creator–a modern, new edition of the immemorial attempt to be God, to be like God.10
This description is not only of a world without God, but a world without man as we have known him, something that theists expected would come about once the denial of God was spelled out in its complete consequences. 9 10
Ibid. 52. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997),
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Today, the Thomist answer to atheism is not that such “restructuring” of man cannot be carried out by the “rational” being. His response, call it consequentialism if you will, is that the product, the “new man,” the “new edition,” is in no way superior to the man that was created ex nihilo along with all else. The theist holds that we are given the choice. Will we choose to retain what we are as a gift superior to anything we could concoct by ourselves as an alternative? The new man asks: “If we can do it, why not do it?” Will men be “like gods?” The fact is, in this “new edition,” men will not even be “like men.” The “rebellion against the biological limits” of man’s being is a rebellion against what he is. No “serene atheism” can be found that leaves man in harmony with himself. Will men be “like gods” deciding their own good and evil? They will not even be like men. The choice in the Garden has come full circle. Man is free of “all prior givens,” except one. His rebellion does not allow him to be himself. For to be himself, he must choose himself, not as he wills, but as he is given to be what he is. Aristotle was right. Politics did not make man to be man, but taking him from nature, as already man, makes him to be good man. We do not make men “good” by remaking them as men. The atheist and the Thomist now have the field of the world to themselves. The great battles are first fought in the souls of men. What we see in our culture is merely the claim of the apparent victor. Which is the fool and which is the wise man, we are left to ponder. It is indeed a “revolt against creatureliness.” The whole essence of atheism is that there is no god. The whole essence of Thomism was that, for a creature, it was all right to be a creature and not a god. Thomas Aquinas stated in his Commentary on the Metaphysics, that “all beings must be referred to one first being.” If there is no first being, then the only thing to which all being can be referred is the human mind making and remaking itself. Thomism, thus, remains the only real opposition to atheism, which simply means “man making himself without God.” James V. Schall, SJ Wolfington Hall Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057-2100 USA Email: [email protected]
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The Geopolitical Gaze at the End of History I begin with Nietzsche because his aphorism nicely displays the problematic with which we shall be concerned, namely how the church ought to respond to a world so thoroughly captured by the apparent triumph of political and economic liberalism. Many Christians have greeted this historical development with deep satisfaction, believing that the gospel is quite compatible with the logic of capital and have boldly proclaimed, with Michael Novak, that “we are all capitalist now.”2 However, many other Christians lament this development and view capitalism as a monstrous aberration that is incompatible with the truth of the gospel. Taking as a starting point the latter position, what is less than clear is how to adequately wrestle with this great leviathan, whose power seems insurmountable. I will suggest that the universalism Alain Badiou reads out of Paul is precisely designed to address this conflict and does so in a remarkable fashion by refusing to violently dominate or overthrow capital and rather inhabits a vulnerable stance that risks its own annihilation. However, to begin to understand Badiou’s theologico-political reading of Paul we must have at least some sense of the background against which it is set and it is to that task that we now turn. The modern imagination has been conditioned to believe that the nation-state is the only imagined community around which life can be adequately organized. Politics thereby becomes the science of statecraft that is based not on the shared ends or goals of a given state but rather on the means of rule, which is to say, on coercion. This idea of an abstract sovereign state based on the successful manipulation of the citizenry can be traced through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, however what is most important to note for our purposes is that modern politics is based on the ontological primacy of evil and violence borne out of the fear of death.3 Perhaps seen most clearly in Hobbes, the state is envisioned as an artificial man, the great Leviathan, who can guarantee individual rights, personal security and non-interference only with absolute and unlimited power.4 In the absence of any shared ends, jettisoned in favor of securing both property and self from perceived threats, the modern liberal state 2
Michael Novak, The Capitalist Revolution, (New York: The Free Press, 1993), p. 101. See Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), especially pp. 20–38. 4 Manent helpfully notes the sense in which Hobbes’ definition of Leviathan’s power resembles Anselm’s famous ontological argument for the existence of God. See Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, p. 30. Equally important is the pervasive influence of Hobbes on modern politics and the sense in which he remains “modernity’s instructor” with regard to issues of power. See Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expaned ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 214–56 & 393–5. 3
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depends for its very survival on a social contract that imbues it with a monopoly on the legitimate uses of violence, which are so judged solely on the basis of state sanction. The enduring power of the mythos of the state illuminates the extent to which it has been able to so thoroughly discipline our bodies and minds that we are unable to break free of its imaginative hold on us. Put simply, that we are unable to imagine the world differently is a testament to the powerful, near univocal, character of the state story. However, as William Cavanaugh notes, the state is just one more historically contingent community founded upon stories of human nature, the sources and origins of human conflict and enacted as a solution to these modes of conflict.5 Complicating the mythos of the state, recent theorists of global capitalism argue that the nation state is in decline and the clear boundaries and spheres of sovereignty that once dominated the geopolitical landscape are giving way to increasingly decentered and deterritorialized notions of power that progressively incorporate the entire globe. No longer can we point to one dominant center but are instead embedded in vast mobile networks where borders are more flexible and identities more hybrid and fluid. However, while the nation state is declining in the face of new global networks that increasingly relativize the significance of national borders, that does not mean that sovereignty as such is in decline. It has, rather, descended from its transcendent heights to become immanent. Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that this epochal shift is best understood as the passage from a disciplinary society to a society of control where power is no longer contained within social institutions (schools, factories, hospitals, prisons, churches, etc.) but rather becomes a machine that creates and sustains power relations independent of those exercising power and is deployed with logics of subjectification that are generalized across the social field.6 What is especially important to note is that this immanentization of sovereignty is also, at the same time, the emergence of the biopolitical character of modern politics. The modern self is no longer simply the political animal envisioned by Aristotle but is produced and called into question by power. What is at stake is nothing less than the production and reproducion of life itself. Making the connection between the political philosophy 5 See William T. Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House’: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State”, Modern Theology 11:4 (1995), pp. 397– 420; and “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 182–200. Particularly instructive is his claim that the “soteriology of the modern state is incomprehensible, however, apart from the notion that the Church is perhaps the primary thing from which the state is meant to save us.” 6 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 329. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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of Carl Schmitt, who famously designates the sovereign as he who decides on the state of exception, Giorgio Agamben argues that “the immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges clearly in the ‘military order’ issued by the president of the United States on November 13th , 2001, which authorized the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by ‘militiary commissions’ of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.”7 From this perspective it is clear that what binds this genealogy together is its continued reliance on a Hobbesian legacy of fear that remains the primary mechanism of control. What is equally clear is that far from conceding its significance, the state remains as an instrument of biopolitical production, smoothing out the terrain on which commodities travel, thereby neutralizing opposition to the endless flows of global capital and enabling its acceptance as inevitable and natural. Thus the age of globalization, as we seem destined to regard it, can be seen as a hyperextension of the state mythos insofar as it continues to subsume local particularities and differences under its universal mapping of social terrain and envelops them in its vast fluctuating networks of power, rendering them merely different.8 What seems clear, then, is that the viable alternatives to Western liberalism have been crushed by the Soviet tanks that rolled through Prague in 1968 and finally dismantled with the Berlin Wall in 1989 such that we have arrived at what Francis Fukuyama calls “the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s [sic] ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”9 The apparent triumph of political and economic liberalism is realized today in the new face of capitalism that, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari note, “is an
7 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 3. 8 See William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2002), pp. 97–122. The logic of global capital, which is the pinnacle of the modern biopolitical paradigm, celebrates the illusion of diversity by mapping it within one global and universal marketplace, for example, in the facile multiculturalism of the food court. Fueled by its accelerating need for growth, which is to say its need for greater and greater profits, it seeks out ever more specialized products, prized for their novelty, that it subsequently envelopes within its commodifying mechanisms whilst simultaneously masking the rigid boundaries it underwrites. See also Kenneth Surin, “A ‘Politics of Speech’: Religious Pluralism in the Age of the McDonald’s Hamburger,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. Gavin D’Costa, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990), pp. 192–212. Surin helpfully notes the sense in which the “democratization of difference,” while premised on recognizing plurality, is always fatally linked to a homogeneous logic that irons out particularities and subsumes them under a totalizing global gaze. 9 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest 16 (1989), pp. 3–18. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a single City, megalopolis, or ‘megamachine’ of which the States are parts, or neighborhoods.”10 As an “international ecumenical organization,”11 capitalism has co-opted the state as an instrument of biopolitical production that has finally infiltrated every aspect of life with its logic of consumption and admits of no “outside” to its power, no “pure” space from which a critique could be mounted.12 In this admittedly bleak context it seems that Walter Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history in which theology is cast as the hunchback that must “keep out of sight”13 is not only an apt description of the state of our contemporary situation but has also been adopted by the church as its own self understanding. In the conditions of late capitalism, heralded as “the end of history,” the church seems to think it self evident that if it is to have any public relevance at all it will have to be on the grounds that it fosters the ideals and motives that are required for engagement in secular politics or that a more just society can be achieved by deriving and translating Christian values in to a new desacralized public philosophy that can be embraced by anyone. Simply put, the church has become convinced that, if it is to have any public relevance whatsoˇ zek has recently suggested ever, it cannot be itself. However, Slavoj Ziˇ that it is time to reverse Benjamin’s first thesis: “The puppet called ‘theology’ is to win all the time.”14 This is quite a startling reversal, especially given the extent to which the mythos of the state, now in the service of smoothing out the terrain and enabling the endless flows of global capital, has been able to so thoroughly capture us in its mechanistic logic of endless consumption. Despite this fact, Badiou turns to the conceptual resources and classic texts of the Christian tradition precisely as a way (perhaps the last way?) to stand in the face of the twin dangers of capitalism and liberal democracy that dominate the geopolitical landscape at “the end of history.”
10 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 434–5. 11 Ibid., p. 435. 12 Hardt and Negri take this analysis even further, arguing that since power takes on the form of a web of shifting alliances, clarifying a common enemy becomes exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. See Empire, pp. 56–7. It is helpful to note at this point that while this may present a rather hopeless picture, it is drawn from the heights of Deleuzian metaphysics where the line between oppressor and oppressed is obscured in a way that, as Hardt and Negri seem to realize, is brought into focus on the ground in places like Rwanda or Darfur. 13 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Suffolk: Chaucer Press, 1970), p. 255. 14 ˇ zek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (CamSlavoj Ziˇ bridge: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 3. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Badiou’s Paul: The Event of Christianity and the Politics of Truth Against this background, Badiou’s reading of Paul turns on four interrelated concepts: truth, event, subject and fidelity. What is most important to see in Badiou’s reading of Paul is the “paradoxical connection between a subject without identity and a law without support,”15 which opens up the possibility for the first truly universal teaching within history itself. That is, Paul’s proclamation that “Jesus is resurrected” (Rom. 1:4, 1 Cor. 15:1–4) names an event, the first irruption of an absolutely universal claim. Lest confusion run rampant, Badiou makes it perfectly clear from the outset that, for him, Paul is not a saint nor an apostle but rather a “poet-thinker of the event” who propounds a “speech of rupture” that mobilizes a universal singularity against the prevailing abstractions of captial that dominate the contemporary world. Read this way, Paul becomes, for Badiou, a political thinker of the utmost importance and, moreover, the founder of an “unprecedented gesture” that subtracts truth from the communitarian grasp. The great “unprecedented gesture” Badiou attributes to Paul is simply that he reduces Christianity to a single statement, an event, moreover, that he identifies as a point fabuleux that “fails to touch on any Real.” Throughout Saint Paul, Badiou is at pains to reiterate this point and notes that Paul’s texts retain little of Jesus’ teachings or miracles and instead bring everything “back to a single point: Jesus, son of God, and Christ in virtue of this, died on the cross and was resurrected. The rest, all the rest, is of no real importance.”16 What this means for Badiou is that the Christian subject is “devoid of all identity and suspended to an event whose only ‘proof’ lies precisely in its having been declared by a subject.”17 That is, what is true cannot be reduced to an “objective aggregate” and is thoroughly subjective and radically singular all the way down and is, furthermore, only constituted by a process that is inextricably intertwined with the rupture that is the event. Thus Badiou will often refer to truth as a process, as that which is materially produced in exceptional circumstances under the sign of an event that represents a radical break with the prevailing logics and structures that govern the cosmos. Indeed, Badiou claims “that a truth-process is heterogeneous to the instituted knowledges of the situation. Or – to use an expression of Lacan’s – that it punches a 15
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 5. 16 Ibid., p. 33. Or, again, “Jesus is resurrected; nothing else matters, so that Jesus becomes like an anonymous variable, a ‘someone’ devoid of predicative traits, entirely absorbed by his resurrection” (63). 17 Ibid., p. 5. Emphasis added. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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‘hole [trou´ee]’ in these knowledges.”18 That is, for Badiou, truth is an absolute and immanent break, a rupture, a subtraction, a crisis that is beyond all calculation, prediction and management, a kind of creation ex nihilo. His zealous commitment to truth as a universal singularity is, perhaps, the most striking general characteristic of Badiou’s philosophy and differentiates him from fields of academic philosophy as diverse as the analytic, hermeneutic and poststructuralist traditions that all harbour, as Peter Hallward notes, “a profound suspicion of the very word truth.”19 Moreover, truth is sustained, for Badiou, by fidelity to the event, by holding fast to the evental becoming of truth in the face of countless obstacles and objections. Truth, event, subject and fidelity are thus all part of a single process: truth comes into being via subjects who declare an event and, in so doing, are constituted (“subjectivated” Badiou likes to say) precisely by their faithful and continuous response to the irruption of that revolutionary event. Echoing Paul’s words that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Cor. 5:17) Badiou says that “for Paul, the event has not come to prove something; it is pure beginning” and holds fast to the conviction that Christian discourse is “absolutely new.”20 Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus (Acts 22:6–11) nicely displays Badiou’s conception of the evental becoming of truth and, furthermore, mimics the founding event of Christ’s resurrection. It is clear from Paul’s own account that there was nothing leading up to his so called conversion, it was in itself incalculable and of the order of an encounter, and in his letter to the Galatians he makes it clear that this conversion was not carried out by anyone but was rather received through a revelation (Gal. 1:11–12). Furthermore, he does not seek subsequent confirmation of this event that has appointed him an apostle to the nations, as Badiou says “he leaves this subjective upsurge outside every official seal.”21 Paul does not travel to Jerusalem nor does he seek out the apostles who knew Christ but rather goes into Arabia to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles (Gal. 1:15–17). Interestingly, Badiou sees Paul’s confidence rooted in this encounter on the road and, furthermore, notes that his conviction will cause him to enter into conflicts with the core of the historical apostles, most notably Peter. In what is perhaps his most covertly theological affirmation, Badiou links this with the fact that Paul’s letters are best 18 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, (London: Verso, 2001), p. 43. 19 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. xxiv. 20 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 49 and 43, respectively. 21 Ibid., p. 18. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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read as interventions in the lives of the enclaves of the faithful with all the political passion proper to the inevitable struggles that holding fast to a declaration will bring.22 That is, Badiou, rightly, sees the ecclesia as a site of contestation that requires nothing less than an active and never-ending pursuit of clarification to remain faithful to the truth-event that is named in the resurrection. Badiou’s understanding of truth as a universal singularity helpfully illuminates the deliberately provocative subtitle of his book: the foundation of universalism. To reiterate, Paul’s great “unprecedented gesture,” as we have seen, is to subtract truth from the communitarian grasp and to never let it be determined by the available generalities of the evental site. What Badiou means, then, by saying that Paul is the founder of universalism is precisely that the proclamation “Christ is resurrected” exceeds every generality and consists in the potential of universal recognizability alone. It is a going beyond, an address that is radically “for all,” that is, an entirely new conception of what universalism is. Conceding that various forms of universalism existed “in this or that theorem of Archimedes, in certain political practices of the Greeks, in a tragedy of Sophocles, or in the amorous intensity to which the poems of Sappho bear witness,” Badiou nevertheless claims that Paul’s founding gesture, which constitutes the immense echo of Christianity, reveals the formal conditions of truth rooted in a pure event that is supported only by itself.23 Paul’s founding gesture, then, is not the production of a universal truth as much as it illuminates, for the first time, the laws of universality as such. Therefore Badiou can see in Paul an “antiphilosopher of genius” who “warns the philosopher that the conditions for the universal cannot be conceptual.”24 Accordingly, Badiou can be situated as an interventionist thinker whose central insight is that the militant apparatus of truth can only be achieved by going against the flow of the world.25 This becomes especially clear in his militant advocacy that “Paul demonstrates in detail how a universal thought, proceeding on the basis of the worldly proliferation of alterities (the Jew, the Greek, women, men, slaves, free men, and so on), produces a Sameness and an Equality (there is no longer either Jew, or Greek, and so on).”26 What this amounts to is nothing less than a scathing indictment 22
See Ibid., pp. 20–1. Ibid., pp. 107–9. 24 Ibid., p. 108. 25 Indeed, Badiou explicitly claims that his admiration of Blaise Pascal consists in “the effort, amidst difficult circumstances, to go against the flow; not in the reactive sense of the term, but in order to invent the modern forms of an ancient conviction, rather than follow the way of the world.” See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 222. 26 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 109. 23
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of those philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel L´evinas, Luce Irigaray and others, who have been preoccupied with the category of alterity. Badiou’s scathing critique of Emmanuel L´evinas, whose “ethics of difference” amounts to “good old-fashioned ‘tolerance,’ which consists in not being offended by the fact that others think and act differently from you” and “has neither force nor truth” is a case in point.27 Militantly in defiance of this mode of thought, Badiou claims that the question of universality is about “maintaining a nonconformity with regard to that which is always conforming us,”28 or, as Paul magnificently exhorts, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Rom. 12:2). Badiou is at his strongest in pointing toward the inconsistencies of contemporary discourses that claim to respect differences but only on the unacknowledged grounds that the celebrated “Other” be subject to generalized circulation and fall under the logic of the count. Characterizing the contemporary world in terms of two processes that are perfectly intertwined, Badiou claims that: On the one hand, there is an extension of the automatisms of capital, fulfilling one of Marx’s inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of abstract homogenization. Everything that circulates falls under the unity of a count, while inversely, only what lets itself be counted in this way can circulate. On the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation.29
Taken together, these two processes constitute the state of the contemporary world in which what is of utmost importance is the absolute necessity that everything be subject to free circulation, that is, provide material for its own investment in the market. Therefore, as Badiou recognizes, the appearance of difference is precisely what is most amenable to such investment. Indeed, difference must be actively sought out since ever more specialized products, prized for their uniqueness, create in their wake new and ever-expanding market niches. Examples of the proliferation of specialized products abound, from environmentally sensitive clothing made from organically grown cotton to gourmet coffee made from beans passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet. Badiou claims this process, which is nothing but monetary homogenization, largely takes the form of demanding recognition of the cultural significance of various communities or minorities (women, homosexuals, the disabled, 27 28 29
Badiou, Ethics, pp. 18–25. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 110. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
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Muslims, etc.) and is furthermore often combined and specialized by coupling this demand with the seemingly inexhaustible addition of various predicative traits (female ecologists, black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, moderate Muslims, etc.) such that “each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, ‘free’ radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady ‘public debates’ at peak viewing times.”30 Tipping his hat to Deleuze here, Badiou argues that: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist logic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of communities or minorities form an articulated whole.31
What is most important to note is that there is no true respect for difference here. On the contrary we have a radical effacing of difference in the name of difference or, as Badiou says, a kind of abstract homogenization whereby these differences are systematically caught up and distributed in the marketplace, rendering them merely different. In effect evacuating any substantive difference, those selfproclaimed apostles of the ethics of alterity reveal themselves to be sutured to the capitalist logic of endless consumption, advocating a thinly veiled version of liberal tolerance, for they cannot sustain any encounter with a rigorously defended difference. This problem is nicely displayed by the demonization of “Islamic fundamentalism,” especially in the United States where there can be no freedom for the enemies of freedom. As Badiou disdainfully remarks, this kind of ethical ideology “is simply the final imperative of a conquering civilization: ‘Become like me and I will respect your difference.’”32 It is precisely in the face of this deplorable situation that Badiou reads Paul’s proclamation of a universal singularity. For Badiou, capital’s apparatus of capture, necessarily a dominant cycle that subjects everything to the logic of the count, is radically without truth since, as we have seen, a truth procedure is an interruption that cannot be supported by the abstract permanence of capital’s repetitive homogenization. Alternatively, the universalism Badiou claims to read out of Paul is such that it permits resistance to the imperialistic demands of the logic of capital, not by coercive argument or legal demand but rather by a proclamation that summons a response. It is interesting 30 31 32
Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Badiou, Ethics, p. 25.
