A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • In defense of C.S. Lewis

    Via Catholic blogger Mark Shea I came across this article arguing that J.R.R. Tolkien’s lukewarm response to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series is rooted in something deeper than aesthetic preference. The author, Eric Seddon, contends that Tolkien’s intense dislike of Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm (which Tolkien called “a distressing and in parts horrifying work”) indicates deeper theological differences between the two men, which may account for Tolkien’s lack of enthusiasm for Narnia.

    I’m far from being of the “C.S. Lewis is infallible” school of thought, but I think Seddon levels some inaccurate and unfair criticisms against Lewis in the course of comparing Lewis’ and Tolkien’s theological views. The heart of Seddon’s argument is that Malcolm is, in several places, a thinly disguised anti-Catholic polemic and that this same theological vision lies at the heart of the Narnia books, which explains Tolkien’s evaluation of them.

    Seddon scores some points, I think, when he says that Malcolm‘s form as one side of a fictional correspondence allows Lewis to bring up his differences with Catholicism while appearing to be doing so only under pressure from his correspondent. Seddon correctly notes that this form can disguise the fact that it’s Lewis who decides which topics are brought up for discussion (since there is no Malcolm). So, for instance, when “Malcolm” criticizes Lewis’ views on devotion to saints Lewis is able to offer a criticism of the “Roman” view in the course of defending his own views on the matter.

    In this carefully balanced literary structure, which is a monologue cast as one side of a dialogue, we find Lewis’s most overtly Anglican work. It is filled with theological barbs–most of them aimed at Roman Catholicism. As such it provides us with the very clearest contrast between his and Tolkien’s beliefs. Reading the book from the Roman Catholic perspective of Tolkien, it is not difficult to glean what aspects of it might have distressed and even horrified him. When investigated, they shed light on Tolkien’s permanent rejection of Narnia[.]

    This is all fair enough, it seems to me. However, Seddon goes further in attributing to Lewis positions which, if one examines his entire corpus, are not faithful representations of his thoughts. I’ll identify just three of these, though there are more.

    “Subjectivism” vs. “Objectivism”

    Seddon admits that Lewis allows for the permissibility of devotion to the saints. Indeed Lewis writes that there “is clearly a theological defence for it; if you can ask for the prayers of the living, why should you not ask for the prayers of the dead?” (Malcolm, p. 15). He admits that this can lead to excesses and misunderstandings, but doesn’t reject it wholesale. He does say that he doesn’t intend to adopt the practice himself, but “who am I to judge the practices of others?” (ibid.)

    This strikes me as in keeping with the Anglican tradition on these matters. Seddon, however, takes this to be indicative of “Lewis’s subjectivism in spiritual matters, conflicting with Tolkien’s objectivism”:

    Thus Lewis, in a perfectly typical, Anglican manner, states that devotions to the saints are optional, depending upon the opinion of the individual–the final arbiter on the matter being a Protestant, relativistic conception of the Self. Tolkien would not have shared this belief, instead understanding such devotions to be an absolute good–the final arbiter on theological matters being not the Self alone, but the greater Christian community of the ages working in conjunction with personal consent–a typically Catholic understanding. The implications of this difference between them was perhaps more radical than either of them realized at the time of their closest friendship.

    I’m frankly a bit baffled by this passage because I find it very difficult to understand how someone who was familiar with Lewis’ work as a whole could possibly regard him as someone who believed that the “final arbiter on theological matters” is “the Self alone.” This is a straw-man version of Protestantism that one sometimes hears from Catholic apologists and, however much it might characterize some dessicated versions of liberal Protestantism, it’s hardly true of Protestantism more generally, or Lewis in particular. As he says in Mere Christianity:

    [T]he one really adequate instrument for learning about God, is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science–the laboratory outfit. That is why all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out to put all the real astronomers right. (Mere Christianity, p. 144)

    The dichotomy between subjective, relativistic Protestantism and objective, tradition-bound Catholicism simply doesn’t hold water. I’m no expert on Catholic theology, but I’m not even sure that devotion to the saints is regarded as mandatory for Catholics. There is inevitably an element of personal preference in the selection of a devotional practice, with various devotions being perhaps suited to different temperaments, but this in no way implies a generalized subjectivism about theological truth.