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to note that this reading requires Badiou to give a much stronger defense of Paul against the traditional charges of misogyny and antiSemitism leveled against him.33 Indeed, Badiou makes reference to Paul’s claim that “for though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win the more” (1 Cor. 9:19). This initiates what Badiou calls a process of “subsequent symmetrization” whereby particular differences are affirmed, for example between men and women (cf. 1 Cor. 7:10–11), in such a way that they may be exposed to the universal event. As Badiou says, “this is the reason why Paul not only refuses to stigmatize differences and customs, but also undertakes to accommodate them so that the process of their subjective disqualification might pass through them, within them.”34 Terming this subjective process “an indifference that tolerates differences,” Badiou goes at least some of the way toward critiques that would turn his incisive indictment of contemporary philosophy’s ultimately disingenuous preoccupation with alterity against him.35 However, in a beautiful formulation Badiou claims that “what matters, man or woman, Jew or Greek, slave or free, is that differences carry the universal that happens to them like a grace.”36 For Badiou, then, it is of the utmost importance that existing differences are not simply patronizingly tolerated nor strategically deployed in the marketplace as a potential source of income but that they are rather exposed to the universal such that they are capable of welcoming the truth that traverses them. As such, Badiou’s profound thesis is “that universalism supposes one be able to think the multiple not as a part, but as in excess of itself, as that which is out of place, as a nomadism of gratuitousness.”37 Thus imagined, the evental becoming of truth is capable of transcending and traversing received opinion and custom without having to give up those differences which allow us to recognize ourselves in the world, precisely what the abstract homogenization of the logic of capital does not allow. Read this way, Badiou’s Paul represents a radical disruption of unproblematic accounts of identity and difference that interrupts their otherwise smooth integration in the rampant automatisms of capital and thus represents a compelling alternative picture to the current world-as-market configuration.
33 For a helpful excursus on the traditional charges of misogyny and anti-Semitism that are routinely leveled against Paul see Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), especially pp. 136–57 & 201–27. 34 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 99. 35 See, for example, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., “Badiou’s Faith and Paul’s Gospel: The Politics of Indifference and the Overcoming of Capital,” Angelaki, 12:1 (2007), pp. 97–111. 36 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 106. Emphasis in original. 37 Ibid., p. 78. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Bell on Badiou’s Paul: A Politics of Indifference or A Vulnerable Universality? While there are admittedly serious theological problems in Badiou’s reading of Paul, perhaps most seriously his claim that for Paul there is no path of the cross38 , the extent to which his reading of Paul helpfully articulates a vision for the shape of the ecclesia within the conditions of late capitalism is not best understood as yet another point of conflict in which a new threat calls for additional security measures and defense but rather as a providential occasion for further clarification and appreciation of the valuable treasure that has been entrusted to the church as gift, not possession. However, to receive Badiou’s reading as a gift, I suggest we shall have to risk letting Paul go, risk keeping nothing safe for the sake of the Gospel since our investigation will be more meaningful when less concerned to dominate. The resources that Badiou offers the church in his powerful diagnosis of the contemporary geopolitical landscape are significant and, moreover, can easily be missed even by those theologians that claim to have moved beyond the division between Paul’s texts and Paul’s faith displayed in his reading. The extent to which this is the case is brought into sharp relief upon close examination of a recent theological critique of Badiou that helpfully teases out the profound sense in which Badiou points the way toward a radical ecclesiology. In his essay entitled, Badiou’s Faith and Paul’s Gospel: The Politics of Indifference and the Overcoming of Capital, Daniel Bell, Jr. helpfully situates Badiou as exceeding the threadbare debates of an earlier age in his confrontation of the empty universalism of capital.39 Making his analysis of Badiou even stronger, Bell recognizes from the outset the danger inherent in a theological reading of Badiou’s Paul and claims that he will take issue with Badiou’s use of Saint Paul, “but not for the sake of defending Paul.”40 This is all to the good. However, just a few sentences on, describing the ways in which he argues Badiou’s Paul fails, Bell says that “Badiou retreats from the full radicality of Paul’s gospel and that, as a consequence, his thought does not foreshadow liberty and liberation from capital,”41 a statement that goes at least some of the way to questioning the extent to which Bell is genuinely able to take issue with Badiou on his own terms. 38 See Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 67. For an alternative view that complicates Badiou’s radical separation of cross and resurrection see Stanislas Breton, Saint Paul, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), with whom Badiou triangulates his own reading of Paul. 39 Bell, “Badiou’s Faith and Paul’s Gospel,” p. 97. 40 Ibid., p. 98. Emphasis original. 41 Ibid., p. 98. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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What is fundamentally at stake for Bell is Badiou’s universalism. In his discussion of what he calls the “withering of the Jews” in Badiou’s thought, Bell notes that Badiou does not seek to eliminate particular differences but questions the sense in which his indifference is, nevertheless, its own form of destruction. Articulating this point, Bell notes that “Jews remain; but they are deracinated. They are Jews like a food court taco is a taco.”42 What is most important to note in Bell’s critique of Badiou, however, are his reasons for arguing that Badiou’s Paul cannot, in the end, stand against the homogeneous logic of capital. Suggesting that Badiou’s pronunciation of the resurrection as a fable is simply the result of his fidelity to the truth-event of post-Cantorian mathematics, Bell argues that Badiou’s atheism is best understood as a “commitment to modernity – at least its thought, if not its politics, ethics, and economy.”43 His conclusion that Badiou’s universalism is thus thoroughly situated and his concomitant rejection of it based on its being sutured to the logic of the Enlightenment is too easy and uncritical a dismissal of Badiou’s Paul, which cannot be so easily identified with the modern project.44 Linked with his easy identification of Badiou and modernity, Bell outlines what he takes to be the most serious flaw in Badiou’s Paul. . . . Badiou’s universalism, effacing as it does differences and particularity even as it affirms them, actually mirrors capitalism’s abstract homogenization of differences and particularities. Indeed, it is not immediately clear what distinguishes the truth procedure that traverses differences and the generic subject that results from that procedure from the commodities produced by capitalist monetary homogenization.45
Bell’s central worry here is that Badiou’s Paul remains too close to the logic of capital such that it may well slide into or mirror the very processes of abstract homogenization that he seeks to repudiate. Indeed, it seems this proximity to capital is exactly what is at stake since Bell claims that “the (minimal) distance Badiou asserts exists between capitalism’s universality and his own universalism of love has failed to materialize.”46 Thus Bell rhetorically asks “Whence cometh peace? . . . Badiou’s mathematized grace can actually promise nothing in the way of deliverance.”47 42
Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 100. 44 This easy dismissal of Badiou based on his affinities with modernity belies Bell’s claim to have exposed the sense in which Badiou fails on his own terms. His claim that “Badiou’s thought approaches the level of the dogmatically modern when it begins simply with the supposition that the theological has been finished off once and for all,” (100) remains insufficient to characterize Badiou’s thought as modern. 45 Ibid., p. 103. 46 Ibid., p. 105. 47 Ibid., p. 104. 43
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What is most remarkable about Bell’s reading is that in exposing the reasons he thinks that Badiou’s Paul cannot stand in the face of the logic of capital he articulates perhaps the most profound aspect of Badiou’s reading yet rejects it by interpreting it as a weakness. Bell is incisively correct in his analysis of Badiou’s Paul, his universalism is indeed close to the false universalism of capital, however it is precisely this proximity that makes Badiou’s Paul so compelling. In this sense Bell may very well be right that Badiou’s reading could end up being a withering of the Jews, however this does not necessitate a counter-reading, a “concrete universalism” that can guarantee results.48 What Bell interprets as a weakness is actually the greatest strength of Badiou’s reading, a strength that consists in its vulnerability (cf. 2 Cor. 12:9). While he may not impugn Badiou’s Paul by arguing that Badiou has failed to articulate an authentic or canonical Paul, in the end, Bell makes Christianity necessary for a complete and proper understanding of Paul. Attempting to exploit the the fragility of the proximity to capital that Badiou reads out of Paul even further, Bell makes much of the fact that, in affirming Karl Marx’s radical critique of feudal socialism, Badiou claims that “on this point we are rivals to capital, rather than merely reacting against it.”49 Bell seems to think that what Badiou means by this is simply that he is “better understood as a rival rather than an opponent of captialism”50 and that an emancipatory politics worth the name necessitates a truly alternative approach that goes beyond mere rivalry. Undoubtedly part of Bell’s reason for this is his own critique of capitalism, which will have none of the half-hearted condemnations issued by Marx. His more comprehensive work, Liberation Theology After the End of History, illuminates the sense in which for Bell there is almost nothing redeemable in capitalism whatsoever but “only a madness, a culture that in its destruction of peoples and nature amounts to a celebration of collective suicide.”51 48 This possibility of becoming the unconscious agents of capital itself is precisely what the vulnerability of Badiou’s position consists in and this possibility, which is by no means a necessary one, must remain perpetually exposed. Bell’s attempt to cover it over by linking it with an obliteration of difference is unconvincing at best and is not sufficiently demonstrated in his argument against Badiou. Moreover, Bell seems not to recognize the possibility that becoming a conscious agent of capital might itself work as a kind of redistribution that hollows out the abstract permanence of capital’s repetitive homogenization from within. Many of the immigrant communities in Manchester, where I currently live, work precisely to send money back home and serve as an example of how this kind of redistribution is already happening. 49 Badiou, Ethics, p. 114. See also Alain Badiou, Manifesto For Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz, (Albany: SUNY, 1999), especially pp. 56–8 where he is more positive about a point of collusion with capital. 50 Bell, Badiou’s Faith and Paul’s Gospel, p. 103. Emphasis added. 51 Daniel M. Bell, Jr. Liberation Theology After the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering, (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 12. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Moreover, Bell seems unable to recognize the sense in which the vulnerability he writes off in Badiou’s reading as a weakness would, in fact, strengthen and complement his own elaboration of universalism that consists in the possibility, even the normativity, of the peaceful embrace of difference that is rightly named catholicity. Indeed, speaking directly to Bell’s worry about the erosion of particularity, Badiou turns to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “If even lifeless instruments, such as the flute or the harp, do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is being played on the flute or the harp?” (1 Cor. 14:7). Like Bell, Badiou is concerned to save particularity from the cold waters of selfish calculation and argues that “differences, like instrumental tones, provide us with the recognizable univocity that makes up the melody of the True.”52 That Bell cannot make this recognition and reads his own “concrete universalism” against Badiou’s vulnerable universalism, reveals his reading to be nothing less than an attempt to shore up the gospel against external threats in a way that is certainly not in keeping with the Pauline text. In this way, Bell’s critique of Badiou can be turned back against him since it is Bell the Christian theologian, not Badiou the professed atheist, who retreats from the full radicality of Paul’s gospel. This stance of vulnerability can be seen throughout Badiou’s reading of Paul and is precisely what marks a radical ecclesiology. For Badiou, Paul presents a “militant discourse of weakness,” a “struggling universality”53 in which fidelity to the event necessitates ongoing clarification, a nomadism of gratuitousness that is never finally settled.54 Thus Badiou is able to appreciate the sense in which for Paul, the task of the ecclesia is not to reactively overcome capital as it is for Bell but rather consists in the vulnerable stance of patiently dwelling within the world capital dominates and struggling to remain faithful to the event of the resurrection, even if it means that Christ’s own body becomes infected.
Toward a Radical Ecclesiology In conclusion I would like to return to Nietzsche’s aphorism and suggest that what is at stake between Badiou’s reading of Paul and Bell’s critical rejoinder is not only differing conceptions of universalism but also differing conceptions of the monstrous. In his discussion of the relationship between pity and fear in his Sweet Violence, Terry 52 53 54
Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 106. ˇ zek’s. See The Puppet and the Dwarf , p. 109. This term is Ziˇ See Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 53 & 78.
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Eagleton suggests that “for the radical, the real monsters are ourselves.”55 What this means for our purposes is that Badiou’s vulnerable universalism is able to embrace self-critical practices since it is perpetually aware of its own fragility and susceptibility of mirroring the abstract homogenization of capital whereas Bell’s concrete universalism is reactionary in its perpetual drive to overcome capital and is constructed precisely to master the contingency inherent in Badiou’s reading. In the end, Bell is unwilling to inhabit a space in which we may be exposed to the risk of being the unconscious agents of capital itself and seeks instead to insulate and shore up his position against such immanent dangers. In this way, Bell directs our attention to the first half of Nietzsche’s aphorism, which places the emphasis squarely on our avoidance of the monstrous we see in others. However this reading misses the profound implication in the second half of Nietzsche’s aphorism, which suggests that we may well embody the monstrous that we seek to expose in others. That is, alongside the task of diagnosing the multiple flows of power with which we are confronted at “the end of history” must go a renewed analysis of the ways in which we ourselves are the products of these very powers. I suggest that Badiou is able to recognize this precisely insofar as he articulates a universalism that is not primarily a reaction to external threats, which would make his position all the more amenable to the mechanized logic of capital, but rather embodies a stance of vulnerability. As Badiou says, following Paul’s proclamation that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength (1 Cor. 1:25), we must dispense with every formula of mastery.56 In habituating ourselves to the sense in which we may well be the monsters, we become enabled to see the complex movements of power that are covered over by the abstract homogenization of capital and remain hidden from sight. Going beyond Badiou, this means cultivating an awareness that if the church is truly to be itself in the conditions of late capitalism it must not hover on the margins to keep itself pure but rather realize the profound sense in which its proclamation of the lordship of Christ depends on a network of complex relationships that consist of profound and costly involvement with each other where disagreement can flourish and we can vulnerably put ourselves in question. In this sense, the church must refuse any and all strategies that attempt to secure a “peace” beyond vulnerability by avoiding tension and must instead cultivate practices that enable us to see the monstrous in ourselves. That is
55 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 165. 56 See Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 58–9. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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to say, the church must be the kind of place that is hospitable to conflict.57 What is required, then, in the face of these desires to control outcomes and master contingency is a constant potential for radical reformation that is fostered by seeking out conflicts and creatively addressing them in ways that neither obliterate differences nor patronizingly tolerate them but rather engage them as a generative source for learning how to live better together. Simply put, the church must be a site of contestation, not a place where fundamentals are preserved beyond debate and conversations begin by searching for some kernel of unity upon which differing sides can easily agree and move forward. This can only be accomplished by costly engagement with each other in which we actively seek out difficult conversations that question the sense in which our conclusions may be artificial. In the end, there is no way of knowing precisely what shape these costly conversations might take, however it is clear that any honest proclamation of the lordship of Christ must inhabit this fragile space if it is not to become yet another commodity that presents itself for investment in the market. It is precisely this fragility, this vulnerability, this openness to seeing the monstrous in ourselves that makes possible the peaceful interaction of differences Bell rightly calls for. That Bell retreats from the admittedly dangerous precipice that Badiou articulates and favors a position that can guarantee the “undulations of the snake” will be overcome, means that he fails to discern the profound sense in which Badiou has rightly understood Paul’s vision of the ecclesia as a body that is organized around a response to the proclamation of the resurrection, with all the political passion and conflict that such a body will undoubtedly engender. Thus, in its struggle to be faithful to the resurrection, Badiou’s vulnerable universalism points toward a radical ecclesiology that is closer to the universalism that is rightly named catholicity just to the extent that Bell’s concrete universalism refuses to inhabit this space of fragility. Kyle Gingerich Hiebert The University of Manchester Religions and Theology Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom Email: [email protected] 57 Romand Coles makes an insightful case for this in his reading of Rowan Williams in Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2008), especially pp. 174–94. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the work of the LCWR in supporting its membership as communities of faith and witness to Christ in today’s Church . . . .”3 The Apostolic Visitation is scheduled to provide confidential reports to the Vatican at the end of 2011; the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s assessment may or may not result in a public statement regarding LCWR. What seems central is the question of vocations to religious life for women. In 1983, Pope John Paul II asked for an evaluation of US religious life in the United States concurrent with release of “Essential Elements on Church Teaching on Religious Life as Applied to Institutes Dedicated to Works of the Apostolate” (May 31, 1983) by the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes (SCRIS). Then, as now, the precipitous drop in vocations combined with significant departures of women from religious life concerned local bishops, who were losing a reliable (and, not incidentally, lowcost) source of workers. Not all US women’s institutes are fading. A recent study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) reports that newer and more conservative institutes are gaining younger members, while older, established institutes are not.4 The pre-determined conclusion, and perhaps cause, of the recent investigations seems to be that some individual institutes (under scrutiny by Mother Millea) and their larger leadership organization (questioned by Bishop Blair) have departed from traditional religious life and are near extinction. While more traditional institutes represented by the Conference of Major Superiors of Women (CMSWR) are gaining newer, younger members, overall proportionately fewer women are entering institutes of apostolic religious life as compared to other available vocations to Christian ministry. Hence, a closer examination of how the Church might better respond to women who wish to minister might present another answer to the precipitous post-Vatican II drop in religious vocations.5 Dual forces have led to marked change in older and more established institutes. Historically the ordinary lifespan of a newlyfounded religious institute is approximately 150 years, as it moves in a Bell curve from the excitement of initial charism through building 3 “Doctrinal Assessment of LCWR by Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” http://www.lcwr.org/what’snew/assessment.htm (accessed 7 November 2010). 4 “. . .there is a ten-year gap in average and median entrance age between women in LCWR institutes and women in CMSWR institutes. According to the survey of religious institutes, more than half of the women in initial formation in LCWR institutes (56 percent) are age 40 and older, compared to 15 percent in CMSWR institutes.” Mary E. Bendyna and Mary L. Gautier “Recent Vocations to Religious Life: A Report for the National Religious Vocation Conference” Washington, DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 2009. 5 CARA reports 173,865 US women religious in 1965, and 79,876 in 2000. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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traditions and institutions, to a dying off. Second, contemporary women religious who belong to these now-older institutes have adapted to their changing circumstances and the changing needs of the ecclesia they serve to live more “in the world.” The service of women “in the world” is counter to traditional understandings of religious life. Yet the “modern” ways of many contemporary religious in the United States may be rebirth of an ancient way adapted to contemporary society. I posit that many apostolic women religious, as well as secular women lay ecclesial ministers, are mirroring the deacons of antiquity and of perhaps of today. The newer religious institutes representing the most growth follow more traditional models of religious life. They live common horaria, wear common habits, and appear, for the most part, to be involved in traditional works taken up by women religious since the mid-19th century: maintaining and providing housekeeping for residences for priests and bishops, working as catechists in local parishes, running educational institutions connected to their mother houses, and generally working in direct support of diocesan or parochial enterprises. Their leadership belongs to the Conference of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR), and they offer new members common purpose and common life within a highly structured setting. But what about the other institutes, those top-heavy with aging members, whose newer and younger members don’t fit the mold presented (and perhaps looked for) by the Apostolic Visitators? The Questionnaire for Major Superiors has six major areas of inquiry: 1) Identity; 2) Governance; 3) Vocation Promotion; 4) Spiritual and Common Life; 5) Mission and Ministry; 6) Financial Administration.6 Each section has several subsections, but the overall questionnaire presents a particular vision of religious life that leans distinctly to the right. Certain viewpoints are presupposed, including what drives or motivates individuals and institutes to consecrated life. In some cases questions are redundant or reach across categories. Not answers, but observations that may shed light on what seems to be an impasse here follow.