    Transubstantiation and the Eucharist

    Another Catholic “hot-button” that Seddon accuses Lewis of pushing is the doctrine of transubstantiation. He quotes Lewis as saying that

    I find “substance” (in Aristotle’s sense), when stripped of its own accidents and endowed with the accidents of some other substance, an object I cannot think. My efforts to do so produces mere nursery-thinking […]. (Malcolm 102)

    “For Tolkien,” Seddon writes, “the condescension would have been palpable.” Seddon sees Lewis here as leveling an accusation of childishness at the Catholic doctrine, something Tolkien would’ve regarded as a slap in the face. But I think the passage as a whole gives a very different picture of what Lewis is up to.

    What Lewis is discussing here is his inability to accept a “theory” of the Eucharist, whether it’s the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation or the “memorialist” views associated with some Protestant churches:

    Some people seem able to discuss different theories of this act as if they understood them all and needed only evidence as to which was best. This light has been withheld from me. I do not know and can’t imagine what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood. I can find within the forms of my human understanding no connection between eating a man–and it is as Man that the Lord has flesh–and entering into any kind of spiritual oneness or community or koinonia with him. And I find “substance” (in Aristotle’s sense), when stripped of its own accidents and endowed with the accidents of some other substance, an object I cannot think. My effort to do so produces mere nursery-thinking–a picture of something like very rarefied plasticine. On the other hand, I get on no better with those who tell me that the elements are mere bread and mere wine, used symbolically to remind me of the death of Christ. They are, on the natural level, such a very odd symbol of that. But it would be profane to suppose that they are as arbitrary as they seem to me. I well believe there is in reality an appropriateness, even a necessity, in their selection. But it remains, for me, hidden. Again, if they are, if the whole act is, simply memorial, it would seem to follow that its value must be purely psychological, and dependent on the recipient’s sensibility at the moment of reception. And I cannot see why this particular reminder–a hundred other things may, psychologically, remind me of Christ’s death, equally, or perhaps more–should be so uniquely important as all Christendom (and my own heart) unhesitatingly declare. (Malcolm, 102)

    Seddon reads this as little more than anti-Catholic polemic, but on a more charitable reading it seems clear that Lewis is grappling with the same issue that the magisterial Protestants grappled with: finding a middle way between transubstantiation and sheerly subjective or memorialist views of the Eucharist. Luther and Calvin both had “high” views of the Eucharist, even though they rejected the Catholic doctrine as it was formulated in their time. Lewis himself writes that the Eucharist (along with baptism) is the very means by which the new life of Christ is transmitted to us (see, e.g. the discussion in Mere Christianity) and that the Blessed Sacrament is the most holy object ever presented to our senses in this life (in the Weight of Glory). Nowhere that I’m aware of does he deny the Real Presence and he is probably best characterized as a High Church Anglican in his view of the sacraments.

    “Gnosticism”

    Finally, I want to address the accusation that Lewis is a kind of “crypto-gnostic,” a criticism not unique to Seddon. Seddon thinks that Lewis’ views on matter and on the nature of the resurrection body are “impossible to reconcile to Catholic theology and doctrine […] while hinting at (or hedging closer to) the Gnostic and Manichaean notion of matter as evil.” In order to adjudicate this claim it’s necessary to get clear on exactly what Lewis is claiming and where this might collide with Catholic doctrine (or orthodox Christian belief more generally).

    Seddon cites a passage near the end of Malcolm where Lewis speculates a bit about the nature of the resurrection body:

    About the resurrection of the body. I agree with you that the old picture of the soul re-assuming the corpse–perhaps blown to bits or long since usefully dissipated through nature–is absurd. Nor is is what St. Paul’s words imply. And I admit that if you ask me what I substitute for this, I have only speculations to offer.

    The principle behind these speculations is this. We are not, in this doctrine, concerned with matter as such at all; with waves and atoms and all that. What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations.

    Now we already have some feeble and intermittent power of raising dead sensations from their graves. I mean, of course, memory.

    You see the way my thought is moving. But don’t run away with the idea that when I speak of the resurrection of the body I mean merely that the blessed dead will have excellent memories of their sensuous experience on earth. I mean it the other way round: that memory as we now know it is a dim foretaste, a mirage even, of a power which the soul, or rather Christ in the soul (He went to “prepare a place” for us), will exercise hereafter. It need no longer be intermittent. Above all, it need no longer be private to the soul in which it occurs. I can now communicate to you the fields of my boyhood–they are building-estates today–only imperfectly, by words. Perhaps the day is coming when I can take you for a walk through them.

    At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow “inside” the body. But the glorified body of the resurrection as I conceive it–the sensuous life raised from its death–will be inside the soul. As God is not in space but space is in God. (Malcolm, pp. 121-122)

    According to Seddon, Lewis’ view conflicts with orthodox Catholic theology (and Seddon tends to use “orthodox” and “Catholic” nearly interchangeably) at two points. Catholic theology teaches, he says, that the resurrected dead will rise with the very same bodies they had on earth, and Catholic theology affirms the inherent goodness of matter, whereas, for Lewis, matter’s goodness is “ultimately contingent upon its potential for being transformed into something non-material.”

    Thus Lewis’s theology is something of a semi-Gnosticism; perhaps containing some hidden reservations about the goodness of the body, or even the material universe. Tolkien would undoubtedly have recognized this as incompatible with his own understanding and that of the Catholic Church: “[Man] is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God created it and will raise it up on the last day” (Catechism 93). (Note that Catholic theology stresses the goodness of the body in relation to God’s having created it–not as contingent upon what the body will become after death.)

    Again, I have to protest that this is hardly a fair characterization of Lewis’ views taken as a whole. “God likes matter,” Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, “He invented it.” Lewis, as is well known, had a keen appreciation for the earthy pleasures of the material world and held the material creation in high esteem. Indeed, theism, Lewis thought, was the guardian of a proper reverence for nature:

    [O]nly Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, and then you will see…this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch. But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The “vanity” to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence. She will be cured, but cured in character: not tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilised. We shall still be able to recognise our old enemy, friend, play-fellow and foster-mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting. (Miracles, pp. 66-67)

    This strikes me as a perfectly orthodox position: nature is good, but fallen. And nature will, along with us, be redeemed in ways beyond our imagining.

    Which brings us to the question about the resurrection of the body. Lewis rejects the position, which Seddon attributes to Catholicism, that we will rise after death with the very same body that we had on earth. The problem with this view is that it’s difficult to specify what “same” is supposed to mean exactly. It can’t, for the reasons Lewis mentions, mean that the resurrection body will be composed of the same physical particles as the earthly body. For starters, none of us, we’re told, posses any of the same physical particles that we had as children: our bodies are more like flowing streams than blocks of marble. Furthermore, the particles that currently constitute my body have previously been parts, no doubt, of countless other physical objects.

    So, it’s far from clear what it would mean to say that we rise with the same body. What some contemporary theologians have suggested instead is that we will have new bodies which are fitted to the new environment that we will inhabit in the resurrection life, while enjoying a suitable continuity with our earthly bodies. And, as Lewis suggests, these bodies will act as vehicles for perfect expression of the soul and communication between the redeemed in heaven.

    There is some (in my view) needless opposition between the idea that are destination is “heaven” and the idea that God will create “a new heaven and earth.” Whichever image you favor, everyone agrees that the resurrection world will be one which is different from the present world in dramatic ways. Death, pain, suffering, sin, predation, and decay will not be present, which suggests a world which is transformed in ways we can scarcely imagine.

    Seddon criticizes Lewis for holding that the value of matter is “entirely dependant upon its ultimately becoming something else,” but this is misplaced. To say that the physical world (including our bodies) will be transformed in the course of being redeemed is not to deny that they lack present value. In fact, it’s simply the traditional Christian position that the present world is destined to be transformed in the process of being released from its bondage to sin and death. Lewis’ (admittedly speculative) account of what the resurrection life might consist in may be off-base, but it’s neither “gnostic” nor heretical as far as I can tell.