Identity The first section, “Identity,” asks about founding charisms, vows, reconfigurations and mergers and, tellingly, whether the institute is “moving toward a new form of religious life.” I believe that many apostolic institutes are not moving toward a “new form” of religious life, but, rather are reclaiming an older vocation of women, that 6 The three-part questionnaire can be accessed at http://www.apostolicvisitation.org/ en/materials/index.html. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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of the diaconate. Throughout history, this traditional vocation has burst the seams of official restraints on women, first emerging as a vocation verified in the letters of Paul, who calls Phoebe not only a woman of some authority and stature, but a deacon (not deaconess). In fact, Phoebe is the only person in Scripture who is titled “deacon.” (Rom. 16:1)7 While the diaconate of men and of women effectively died out and remained moribund as a distinct vocation for centuries, women’s ministry did not. From the first inklings of organized religious life for women in monasteries, through the Rule for Virgins of Caesarius of Arles and later iterations of monastic rules, to the Beguines and medieval Third Order women (such as Catherine of Siena) who sought consecrated life with direct service to the people of God, to the emergence of apostolic (i.e. non-cloistered) religious life for women through the genius of Mary Ward and others, women have found ways to minister. Because they were—and are—barred from clerical sinecure, their ministry was—and is—self-supporting. The identities of women’s apostolic institutes in the United States were well-studied in the years following Vatican II. Most chose to “update” in one way or another: to release members from common horaria and habits, to allow diverse ministries, and to develop creative alternatives to institutional housing. The focus was on growth— spiritual, human, intellectual and professional—within the context of their common charisms.8 Concurrently, these same institutes began to lose both members and institutions. What was the “identity” of the woman religious? How did the individual woman maintain active membership when so much around her appeared to be crumbling? Also concurrently, the so-called “woman’s movement” opened new doors in secular society for the highly-educated women religious whose institutional employment had ended. Some women religious left their communities as they entered the world of secular employment. Many, however, remained, employed in disparate organizations—in educational institutions not connected to their institutes, or, even, to the church, and in multiple secular situations. Many retrained, becoming social workers and attorneys, statisticians and nurses. More often than not, they increasingly saw their religious commitment as who they were rather than what they did. Others chose alternative paths to a broadened notion of ministry as liturgists, pastoral associates, directors of religious education, 7 Paul writes to the bishops and deacons at Philippi (Phil. 1:1), and diaconal characteristics and requirements are mentioned (1 Tim 3:8 and 1 Tim 3:10) twice. 8 Later studies came forth from LCWR, including Anne Munley et al., Women and Jurisdiction: An Unfolding Reality (2001), and Anne Munley, Study of the Ministries of US Women Religious (2002). C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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chaplains, and spiritual directors. While these sisters often undertook additional studies in preparation for new positions outside the classroom, their religious commitment often became a certification for their work. Here marked the beginnings of mistaking vows for orders, of relying on novitiate training and religious life as a substitute for seminary training and ordination. As these two ways of living post-Vatican II religious life mirrored each other, a startlingly new-old way of understanding women’s vocations began to emerge. In the first case, where women vowed in community undertook secular employment, membership was divorced from mission even while it remained inserted into charism.9 Consecrated life was personal consecration to God in celibacy, lived with more flexible understandings of poverty and obedience. Poverty became much more connected with simplicity—of dress, of living arrangements, of lifestyle in general. Obedience widened to include obedience to the mission of the church viewed through the lens of the founders’ charism. Without institutions in their control, superiors were often happy to simply approve of the fact that a sister found a job and reasonable simple housing. Consequently, in this first case, identity was much more rooted in the individual commitment to work and communal life as explicated in the founding charisms of their institutes. As externals continued to fade, the interior commitment to Gospel values and founding charisms overtook the externals. Sisters were still Josephites and Mercys, Dominicans and Franciscans, but in a new iteration of the older theme. They were now recognized in the specifically “Josephite” or “Franciscan” way they responded to communal discernment and to external questions regarding the public secular communities in which they lived and, now, worked. In the second case, women vowed in community who undertook employment more directly in direct parish or diocesan service often found their founding charisms subsumed to a more general understanding of “nun.” That is, the persons with whom they worked and they whom they served saw these apostolic sisters as distaff priests. Against the backdrop of advancing feminism, especially in the United States and in Europe, seculars saw nothing strange or odd about a woman minister. Sisters in this second cadre of women, interested in direct ministerial service of the people of God, chafed under restrictions necessarily placed on them as women and as lay persons. They were not, and would not be, ordained, and they were now appearing daily without identifying religious habits and veils.
9 Sandra Schneiders, Selling All: Consecrated Celibacy, and Community in Catholic Religious Life (Religious Life in a New Millennium, V. 2), (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001), p. 380. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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With this second cadre of women, the phenomenon of what has been termed “ministerial apostolic religious” grew,10 but the sisters who so ministered often did so with different education and training from that of ordained clerics. Specifically, while some women managed to train alongside priest-candidates, few had studied philosophy beyond introductory college courses. That is, while priest-candidates in the United States were required to have a minimum of 18 credits of graduate philosophy in order to advance to theological studies, few women—religious or secular—had the time or funds to support such preparation. Hence the underpinnings of their theological educations were often bereft of the philosophy necessary to fully deal with systematic theology. While some managed to receive the M.Div., many more attended graduate schools of religious education, which offered certifications and degrees sufficient to obtain parish and diocesan employment. Their theological training, however, suffered without the underpinnings of philosophy. Consequently, the new-found voices of women religious were sometimes raised in support of causes outside the confines of the Magisterium.
Governance The Apostolic Visitator’s questionnaire’s detailed look at governance asks about the matter and form of governance, perhaps in response to complaints that some sisters have been disenfranchised. It also asks about what may be the heart of the other shoe dropped from Rome: how does the institute deal with “sisters who dissent publicly from Church teaching and discipline”? Here the hand of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) can be seen stretching from the investigation of LCWR into the Apostolic Visitation. The three specific areas focused on by CDF, homosexuality, women priests, and questions of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, are the most likely topics (along with abortion and birth control) for dissent, and, consequently, scrutiny. Since the explosion of public debate on abortion in the early 1980s, some women religious took sides on this and other issues diametrically opposed to the positions of the church, in effect denying the teaching authority of the diocesan bishop. Since the diocesan bishop effectively authorized their church employment, whether at the diocesan or the parish level, and in fact authorized their very presence as religious in his 10 The term probably originated with Sandra Schneiders, whose two volumes on religious life for women examine the concept in great detail. Schneiders recommends a religious have a master of divinity degree, “the degree required for ordained ministry in virtually all mainstream Christian denominations in the United States today” before profession. Schneiders, Selling All, 58. The M.Div. is ordinary for priest-candidates, but not for deacons. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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diocese, it was left to him to communicate his displeasure via the local or general superior, who in turn must respond to complaints from competent authority.11 The issues directly on the CDF’s LCWR agenda, homosexuality, women priests and the centrality of Jesus in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, are specific areas addressed by many US theologians, some of them women, some of these women religious. Their analyses have reached wide audiences, often outside the academy. The Vatican II Decree on the Media of Social Communication, Inter Mirifica (4 December 1963) begins to recognize, but in no way predicts, the climate of world-wide instantaneous communication in which we live. The Pastoral Instruction on the Means of Social Communication, Communio et progressio (29 January 1971), delineates the application of the Decree under the general rubric of “mass communication,” and states “experts enjoy the freedom required by their work and are free to communicate to others, in books and commentaries, the fruits of their research,” while warning that only Magisterial doctrines may be attributed to the Church, and warns of the possibility of opinions being confused with teachings.12 While e-mail, Twitter, Google and YouTube are well in the future of these Vatican documents, their principles can be applied to include the allowance of respectful (if dissenting) theological discourse among peers. One must fairly distinguish between investigation and advocacy, even as the former is often mistaken for the latter. As media access for both consumers and creators grew in the wake of the documents on mass communication, economic and social barriers to public speech began to fall. A leveling of methodology allowed 11 See for example, the case of Sinsinawa Dominican Sister Donna Quinn, whose superiors stated publicly: “After investigating the allegation, Congregation leaders have informed Sr. Donna that her actions are in violation of her profession as a Dominican religious. They regret that her actions have created controversy and resulted in public scandal.” ChicagoCatholicNews.com, 4 November 2009. http://www.chicagocatholicnews.com/2009/ 11/new-religious-order-acts-on-nun-who.html (accessed 7 November 2010). 12 118. For this reason, distinction must be born in mind between, on the one hand, the area that is devoted to scientific investigation and on the other the area that concerns the teaching of the faithful. In the first, experts enjoy the freedom required by their work and are free to communicate to others in books and commentaries the fruits of their research. In the second, only those doctrines may be attributed to the Church which are declared to be such by her authentic Magisterium. These last, obviously, can be aired in public without fear of giving scandal. It sometimes happens, however, because of the very nature of social communication that new opinions circulating among theologians, at times, circulate too soon and in the wrong places. Such opinions, which must not be confused with the authentic doctrine of the Church, should be examined critically. It must also be remembered that the real significance of such theories is often badly distorted by popularization and by the style of presentation used in the media. Pastoral Instruction on the Means of Social Communication, Communio et progressio (29 January 1971), Austin Flannery, OP, ed., Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, Vol. 1 (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Company, 1975, 1996), pp. 331–2. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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non-clerics (including women religious) access to the faithful, mostly through secular media, but increasingly through lay-owned and operated Catholic media. Concurrently the concept of “we are the church” spread throughout Europe and the United States, and leapt over convent walls. Not only did women religious find increased voice for themselves in non-clerically controlled avenues of communication, secular media were noticing the brewing of dissent. Additionally, some women religious who might otherwise be teaching multiple sections of undergraduates at small, out-of-the-way colleges of their institutes took their Sorbonne and Yale degrees to free-standing theologates and major universities, published widely in secular journals, and trained many members of the current generation of Catholic theologians. These relatively few finely-trained women also provided intellectual capital to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which increasingly took up serious discussion not only about religious life, but about other current theological issues as well. Some incidents, such as the October 7, 1984 New York Times ad entitled “A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion” contending ‘‘there is a mistaken belief in American society that [abortion is always morally wrong] is the only legitimate Catholic position,” and stating some Catholic theologians believed abortion could be a moral choice, exploded into major incidents. Among the 97 signers were 26 women religious.13 The majority recanted when confronted by their superiors, who in turn had been directed by Rome to require public renunciation by their members. Most religious institutes refused, but eventually a comprise was worked out, except in the case of two sisters later singled out by Cardinal Jean J´erˆome Hamer, O.P., then-prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes (SCRIS), the predecessor curial office of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL) that initiated the Apostolic Visitation and coordinated with CDF on the investigation of LCWR. These two sisters eventually left their institute.14 The Apostolic Visitation questionnaire correctly intuits that individual members might disagree with corporate stances of their institutes, especially those made by its Justice and Peace Committee or United Nations Non-Governmental Organization representative. As with the infamous abortion ad, the problem is dual: 1) is the statement in question representative of the entire institute or of the individual member (or group) making it? And, 2) if the statement is considered
13 The New York Times, 7 October 1984, E-7. Sister Donna Quinn, OP, noted above, was one signer. 14 See Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, No Turning Back, (NY: Ivy Books, 1992). C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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representative of the entire institute, how can members distance themselves from it if they disagree?
Vocation Promotion As noted above, it is clear that the largest influx of new members is to the most conservative of institutes, especially those that have gained a reasonable cohort of younger members. While the questionnaire asks pro-forma questions regarding vocation promotion and formation, the vocations section remains the second longest of the questionnaire (after Spiritual and Common Life). In it, the focus seems to be as well on inter-institute formation, that is, on general formation to apostolic religious life informed by other than internal influences. Of course, the movement toward conducting at least some formation—especially intellectual formation—in common locations (often organized according to LCWR Regions, which in turn mirror regions of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops) made and makes continuing sense where the numbers of new members is low. What comes to the crux of the matter, especially in light of the CDF investigation of LCWR, are the questions regarding human and psychosexual development and, especially, regarding how “the vows and the Church’s understanding of religious life” are taught. The Apostolic Visitation questionnaire asks, specifically, whether Vatican II documents, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and other post-Conciliar documents are taught.15 The questionnaire emphasizes “knowledge of and fidelity to the Church’s understanding of religious life,” and asks the names of presenters at workshops (in individual institutes) since 2004.16 Again, the presumed influence and leanings of LCWR are a consideration in this section. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) 2009 “Study of Recent Vocations to Religious 15 The Apostolic Visitation website lists the following documents: Paul VI, Apostolic exhortation, Evangelica testificatio: on the renewal of the religious life according to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (29 June 1971); John Paul II, Apostolic exhortation Redemptionis donum: on their consecration in the light of the mystery of redemption (25 March 1984); John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic exhortation, Vita consecrata: on the consecrated life and its mission in the church and in the world (25 March 1996) and selected quotations from Pope Benedict XVI on consecrated life. 16 The total list compiled by the Apostolic Visitation is quite probably long and varied, and includes some women and men religious who have attracted curial attention through their work, including Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM, Margaret Farley, RSM, and Michael Crosby, OFM. By way of contrast, keynote speakers at LCWR annual assemblies since 2004 were: M. Shawn Copeland and Richard Gaillardetz (2010); Cokie Roberts (2009); Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ (2008); Laurie Brink, OP (2007); Joan Chittester, OSB (2006); Margaret Brennan, IHM and Maria Cimperman, OSU (2005); Dr. Mary Robinson (2004).
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Life” tracked the interests of those attracted to defined religious life. It did not (nor could it) track the interests of women not attracted to religious life as defined by the Vatican, especially those who find the institutes receiving the bulk of new vocations too constraining. But, too constraining of what? And, too constraining for what? The CARA survey fairly tracks a defined group, but undefined groups deserve attention as well. How many young Catholic people are attending universities for study in theology and ministry? How many of these are in non-Catholic institutions? How many are choosing non-Catholic ordained Christian ministry? For 2008, the Association of Theological Schools (ATA) reports 3,465 Roman Catholic students in theological and ministerial studies in 149 schools (including non-Catholic schools)—roughly the same number of persons identified in the CARA report. This is the largest number by denomination except for Southern Baptist (4,383) and “Other” (6,432). Even discounting for Catholic seminarians at ATA schools (CARA counts 3,357 US Catholic seminarians at ATA and non-ATA schools), that leaves a significant number of women—including many young women—training for ministry outside convent walls. Anecdotally, at least, these women say they are called to a ministry that does not have a proper name, except perhaps “lay ecclesial ministry” and that does not imply celibate commitment. The redundancy in the Apostolic Visitation’s questionnaire may unwittingly be attempting to uncover an unarticulated reality: proportionately, there are probably no fewer women seeking to serve the church, but they are seeking to serve in a manner free of the constraints of traditional religious life for women. The largest proportion of young Catholic women interested in ministry whom I have taught are seeking spiritual, human, intellectual and professional formation,17 but they are not interested in traditional religious life. These would best be classed as lay ecclesial ministers. The Apostolic Visitation seems intent on tracking whether candidates and sisters are indoctrinated to the hierarchical church’s vision of religious life, and as such will prove itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those institutes that supply traditional formation will form persons interested in traditional religious life.18 Those institutes that do not supply traditional formation are forming persons not interested in traditional religious life. The two missing parts of the syllogism 17 At Boston University, Yale Divinity School, St. Michael’s College, VT, and St. Leo University, FL. 18 A recent study conducted in Poland concludes “Religious habit makes a nun in the sense that it both embodies and represents the abstract basis for her religious identity.” Marta Trzebiatowska, “Habit Does Not a Nun Make? Religious Dress in the Everyday Lives of Polish Catholic Nuns” Journal of Contemporary Religion, 25:1 (January 2010), pp. 51–65. The European notion of “nun” appears pervasive in the documentation and application of the principals of the Apostolic Visitation. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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are, first, there are several other places women—especially young women—can obtain qualifications for ministry, and, second, some young women simply move to other Christian denominations so as to be able to serve as fully certified ministers. A more telling survey than the Apostolic Visitation questionnaire or even the CARA survey would count the numbers of former Catholics in formation in other denominations over the past ten years. Unfortunately, these numbers are not readily available. Further, as the US population of deacons has increased exponentially, from virtually none in 1968 to approximately 16,000 today, a new-old vocation has come into view.19 Since this new-old vocation is one that both scripture and tradition attest to as being open to women, one can only speculate as to whether the dearth of vocations to religious institutes that appear at first glance to be secularizing is in itself an indication of the Church calling forth a renewed permanent order of the diaconate both for men and for women. The complicating factor is that since the permanent order of deacon is presently only open to men, and since it is in its initial stages of reformation, in the United States it is rapidly becoming understood as a clerical vocation for older married men.20 Even so, if only the non-liturgical ministerial life of the deacon is considered, the vocation to the diaconate is clearly possible for women. That ministerial life looks considerably like the ministerial life of many apostolic women religious now living in institutes without habits, horaria, and common institutional ministries.
Spiritual Life and Common Life Considering the less “traditional” institutes of religious life in light of increasing numbers of young secular women training in programs that would otherwise lead to ordination, one might conclude that diaconal life for women is being reintroduced to the church in two directions: sisters are living and ministering more as secular deacons; 19 For example, from 1971 to 1999 the number of US deacons rose from 7 to 12,862. See “A Research Report by the Bishop’s Committee on the Diaconate and by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate” (June 2000). http://cara.georgetown.edu/ pdfs/PermanentDiaconate.PDF. The most recent CARA statistics cite The Official Catholic Directory for 2008, which counts 15,396 deacons in the 195 diocese and eparchies whose bishops belong to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. 20 William T. Ditewig, The Emerging Diaconate: Servant Leaders in a Servant Church, (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2007); Alfred Hughes, Frederick F. Campbell, William T. Ditewig, Michael Kennedy, Owen F. Cummings, Marti R. Jewell, Today’s Deacon: Contemporary Issues and Cross-Currents, (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2006); Owen F. Cummings, William T. Ditewig, Richard F. Gaillardetz, Theology of the Diaconate: The State of the Question (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005).
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young secular women are seeking living and ministerial arrangements equivalent to those of secular deacons. Before it addresses the questions of ministry, the Apostolic Visitation’s questionnaire asks about specific practices of spiritual and liturgical life, in conjunction with common life. Scattered throughout the section are questions regarding liturgical law: do sisters participate in Eucharistic liturgy “according to approved liturgical norms;” “do rituals replace celebration of the Church’s liturgy;” do sisters pray the Liturgy of the Hours—and what date, publisher, text? However, there are no questions regarding personal prayer, nor about the quality of community life.21 To play the Apostolic Visitations’ advocate, some of the questions are very important. If just one disenfranchised sister is discovered— and rescued—by questions about spiritual and physical care for the elderly and infirm, then the entire exercise will have been worth it. However, any discovery of a disenfranchised sister would also be an indictment of the diocesan bishop and his vicar for religious. Even so, questions about common life and housing strike to the heart of the post-Vatican II renewal of religious life and the concurrent implosion of Catholic institutions. Did the parish school close for financial reasons, perhaps attributed to the need to pay professional salaries to secular lay teachers? Perhaps, but when the parish school closes, the pastor often puts resident sisters out of the parish convent. When the institute-owned high school closes, the sisters must sell it—along with the high school convent. Common life becomes bound to the effort to find employment within a reasonable commuting distance of wherever sisters of the institute have been able to find affordable housing. Often the split averred to above occurs. Sisters may be able to live in common, even traditional settings, but work in diverse ministries (with consequently disparate time schedules). Or, sisters may be able to work in parish or diocesan institutions, but must live alone, or in very small groups, in secular settings—neighborhood houses or apartments. Questions relative to spiritual and personal life really revolve around these two concerns: housing and ministry. Can a sister living alone and ministering in a parochial or diocesan institution find daily mass? Yes, assuming she lives close enough, and her hours allow it. Can a sister living in community and ministering in secular employment find daily mass? Perhaps not, again, given constraints of time and distance. The questionnaire itself, biased toward a preVatican II Church and a pre-Vatican II notion of women’s ministry, predicts its own conclusions. But, rather than see the evolution of some institutes of women religious as moving “away” from an ideal, 21 This is pointed out by Kathleen Hughes, “The Apostolic Visitation: An Invitation to Intercultural Dialogue” Review for Religious, 69:1 (2010), pp. 16–30, at 29. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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perhaps the notion that these very institutes are moving toward a new ideal can be considered. The problem—if it is a problem—is that few young women seem to be joining the institutes upholding the new ideal. Why? Perhaps, as the Apostolic Visitation itself may appear to demonstrate, they do not find reason to trust the men of the Church.