    “Gnosticism” has become a kind of catch-all epithet to hurl at any theology that is the least bit “otherworldly.” But Christianity is otherworldly in many ways: it contains a holy impatience with the world as it is and longs for a radically transformed state of things. Lewis was certainly a sort of Christian Platonist, but, depending on how you define “Platonism,” it is an integral part of historic Christianity.

    All of this is not to dispute that there may be something to Seddon’s historical argument that Tolkien’s dislike of the Narnia series is attributable to some theological differences. But Seddon tries to hard to create a dichotomy between a “subjectivist,” “anti-materialist,” “heterodox,” “semi-gnostic” Protestant Lewis and an “objectivist,” “sacramental,” “orthodox” Catholic Tolkien. This dichotomy is unsustainable in my view. Whatever theological differences the two men may have had, Lewis’ thought is essentially that of a traditional orthodox Anglican Protestant Christian.

  • “Making God’s kingdom real”

    Matthew Yglesias, pointing to this post by Alexia Kelley at the TPM Cafe discussion of E. J. Dionne’s Souled Out (see my previous post), says that it exhibits “a side of the ‘religious left’ that strikes me as a bit creepy and illiberal.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it does employ a style of language that I find a bit wrongheaded:

    It is particularly tempting for people who are privileged to have a seat at important tables to forget that our task is nothing less than making God’s kingdom real.

    […]

    Clearly, all of this has specific political implications, but it also requires a more expansive religious imagination that is mindful of ultimate ends. For Christians, this is the work of building God’s kingdom up here on earth – realizing a time of justice and peace. Our Jewish brothers and sisters speak of tikkun olam, repairing or perfecting the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of nameless heroes of the civil rights movement were challenging unjust social structures, but they were also converting hearts and moving spirits through an uncompromising moral witness to human dignity.

    I’m genuinely curious where this language of “building God’s kingdom” or “making God’s kingdom real,” which seems to be a staple of some segments of the Religious Left, comes from. It strikes me as both biblically and theologically dubious. Does God need us to build his kingdom? I can’t think of any place in the New Testament where this kind of language is used. And it seems to imply a very Pelagian view of human agency. So, what is its historical provenance? Does it come from the social gospel movement?

    It also, as I’ve argued before, seems to identify God’s Kingdom with an idealized social and political state of affairs. But the final advent of the Kingdom, at least as traditionally understood, involves far more than this. We’re talking about the end of suffering, disease, and death and the healing of all relationships between human beings and God. No political settlement engineered by human beings, however just, can accomplish this.

  • “Teach us how to pray”

    Fr. Chris on the Art of the Collect.

  • Directing traffic between science and theology

    The other day I asserted that Christian theology still hasn’t fully absorbed the insights of Darwinism, even where it claims to have accepted them. This Christian Century article provides a good overview of some attempts to do just that.

    I think there are two issues that stand out as particular challenges for theology here: the nature of divine action and providence, and the nature of human beings. This article deals mostly with the former, though it touches on the deeper connection between human beings and the rest of creation that Darwinian science discloses.

    There is also an epistemic question here of exactly what kind of status theological and scientific claims have and, in cases of apparent conflict, which should give way. Ultra-fundamentalists might say that theological claims always trump scientific claims, whereas many secularists would say the opposite. But most of us, I think it’s safe to say, reside somewhere in the middle: we recognize that new knowledge of the physical world requires at least some modification (or at least re-interpretation) of certain traditional theological claims. On the other hand, a lot of dubious claims have been passed off as the assured findings of “Science,” which are nothing of the sort.

    A concrete example might help us see the problem a bit more clearly. Much traditional theology taught that death was, in some mysterious sense, the result of sin. This could be understood in different ways: death could be seen as the punishment for our disobedience of God’s commands, or it could be seen as the inevitable result of humanity’s turning away from communion with God (or some combination of the two).

    The picture given to us by evolutionary theory, however, tells a very different story. In this telling the existence of death long preceded human sin, or the existence of human beings for that matter. In fact, given our understanding of the evolutionary process, it seems that death is something like an inextricable aspect of the process by which new forms of life come to be. Far from being a punishment imposed from without, death is a necessary condition of human existence (at least in this world).