Mission & Ministry The questionnaire asks for “the specific apostolic purpose” of the institutes surveyed and for current apostolic projects that evidence their charisms. Again, the questionnaire seems to presume both numbers and institutions, and moves in the direction of the financial implications of a given institute’s diminished influence in an institute affiliated organization. Some questions, however, seem to appreciate the fact of independent ministries of women religious, although perhaps not without reservations, echoing the concerns noted above: “How do you, as Major Superior, ensure that the ministries of your unit and the ministerial works of your sisters are in accord with Church teaching and discipline?” The analogy of diaconal ministry as presently lived in the United States is of value here. The minority of ordained deacons support themselves through direct Church employment. Recent studies report only 13% of deacons in full-time ministry, with 47% working in part-time ministry. Most ordained deacons support themselves in secular employment (30%) or by retirement funds from secular employment. Their occupations were and are as varied as they are—some are professionals, some own businesses, some are retired and volunteer or work part-time in non-for-profit institutions, including those church owned-and-operated. Hence, only a few are directly and fully employed in “religious” employment, for dioceses, parishes, and Catholic schools and hospitals.22 This is true as well of many apostolic women religious, whose institutes no longer control Church-related institutions. Given the median age of apostolic women religious in the United States (73 in 2008),23 one can assume the retirement-age majority are employed or volunteer part-time. The distinction, of course is that the deacons, ordained to service of the Word, the liturgy and charity, are (or can be) regularly and ceremonially seen by the ecclesia as ordained deacons. The deacon who 22
See Ditewig, The Emerging Diaconate, pp. 30–32. Bendyna, RSM, Mary E. and Mary L. Gautier. Recent Vocations to Religious Life: A Report for the National Religious Vocation Conference. (Washington, DC: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 2009) p. 28. 23
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has faculties from his diocesan bishop can preach, baptize, marry and bury the faithful to whom he was ordained to carry the Gospel. While women religious may have employment in diocesan or parish structures, or in Catholic schools and hospitals not affiliated with their institutes, there is no regular public ceremonial recognition of their ministry, nor any opportunity for them to speak to the church assembly about how the Gospel informs their works. Why, then, would it be surprising that some women religious proclaim their understandings of the Gospel in different places and in different ways, other than preaching in the liturgy of the Eucharist? In this light, membership in groups that give them “voice,” whether Non-Governmental Organizations of the United Nations, or targeted interest groups, from SOA Watch to NETWORK, makes ultimate sense. However, their corporate and/or individual membership and work in these organizations calls forth the Apostolic Visitator’s question regarding whether “the ministerial works of your sisters are in accord with Church teaching and discipline.” Overall, declining numbers of members combined with increased age points to a more limited mission and ministry of an institute as a whole. The founding charism of any institute lives through the lives of members and former members, and all those to whom they ministered. However mission and ministry eventually become questions of emphasis and influence. Specific charisms emphasize one or another Gospel value; individuals imbued with the specific charism lend its influence wherever they are. Faced with declining membership, institutes are less able to identify a corporate mission and ministry, even as they wish to retain the influence of their founding charisms. The recent suggestions of sociologist Patricia Wittberg, that fading institutes transfer their charisms to what she terms social movement organizations, echo the development of diaconate circles in Europe over 50 years ago. Wittberg’s recommendations that these social movement organizations take up specific works: soup kitchens or providing burial rites for the poor and homeless, for example, are for traditional diaconal works.24
Finances But, who funds the diaconate? As noted earlier, in the United States, most deacons are volunteers or part-time ministers, while their secular employment or retirement funds from non-ecclesial structures supports their ministry. Meanwhile, the founding charisms of institutes of apostolic women religious are now largely self-propelled by 24 Patricia Wittberg, “Opening a New Window: Fifteen Years after the FORUS Study” Review for Religious (68:4) 2009 364–378. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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individuals and small institute-financed ministries. In some cases, institutes have corporately determined to transfer assets to others living their charisms, for example to Josephites or Franciscans in thirdworld countries. On the point of finances, the questionnaire seemed less interested in further supporting individual charisms than in delving into the institute’s finances. Notably, part way through the time period allocated for preparation of the questionnaire, changes to the requirements for Part C regarding financial holdings no longer required listing of properties owned or partly owned, nor a copy of the most recent independent financial audit. The retraction of the request followed some very public comment that the information was rightfully privileged to members of given institutes and their advisers. The retraction, combined with the removal of another request in Part C of the questionnaire: a list of “each sister, year of birth, address and type of ministry (full time/part time)” changed the nature of the Visitation. The excised requests combine to present the Visitator viewing apostolic women religious as clerics, and individual institutes as the equivalent of parishes or dioceses, and the relationship of the Apostolic Visitation to these as one of command and control. The diocesan bishop has authority over the ministry of apostolic women religious in his diocese (and until 1917 Code of Canon Law could admit members to institutes of diocesan right), and it is he who rightfully is concerned about their governance, mission, ministry and finances. If we recall the trustee debates of the American church, against the backdrop of some current US diocesan fiduciary worries, the hierarchy’s concerns about the transfer of institutions and finances become self-evidently ones about alienation of property from ultimate diocesan control.25
Conclusions The Apostolic Visitation is here directing its inquiry specifically at sisters in simple vows, the mechanism devised over 400 years ago to allow women egress from the cloister and access to the people of God. Its questionnaire, however, focuses its categories and details on points more related to cloistered life. As demonstrated, the six major areas of inquiry: 1) Identity; 2) Governance; 3) Vocation Promotion; 4) Spiritual and Common Life; 5) Mission and Ministry; 6) Financial Administration include questions that collide with the emerging view of religious life as lived 25 However, Can. 635 §1 defines the temporal goods of religious institutes as ecclesiastical goods governed by further provisions of Canon Law where there is no express provision to the contrary. Can. 1274 §2 directs epsicopal conferences to ensure the social security of the clergy, but there is no similar provision for religious. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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by older, more established institutes of women religious in the United States. Members of these institutes are in turn living their ministerial lives more in accord with the ministerial lives of secular deacons. Of particular import is the fact that certain viewpoints are presupposed by the questionnaire, including what motivates individuals to consecrated life. What is left unexamined is the development of vocations to what would otherwise be traditional and historical ordained ministry for women. The impasse, then, is may not be between two views of religious life, but rather between views of ministerial life for women. The one (presumably of the Apostolic Visitation) searches for commitment to common religious life and horaria in conjunction with direct service to the church or church-related institution. The other, developing for women both inside and outside of convents, displays commitment to the people of God, sometimes supported by common religious life and sometimes not. The institutes of women religious that appear to be criticized are providing financial and spiritual support to women totally dedicated to a new ecclesial ministry rooted in the deepest traditions of the ecclesia and echoing the ministry of women of Scripture, now anawim in both the desert of the Church and of the world. Phyllis Zagano Department of Religion 104 Heger Hall 115 Hofstra University Hempstead, NY 11549-1150 [email protected]
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a neighboring Dominican order, with which the beguines shared a similar mode of life. It was her Dominican confessor, Heinrich of Halle, who encouraged her to heed God’s command and compose her book.3 Mechthild began writing The Flowing Light around 1250, penning it in Middle Low German, the vernacular dialect of northern Germany. Scholarly consensus is that the first five books were finished around 1260, with a sixth book added over the next decade.4 Heinrich provided some assistance with the editing process, but most contemporary scholars conclude that he was a careful editor who worked with deep respect for Mechthild and her text, changing very little.5 Around 1272, after an aging Mechthild joined a community of Cistercian nuns at Helfta, she composed a seventh book. The last chapters of The Flowing Light were dictated due to Mechthild’s failing eyesight and she died around 1282. In recent decades, scholars have been particularly interested in Mechthild’s employment of erotic language and imagery to describe her relationship to the divine, a characteristic that she shares with other medieval women mystics.6 Most have come to conclude that the overtly sexual language in medieval women’s mysticism is more than simple allegory, but an intrinsic aspect of their thought. In this way, Mechthild’s eroticism is best understood as an inherently positive and straightforward category, an intentional union of the spiritual and sexual to express, in the words of Caroline Bynum, the way in which “a male Christ [is] handled and loved.”7 Moreover, it is acknowledged the consistent use of erotic language is evidence of Mechthild’s ambivalent relationship to the body, in general. Even as physicality is seen as a spiritual hindrance throughout The Flowing Light, Mechthild’s erotic rhetoric reveals that she also understands women who adopted lives of celibacy, voluntary poverty, and religious devotion without joining an approved religious order. This means that they had no common order of life and did not fall under direct ecclesiastical authority. Frequently, this made the beguines subjects of suspicion, with some even being accused of heresy, which is reflected by Mechthild’s references to her detractors and enemies in her text. During Mechthild’s lifetime, beguines typically shared a common house and supported themselves through donations and cottage industries, such as weaving and spinning (Tobin, Mechthild von Magedburg, 2). 3 Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism—1200–1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 223. 4 McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 223; Tobin, Mechthild von Magdeburg, 3–4. 5 Tobin, Mechthild von Magdeburg, 3–4. 6 See, for example, Elizabeth Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Frances Beer, Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages (Rochester, NY: Boydell, 1992); and Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7 Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 248. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the realm of the sensual to be an appropriate place from which to articulate her relationship to God.8 In addition to the erotic, Mechthild and other medieval women mystics employ the language of suffering and pain to describe both their practical piety and mystical experience. Of course, an emphasis on pain and suffering is not unique to women or mystics, for it is a defining characteristic of Western Christian spirituality.9 Still, for reasons that are not altogether clear, many women religious in the medieval period emphasized the imitation of Christ’s bodily suffering as the prime focus of their holy work.10 In this way, their pain became redemptive and an essential means of union with the divine. Although Mechthild’s use of such rhetoric is not nearly as prolific as other women mystics of her day, she does utilize the language of pain, alongside that of eroticism, to speak of her intimate relationship to God. Thus far, scholars have approached Mechthild’s combined rhetoric of eroticism and pain in a number of ways. Most advance the issue within a larger discussion of Mechthild’s view of the body. In these studies, the focus has been upon the subversion of medieval discourses on the female body as a means of authorial and prophetic empowerment.11 Although by no means ignored, pain is largely incidental to the larger discussion in these works, treated as a feature of the “physical and spiritual disjointedness,” of human existence,12 or the manifestation of the female mystic’s commitment to bodily imitatio Christi.13 Furthermore, these studies tend to include Mechthild within a survey of women medieval mystics generally, with 8 David O. Neville, “The Bodies of the Bride: The Language of Incarnation, Transcendence, and Time in the Poetic Theology of Mechthild of Magdeburg,” Mystics Quarterly Vol. 34, Nos. 1–2 (Jan-Apr 2008): 1–34. See also, Paul Martin, “The Body in the Realm of Desire: Gendered Images on the Horizon of the Divine,” Mystics Quarterly Vol. 30, Nos. 3–4 (Sept-Dec 2004): 96–121. 9 Indeed, one scholar sums it up well: “Perhaps no other major world religion endows pain with greater spiritual significance that Christianity” (Maureen Flynn, “The Spiritual Uses of Pain in Spanish Mysticism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 64, No. 2 [Summer, 1996]: 257). See also the important study by Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (New York: Routledge, 1995). 10 Caroline Bynum has done the most exhaustive work on this topic. See Fragmentation and Redemption and Holy Feast and Holy Fast. 11 See, for example, Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Sara S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism. 12 Neville, “The Bodies of the Bride,” 14. See also Neville’s unpublished dissertation, “The Chalice of the Flesh: The Soteriology of the Body in Mechthild von Magdeburg’s ‘Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit’,” (Washington University, 2002). 13 Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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little regard to possible differences among them, particularly between Mechthild’s characterization of pain and that of her contemporaries.14 Other scholars have offered more provocative perspectives on Mechthild’s erotic and painful rhetoric. Some have chosen not to read medieval women mystics on their own terms, opting for a psychoanalytic approach that finds within their texts either sublimated masochism before the dominant male (i.e., Christ) or a form of female narcissism.15 One recent feminist scholar has taken a more nuanced approach, choosing not to psychoanalyze Mechthild’s text, but still seeking to problematize the wedding of pain and eroticism in her spirituality. In this way, she uses Mechthild as a means to argue that the “eroticized violence” of medieval women mystics advanced and sustained the patriarchal ideology that women take pleasure in physical and spiritual violence done to them in the name of love.16 Still, not only do these studies tend not to read the women on their own terms, but also they assume, perhaps prematurely, a significant degree of conceptual continuity among multiple mystics, across multiple centuries. While affirming the merit of these recent studies, I contend that a need remains for a comprehensive consideration of the rhetoric of eroticism and pain within The Flowing Light, on its own terms. It is quite possible, even probable, that by subsuming the study of Mechthild’s mystical spirituality within a larger project devoted to medieval women mystics in general, we lose sight of those features that make Mechthild’s perspective unique. What exactly does Mechthild do with the language of eroticism and pain in the The Flowing Light? Does she simply borrow from the medieval asceticism of her contemporary women mystics, or does Mechthild have a coherent mystical theology of pain all her own? To address these questions fully is impossible at this point, but I intend to take one step in that direction in what follows. I will begin by presenting a survey of select texts from The Flowing Light that use a combination of erotic and painful language to speak of the soul’s union with the divine. This cannot be comprehensive, of course, but it will provide a suitable introduction to the rhetoric of eroticism and pain in the volume. Then, I will present a focused analysis of Book IV, Chapter 12, a conceptually dense passage, where 14 A possible exception to this is David Neville’s unpublished dissertation, “The Chalice of the Flesh,” but as of this paper’s completion, I have not had access to this work. 15 Perhaps most notable for this viewpoint is Luce Irigaray, “La Myst´erique,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985): 191–202. 16 Julie B. Miller, “Eroticized Violence in Medieval Women’s Mystical Literature: A Call for Feminist Critique,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Fall 1999): 25–49. Whether a link exists between medieval women’s mysticism and misogynist ideology is an important question, but I think it is necessary to seriously examine the rhetoric of pain and eroticism in medieval texts prior to making such a case. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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pain is characterized as a courtly intermediary between Christ and the soul. My contention is that a deeper consideration of this chapter, its theological perspective, and its context in the Christian narrative provides significant insight into Mechthild’s overall conception of pain in relation to the divine. I hope to show that closer scrutiny of The Flowing Light reveals that Mechthild does indeed have a coherent mystical theology of pain, one to be distinguished from her fellow medieval women mystics and situated firmly within the Christian narrative and liturgy.
Mechthild’s Strange Bedfellows: Pain and Eroticism in The Flowing Light of the Godhead As stated above, despite the dominant erotic themes, the rhetoric of suffering and pain is prevalent throughout The Flowing Light of the Godhead. The book, unique in its great variety of literary forms, includes discussions of pain and suffering within Mechthild’s apocalyptic visions, poetry, dialogue, autobiographical remarks, spiritual instruction, and more. Rather than try to deal with all the variety of forms in which the rhetoric of pain appears, in what follows I will provide a survey of four key poetic texts. In each of these texts, Mechthild combines the language of eroticism with that of pain and violence in reference to the soul’s union with God. Of course, this brief review is not intended to be comprehensive, but merely to provide a rhetorical and conceptual overview and to bring to light some of the difficulties inherent in Mechthild’s mystical language. In Book I, Chapter 22, Mechthild describes the origin of the soul in the Trinity and the experience of the soul as the Bride of Jesus Christ. She depicts the human soul as created out of the abundance of God’s love and, for this reason, “no creature is able to give comfort” or to “open it up except love alone.” In this way, the soul, the Bride, can only be made complete through union with Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom. Mechthild describes this union through a poetic listing of a number of mystical paradoxes, in the midst of which, the imagery of pain comes to the fore: The longer she is dead, the more blissfully she lives. The more blissfully she lives, the more she experiences. . . The deeper she dwells, the more she expands. . . The deeper her wounds become, the more violently she struggles. The more loving God is to her, the higher she soars (FL I.22).
The language of romance and eroticism becomes more explicit and intense following this expression of pain: The more his desire grows, the more extravagant their wedding celebration becomes. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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The narrower the bed of love becomes, the more intense are the embraces. The sweeter the kisses on the mouth become, the more lovingly they gaze at each other. . . The more ardent she remains, the sooner she bursts into flames. The more she burns, the more beautifully she glows. The more God’s praise is spread abroad, the greater her desire becomes (FL I.22).
What is particularly striking about this poetic description of the soul’s union with God is that the “deeper” the soul dwells in the Godhead, the “deeper her wounds become.” This entails a direct connection between union with God and wounding. And, as the soul’s wounds become deeper, the “more violently she struggles”— presumably against God, her intimate partner. Even so, the soul eventually surrenders to the “desire” of the Bridegroom and is swept up in the intensity of their “wedding celebration.” Indeed, by the time their passionate consummation is complete, “she bursts into flames.” A critical reading of this passage recognizes within it features that, on the surface, make up a troubling romantic plot. What do we do with the fact that Mechthild’s description of the soul’s union with the Bridegroom involves wounding and apparent coercion?17 One important feature of Mechthild’s poetic account is that the soul is a mutual participant in the pleasure of the encounter. In the end, she bursts into flames, not out of pain, but out of passion for the Bridegroom. It is also important to recognize that, as she portrays it, the soul in Mechthild’s drama is not a victim of God’s assault. The soul is an active subject participating in a welcomed romantic rendezvous. Although wounding is experienced, according to Mechthild, the union of the soul with God is what brings the soul completion— ultimate comfort and joy. While modern sensibilities understand pain and pleasure to be mutually exclusive bodily experiences, clearly Mechthild’s poetry represents a vastly different point of view, with which would-be interpreters must reckon.18 In Book II, Chapter 23, Mechthild reproaches the “foolish Soul” for neglecting her Bridegroom through excessive concern with bodily matters. When the foolish souls asks to know where the dwelling of the Lord is, Mechthild answers: 17 I use the term “coercion” advisedly due to the impression given by Mechthild’s poetry that even as the soul struggles violently, she is wooed into submission by God’s advances. 18 Bynum explains it this way: “We cannot understand medieval religiosity until we realize how different such. . .embracing of body as pain-pleasure is from most modern notions of body, in which pleasure and pain are seen as opposites and the cultivation of pain is rejected as pathological. In understanding this difference it is helpful to remember how little medieval people could do to mitigate discomfort of any kind. Thus medieval metaphors and symbols express the experiencing of body more than controlling it” (Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 245). C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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He lives in the peace of holy affection and whispers to his beloved in the narrow confines of the soul. He also embraces her in the noble comfort of his love. . . He kisses her passionately with his divine mouth. You are happy, more than happy in this most glorious hour. He caresses her, as well as he can, on the bed of love. Then she rises to the heights of bliss and to the most exquisite pain when she becomes truly intimate with him. Ah, dear Soul, let yourself be loved and don’t fiercely fend it off (FL II.23).
Here, in a more straightforward, but no less erotic, description of the Lord’s intimacy with the human soul, similar elements present themselves as in the previous passage: embrace, kisses, a bed of love, and pain. Moreover, even though a violent struggle against God’s loving advance is not explicitly described, Mechthild’s admonition implies that the soul has a tendency to “fiercely fend it off.” Again we find a narrative of sacred romance, in which the soul struggles against but eventual submits to divine persuasion. What is distinctive about this passage, however, is that the “foolish Soul” asks Mechthild for clarification: “Who are those who defend themselves fiercely?” And, she replies: Those who pester others and themselves with their own spitefulness. Now I shall tell you who he is. He is the loftiest of all pinnacles, and this same loftiest of all pinnacles bent down into the deepest of all valleys, and this deepest of all valleys ascended onto the highest of all pinnacles. O dull Soul, look all around you and open your blind eyes (FL II.23).
This response helps to shed some light on the theme of struggle from the first text we considered. It seems that in Mechthild’s imagination, the soul in violent struggle against God corresponds to those whose “spitefulness” afflicts others and themselves. Furthermore, those who possess this character miss the grandeur of the Bridegroom entirely, blinded as they are by their sin. In this way, the rhetoric of the soul’s struggle with God refers to a resistance to the soul’s own tendency to dullness and blindness. It seems that Mechthild does not envision a soul singularly focused on fending off the romantic advances of the Godhead, but a soul divided in its loyalty, at once desirous of divine union and working against these desires at the same time. Even so, we should note that a fuller explanation of the soul’s struggle against God does not resolve why, in the first place, God’s erotic advances are experienced as deep “wounding” and “exquisite pain.” In both passages, pain is understood as an inherent part of encountering the Godhead. As stated above, this conception of divine union is counterintuitive for contemporary interpreters, for whom loving fulfillment and deep pain are mutually exclusive experiences. Even while acknowledging and respecting the hermeneutical gap that C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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separates us from Mechthild’s medieval context, it still seems reasonable to wonder why union with the Godhead, the only One who is able to comfort and complete the soul, produces wounding and pain. Hopefully, we can approach an explanation of this difficulty as we delve deeper into The Flowing Light. The next passage to consider, found in Book II, Chapter 25, is an extended romantic poem depicting an intensely erotic conversation between the soul and God. The heart of their exchange is the conflict between the soul’s unending desire for God and God’s apparent inconstancy to the soul. Throughout the passage, the soul desires complete satisfaction and constant union, while God assures her of the need for his periodic departure. The soul expresses the “inhuman anguish” she feels in “great longing” and “burning love” for God. God replies with the words of a lover, affirming that he hears her “secret sighs” and “heart’s anguish,” and that he yearns for her as well. In the midst of this erotic exchange, God acknowledges the reality of pain in their intimate union: No matter how softly I caress you, I inflict immense pain on your poor body. If I were to surrender myself to you continuously, as you desire, I would lose my delightful dwelling place on earth within you, For a thousand bodies cannot fully satisfy the longings of a soul in love (FL II.25).