    How theology negotiates this apparent conflict has far-reaching implications. It affects our understanding of providence, sin, atonement, and redemption. For instance, if death is, in some sense, a “natural” part of existence rather than a punishment for sin, does this affect how we understand what it is Christ is supposed to save us from and how he does it? Or what does the omnipresence of death say about God’s power and goodness?

    There isn’t, it seems to me, any single “correct” way for proceeding here. The Christian metaphysic (or narrative if you prefer) isn’t a single monolithic whole, but a mutable cluster of views some of which are more central than others. To what extent it can be changed without surrendering something essential is something about which there’s been a lot of disagreement. Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, has been alternatively praised as providing a successful re-interpretation of some central Christian claims, and criticized as someone who essentially abandoned those claims. (See, for instance, Was Reinhold Niebuhr a Christian?)

    At the same time, Christians looking to be up-to-date have at times been too quick to embrace claims that are properly speaking philosophical rather than scientific. A lot of revisionist theology which denies God’s intervention or the possibility of miracles falls into this category; it has embraced a philosophical naturalism which isn’t mandated by scientific findings, even if it may be compatible with it.

    In his short book An Examined Faith, the Protestant ethicist and theologian James Gustafson identifies three strategies theologians use in dealing with scientific and other “secular” sources of knowledge: rejection, absorption, and accommodation. Rejection subsumes scientific claims to theological ones, whereas absorption does the reverse (perhaps with the creation of a “nature spirituality”). But accommodation of some kind remains, for Gustafson, the most viable strategy.

    Within the “accommodationist” strategy Gustafson distinguishes between approaches in which scientific findings primarily limit religious claims and those which authorize them. Limiting approaches means, essentially, that religious claims need to be re-visited primarily where they conflict, or appear to conflict, with the well-founded findings of science. Authorizing approaches go further in using science to inspire or shape the character of theology. For instance, a limiting approach might acknowledge that biological and other sciences show certain things to be true about human beings, but deny that they give an exhaustive account of human nature. An authorizing approach might, on the other hand, seek to provide an overview of human nature entirely legitimated or inspired by scientific considerations (see Gustafson, pp. 90-91).

    As Gustafson says

    Few, if any, Christian thinkers use only one criterion or rule to direct the flow of traffic in any intersection where theology and ethics meet scientific and other secular traffic. Interest in different Christian doctrines determines which secular traffic has to be directed, as I have shown above. Accommodation to traffic from astrophysics is different from accommodation to psychoanalysis: the former, prima facie, intersects with the doctrine of creation, the latter with theological anthropology. (p. 91)

    A further implication, I think, is that there is no general a priori way of determining how “science” should relate to “theology.” Rather, the approach should be more piecemeal, by identifying specific doctrines which seem to intersect with particular scientific findings (be they physical, biological, social, etc.), each of which may be more or less well-founded. The challenge is that it would seem to require that religious thinkers be well-informed about particular scientific disciplines and findings and not rely exclusively on generalized characterizations of what “science” does and doesn’t do.

  • More on +Rowan’s lecture

    Via Fr. Chris, an in-depth analysis and defense of the now-infamous Rowan Williams “sharia lecture” by Mike Higton, a theologian and scholar of Williams’ work. As Higton says in his brief summary:

    Despite everything you’ve heard and read, the most striking thing about Rowan Williams’ lecture is that he mounts a serious and impassioned defence of ‘Enlightenment values’.

    Fr. Chris also makes the following point that’s well worth considering:

    It is always interesting — frustrating, too — to observe how Muslims are criticized illegitimately for doing things that Christians seem to be called to in some ways as well. 1 Cor 6 seems to suggest that we Christians should also avoid bringing our legal disputes into the secular realm, solving them within the Church wherever possible. The Muslim system goes further than this, so the situations are not identical. But on the face of it, I don’t see the desire to adjudicate some claims within one’s faith community — especially where there are safeguards so no one is coerced to give up their basic human rights, an important caveat in Williams’ proposal — is illegitimate.

    P.S. See also Ross Douthat and Alan Jacobs for somewhat more critical, but still intelligent takes.

  • John Gray contra humanism

    Over the weekend I started reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Gray, a British political philosopher, has gone from being a free-market Thatcherite to a critic of global capitalism to a proponent of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. If there is a connecting thread here it’s Gray’s resolute opposition to utopianism of every kind, whether it’s communism and socialism, “global democratic capitalism,” or humanisitic progressivism. (In his latest book, Black Mass, he takes on neoconservatism.)

    Straw Dogs is somewhat loosely organized around the theme of human uniqueness. While Gray dismisses Christianity without devoting much argument to it, he reserves the majority of his scorn for post-Christian humanism. It’s cardinal error, he says, is that it wants to maintain an ideology of human uniqueness and progress which is completely undercut by the naturalistic and Darwinian foundations of secular thought. Humanists think that scientific progress will translate into progress in the moral and social spheres, but Gray demurs: “For though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive” (p. 4).

    The problem as Gray sees it is that humanists aren’t naturalistic enough. They still maintain a view of human nature that is essentially Platonic and Christian: that we are defined by our possession of reason and free will and that these qualities allow us to take charge of our destiny as a species.

    Some of the more extreme versions of this hope envision us “transcending” our humanity, either by means of bio-engineering or artificial intelligence. However, Gray points out, whatever post-human forms of life we may engineer will inherit the “crooked timber” of their creators, since technology is deployed by frail humans. C. S. Lewis made the same point in The Abolition of Man when he said that “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means … the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

    On naturalistic, post-Darwinian premises, Gray contends, the idea of “the species” transcending its own limitations is abusrd. Moreover, technology is not deployed by disinterested philosopher-kings, but by a confused melange of human interests, some sordid and some noble. It’s just as likely to be used for destructive ends as for beneficial ones.

    Humanism, in other words, is still trying to live off the moral and metaphysical capital of Christendom. A thorough-going integration of the teachings of biology with our world view would lead us to see ourselves not as standing over nature, but as part of it. And an increasingly destructive part of it at that. Gray thinks it just as likely that humanity will face a major die-off as Gaia reasserts herself as that humanity will somehow “master” its environment:

    Darwin’s theory shows the truth of naturalism: we are animals like any other; our fate and that of the rest of life on Earth are the same. Yet, in an irony all the more exquisite because no one has noticed it, Darwinism is now the central prop of the humanist faith that we can transcend our animal natures and rule the Earth. (p. 31)

    The teachings of modern science – from Darwinian evolution to neuroscience – tend to show that human beings are actually far less free and less rational than we – influenced by our Christian heritage – would like to think. The only “salvation” possible, Gray thinks, is to recognize our status as one animal among many, as part of the natural world. Though Gray thinks that perhaps some of the illusions we have about ourselves are ineradicable.

    Though humanism is Gray’s main target, I think it’s worth thinking about what a proper Christian response would be to a view like his. He seems to think that Christian belief is necessarily fading for “modern” people, but I obviously think he dismisses it far too easily. Still, I think that Christian theology, even where it accepts the general outlines of the Darwinian picture, hasn’t yet fully absorbed it. For instance, can theology continue to maintain the sharp distinction between humanity and other creatures? What does theology do with the virtual certainty of the human race’s eventual extinction? How does it address the picture of human beings suggested by some science as far more conditioned by both biology and environment than many traditional theological anthropologies would have it?

  • Sane repetition

    I see that the Catholic webzine Godspy is up and running again (via Kevin Jones). One particular article I liked was blogger Eve Tushnet’s commendation of repetitive prayer. This hits home for me:

    In “falling back on” other people’s words I can admit that I can’t express myself very well, and I need help even to understand what I might want to say. Helplessness and a sense of terrible distance from God lend themselves naturally, I think, to these shy borrowings of others’ speech. (Jesus on the Cross uses the Psalmist’s words when He cries, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”)

    St. Josemaria Escriva touches on a similar theme in The Furrow, with added bite: “For those who use their intelligence and their study as a weapon, the Rosary is most effective, because this apparently monotonous way of beseeching Our Lady, as children do their mother, can destroy every seed of vainglory and pride.” So it isn’t only that the repeated prayers can help us when we already feel as weak and small as a child; it’s also that we need to put ourselves, voluntarily, in that state of spiritual littleness, overcoming our pride. It’s good to put aside our very own, special-snowflake words sometimes, and accept others’ words as an act of humility. The repetitions push us to recognize how much more there is in these humble words than we might initially realize. It’s good at times to pray patiently in a way we did not choose, and see what others’ practices can teach us.