Here, even more than the previous passages, it is clearly stated that God inflicts “immense pain” upon the body of his beloved. Furthermore, if we understand God’s “delightful dwelling place on earth” to be the body of the soul in love, then it seems that God acknowledges that if he gave himself totally to his lover, she would be consumed. In this way, divine intimacy entails severe pain and even the possibility of annihilation.19 For her part, the soul responds in the following way: O Lord, you pamper to excess my dank prison, In which I drink the water of the world and eat in great misery The ash cake of my frailty, And am wounded to the death By the beam of your fiery love. Now you leave me, Lord, lying in my misery, My wounds untended, in great torment (FL II.25). 19
We should note, however, that Mechthild gives very little attention to the soul’s annihilation in the The Flowing Light and in this passage it remains simply an alluded-to possibility. Compared to the theme’s prevalence in the writings of her contemporaries, it is almost nonexistent. The beguine mystic most known for this emphasis is Marguerite Porete, whose book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, was condemned as a heretical document prior to her execution by burning in 1310. For more information, see McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 244–265. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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In her reply, we see the soul acknowledging that her experience of intimacy with God is deeply painful. She depicts her body as a dank prison, where she is forced to experience worldly frailty, and God as a lover who indulges her body nonetheless. Still, in the midst of this pampering, the soul is “wounded to the death” by the “beam” of God’s “fiery love.” Moreover, when God takes leave of the soul again, she is left alone in misery with fresh wounds, “in great torment.” Here again, along with the language of romance and desire, union with God leads to wounding and pain. And, an explanation as to why this is the case remains elusive. The final passage we will consider is found in Book III, Chapter 10. This extended poem takes the rhetoric of romance and pain to another level, depicting the erotic union of the “loving soul” with God through the language of Christ’s Passion. More than any other in The Flowing Light, this text combines overtly violent language with the language of loving divine union. At first, Mechthild speaks of the soul’s romantic infatuation with God, using verbs from the narrative of Christ’s arrest: She is captured in the first experience When God kisses her in sweet union. She is assailed with many a holy thought That she not waiver when she mortifies the flesh. She is bound by the power of the Holy Spirit, And her bliss is indeed manifold (FL III.10).
As Christ was captured, assailed, and bound, so also is the soul in love with God. Notice the way in which Mechthild weds romantic language to the language of assault, even as it produces “bliss” in the soul. She goes on to describe the soul experiencing most of the other elements in the Passion of Christ, as well, including being “slapped” and “beaten,” being “stripped of all things,” “ridiculed” and “imprisoned.” And, all of these experiences of suffering and pain have some correlation to an experience of God’s favor and love. Then, in what appears to be the climax of the poem, the loving soul is crucified: She carries her cross on a sweet path When she truly surrenders herself to God in all sufferings. . . With the hammer of the chase of love she is nailed so fast to the cross That all creatures are not able to call her back again. . . Her body is killed in living love When her spirit is raised aloft above all earthly senses (FL III.10).
The soul goes on to offer her spirit to God in death, descend into hell, be raised from the dead, offer consolation to her disciples, and ascend into heaven. In all these ways, the loving union of the soul with God is depicted in the language of Christ’s own experience in the New Testament Passion narratives. Mechthild C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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concludes this extensive poem with a simple explanation: “This passion is suffered by every soul that in holy moderation of all her activity is truly permeated by genuine love of God.” This indicates that a soul’s intimacy with God is vitally connected to suffering and pain, so much so that her experience becomes analogous to the Passion of Christ himself. Once again, we see that in Mechthild’s poetic mysticism, the painful and the erotic make for strange, yet inseparable, bedfellows.
Lady Pain, Messenger of the Soul: Theological Insights from Book IV, Chapter 12 Book IV, Chapter 12 of the The Flowing Light is notoriously dense, containing a combination of dialogue, poetry, and narrative description. In what follows, I will provide an overview of the entire chapter, highlighting the links Mechthild makes between divine intimacy, physical pain, and estrangement. I will show that a fuller understanding of this passage provides significant theological insight into her overall understanding of pain in relation to divine union. In the beginning dialogue, Mechthild draws on the courtly tradition of the “dawn song” to describe the sadness of the soul, the bride of the Trinity, at the departure of her Beloved after a night spent in his embrace.20 She refuses to be comforted by the created world or any creature. Then, in poetic form, the bride proclaims the “nobility” of her status in God, that is, “her pre-creational status in God.”21 Because she has been made to love God alone, only being drawn into the Trinity can bring her satisfaction. And, in her description of God’s usual “consolation,” he is a lover who “cannot get enough” of “caressing souls.” Then, the reader is told that eight years pass before the narrative resumes again. Mechthild says that at this time, God desired to console her “way beyond what was due to [her] soul’s nobility”—that is, beyond what she deserves. Rather than be elevated, therefore, the soul asks God to allow her to remain in the “lowest part” for his sake. What follows is a description of the soul’s “sinking” into the depths of estrangement from God, first into purgatory and hell, then into complete darkness and lack of knowledge, completely void of divine intimacy. Curiously, the soul welcomes this estrangement and she beseeches God to allow her to “sink further” for his honor. In this midst of this trial, the soul struggles with trust and faithfulness and she converses alternately with “Lady Trust” and “Lady 20 For more on “dawn songs,” in medieval love poetry, see A. T. Hatto, Eos: An Enquiry into the Theme of Lovers’ Meetings and Partings at Dawn (London: Mouton, 1965). 21 McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 240. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Constancy” in pursuit of both. The Trinity speaks encouragement to the soul, as well, with each person bidding her to recall his prior works: Then the Father of heaven said to the soul: “Remember what you experienced and what you saw while there was nothing between me and you.” And the Son said: “Remember what your body suffered from my pain.” This is what the Holy Spirit said: “Remember what you wrote” (FL IV.12).
It is important for our discussion to note that in this dialogue the pain experienced by the soul in the Son’s Passion is to be viewed as proof of God’s favor and presence. Indeed, the memory of suffering and pain, along with the intimacy of the Father and inspiration of the Spirit, provides such assurance to the soul that she responds with “the constancy of true faith,” saying: “As I have believed, loved, enjoyed, and known, so shall I go forth from here unshaken.” After this declaration of faith, “constant estrangement” descends, a “chambermaid” now fully welcomed by the soul, bringing her joy, marvels, and delight. The soul proclaims that the experience of complete estrangement from God is now more welcomed than God himself, for she is certain, in paradoxical fashion, that even in “great estrangement” he will console her. At this point, the narrative takes a strange turn, so that that pain and suffering become the central focus for the rest of the chapter. First, the Lord makes a request of the soul: “Grant me this: that I might cool the heat of my Godhead, the longing of my humanity, and the pleasure of my Holy Spirit in you.” The soul assents, but only on the condition that it is “good for you and not for me”—that is, the soul that has embraced estrangement no longer desires pleasure from encounter with the divine. Then, comes the following description as the soul is introduced to her final courtly companion–“Lady Pain”: After this the bride entered such a great darkness that her body sweated and writhed in painful cramping. The pain was asked by someone to be a messenger to God for her. She said: “Lady Pain, this I bid you: that you release me now, for you are now the most important thing about me” (FL IV.12).
Lady Pain obliges the soul and ascends to the door of the kingdom of heaven to speak with God. The Lord greets her as a dearly loved friend, “the garment” he wore next to his skin while on earth; but he does not allow her to enter the kingdom. Instead, Lady Pain is permitted to be the messenger between himself and the “virgin,” the means by which he will “embrace” the soul and unite himself her.
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Even so, the final dialogue between the Lord and Lady Pain complicates the narrative further, by revealing the diabolical character of suffering: Then pain said this: “Lord, I make many blessed and yet am not blessed myself, and I consume many a holy body and yet myself am evil, and I lead many to heaven and yet do not enter it myself.” To this our Lord responded: “Pain, you were not born from the kingdom of heaven; therefore, you may not enter it. Rather, you were born from Lucifer’s heart; there you shall return and shall dwell with him eternally” (FL IV.12).
Mechthild closes the chapter with further declaration of her devotion to the Lord and the way of estrangement. She asserts that her will is strengthened through pain and the closer she draws to “Blessed Estrangement,” the more intensely God falls over her. Her final words are a poetic couplet: “But the deeper I sink, The sweeter I drink.” There is much within this passage upon which we could dwell, I would like to focus on the person of “Lady Pain.” Mechthild’s depiction of pain as “messenger” (bote) is an adaptation of a device common in medieval German Minnesang (sung love poetry from the 12th and 13th centuries). In these songs, a courtly ladyin-waiting often serves as a messenger between absent lovers, someone who negotiates the distance and unfulfilled love between them.22 Eventually, the messenger comes to represent the presence of the other to both lovers. The way Mechthild employs the messenger role in the above chapter suggests that in the mystical relationship between the Godhead and the soul, the physical pain of bodiliness is a vital intermediary between the earthly and the divine. That is to say, Mechthild understands that fallen humanity is brought into intimate union with God through the mediating work of physical pain.23 The casting of pain in the role of divine-human messenger is not an arbitrary literary device, nor can it, in my opinion, simply be dismissed as a romanticized manifestation of female misogyny. Mechthild’s view of pain (and bodiliness, in general) must be understood in light of the Christian narrative of salvation, in which the crucifixion of the Son of God is the means by which the Godhead is reconciled with the world.24 In the framework 22 Neville, “The Bodies of the Bride,” 2. Neville depends upon the work of Hugo Moser and Helmut Tervooren, Eds., Des Minnesangs Fr¨uhling (Stuttgart: Hirzel Verlag, 1988), 345–347. 23 Neville, “The Bodies of the Bride,” 2. 24 In a parallel vein, Bynum concludes of medieval women’s ascetic practices: “[L]ate medieval asceticism was not, at its most basic level, dualistic, nor was internalized misogyny the dominant element in women’s conception of their religious role. . . [Ascetic C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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of the Incarnation, pain is, literally, the crux of the matter— the center of God’s identification with humankind. This helps us understand why the loving soul comes to embrace estrangement (“sinking”) as the most welcomed form of intimacy with God, for it was Christ’s own estrangement that brought about redemption. One scholar applies this to Mechthild’s mysticism in the following way: Since a lover can take no joy except in her Beloved, the supreme sacrifice must lie in the willed choice of absence over presence. . .God’s very absence, once bitterly lamented, now becomes a sign of union with the abandoned Christ. . .She welcomes new handmaids, Blessed Estrangement and Lady Pain, and she puts on her wedding garments of sickness, temptation, and heartache. . .For Mechthild, the abjectly loving soul no longer seeks her Beloved because she is identified with him, imitating Christ’s passion so perfectly that she becomes herself a womanChrist.25
Understood in this way, the literary role Mechthild gives to Lady Pain in her narrative invests the physical reality of pain with deep theological meaning. Despite her ambivalent relationship to the body elsewhere in The Flowing Light, Mechthild clearly understands the conjunctive relationship between body and soul as the place in which her relationship to God is negotiated and expressed.26 In this sense, it seems right to conclude that physical pain serves as a sensory bridge between herself and her Beloved. Since “Lady Pain” was Christ’s closest companion while on earth, she is the most suitable messenger to negotiate the distance and desire between Mechthild and the Godhead.27 The presence of pain, therefore, assures Mechthild of the presence of her Beloved and the reality of her union with the divine, even in the midst of “sinking” estrangement. It is not enough, however, to understand that Mechthild views pain as a corporeal mediator between the soul and the divine. We practices that involved self-denial and pain] did not, to medieval people, mean self-torture; rather, they were ways of fusing with a Christ whose suffering saves the world” (Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 217–218). 25 Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 162. The use of “womanChrist” language may seem a bit exaggerated. But, we should recall the extended poem that closed our survey of erotic and painful language in the previous section (The Flowing Light, Book III, Chapter 10). There, the soul’s love for Christ allows her to become identified with him in such a way that their union is experienced as an analogue to Christ’s Passion. In this sense, I think we can safely say that loving and painful union with Christ makes Mechthild into a “womanChrist.” 26 Martin, “The Body in the Realm of Desire,” 114. 27 Although her conclusions apply mainly to the writings of Spanish mystics, Maureen Flynn’s discussion of the medieval notions of pain as proof of God’s presence and purification have been helpful in my reflections on Mechthild’s perspective. See Maureen Flynn, “The Spiritual Uses of Pain in Spanish Mysticism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 1996): 257–278. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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must clarify this with Mechthild’s expressed understanding of pain as originally diabolical and ultimately unsuitable for the kingdom of heaven. We should recall the words of the Lord to Lady Pain in Book II, Chapter 12: “Pain, you were not born from the kingdom of heaven; therefore, you may not enter it. Rather, you were born from Lucifer’s heart; there you shall return and shall dwell with him eternally.” This statement provides corrective to contemporary misunderstandings arising from modern notions of the body, in which “the cultivation of pain is rejected as pathological.”28 Clearly, Mechthild does not embrace pain because it is inherently good or even eternally oriented. Although she understands pain (closely tied to bodiliness) as the necessary and appropriate mediator for human-divine encounters in the present life, the time will come when pain ceases to play this role. Once again, this nuanced viewpoint arises from the Christian narrative of salvation, in which the crucified Christ is also the glorified Christ, who ascends into heaven to receive his reward from the Father. When Mechthild’s soul is resurrected and joined with her glorified body in heaven, Lady Pain will not be needed, for the distance between the soul and the Godhead will be bridged and eternal ecstasy will be her reward.29 A final layer to the theological context surrounding Mechthild’s characterization of Lady Pain is the centrality of the Eucharist and Eucharistic devotion in mystical spiritual practice. Although space does not allow an exploration of this issue in any significant depth, it is important to note that recent scholarship on medieval women mystics has shown a vital connection between their understanding of bodiliness and pain and the importance of the Eucharist in their religious life.30 To partake of the Eucharist was to partake of the human body of Christ, which suffered for the salvation of the world. In this way, “God is food, which is flesh, which is suffering, which is salvation.”31 The emphasis on the fact that Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is literally flesh and blood led to an increasingly literal understanding of what the imitatio Christi entailed.32 For medieval women mystics, the pursuit and embrace of physical pain became a focal point of their ascetic religious devotion and the primary means by which they experienced union with God. This context provides further depth to Mechthild’s characterization of pain as a human-divine lady-in-waiting. For Mechthild, the 28
Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 245. For a discussion of Mechthild’s ambivalent attitude toward the body and what appears to be an eventual acceptance of the body as “hylomorphically necessary for heavenly deliverance,” see Paul Martin, “The Body in the Realm of Desire.” 30 Most notable is the work of Caroline Bynum in Holy Feast and Holy Fast and Fragmentation and Redemption. 31 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 250. 32 Ibid., 255. 29
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suffering of Christ physically present in the Eucharist is a material mediator between God and her soul. Likewise, the suffering of her physical body in spiritual devotion is a corporeal mediator between her soul and God. Moreover, the practice of Eucharistic devotion begins to explain why pain and suffering could be so closely linked to pleasure in Mechthild’s mystical theology. When the consumption of Christ’s body in the Mass brings literal nourishment from, and intimacy with the divine, then it is appropriate to understand that the experience of pain in imitation of Christ brings pleasure and intimacy, as well.
Toward a Conclusion There is no doubt that the study presented above is more of a first word than a last word. While space constraints have prevented the presentation of a complete argument for the notion that Mechthild imparts a coherent mystical theology of pain, I think sufficient ground has been covered to suggest strongly the possibility. If nothing else, it is clear that Mechthild’s poetic texts reveal a depth of theological insight that situates her firmly within the Christian narrative and liturgical tradition. More work remains to be done in order to develop whether the view presented above is consistently reflected throughout The Flowing Light, in the various literary forms Mechthild employs. Moreover, it remains to be seen whether the characterization of pain as courtly mediator is something unique to Mechthild or if it is reflected in the works of other medieval mystics, male or female. Whatever the focus of future studies, it is certain that Mechthild’s unabashed combination of erotic and painful rhetoric to speak of her union with God will remain a topic of great interest to scholars of women’s religious history and mysticism. Indeed, even after the above presentation, some would say that the most important question of all remains unanswered: For Mechthild, why does union with the Godhead, the only One who is able to comfort and complete the soul, produce wounding and pain? Certainly, room must be made for the emphasis of medieval scholasticism upon God as Wholly Other and the Aristotelian notion of pain as the aspect of bodily existence that is most intimately human.33 But, for many, especially feminist scholars concerned about the glorification of suffering and violence against women, such suggestions fall short of providing a satisfactory explanation. Pursuing an answer to this question would take us beyond the bounds of this paper, but my preliminary thoughts are these. Although deeply sympathetic with the concern to disassociate divine love and 33
Flynn, “The Spiritual Uses of Pain in Spanish Mysticism,” 272.
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human pain, I think documents produced by the Western Christian tradition cannot be made to do so. Since the penning of the New Testament, Christians have taught that in the Passion of Christ, divine love and human suffering met for the redemption of the world. It is clear, therefore, that when Mechthild’s mystical theology pairs “the heights of bliss” with “the most exquisite pain,” it does so as a faithful recipient of this tradition, in which love and pain occupy the center of God’s relationship to humankind. Ultimately, those who are scandalized by Mechthild’s wedding of erotic and painful rhetoric will be scandalized by what has become the heart of the Christian tradition, as well.
Works Cited Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ———. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Flynn, Maureen. “The Spiritual Uses of Pain in Spanish Mysticism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer 1996): 257–278. Hollywood, Amy. The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Jantzen, Grace M. Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Martin, Paul. “The Body in the Realm of Desire: Gendered Images on the Horizon of the Divine.” Mystics Quarterly. Vol. 30. Nos. 3–4 (Sept-Dec 2004): 96–121. McGinn, Bernard. The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism— 1200–1350. New York: Crossroad, 1998. Mechthild of Magdeburg: The Flowing Light of the Godhead. The Classics of Western Spirituality. Trans. Frank Tobin. New York: Paulist Press, 1998. Miller, Julie B. “Eroticized Violence in Medieval Women’s Mystical Literature: A Call for Feminist Critique.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Vol. 15, No. 2 (Fall 1999): 25–49. Neville, David O. “The Bodies of the Bride: The Language of Incarnation, Transcendence, and Time in the Poetic Theology of Mechthild of Magdeburg.” Mystics Quarterly. Vol 34, Nos. 1–2 (Jan-Apr 2008): 1–34. Newman, Barbara. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Tobin, Frank. Mechthild von Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes. Literary Criticism in Perspective. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995.
Emily Hunter McGowin 217 Virginia Ave, Dayton, OH 45410, USA Email: [email protected]
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Influence’ (pp. 121–138); A. Andreopoulos, ‘Icons and the Bible: St. Nicholas’s Orthodox Church, Cardiff’ (pp. 253–270); S. Kadish, ‘The Jewish Presence in Wales: Image and Material Reality’ (pp. 271–290); b) D. Jasper, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Biblical Art in Wales’ (pp. 139–154); C. Rowland, ‘Images of the Apocalypse: Blair Hughes-Stanton (1902–81) and John Hancock (1899–1918)’ (pp. 155–170); H. Dentinger, ‘Biblical Imagery in the Engravings of David Jones (1895–1974)’ (pp. 171–186); P.E. Esler, ‘The Biblical Paintings of Ivor Williams (1908–82)’ (pp. 187–204); N. Gordon Bowe, ‘Interpreting the Bible through Painted Glass: The Harry Clarke Studios and Wilhelmina Geddes (1887–1955)’ (pp. 205–216); A. Smith, ‘Light, Colour and the Bible: The Stained Glass Windows of John Petts (1914–91)’ (pp. 217–234); c) P. Lord, ‘The Bible in the Artisan Tradition of Welsh Visual Culture’ (pp. 91–120); O. Fairclough, ‘Biblical Imagery in Private and Public Spaces in Wales (1850–1930)’ (pp. 291–304). The final article, C.Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Transformation or Decline? Modern Welsh Artists and the Welsh Biblical Heritage’ (pp. 305–317), takes an honest look at the present position with regard to biblical art in Wales. Much traditional biblical art depended on religious patronage. This is no longer as readily available to artists, since patronage now comes more and more from secular sources. Going along with this is the decline in religious observance, with the result that scenes from the Bible no longer have the same resonance for present-day Welsh people as they had for their forebears. Lloyd-Morgan asks the question, ‘Biblical subjects are certainly rarer among practising artists today than ever before. Now that the younger generations lack the thorough, early grounding in the content of the Bible, has the Bible remained a source of inspiration or has it largely been abandoned?’ (p. 308). She concludes that the production of this volume, and the DVD to accompany it, is timely since it preserves the rich heritage of Welsh biblical art before it is attenuated further. This reviewer concurs and thanks the editors and the many researchers involved for a superb production. ´ CELINE MANGAN OP DIALECTIC AND DIALOGUE by Dimitri Nikulin, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2010, pp. xiii + 169, $19.95 pbk, $19.95 e-bk, £55 hbk
In his seventh letter (if indeed it is his), Plato remarks that he will never write about the deepest matters of philosophy, ‘For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself’ (341c). This idea, that there are some matters that cannot be expressed or attained to outside of oral dialogue, forms the backdrop to Dimitri Nikulin’s book, Dialectic and Dialogue, which attempts to provide a philosophical and historical account of the origins, interrelatedness, and significance of dialectic and dialogue. In the first chapter on the platonic origins of dialogue and dialectic, Nikulin identifies a development that is key to understanding the relation between them: ‘dialectic originally was an oral practice established in oral dialogue; written dialogue then appeared as an imitation of oral dialectic; and finally, written dialectic was distilled into a non-dialogical and universal method of reasoning’ (p. 2). In chapter two, ‘Dialectic: Via Antiqua’, Nikulin looks in more detail at the origins of dialectic. For Plato, the purpose of dialectic is to know the ‘what’ of a thing (its essence). In Plato’s earlier dialogues, Socratic oral dialogue forces its ‘interlocutors to recognize that the original description of a thing’s essence was C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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wrong and that they must begin anew, doing so often without success’ (p. 25). Plato develops dialectic as a discursive, logical activity: ‘dialectical investigation begins with what interlocutors can agree on and then proceeds toward a conclusion by excluding possibilities through reasoning with respect to opposites’ (p. 27). Aristotle takes dialectic in a different direction. In the Topics it is associated with premises that are probably true and is therefore distinct from both eristic dialectic and syllogistic deduction. It cannot be the case for Aristotle that dialectic is a science of being, since it concerns the probable and not the true. Thus, ‘Plato and Aristotle substantially disagree about what dialectic is and how far it extends’ (p. 43). According to chapter three, ‘Dialectic: Via Moderna’, in modernity dialectic becomes ‘a logical calculus of propositions . . . taking mathematics as a paradigmatic example of clarity, systematicity, and order of arrangement’ (p. 49). Dialectic becomes one of reason’s pretensions and needs to be subjected to critique: Kant’s ‘transcendental dialectic is the critique of the rational illusion and unjustified claim of reason of achieving complete and absolute knowledge’ (p. 52). Nikulin traces the origins of Hegelian dialectic in Nicholas of Cusa’s ‘program based on the coincidence of opposites’ (p. 54). For Hegel dialectic ‘utterly dissociates itself from dialogue and becomes the method and driving force that cannot be divorced from philosophy as the enterprise of solitary thinking’ (p. 65) In chapter four, ‘Dialogue: A Systematic Outlook’, Nikulin identifies four key features of dialogue: personal other – the indefinable constant in and precondition for dialogue; voice – that which expresses and communicates discursively; unfinalizability – at every moment meaningful and always able to be carried further inexhaustibly; and allosensus – constructive, non-confrontational disagreement. Thus, dialogue ‘is a process of meaningful but unfinalizable allosensual exchange that can always be carried on without repetition of its content and that implies communication with other persons in the vocal expression of one’s own (but not “owned”) personal other’ (p. 79). Dialectic, on the other hand, does not recognize this personal voice. It is monological. Moreover, it is not ‘unfinalizable’. It possesses the argument in a finite number of steps following formal logical rules, ending in a true conclusion, whereas dialogue only ‘accidentally’ reaches a logically justified conclusion. In chapter five, ‘Dialogue: Interruption’, Nikulin considers the claim that ‘dialogue is essentially based on interruption’ (p. 95). It is this spontaneity of the interruption that distinguishes it from dialectic and written dialogue. In oral dialogue ‘there is no rule indicating when to interrupt or what to say exactly’ (p. 100). However, Nikulin’s assertion, that to be ‘interrupted is to be included, invited, and recognized’ (p. 103), can hardly be said to reflect the common experience of being interrupted. Nikulin, aware of the irony involved, gives the title ‘Against Writing’ to chapter six. He recognises that dialectical reasoning requires the written form to maintain its argument: ‘writing is more effective than human memory at storing lengthy lists and the exact details and particular path of an argument through which discursive thinking had to proceed in order to establish a proof’ (p. 120). However, writing’s function as a ‘cure’ for the weakness of memory – verba volent, scripta manent – is not as successful as we might think. Writing conveys knowledge without understanding. It is inflexible. It cannot speak to defend itself or clarify its meaning. It cannot interrupt. And ‘if Plato is right in holding that being cannot be known discursively . . . then it cannot be approached through a step-by-step dialectical movement or argumentation, and it cannot be properly represented, written down, or read’ (p. 130). This is an eloquent book, more rhetoric than dialectic, and its eloquence at times pushes the argument in unwarranted directions. Nikulin gives no consideration to the liberating nature of the written word, which makes available to all, potentially C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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at least, the knowledge, skills, and techniques that are otherwise available only to a small elite. (The symposium is after all only open to a handful of invitees, ‘no fewer than the number of the Graces and no more than the number of the Muses’ (p. 83).) Nor does Nikulin consider the role of the electronic media as an alternative means of capturing and conveying oral dialogue. He also understates the major limitation of the oral, its fleeting nature. The dialogue must end, and once it is ended it disappears (unless captured on media such as YouTube). Oral dialogue may never be completed, but, unfinalizable or not, it will eventually be abandoned and lost. Nikulin ends his book with a statement reminiscent of Martin Buber’s ‘Dialogphilosophie’: ‘to be is to be in dialogue’ (p. 155). To be in dialogue with God? That is not a question the author considers or perhaps would want us to consider. But it is, I think, where his ‘conclusion’ is pointing. IAN LOGAN THE INCARNATION OF THE WORD: THE THEOLOGY OF LANGUAGE OF AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO by Edward Morgan, T&T Clark , London and New York, 2010, pp. x + 191, £60
This book studies one, highly important aspect of Augustine’s understanding of language – as the vocal medium in which God discloses Himself to believers and discloses believers to themselves – and three works in which the theologian develops his ideas on this theme: the De trinitate, the De doctrina christiana, and the Confessiones. Familiar texts support a novel conclusion, that for Augustine ‘human utterance’ is ‘what keeps the mind going in its searching after God’s reality’ (p. 13). The starting-point is De trinitate, Book 15, and Augustine’s reading there of 1 Corinthians 13:12. The image of God within the human person is the enigmatic mirror in which alone we can see God darkly. In thought (an understanding present within the heart prior to any kind of inner speech, and not as a word in any given tongue) Augustine sees an image of the Divine Word in relationship to the Father whose Word and Wisdom He is. The opening chapter then turns to the analogy Augustine sets up between our utterance of a word in giving voice to thought and the incarnation of the Divine Word. Morgan holds (in a way we may question) that this unqualified analogy ‘opens up human discourse and language christologically, enabling them to stand as salvific in a way analogous (sicut) to the historical event of the incarnation of the Word’ (p. 44). Chapters Two to Four switch away to the De doctrina. We follow Augustine’s train of thought in Book I from the defence of theological writing on biblical exegesis as integral to the proper understanding of it, to the ineffability of the God of whom silence speaks louder than words, yet who has created people with the desire to praise Him in so far as we can and whose Word (unlike the Plotinian deity) became flesh for us and stands revealed in the Bible. We return to the fundamental analogy of the spoken word which now points to the significance of the incarnation as an act of communication by which God without change in Himself may enter into the heart and mind, just as thought is given voice so that it may enter unchanged into the hearer’s consciousness. Again, Morgan’s summary turns the analogy round: ‘Words, in their outwardly verbalized form, are mediators between God’s transcendence and humanity’s material embodiment’ (p. 53). From Augustine’s reading of inspired human lives and deeds as God’s speech act, Morgan next explicates Books 2 and 3 of the De doctrina to show how Augustine understands Scripture as reflecting our fallen humanity back at us: ‘Reading for Augustine, or rather the task of learning not to misread, is itself C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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part of providence’s plan for human growth towards God’ (p. 63). We are taken through Augustine’s seven-stage ascent towards God and the place of devout meditation upon Scripture in that progression. Within this process, Tobit’s command – do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself – acts as a break on wilful misreading while it also requires the reader to apply the abstract command to practical circumstances. In the same way that Nathan’s figurative address to David permits the King to repent of his murderous adultery, Scripture engages the reader in an exercise which brings home the meaning of his or her acts. Finally, in this central section of the book, Morgan sets out Augustine’s understanding in De doctrina, Book 4, of wisdom’s relationship to eloquence in Scripture, which the preacher is to explicate when himself inspired to wisdom by an eloquence that points beyond itself and transcends the classical canons. This eloquence is both divine and flows from the human authors of Scripture whose voices and virtues address us publicly, put us on the spot. This is perhaps the most attractive element of Morgan’s presentation, directing us to a view of Biblical authority which sees us as both attentive and answerable to a historical community of holy interlocutors rather than simply to the book per se. Chapter Five takes this rich account of how speech draws us towards God and applies it to the Confessions as ‘an act of exemplary speech’ (p. 101). Morgan deftly observes that Augustine’s encounter with Neoplatonism in Book 7 is the point at which Augustine first considers himself to be addressed by God and drawn into a sustaining conversation with God. Morgan also suggests persuasively that Ambrose, the preacher par excellence, is described in the same terms as the biblical text he explicates and thus ‘represents an embodied paradigm of the characteristics of scripture’ (p. 109). Augustine’s conversion – his acceptance of baptism and the chastity he understands as consequent upon it – is then described as the outcome of a crisis generated and negotiated by the harmonious interaction of Scripture and the social context of a Church invigorated by both the eloquence of its local bishop and the tale of a distant monk. Out of this crisis, in Book 9, emerges an Augustine seen to possess a new garrulity in addressing the God who first spoke to him (p. 121), when Augustine for the first and only time in the text directly addresses Jesus Christ. The final part of this study, a hefty fifty pages, returns to the De trinitate, and Augustine’s concern for the continuity between what Christ teaches and who He is as the Father’s Word (De trinitate 1.12.27). Our engagement with this teaching is our entry into an understanding of the Trinity. The chapter takes a commonly accepted view of Augustine’s account of what ‘person’ means in speaking of three ‘persons’ in the Trinity: Augustine does not mean what we do in using this term, and the term is nothing more than a convenience in the business of asserting that there are three who are the one God. Except, however, that Morgan also thinks that Augustine uses this empty term ‘as the reference point for our understanding the nature of identity and differentiation within the Trinity’ (p. 146). Much is meant to turn on this, though its sense is not entirely clear, and the issue is further problematized by the later claim that Augustine ‘meditated on the meaning of the word persona as exemplifying the Trinity’ (p. 157). At very least, however, the word keeps the conversation going and so makes possible the communication of the mystery. From here, the chapter moves to how love for God is deepened through our attraction towards what is good and just in holiness of life. St Paul, whom we know and love from his letters, attracts us towards the good which transcends himself. Knowledge and love of God cannot be had in isolation from exposure to, or participation in, such virtuous social contexts. Morgan then reflects briefly on Augustine’s account of love as itself Trinitarian in form (with lover, beloved, and the love shared between them). The human being can image God ever more strongly in the practised recollection, knowledge, and love of God, but must ever acknowledge the dissimilarity between C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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God’s simplicity and our complexity, between image and reality, an admission that further prompts contemplative awe before the God who transcends both words and wordless thought. There is much here to remind or teach us of the value of Augustine’s theology, and of how far that theology builds upon a rich vision of the human person who is saved through listening and responding to the Divine Word which addresses him or her. However, this is also very much a book which betrays its origins as a doctoral thesis. Numerous and extensive summaries hope to persuade the reader that the different close readings, some of which are subtle and many of which are obscure, add up to a single and coherent argument. Despite, and to some extent because of this, the book remains hard going, and could not be recommended in toto to students of Augustine, let alone to the general reader. This reader at any rate fears that at several places along the way he may not have seen the wood for the trees. RICHARD FINN OP THOMAS AQUINAS: THE ACADEMIC SERMONS TRANSLATED by MarkRobin Hoogland, The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation Vol. 11, The Catholic University of America Press, Washington DC, 2010, pp. 358, £44.50
Mark-Robin Hoogland’s English translation of the academic sermons of Thomas Aquinas renders a great service to the world of Aquinas scholarship as it presents a more complete view of Thomas Aquinas, Dominican friar, a member of the Order of Preachers. In the past, scholarship has tended to focus on Aquinas as a philosopher or as a theologian (a generally unhelpful and anachronistic distinction), while more recently scholarship has reminded readers of Aquinas’ primary role as Magister in Sacra Pagina, a lecturer in sacred scripture. Thus far his academic sermons have tended to be overlooked. The Leonine Commission are currently preparing the first complete and critical edition of the 20 sermons identified as authentic from amongst the myriad of sermons attributed to Aquinas. This work of Hoogland’s contains all 20, translated from the original Latin texts, plus one whose authenticity is debated (sermon 10, Petite et accipietis). The sermons, composed in the logical style of Aquinas, contain solid, profound, theological content, and yet are presented in a manner accessible to the listener. Some study and reflection on these sermons might provide interesting lessons for those involved in the ministry of homiletics today. While most sermons were delivered to an audience of student theologians, this in no way detracts from their wider relevance. A very informative Introduction provides the reader with the necessary background knowledge for fruitful and easy reading of this book. The sermons, we are told, were preached in Latin, mainly in Paris, but some were preached in Bologna and in Milan. Generally speaking while the occasion of the sermon (i.e. the place in the Church calendar) is known, the actual date is not. The sermons consist of three parts – the sections termed the prothema (a very short introduction) and the sermo were preached at mass, while the collatio in sero was given later in the day, during vespers. Hoogland explains the probable process of recording and transmission of these talks, and tells us, unsurprisingly, that not all of the sermons have been passed down in full. In the sermo itself Aquinas follows the classic rhetorical rules, beginning with an outline plan, usually identifying three or four points, and then proceeding to go through the points methodically. The language used is strikingly plain and simple. Truth, and not the entertainment of an audience, is the concern of the sermon. Knowledge, and putting knowledge C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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into practice, belong together. As in the Summa theologiae the cultivation of a virtuous life is his central teaching – ‘In all sermons Thomas urges his audience to lead a virtuous life’ (p. 15) – and Sacred Scripture is once more his foundational resource. As one might expect God is central. The image of God portrayed is loving, kind, just, merciful. Sermon 15, Homo quidam erat Dives, speaks luxuriantly of God, and demonstrates Aquinas’ style in reading scripture where he posits a character in the story recalled from Sacred Scripture as ‘God’. In this way scripture’s revelation of the ‘nature’ of God is augmented. Many characters portray God, and so not only Christ, but also many other characters in the bible reveal something of what God is. Aquinas’ positive view of humanity, and his reading of scripture as speaking of God’s desire to be intimate with us, leads him to teach in a touchingly profound way: ‘If God has proved himself so intimate with us, then we also ought to prove to him that we are intimate with him.’(p. 217) Consideration of God is presented in parallel with his consideration of the human, always presented as created in God’s image. In this same sermon Aquinas considers ‘What is proper to man (hominis)?’ Mildness in nature, and kindness are identified as the properties natural to a human, ‘because kindness (benignitas) is called humanity’ (p. 218). Each sermon contains similar nuggets of wisdom, and the translated text is greatly augmented by the excellent footnotes provided by Hoogland. These frequently refer the reader to the relevant sections of the Summa or to other writings of Aquinas, while in other cases they fill out pieces of information lacking to the reader of the 21st century such as the explanatory note on the Parvus Pons (p. 234). The notes also remind us that while Aquinas is very much a man of his time in his understanding of women, his view that in Christ they should not be treated as secondary people (p. 234, n. 4) merits attention. In a comment on sermon 20, Hoogland cautions the reader against being too quick to make a judgement on Aquinas’ attitude toward women. It is a noteworthy comment, as some theologians have indeed dismissed all of Aquinas’ works because of the comments on women made in one or two places by a man from the 13th century. This collection of sermons makes available a rich feast of theology presented in the trademark clear and logical fashion of Aquinas’ theology, in an eminently practical and down to earth fashion. Sermon 12 provides a rich theology of God as Trinity while Sermon 13 discusses at great length the dinner scene mentioned in Luke 14:16. Thomas concerns himself with the man who prepared the dinner, the kind of dinner, and how big it was. This practical meal imagery is used to speak of vocation, call, amongst the spectrum of peoples who live in this world. Meal imagery is again used in Sermon 20 where we read that to eat at God’s table is to delight in and to be ‘refreshed by the same thing by which God is refreshed . . . his goodness’ (p. 306). Aquinas’ stress throughout the sermons on justice and on hospitality is striking, as is his wisdom regarding the clerical state. He cites Pope Symmachus to remind us that ‘being a cleric does not amount to much if that man does not surpass a layman in virtue’ (p. 323), again a valuable teaching for today. This edition of the sermons is greatly enhanced not only by the footnotes, as mentioned earlier, but also by the provision of two excellent indices, and an appendix providing information on people famous in the time of Thomas but perhaps not so familiar to the contemporary reader. Hoogland’s work of translation has much to recommend it. The care taken not only in translating but also in providing much additional information means that this book should be accessible to a reader approaching Thomas Aquinas for the first time. It is to be recommended to teachers and preachers alike. ´ FAINCHE RYAN C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IN THE RENAISSANCE by Paul Richard Blum, Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology , Ashgate , Farnham, 2010, pp. 222, £50