    I notice that often when trying to pray “in my own words” I end up praying, not simply and directly, but in what I imagine to be “theologically correct” language, as though I’m trying to show off my knowledge and erudition to God. Which is, of course, completely ridiculous (not least because I don’t have much knowledge and erudition when it comes to theological matters).

    I’ve also found the Rosary in particular to be the best way for me to focus my prayers, not on my own needs, but on the great story of God’s love for us. By meditating on the Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries I sometimes find that my own needs (or more often wants) which seemed so pressing are put in their proper perspective. Such prayers focused on what Christians believe to be God’s own story help, I think, to orient the self to reality, rather than trying to manipulate reality in service to the self.

  • The Buddha and the Christ

    Here’s an interesting piece by a lapsed Catholic who studied Tibetan Buddhism and eventually found his way back to the Catholic Church. He discusses Tibet, and the many misconceptions Westerners have about it, as well as the differences between Buddhism and Christianity.

    Partly for personal reasons and partly out of curiosity I’ve been delving into the world of Buddhism a bit myself. Here are some books I’ve read over the last few weeks that I liked:

    Sitting: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation, by Diana St. Ruth

    Zen for Christians, by Kim Boykin

    Buddhism Plain and Simple, by Steve Hagen

    I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this, but trying to practice meditation daily has been a good discipline. And at the risk of becoming some kind of cheesy Western dilettante, cultivating an awareness in and of the present moment strikes me as a good thing to do, regardless of your religious beliefs.

  • Whose faith? Which rationality?

    In a comment to this post, Eric makes the valuable point that “reason” is not a univocal term. He points out that what some theologians are up to is trying to recover a richer notion of what reason is. He refers to Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address which called for a kind of “re-Hellenization” of our understanding of what reason does in contrast to the often dessicated account of reason offered by much modern (and post-modern) thought.

    Now, I think this is all to the good. There definitely is a strain in post-Enlightenment thought that has reduced reason to instrumental or scientific rationality, banishing everything else, such as religious and moral truth, to the realm of the subjective.

    However we understand reason though, we need to be careful not to smuggle our preferred conclusions into our definition of rationality. For instance, should reason be defined as that which, when rightly used, leads us to God? This makes atheists irrational by definition, but that sounds like a word game or winning by definition. It’s more charitable to admit that different people, employing their powers of reason to the best of their ability, can come to different conclusions about God’s existence and other important questions of existence.

    I agree that there is a problem with certain modernist accounts of rationality to the extent that they restrict the category of knowledge to beliefs supported by a certain kind of evidence or method of inquiry – that appropriate to scientific work. This excludes certain modes of knowing – personal, experiential, intuitive, even mystical – a priori. A more comprehensive view of reason would see these as complementary ways of knowing, not inferior ones. But by their very nature these modes of knowing aren’t publicly demonstrative or easily verified intersubjectively. So, as a basis for deliberating about the common good they have problems.

    The challenge, if a pluralistic society is to find some kind of modus vivendi, is to locate an overlapping consensus on the conditions for a relatively decent social order. To say that Christians should be in the public sphere “as Christians,” as Stanley Hauerwas likes to say, leaves unclear what it means for them to be there as Christians alongside non-Christians. Should Christians seek to embody their convictions about what’s right in the law, to bring it into conformity with God’s law, as Mike Huckabee says? Or should they take a strict policy of non-involvement with the structures of government?

    I sometimes think that this is more of a theoretical problem than a practical one. Personally, I often find I have more in common politically with my some of my secular friends than many of my co-religionists. Indeed, I have little difficulty finding common ground with them on a whole host of issues. Does this mean that my political views are insufficiently informed by my religion? Maybe. But it could also be that religious belief under-determines political belief by its very nature. After all, I’m hardly the first person to observe that the line from Christian doctrine and moral principles to concrete policy prescriptions is hardly a short or straight one.