Oliver Wendall Holmes once wrote: ‘I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity’. Having read Blum’s book, I would suggest what this text lacks is simplicity, a simplicity that the author needed to ensure the work contained in order to make difficult concepts real and immediate to his readers. The major stumbling block in attaining this simplicity is in the very premise that Blum sets out as his goal. In the Preface Blum writes: ‘A purely theoretical book on faith, reason and religion could be written, but not by me. For in my view, a philosophical problem is constituted by its history, so that its historical stages enable us to understand what troubles us today’ (p. vi). One has to bear this premise in mind before beginning Blum’s text, a text that is essentially a scan of a dozen religious minds of the Renaissance, examining how each philosopher spawned a new idea or reacted to the ideas of another. Blum has collected this group of philosophers suggesting that their Great Conversation, has helped shape the religious intellectual climate of modern times. One of the text’s great strengths lies in how Blum selects not only some of the well-known philosophers of the age, such as Montaigne, Raymond Lull, and Nicholas of Cusa, all of whom have found their way to some extent into contemporary parlance, but he also re-emphasizes the importance of others such as Plethon and Salutati, towards whom posterity has not been so generous. The text’s weakness is that it is certainly questionable whether justice could be done in such a brief work to philosophers whose intellectual acumen was so great. The great danger of doing this is that one risks losing the reader by throwing at them a great diversity of thought without providing adequate humus in which these ideas might germinate. There is also the problem of abstruse language in Blum’s text which is certainly not a reader friendly book. Granted, every scientific discipline has its own way of communicating to their own, but surely there are better ways of conveying meaning, then extraordinarily long sentences such as: ‘Marsilio Ficino’s attempt at salvaging Christianity and converting neopagan Aristotelians branched into extremely abstract speculation in order to capture the transcendence and absoluteness of God and a moral religiosity that in the end could only lead to a quasi-pietistic interiorization or spiritualization of the mystery of the divine by making the theoretical ascent an essential feature of being human’ (p. 126). This sentence may sound erudite to some but it makes one wonder why the book was written: was it to publish a doctoral thesis, or a collection of lectures, or to inform the public? If the first, so be it, if the second, more support material was required, if the latter, then the author must serve the reader better by making the text, perhaps not rivetting, but at least stylistically interesting. A further point is that – as with any discussion of the history of ideas – a map or chart would have been useful, perhaps a progressive map, showing how the author is connecting the myriad of ideas to which he is providing an exposition. For although one can be certain that the author has a grasp of this interconnectedness of ideas, he must endeavour to ensure that the meaning is clear to the reader by text’s end. Blum’s Epilogue goes a distance in creating some intellectual coherence, but a chart would have been far clearer. So now for the particular gems of Blum’s work. Blum’s opening chapter, ‘From Faith and Reason to Fideism: Raymond Lull, Raimundus Sabundus and Michel de Montaigne’, is well-constructed and highly thought-provoking. He introduces the reader to Lull’s quite radical notion that God desired humanity to love him in a variety of ways, thus explaining the diversity of religions (cf. p. 3). This C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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is a key point to the chapter, for Blum uses the notion of revelation taken up by one of Lull’s followers, Sabundus, who sees religious belief as that which ‘dignifies’ humanity. Montaigne appears soon after, for in his Essays, the French skeptic writes an ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’ which. as Blum argues, is laced with irony and vivid critique. Blum concludes the chapter, by describing how Montaigne stands against both Sabundus and Lull, for Montaigne is convinced that the world is ultimately unintelligible, and that natural theology will ultimately leave the spiritual pilgrim in a cataclysm of faith and doubt. Coluccio Salutati is the subject of Chapter Four, and the reader is exposed to some wonderful ideas from this 14th Century Italian philosopher. We read one of Salutati’s letters where he debates action and inaction, and comes to the somewhat tenuous conclusion that a person is torn in life between planning for a future that may never come and surrendering to Providence for whatever shall be, the latter tending almost to pious indolence. As the chapter progresses, Boccaccio and Petrarca are included in the discussion to assess the role of poetry in theology with the conclusion that Salutati envisages literature as having a theological dignity, something that is inherent to linguistic form. This concept is important for, taken to another level, one could argue that the pagan fables of the Ancient World could have an almost Christian application, a return to what Cusa calls different Rites of religious revelation. In Chapter Five, we see Blum extend the notion of religion and language through the writings of Lorenzo Valla. Blum opens the chapter powerfully with what he perceives as the crux of Valla’s thought: piety through grammar. As Blum states in the conclusion of this chapter, Valla’s approach was ‘to penetrate each word for the sake of reaching the referent, the meaning itself, the truth’ (p. 92). If Shakespeare questioned what was in a name Valla’s question was far broader – what power is held in the word? According to a sliding scale of importance as to what the word denotes, ‘God’ is the most powerful of all possible names, and all words refer back to that highest Word, in order to establish their place in the genealogy of language. So what can be said in sum of Blum’s text? There are many aspects of this text to like but they all relate to the wonderful ideas it contains from so many great minds. Blum should be congratulated for this. It is a joy to read through these ideas and to be exposed to such a treasure. However the book is thoroughly undermined by its brevity, which forces so much that must be said into such a confined space. The text is also constrained by a convoluted style of communication. This being said, Philosophy of Religion in the Renaissance should find a respected place in academic libraries as a useful source book which points toward other avenues for future research. ANDREW THOMAS KANIA THE ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS: IRISH HISTORY, KINGSHIP AND SOCIETY IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY by Bernadette Cunningham, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2010, pp. 348, £45
The Annals of the Four Masters, compiled in the early seventeenth century, were established two hundred years later as the text which perhaps best encapsulated the vitality and precociousness of the indigenous civilization swept away by English conquest. Bernadette Cunningham in her meticulous study shows why the later reputation was acquired. It owed much, she suggests, to cursory – or even no – reading of the work. This is not a failing of which she can be accused. Better than any previous scholar, she uncovers the complex processes through which the Annals emerged and the multiplicity of sources on which they were C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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based. Moreover, the compilation is set assuredly in the ideological, confessional, and political contexts of its time. The result is an analysis which, if occasional details may subsequently be amplified or modified, is likely in all essentials to prove definitive. ´ Cle´ırigh, overThe contribution of one of the quartet of ‘masters’, Mich´eal O shadows that of the other three. Cunningham patiently establishes the nature of the collaboration between compilers and scribes, and indeed between the annalists ´ Cle´ırigh combined and the custodians of the documents on which they relied. O several of the characteristics that underpinned the entire enterprise. He belonged to a dynasty of scholars and so inherited a familiarity with the materials from which any authoritative history of Gaelic Ireland was to be constructed. In addition, the family, although its branches stretched across much of the island, was rooted in the North West. And, indeed it was to that region, in the friary of ´ Cle´ırigh returned Bundrowes (County Donegal), that the compilers headed by O to complete their history. As a consequence of these connections, the dominant family of the area, U´ı Domhnaill (O’Donnell), featured prominently, notably in the sixteenth-century sections, with their struggles against their nearest rivals, the O’Neills. ´ Cle´ırigh’s position within the hereditary learned caste helped his researches. O ´ Cle´ırigh, Cunningham offers a detailed account of the manuscripts used by O their owners, and the contemporary scholars whose expertise was enlisted. What emerges is an interest shared across the deepening confessional fissures in Ireland. Scholars committed to the promotion of Protestantism, such as Archbishop James Ussher and Sir James Ware, assisted. On their side, the Four Masters eschewed the aggressive polemics that marked other literary efforts to rehabilitate an earlier Ireland. Nevertheless, the Counter-Reformation, with its redefinitions and revitalization of Catholicism, is seen as important to the conception and writing of ´ Cle´ırighs had long-standing links with the Franciscan order. the Annals. The O ´ Cle´ırigh himself became a lay brother, in which capacity not only Mich´eal O could he tap into the network of Franciscan houses within Ireland, but benefit from the dynamism pulsing through its continental institutions. Among the latter, the most important was St Anthony’s College, founded at Louvain in 1607. The college was intended to energize Catholic Ireland. To that end, it sponsored a programme of instruction, which included the composition and publishing of devotional helps. More ambitious still was the intention to create an authoritative account of Christianity in Ireland, with appropriate stress on its many saints and scholars. Cunningham demonstrates that the Annals belonged to this project being overseen by John Colgan. As well as deploying formidable technical and linguistic skills, Cunningham has a sure grasp of the secular and cultural politics of the seventeenth century. In the face of a more assertive and effective Protestant state in Ireland, the older worlds of Gaelic lordship were shrinking. Yet, throughout much of Europe, including the Spanish Netherlands, Protestantism lost ground and worshippers were recovered for Catholicism. If one function of the completed Annals would be to celebrate a vanishing order, another was to engage not just the sympathy but the active support of Catholics across Europe. For this reason, it is probable that the Annals of the Four Masters were intended for publication at Louvain. Indeed, one of the two surviving original manuscripts may have been meant for the printer’s copy. However, the scale of the edition and the intervention of other priorities delayed any printing. Only in the nineteenth century, thanks to the foundation in Dublin of learned societies and the urgency in some quarters to work through an avowedly nationalist agenda, was an edition published: an edition, by John O’Donovan, which, as Cunningham gently hints, is ripe for replacing. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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So, with exact scholarship and speculative brio, the minutely local, the resonantly national, and the international dimensions of the Four Masters’ work are set out. As in her earlier study of another leading Catholic historian in seventeenth-century Ireland, Seathr´un C´eitinn (Geoffrey Keating), Cunningham has cut away the thickets of luxuriant verbiage that have grown up to obscure these influential but complex histories. Now, thanks to her efforts, anachronism and nationalist mythologizing are banished. In the clearer light, the achievements of the Four Masters, so far from being diminished, are enhanced, as is Cunningham’s reputation as the foremost expositor of these Irish historical traditions. TOBY BARNARD ANALYTIC THEOLOGY: NEW ESSAYS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF THEOLOGY edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. x + 316, £50 hbk
This is a challenging, rich and stimulating book. Michael Rea’s ‘Introduction’ clarifies the meaning of analytic theology and offers an extended meditation on possible objections to it, objections addressed by later contributions. The book divides into four sections. The first presents the project of analytic theology, the second examines historical cases relevant to this project, the third discusses data for theology (scripture, reason and experience), while the final section returns to addressing objections. Rea notes that much contemporary theology, insofar as it engages with philosophy, uses philosophy from the continental tradition. He also notes that philosophers of religion in the analytical tradition have turned their attention to theological topics. Indeed, ‘analytical theology is just the activity of approaching theological topics with the ambitions of an analytical philosopher’ (p. 7). He wants the collection to stimulate an interdisciplinary discussion about the value of such an approach. He charts the typical features of analytical style – write in a manner that is formalizable, prioritize clarity and coherence, avoid metaphor, use well understood primitive concepts and concepts analyzable in terms of these, and think of conceptual analysis as having an evidential function (p. 5). He notes that many think analytical philosophers are substantively committed to the epistemological position of foundationalism and the metaphysical position of metaphysical realism. While this is not so, it is true that the tasks of clarifying the scope and nature of knowledge and of providing true explanatory theories of phenomena are generally shared. But there are no substantive philosophical theses which separate analytical philosophers from their rivals. Objections to an analytical approach include the charge that it is ahistorical, is committed to ontotheology (which makes God an explanatory posit and removes any sense of mystery), undermines the life of faith with its rationalism, treats issues only amenable to this style, and avoids richer, messier topics, producing mere simulacra (intellectual creations which mimic the true theological topics). Rea believes these objections can be answered, but that they deserve sympathetic attention. Oliver Crisp’s chapter ‘On Analytic Theology’ covers much of the same territory and he is sympathetic to the view that the kind of work done by the great theologians of the past is now being done by philosophers. William J. Abraham’s ‘Systematic Theology as Analytic Theology’ is punchier in its criticisms of contemporary theology. The most provocative essay in this respect is Randall Rauser’s ‘Theology as a Bull Session’. This employs Harry Frankfurt’s celebrated conceptual analysis of bullshit as a kind of discourse which doesn’t care about truth, further distinguishing between kinds which are intentionally C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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produced (insincere talk) and those which aren’t (nonsense) and then indicts Sally MacFague and J¨urgen Moltmann of producing such. Given that analytical theology faces the challenge of being ahistorical, the section on historical perspectives is exceptionally good. John Lamont’s ‘A Conception of Faith in the Greek Fathers’ includes a discussion of the epistemology of testimony (defending a non-reductionist view), links this to the Thomist view of faith (believing God’s word does not rest on inference from something else), and diagnoses a tension between Aquinas’s earlier and later views on faith. Among other things he presents Philo of Alexandria’s anticipation of scholastic philosophical theology, discusses the Indian Nyaya school on testimony, and the recapitulation of the Thomist view on faith by the 17th century Puritan, John Owen. Andrew Chignell’s ‘“As Kant has shown . . .” Analytical Theology and the Critical Philosophy’ is a careful study of the impact of a certain reading of Kant on contemporary theology and an argument that Kant did nothing of the sort. Chignell carefully and persuasively distinguishes Kant’s views on belief (Glaube) and knowledge (Wissen) noting that much theological material operates in the realm of belief and that it can have theoretical underpinnings. He argues that hard-line readings of Kant which present him as a proto-verificationist (Strawson, Bennett, Kemp-Smith) go way beyond what the text licences. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘How Philosophical Theology Became Possible Within the Analytical Tradition’ continues this march from the perceived influence of Kant and situates it in a broader discussion of the trajectory of epistemology, from the classical foundationalism of the Enlightenment to the current situation of ‘extraordinary epistemological pluralism’ (p. 161). He gives a very useful analysis of the much-mentioned term ‘ontotheology’ and an argument that it does not apply to analytical theology. Andrew Dole engages with the ahistorical charge by discussing ‘Schleiermacher’s Theological Anti-Realism’. He discusses the historical context of conflict between religious orthodoxy and free inquiry and notes a tension between Schleiermacher’s reductive approach to theology, which on one side makes it a projection of feelings and intuitions while on the other having a kind of transcendental deduction of the truth of religious claims. An important lesson from Schleiermacher is that religious doctrines do more than report truthclaims – and that analytical theologians ought to be cognisant of the inner-worldly impact of these doctrines. There are two essays on the inspiration of scripture. Thomas McCall examines Karl Barth’s critique of the view that scripture simply is the word of God (the classical view), and his own proposal that scripture becomes the word of God in an event. McCall looks at the case for the Barthian view but is ultimately critical of it. Thomas Crisp examines the epistemological justification of the belief that scripture is inspired and discusses three options – an argument from natural theology, an argument from testimony, and finally the idea of something like ‘the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit’. His technically sophisticated discussion of Swinburne’s use of Bayesian probability theory serves as a detailed case-study for those antecedently dubious of the possibility of using non-arbitrary values in such a context. He endorses a view where accepting the testimony of certain licensed authorities confers justification on the belief that scripture is inspired (the authoritative testimonial doxastic practice, p. 209). This confers justification, while leaving it open whether knowledge ensues. Michael Sudduth discusses the contribution of religious experience to dogmatic theology. His view is that religious experience and natural theology are closely intertwined and both feed into dogmatic theology. Michael Murray examines the relationship of science to religion using the metaphor of different possible kinds of marriage (most of which he deems dysfunctional). He particularly focuses on ‘doormat love’ where one partner uncritically accepts the whims of the other. He points out an historical case where theology accepted the wrong scientific views C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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(Descartes on extension) and challenges a contemporary, John Haught, for an uncritical acceptance of contemporary science at the cost of making his theological view ad hoc and contentless. Murray endorses a view he calls constructive engagement, which does not involve an uncritical acceptance of scientific views (p. 247). The final section looks at challenges to analytic theology. Eleonore Stump discusses the importance of narrative for understanding certain kinds of issue, arguing that all knowledge cannot be ‘knowledge that’ and holds that stories transmit a kind of knowledge of persons which is not reducible to ‘knowledge that’ (p. 259). Merold Westphal explores the place of phenomenology and hermeneutics in theology and thinks of them as complementary to analytical approaches. It seemed to me that the discussion of perspectivism and relativism in this paper would benefit from engagement with recent analytical work on contextualism, making more precise the exact nature of the claims. Finally Sarah Coakley examines Teresa of Avila, described in a memorable phrase as ‘the favoured “pin up girl” of analytical philosophy of religion in its appeal to veridical religious experiences of a sporadic Jamesian sort’ (p. 283). She offers a powerful corrective to that approach, emphasizing that Teresa tells about ‘a transformed epistemic capacity in which affectivity, bodiliness and the traditional mental faculties are in some unique sense (through the long practices of prayer) aligned and made responsive to God’ (p. 294). Each essay repays close attention and several refer to the writer’s other works for further inquiry. This collection is a fine manifesto for a new approach to theology. PAUL O’GRADY THE POLITICS OF DISCIPLESHIP: BECOMING POST-MATERIAL CITIZENS by Graham Ward, Baker Academic, Grand Rapids MI, 2009, pp. 317, $24.99 pbk
The act of being a citizen often looks crass next to the polished acquiescence to consumerism and endless materialism peddled for us by much contemporary entertainment. But for the theologian, who is not a citizen of this world, Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship is a call to a radical kind of impoliteness, the scandal of the Christ, and the Kingdom that this scandal introduces and carries out through his disciples. Ward’s targets are twofold: the facile politeness of ‘depoliticization’ that emerges from the current post-democratic milieu, and the metaphysically adrift sentimentalities of post-materialism, resistances to the ‘endless materialism’ of capitalism that champion causes such as human rights, ecological responsibility, debt relief, and so on. The problem with these causes, for Ward, is that they all lack the ground of a metaphysical mindfulness. Can one defend human rights without first grasping what it means to be human? Especially in this case, Ward argues, the human body itself has been divested of meaning by the advocates for rampant materialism as well as by materialism’s post-modern critics. Part one, ‘The World’, outlines the decay of democracy into post-democracy, a depoliticized matrix characterized by the dominance of the market, where politics erodes into economics. ‘I may choose a post-materialist option and not buy sportswear from Nike because of the charges of sweatshop exploitation, but my index-linked pension, the investments made by my mortgage company and my bank, my credit and debit cards, and online shopping all situation me very firmly in the global economy’ (p. 97). One can swim to the left or right bank, but one cannot swim upstream without great difficulty. And the idea of leaving the stream altogether is unimaginable. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Ward accordingly describes a tectonic break: on one side, a genuine politics, which advocates contestation (Ward’s impoliteness) as a civic responsibility; on the other, laissez-faire capitalism and consumerism, in which the sole discernible telos is the pleasure of the customer. But when pleasure becomes the end, as Ward (and Negri) notes, dialogue is lost. The customer, ironically, now provides the service. The all-important equivocation between citizen and customer empowers the hegemonic market place which had (erroneously) been thought to empower the citizen cum entrepreneur. Pleasure is no longer the goal of the marketplace, but rather (chapter 3) the means to an ever-expanding culture and religiosity of the corporation. The creation and maintenance of pliant zombies becomes the hidden ‘good’ of the undead city of commerce. The depoliticized world of postdemocracy is not an apocalyptic nightmare for us to avoid, but the lived reality of the late-capitalist West. Perhaps Ward’s critics have in mind such examples when they accuse him of capitulating to a dark interpretation of modernity. Yet, in part two, ‘The Church’, Ward explains that it is the milieu of depoliticization which the church has been given to redeem. The church’s job, and that of her disciples, is to ‘repoliticize’ the public space. Ward is at his most theological here as he introduces this program as one grounded in the church’s triune origin. The body participates in the redemptive effects of the incarnation of God in Christ (chapter 5, especially p. 186). He connects politics and the church’s life not merely by the concept of polity as such, but first through Aristotle’s exposition in the Politics of leitourgia as simultaneously political, ethical, and aesthetic. But it is Paul who finally connects the leitourgia of the physical body to the ecclesial body politic. Liturgical service is both political and theological, for the body of Christ is poured out as a libation upon the world (p. 183). The body of Christ then manifests the quintessential marriage of the political and the theological in service. Discipleship as such is a process of being formed into Christ, with all its attendant locatedness and eschatological significance (chapter 6). Appropriately Ward thus renders the Christic body as the model for understanding all embodiment (p. 251). Such a move places Ward’s work in direct dialogue ˇ zek. Yet, unlike those authors, Ward argues that with Badiou, Agamben, and Ziˇ the disciple’s relation to Christ (en Christo) occurs precisely because of Christ’s bodily advent and the disciple’s being baptized into ‘another level of ontological intensity available in this world but not concurrent with it’ (p. 249). Discipleship is completely informed by a metaphysical politics, or theo-politics, of the body of Christ. Just as the Incarnation re-presents the physical body, those who now live corporately en Christo re-constitute the body politic, which is another way of saying that the resurrected body plays out on the stage of the political body, for resurrection implodes the logic of death in both micro and macro arenas. The church ushers in a different kind of politics, the politics of what Ward calls the eschatological remainder (in contrast to Agamben’s remnant). In the final chapter, Ward argues that discipleship alone offers the hope of repoliticization, the chance for viable political alternatives. Discipleship mitigates against the great danger of depoliticization precisely because Christ’s embodiment in the world establishes an alternative kingdom, the Kingdom of the eschatological remainder. The disciple must gauge viability and success by another standard than the post-democratic measure of economic and materialist gain, which amounts to ‘the prolongation of desire itself’ (p. 267). Rather, success for the disciple must be understood as the triumph of love, which creates alternative power relations capable of overturning the present economies of desire (p. 275). Ward, therefore, looks to an ecclesiology of the Christic body politic wherein love amounts to participation in the triune life. The mutual love that flows between the Father and the Son generates and saturates the disciple’s being as a participant in Christ, which is, ultimately, a political matter. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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The Politics of Discipleship makes a valuable contribution to current conversation in political theology. Ward’s fluid style of narrating places, stories, and parables, coupled with critical analyses that draw on critical studies makes for an enjoyable read, but one that will surely find a more likely audience with graduate students or above. And while I am generally appreciative of his argument, I do have several reservations including Ward’s generalized use of the term ‘gnosticism’ without clarifying its meaning in the context of his text (cf. pp. 152–53). Moreover, he weakens the theological power of his argument by postponing a definition of ‘discipleship’ until the final chapter. One significant ramification of this delay is that most of his discussion in part two focuses on the church as a whole; body politics are favored above physical body as agents of change, a consequence of the book’s either/or division of World and Church. Similarly, there is an unnerving lack of attention to the literature on discipleship itself, such as Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship (and the same could be said of his failure to treat Yoder’s Politics of Jesus). It is highly unfortunate that he completely ignores Bonhoeffer’s contribution, given that Bonhoeffer’s case and text would seem to bolster many of Ward’s points. Additionally, Ward’s analysis of the global city suffers from many of the same unsupported generalizations for which thinkers of Radical Orthodoxy are regularly criticized. He does well to recall the megalithic architects of the global city (Le Corbusier and Robert Moses) and the utopian, globalizing legacy they bequeathed to city-dwellers (chapter 5). However, he hyperbolizes their impact in overlooking the visceral and successful resistance to their schemes. While it is certainly true that utopianism represents one notion of the good life, he fails to support his assertion that only one vision dominates the city. Better metaphors for the city, I suggest, might be patchwork or bricolage; that is, the city bears forth multiple ways of living. Furthermore, he commits the same error that he would presumably blame the modern corporate machine for committing when he says that ‘(t)he various flows within the city are all basically flows of money, money as the constitutive rule of modernity’s transcendental logic, its ‘reality principle’’ (p. 215). In so doing, he conflates corporations with real persons, thereby dismissing not only his own metaphysic of the body, but also city dwellers as retrograde consumers, interested in naught else but the aesthetic of their depoliticized, de-ethicized living rooms. I wonder what he makes of the mothers who gather at La Leche meetings, deeply invested in the (profoundly teleological and material) practice of breast-feeding. I suppose that he might lump this and similar practices, like the rise of farmers’ markets and urban renewal in general, with the post-materialist reaction to capitalism and argue that they lack the theological foundation to resist depoliticization. And he may be right about that. However, he makes almost no attempt to substantiate his blatant generalization that city dwellers lack an ethical depth, that ‘they cultivate lifestyles without conscience, beyond good and evil’ (p. 215). That said, Ward is certainly correct that the city has become the locus of an epic struggle of corporate titans that use the city as a base for their financial (mis)exploits versus the denizens who live in the neighborhoods at the periphery. In the face of this, Ward argues, the church must become, as it has so often in the past, a vehicle of cultural change, promoting charity and hospitality, and combating the social imaginaries that prop up purposeless materialism without which production of these goods could never happen, thereby opposing the social, economic and racial boundaries that make ghettos possible. The Politics of Discipleship is a challenging but highly rewarding read whose clarion call to theologians to enter the public fora and reassert the church’s theopolitical voice amidst the warring factions of materialism and post-materialism seems to have already excited constructive conversation. This I am sure it will C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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continue to do given the fact that, as Ward clearly demonstrates, both sides feed from the same consumer trough and so are not going away anytime soon. DANIEL WADE MCCLAIN THEOLOGY ON THE MENU: ASCETICISM, MEAT AND CHRISTIAN DIET by David Grumett and Rachel Muers, Routledge , London, 2010, pp. 224, £75 hbk, £21.99 pbk