    This brings up another, often unappreciated, fact: we talk all too easily about “the” Christian tradition or “the” Christian narrative. But there is no single, coherent, uncontested Christian narrative. The Christian tradition is an ongoing conversation or argument, sometimes a bloody one. In a very important sense it’s highly misleading to think in terms of “Christians” being aligned with or in conflict with “non-Christians” or “secularism.” There simply is no unified Christian community or perspective on society. This may be a tragedy or a blessing depending on your point of view, but it’s a fact that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

    I guess what I’m saying is that however we understand reason, it’s not going to guarantee unanimity on the ordering of our public life. In fact, one of the most important conditions of a peaceful and liberal society is that those in the minority – who, after the votes are counted, still dissent – can count on their rights being respected and that unanimous agreement isn’t a necessary condition for social peace. The same need is present in the church, where we see that even shared theological premises don’t automatically generate agreement on contentious issues.

    I’m not pretending to have resolved the issue: it’s an open question whether we can continue to get along and seek the common good while maintaining divergent conceptions of the good. But this may be a problem that’s never “solved” once and for all – it may not be a theoretical solution that we need, but the virtues of civility, charity, and humility required to travel alongside those very different from ourselves.

  • Faith, rationality and the common good

    Fr. Chris has a good post defending Jeffrey Stout from Christian neo-traditionalist critiques. I’m no expert on Stout, but I think I’m overall more sympathetic to what I take to be Stout’s side in this debate.

    Call me an old-fashioned liberal, but I am deeply skeptical about this idea of replacing a shared rationality with appeals to particular “narratives” or “socio-cultural traditions.” And this is not, in my view, a sheerly “secular” or “liberal” view: there is a long theological tradition which holds that the logos that became incarnate in Jesus is also the principle of intelligibility in the universe which is, in principle, accessible to all people. And this shared participation in the logos allows all of us to discern something of the true and good.

    Each tradition, I would suggest, discerns some aspects of the logos, but at the same time “we see through a glass darkly” which mandates a degree of humility in our judgments about the good. It’s not as though we have a “tradition-free” vantage point which gives us access to pure rationality, but that we each start in a particular place, but seek to find common standards for making judgments about the good.

    Keith Ward makes a similar point in discussing Karl Barth’s “Nein!” to natural theology:

    Barth accepted the pluralist view that various competing worldviews can be equally rational or justifiable to their respective adherents, but made the invalid inference that no reasons can be given for accepting a particular revelation. He was right to think that the giving of reasons is very largely an ‘internal’ matter of exhibiting the coherence and integration of your own scheme of beliefs. But he was mistaken in denying that there could be a common basis of human knowledge and experience to which your belief-scheme needs to be related, with varying degrees of plausibility. All of us speak from a specific viewpoint, but we have the best chance of approaching truth when we take fully into account the viewpoints of others on what is, after all, the same reality. (Ward, Re-Thinking Christianity, p. 195)

    This is the core problem as I see it with certain “postmodern” approaches to Christian belief. Yes, you can make it appear that any worldview is as justifiable as any other if you see them as employing incommensurable and competing “rationalities.” However, once you’ve done that, you’ve essentially undermined any claim for your belief-system to be true. After all, if rationality is sheerly up for grabs, what reason do you have for thinking that your worldview gets at the truth any better than your neighbor’s?

    A better starting point – and one that I would argue is theologically sounder – is to assume that all human beings have, in virtue of their innate cognitive abilities, the ability to grasp at least some part of the truth about reality. Now, Christians believe that they have been given a particular insight into the nature of that reality by God’s self-revelation in the history of Israel and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but this doesn’t necessarily cancel out other insights or knowledge. Given that God is both creator and redeemer, we ought to expect the opposite: that people’s natural God-given capabilities for knowledge will yield genuine insights.

    This ought to encourage a great deal of cooperation and even consensus in thinking about the common good while at the same time allowing Christians (and others) to offer their own distinctive perspectives on that good. I agree what I take to be Stout’s view that, for the most part, whatever consensus is achieved will be ad hoc and empirical, rather than deriving from a priori universal truths embedded in rationality as such, but Christians in particular should expect there to be a great deal of overlap considering that we all share a God-given ability to reason, learn about the world, and reflect upon the good.