Avoiding meat, however discreetly, provokes questions: ‘What is wrong with it?’, ‘Where do you draw the line?’ For the questioners, it often seems, the issues are black and white: either meat is murder or we should be carnivores without limit or discrimination. It is enormously refreshing to encounter instead the nuanced and subtle approach of David Grumett and Rachel Muers in this thoughtful and readable volume. They are constantly attentive to the moral, social and religious complexity of the question of abstinence, and to the multiple meanings that such a practice can carry. The book is packed with details that reveal the breathtaking diversity of Christian attitudes to ascetical eating. At one end of the spectrum were the desert fathers, such as Abba Or, who took his pickled vegetables just once a week. At the other, those clergy of Reformation England who agreed to regulate their appetites according to hierarchy: archbishops would not take more than six meat or fish dishes at one sitting, bishops five, and deans and archdeacons four. Some Protestant reformers, including John Wesley, promoted abstinence from meat for the sake of both physical and spiritual health (one result of this was the invention of Kellogg’s cornflakes). By contrast, the Men and Religion Forward Movement prided itself on its hearty meat-eating and associated vegetarianism with spiritual as well as physical weakness. The early chapters provide a historical overview, which identifies key moments of change. Jewish food laws were definitively, but not wholly, rejected by the apostles and elders at the Council of Jerusalem. It was not long before the desert hermits were taking fasting to new extremes. Coenobitic monasticism, tended at first to regulate fasting in order to moderate rather than increase the ascetical impulse. The close relations between the monasteries and secular society encouraged relaxations and dispensations, which then provoked restrictive regulation. Meanwhile, of course, the whole population followed the Church’s calendar of feasting and fasting, including the long Lenten abstinence from meat and certain other foods. The Reformation signalled a shift from ecclesial to civic control of communal fasting; the Long Parliament, for example, attempted, without great success, to replace the traditional cycle of fasting with a single monthly fast day, the purpose of which was largely political. It was not until 1856 that the statute for ‘fish days’ was repealed, ‘on grounds of disuse’ (though it is notable that some secular institutions even today continue the tradition of serving fish on Fridays). The end of legislation signalled the shift from a communal to an individualistic understanding: ‘fasting and abstinence’ were succeeded by ‘vegetarianism’ and ‘dietary preferences’. The specific themes that Grumett and Muers explore bring out the tensions and paradoxes within their subject. The strictness of both eremitical and communal fasting did not remove the need to honour guests, which meant that the Christian tradition of abstinence always included a distinctive element of flexibility. Thus Cassian found the Egyptian monks readily postponing their fasting at the arrival of a guest, while the Rule of St Benedict prescribes a separate kitchen for the abbot and his guests. Similarly, the rhythm of alternate fasting and feasting allowed food to be used to represent both the Creator’s generous abundance and his creatures’ C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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grief, sinfulness and need. Again, the observance of food customs has always been a powerful way of marking the boundaries of a community. Although Christianity began with a decisive rejection of the Jewish refusal to share meals with outsiders, it too quickly learnt to regard eating as a way of marking the boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy, sometimes by insisting that members abstain from, at other times that they partake of, certain foods. So, for example, the same Christians whose liturgy celebrated the courage of the Maccabean martyrs could (under the Spanish Inquisition) break into private homes to ensure that lard rather than oil was being used for cooking: thus the pork-avoiding ‘Judaizers’ could be eradicated. The memory of Jewish practices is relevant also to a theme that is discussed here with great sensitivity and sympathy, that of animal sacrifice. Grumett and Muers bring out the way in which sacrificial or ritual slaughter, which has endured in certain Christian traditions, embodies realism and reverence in a way that contrasts strikingly with modern meat production. The person who takes the victim’s life is chosen in part for his compassionate nature, the ritual is regulated to minimise suffering, those who consume the animal share in its killing and preparation, prayers of gratitude acknowledge the seriousness of what has taken place. Within the vast variety of eating practices on display in Christian history, can we detect any kind of continuity? Or should the pluralism that Grumett and Muers reveal lead us to ethical indifference about food? First, and fundamentally, all eating has been seen as meaningful, in ways that appeal to health, friendship, social structure, and even political considerations. Secondly, this range of overlapping reasons has reinforced rather than weakened the ethical and religious significance of meals. One of the lessons of this book is that moral seriousness is compatible with both flexibility and nuance. Thirdly, fasting and abstinence have been practised almost everywhere that Christianity has flourished, and where they have been suppressed, they have soon recurred in a different form. Finally, for most of Christian history, these issues have been important to communities, not simply matters of private choice. Grumett and Muers deliberately begin with practice, arguing that just as the lex orandi rightly shapes the lex credendi, so the practices of abstinence properly generate reflection upon their (often multiple) meanings. Whereas individual dietary choices must be self-conscious, the customs of a community may contain hidden and inarticulate wisdom. For this reason, it makes sense to scrutinise tradition as a resource for interrogating current practices, alerting us to ethical questions to which we may have become insensitive. Is there any chance, one might wonder, that the Western Church could recover a communal sense of the significance of what, and how, we eat? We could begin by restoring the regular saying of grace. Perhaps the carnivores among us would like to add a specific prayer of thanks for the lives of the animals they are about to consume: thus both reverence and realism might return to the common table. MARGARET ATKINS OSA ABSENCE OF MIND: THE DISPELLING OF INWARDNESS FROM THE MODERN MYTH OF THE SELF by Marilynne Robinson Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2011, pp. xviii + 158, £10.99 pbk
With his characteristic blend of wit and deceptive simplicity, G.K. Chesterton once defined philosophy as ‘thought that has been thought out’. He followed up this pithy definition with an account of why philosophy, so defined, is indispensable: ‘It is often a great bore. But man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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that has not been thought out. The latter is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today’ (‘The Revival of Philosophy – Why?’ in The Common Man, London and New York, 1950, p. 176). Chesterton would surely approve of the ambitious project undertaken by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson in Absence of Mind. Based on the Terry Lectures given by Robinson at Yale University in 2009, Absence of Mind inveighs against a fashionable species of bad philosophy – of ‘thought that has not been thought out’ – seen by many as inseparable from the cause of ‘culture and enlightenment’. Robinson’s target, however, is not so much a system of philosophy as it is a literary genre embodying a philosophical outlook hostile to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. ‘Parascientific literature’ – the name Robinson gives to the genre in question – refers to a kind of popular polemical writing in which a radically reductionist picture of human nature is defended by invoking the authority of modern science. These days, of course, there is no shortage of writers working in this genre; and the most successful of them – ‘New Atheists’ Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, as well as Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and Antonio Damasio – have won fame well beyond the walls of the academy. Now whatever we may think of these self-styled iconoclasts – and Robinson herself thinks very little of them – there are two things that we absolutely must not say: first, that they have invented the genre in which they are working; second, that what they have to tell us is fundamentally new. As Robinson points out, parascientific literature has been around since the mid-nineteenth century; and the most influential of its early practitioners – Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and Sigmund Freud – defined its essential, modernist message once and for all. And just what is that message? Simple, says Robinson: we are given to understand that ‘the Western understanding of what a human being is has been fundamentally in error’ (p. xiii). Far from being a creature made a little lower than the angels, or a soul intuitively attuned to truth, beauty, and goodness, each of us is nothing more than a poor, bare, forked animal whose self-understanding is inherently untrustworthy, even delusional. Love and compassion, remorse and forgiveness, terror and pity, inspiration and grace: none of our intensely significant experiences are what they seem from the first-person perspective; and all of them can be explained away with the aid of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology. Since science has now shown that everything which Western civilization has traditionally regarded as ‘higher’ is in truth a mere mask of something ‘lower’, it follows that our religion, our morality, and our art can no longer be taken at face value. Such things can be seen rightly only when viewed from a detached or external perspective; and when we look at human beings from this objective point of view – rather in the way a clinician coolly scrutinizes a hypochondriac – we discover that there is much less to human experience than meets the eye (or mind) of the credulous non-scientist. This, then, is how Robinson understands the popular philosophy at which her polemical shafts are aimed. Here are four of her main objections to it: (1) Parascientific literature claims to speak with the authority of science, and yet the intellectual virtues for which science is renowned are conspicuously absent from parascientific tracts. For when we open bestsellers belonging to this burgeoning genre, what do we find? Instead of curiosity, complacency; instead of wonder, glacial knowingness; instead of the bread of evidence, the stones of anecdote; and instead of theory answering frankly to fact, fact tortured and forced to serve theory. (2) Parascientific discourse is apt to present itself as wholly disinterested and objective: that is, as uncoloured by culture, unconditioned by history, and uncontaminated by the subjectivity of its practitioners. However, a closer acquaintance with the classics of this genre – Freud’s works, for example – indicates that this is far from true. (3) Parascientific arguments are typically based on the science of C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the moment. However, any philosopher who builds on this foundation may well be building his house on sand, because the history of science teaches us that no theory ever loses its hypothetical character. Science progresses, forever criticizing and completing and correcting itself, and today’s fresh fact often becomes tomorrow’s stale fiction. (4) Parascientific discourse has the deck stacked against religion from the very beginning. How? Through epistemological legerdemain. Once we have granted that nothing counts as evidence except what is accessible to scientific observation – in other words, once the voice of subjectivity has been silenced and excluded – it is not terribly difficult to depict “religion” as a vestige of a pre-scientific worldview, akin to magic and superstition. Despite a certain amount of repetition (excusable, perhaps, in a lecture series) and occasional longueurs, Absence of Mind is an admirable work: lucid, forceful, and refreshingly impatient with fashionable cant. Like Robinson’s novel Gilead (2004) and her nonfiction work The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), this slender volume – a thoughtful critique of ‘thought that has not been thought out’ – is simultaneously a celebration of the mysterious gift of mind and a demonstration of that gift’s nuanced powers. DOUGLAS MCDERMID ADORNO AND THEOLOGY by Christopher Craig Brittain, Philosophy and Theology Series, T. & T. Clark , London, 2010, pp. x + 238, £16.99 pbk
The forms of Marxism which so dominated sociology, politics, and philosophy in the United Kingdom during the late 1970s and mid-1980s were marked by scholastic skirmishes around theories of the state as derived from the imported texts of Althusser and Poulantzas. In these forms, religion was subsumed under ideology and stamped as irrelevant in a secular ethos that brooked no self-criticism on that matter. With the translations into English of the works of Adorno, Benjamin, and Horkheimer, who dominated the Frankfurt School, considerable surprise was generated in the mid-1980s at the theological baggage attached to these thinkers, all the more so as it was decidedly Jewish in shape and origin. Benjamin occasioned deeper bafflement with his interest in the writings of the kabbalah, his fascination with the painting of Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, his fixations on allegory and the baroque, and his frets over naming that had unexpected roots in Genesis. Cast as idiosyncratic in the United Kingdom during the 1990s, this form of Marxism was never really assimilated into sociology and theology but was deposited in the left luggage section of the history of ideas and was marked as ‘unclaimed’. But as Brittain indicates, with the ‘return’ of religion, again, the shrill cries of the ‘new’ atheists, and the angst of post-secularity, times are ripe for a re-appraisal of that unspent Marxist legacy, which he supplies well in relation to Adorno. Usually treated as a self-declared atheist, with whom Christian theologians did (p. 189) or did not (p. 171) engage, some might be puzzled that Adorno exhibited any interest in theology. Brittian gets around this difficulty by concentrating on what he terms an ‘inverse’ theology in his writings, which extend over the culture industry, politics, and music. Adorno’s route into theology is confused and divided in origin. Rightly, Brittain stresses the influences of Jewish theology in shaping his orientation, but also notes that Adorno’s doctoral thesis was on Kierkegaard and that his supervisor was Paul Tillich. From this study, Adorno emerges more as an agnostic than as an atheist. The study, divided into seven chapters is well sectioned and sub-headed and traverses a lot of ground with considerable economy. There are three prime C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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concerns in the study. First is an exploration of the implications of Adorno’s famous comment that ‘to write poetry after Auschwiz is barbaric’ which Brittain notes is ‘a damning condemnation of modernity’ (p. 5). Second is Adorno’s stress on Bilderverbot, the prohibition on the making of images, which links to his notion of ‘inverse’ theology. Thirdly, the political and cultural implications of Adorno’s writings are explored to assess their contemporary impact. Like Bauman, Adorno is all the time seeking openings and resisting forms of closure effected by method or ideology. This follows a contemporary path in sociological and philosophical thought where reference to the beyond is the price of the preservation of indeterminacy, the antidote to the hegemony of reason. ‘Inverse’ theology arises deductively (virtually as an imperative necessity) from the culture of modernity and is a response to the suffering it generates. Given the deceiving basis of culture and its proneness to commodification, theology emerges as a resource of resistance to these trends, unexpectedly occupying a default position. Its ‘inverse’ form bears a sort of resemblance to negative theology. Brittain treats this ‘inverse’ form as being ‘at the very core of the moral impulse that motivates his work’ (p. 170). He encapsulates Adorno’s plight well when he observes that ‘an inverse theology has no revelatory scripture; it is merely aware of its need for one, and feels the pain of its absence’ (p. 101). In another passage, Brittain suggests that Adorno’s ‘inverse’ theology ‘involves the “spiritual experience” of thinking the “last extreme of horror” and being prepared to confront it’ (p. 174). The difficulty, as Brittain admits is that the term ‘theology’ is not really defined by Adorno (p. 11), who nevertheless seeks from it a theodicy and the motifs of redemption (p. 96), expectations generated by his ruthless appraisals of the distortions of the social. Adorno needs a theology; he does not inhabit one. A missing ingredient in the study and one almost impossible to supply is a notion of a ‘normal’ theology against which to compare Adorno’s ‘inverse’ version. Eluding the study is whether Adorno’s theology is one at all. Somehow, he fumbles about with concerns about ‘reasoning about God, or at least the ontological structures which give shape to existence’ (p. 11). The latter might not require belief in a God, but at least it permits recognition of the ingredients to think about one, and perhaps this is the unexpected witness to wrest from the study. The tenor of the study seems to suggest social suffering finds secularity wanting in supplying healing, hence issues of theology return, so that in this sense post-secularity is the unfinished business of the maturation of modernity. Chapter 2, on ‘actuality and potentiality: on Kant and metaphysics’ and containing a detour into Milbank, is not very profitable. Oddly, when Brittain tries to situate Adorno’s insights in contemporary debates on religion, the complexity of his ‘inverse’ theology that so attracts manages to unravel. Chapter 5 on ‘politics, liberation and the Messianic’ is bitty. It involves a peculiar digression into liberation theology and has not enough on the Messianic, especially in relation to Adorno. The effort in chapter 6 to link religion and the culture industry produces a mixed bag. The critiques of rational choice theory and religion are decidedly unpersuasive, though better material appears on ‘spirituality’ and on religion as a form of compensation. The best chapters emerge when Brittain is dealing with the perplexities surrounding Adorno’s own approach to theology. Chapter 3 on social science, negative dialectics as ‘crypto-theology’, centring much on the debate about positivism between Adorno and Popper, is excellent, as is chapter 4 (which Brittain treats as the heart of the study) on ‘inverse’ theology itself. In that chapter, the material on Benjamin and Kafka is invaluable. The study finishes with chapter 7, aptly entitled ‘hymns to the silence’. The definite article attached to silence is notable. The title marks a return to the issue of Auschwitz where Brittain tellingly notes the way Adorno reversed his position, not only on poetry, but also on belief. The C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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chapter contains a most interesting section on ‘reconciliation: from autonomy to love’ (pp. 194–200), where Brittain suggests that the ‘scattered fragments in his writings . . . offer illuminating commentary on relationships of love which enhance the power of his conception of an inverse theology’ (p. 195). Brittain gets matters right when he suggests that Adorno’s ‘inverse theology acts as a “force-field” against a collapse into pessimism’ (p. 198). Instead of being treated as a site of illusions, theology emerges as a source of sanity, one to be used to make sense of an insane world. To that degree, theology becomes a projection, not cast in illusions but by reference to the requisites for survival. Overall, this study is a brave venture providing much to reflect on. On balance, it copes well with a thinker whose work is as fragmentary as the insights it yields. What emerges is an ‘inverse’ line of thought which ‘new atheists’ are likely to find negative, but which those dwelling in the homelands of theology will regard as oddly positive. Going against the vulgar assumption of the mass media in the United Kingdom that intellectuals exit from theology, this study suggests that they make reluctant entries into its ambit even if these do not yield stated affiliations. As was the case with Benjamin, an oddly rich and unexpected amount of theology can be found in Adorno if one looks as, in this study, Brittain profitably did. KIERAN FLANAGAN NOMADIC NARRATIVES, VISUAL FORCES: GWEN JOHN’S LETTERS AND PAINTINGS by Maria Tamboukou, Peter Lang , New York, 2010, pp. 209, £45
In 2008 the Barber Institute gallery at Birmingham University held an exhibition of paintings of nuns by Gwen John (1876–1939). There were three versions of her portrait of M`ere Poussepin, the founder of an order of Dominican Sisters of Charity with a convent in Meudon, the French town in which John had settled in 1910 after the breakdown of her affair with Rodin. The portraits were based on an old prayer card the nuns gave to John, and this commission led to other paintings of nuns and worshippers in the local church. Evidently Gwen John often sat sketching in the rear pews. But she was also in the church because of her own commitment. Gwen John had been received into the Catholic Church in around 1913. Gwen John is now the subject of a number of books, but most of them have troubles with her conversion to Catholicism. It is often explained away as a rebound from Rodin, when it is not just passed over as an oddity, worth less narrative attention than her fondness for cats. This new volume on John, by the feminist sociologist Maria Tamboukou, continues the trend of passing over the conversion in near silence. This is shown by Tamboukou’s reading of a poignant passage in Gwen John’s notebooks. Writing after her conversion, Gwen John called herself ‘God’s little artist: a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent worker’ (quoted on pp. 56–57). For Tamboukou this passage reveals nothing less than John placing herself in the tradition of the Christ-like artist, a tradition initiated in D¨urer’s self-portraits as Christ. Tamboukou is confident of the link to this tradition: ‘it is this trail in the history of art that John was following in trying to make sense of herself as an artist and this was independent of the fact that she had become a Catholic’ (p. 57). Tamboukou has to make this claim because her analysis is driven by Delueze and Foucault, two writers who feature so often in cultural analysis nowadays that they have become an obstacle to independent thought. This book is led by its theoretical attempt to establish Gwen John as a ‘nomadic subject’ who through her writings and art becomes ‘difficult and impossible to pin down as a C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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coherent and fixed identity’ (p. 57). By this argument to call John a ‘Catholic artist’ – and therefore to take the notebook entry at face value and as a statement of an intention to put the work at the service of God – is indeed to fix identity and thus situate Gwen John within structures of meanings which are fundamentally patriarchal. Tamboukou offers one reading of Gwen John which is based on a deep and sensitive encounter with the archive of letters at the Rodin Museum in Paris and the National Library of Wales in Cardiff. The art is given less attention. Tamboukou is aware of the status of her narrative as one amongst many. She admits to ‘different approaches in how John’s life has been represented and her work has been appreciated’ (p. 2). The multiple approaches all move in the space created by Gwen John’s personal style, which was reticent, small-scale, and quiet, although Tamboukou rightly draws attention to John’s participation in the life of Paris in the 1900s. Before the move to Meudon at least Gwen John was no recluse. By her own concession then – a concession which is inherent to the theoretical and methodological principles she seeks to employ – Tamboukou’s book is itself partial. Like all other books about Gwen John, Tamboukou’s is exploiting the enigma of John for its own theoretical-methodological purposes. It is a shame that this happens. The theoretical baggage often gets in the way of the analysis which Tamboukou is more than capable of providing for herself. It is this theoretical baggage which causes Tamboukou to read John’s identification of herself as ‘God’s little artist’ with a theoretical insight it simply cannot carry. Taken in the round of everything else Gwen John painted and wrote it is hard to justify any contention about ‘Christomorphic’ tendencies. Gwen John is an enigmatic artist but certainly one of the two or three most intriguing British painters of the twentieth century. Her life can be positioned in many ways, so perhaps it is best to turn to the art rather than the artist if we want to develop our appreciation of her status and significance. For Tamboukou, John might not be a ‘Catholic artist’, but when we confront the paintings of nuns and of the nameless girl in the blue dress sitting in the wicker chair whom John painted around twenty times after her conversion, she certainly produced wonderful art possessed of a Catholic religiosity. KEITH TESTER
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