Fr. Robert Barron is a powerful advocate for a Christianity rooted in spiritual praxis, not abstraction. He laments that Christian spirituality – as originally expressed in liturgy, practice, and apprenticeship – has been attenuated and transformed into a beige, bland approximation of its former self. It has become little more than a faint echo of its enveloping secular culture or another set of private convictions. In his book “The Strangest Way” Fr. Barron traces beginning of this long dreary process to the subjectivity, rationalism, and suspiciousness born of Cartesian philosophy in the so-called “Age of Enlightenment”. This cultural mindset was in turn taken up by Christian apologists like Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Rahner who reduced Christianity to something best understood as an interior, subjective experience.
In René Descartes highly influential “Discourse on Method”, he laid out the program that has formed the current culture that has in turn shaped most of us: “Surveying the history of philosophical and religious thought, Descartes despairs of finding any coherency, consistency, or certitude, Whereas mathematics has remained impressively stable over the centuries, metaphysics and philosophy are a jumble of conflicting opinions, varying starting points, elemental disagreements. The greatest minds — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas — are at odds with each other and, worse yet, there seems no common ground on the basis of which to adjudicate their disputes. Classical philosophy, in short, is like an old seaside city, full of winding streets, dead-ends, collapsing buildings, and blind alleys — an ugly and dangerous place. Would it not be a desideratum, Descartes reasons, simply to tear down the old town, find a firmer construction site, and start afresh, this time under the guidance of one architect with a grand, unifying plan?”
Barron continues: “The wrecking-ball Descartes chooses is the powerful one of systematic doubt: if a proposition or conviction can be doubted, it should be doubted. So avid is Descartes to discover philosophical terra firma that he swings this ball wildly, knocking over every idea, principle, experience, and assumption — save one. He finds that the one thing he cannot doubt is that he is doubting; the one thing the wrecking ball cannot knock over is itself This intuition is expressed in what is certainly the most famous one-liner in the history of philosophy: cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. In this luminously “clear and distinct” idea, utterly incapable of being doubted or thought away, Descartes has found his starting point, his foundation. Not in nature, not in the tradition, not in conversation, but in the private interiority of his consciousness, he has discovered the rock upon which he can confidently build his new modern city of thought.
And the unified plan for the construction is a purely rational, mathematical method consisting of four steps:
- begin with clear and distinct ideas,
- break problems down into their component parts,
- move from one step to another in a chain of reasoning only when logic compels such a move, and
- rigorously check your work,
Beginning with the cogito and following the methode, the Cartesian philosopher will design a safe, clean, orderly, and rationally satisfying system; the philosopher will build a “modern” philosophical city, happily unlike the untidy and confusing town of classical thought.”
Now this Cartesian approach – which Fr. Barron sees as being subjectivist, rationalist and suspicious in nature — had an enormous influence, not only on the shaping of the modern physical sciences and the scientific method, but also on the emergence of a typically modern understanding of religion. When Immanuel Kant, at the end of the eighteenth century, sought to delineate a religion “within the limits of reason alone,” he appealed to the luminous inner conviction of a moral imperative. All of religion — liturgy, ritual, biblical narrative, dogmas, creeds — can and should be reduced to this subjective sense from which we must follow our ethical duty.
And when Friedrich Schleiermacher, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, endeavored to defend Christianity against its “cultured despisers,” he did so on the basis of faith being reducible to a mystical intuition of being. In short, both Schleiermacher and Kant made a typically Cartesian appeal to a clear and distinct subjective starting point for an understanding of the religious. If you can’t beat ‘em, goes the familiar nostrum, join ‘em. An echo of Kant and Schleiermacher writings is found in two of the most influential twentieth-century theologians, Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner. For Tillich, Christianity is grounded in a sense of being “ultimately concerned” with the unconditioned power of being itself And for Rahner, faith rests on the individual’s experience of standing in the presence of the absolute mystery, which conditions and lures all particular acts of knowing and willing. Hence interior, subjective experience is the religious terra firma, the rock upon which the whole structure is built.
Barron again: “In the popular Christianity of the last thirty years, this subjectivist bias has been plainly evident. In catechetics, theological reflection, liturgy, and parish ministry, a great stress has been placed on “experience,” one’s inner sense of the presence and activity of God, “Recall a time when you felt close to God” or “remember a moment when you were sure of God’s forgiveness” have been standard starting points for religious instruction and formation. Biblical texts, doctrines, liturgical formulas have tended to be read in light of private experiences, as though the experiences constituted the criterion of faith, the final court of appeal.”
And along with all of this has come an almost gleeful questioning of received traditions and authorities. Kant’s early essay “What Is Enlightenment?” expresses the Cartesian idea not as wrecking ball on the dangerous old city but, using a metaphor of coming of age, Kant tells European intellectuals that they had been behaving like children. Kant announces to them that the moment of their majority has arrived: they can celebrate “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” It is time for European thinkers to move out of the comfortable but infantilizing confines of their intellectual kindergarten and, in his famous phrase, “dare to know.”
Adolf von Harnack gave powerful expression to this Kantian imperative. Harnack scrapped the old traditions and presented Christianity as a simple moral system and Christ, not as the Son of God, but as a humble ethical teacher. Liturgy, the dogmatic tradition, rituals, metaphysics — all of it was seen as peripheral to, even ultimately obscuring of these core Christian facts. We can see here a dumbing down of Christian thought. In Paul Tillich’s early work in dogmatic theology, many traditional Christian ideas have been found unintelligible. Tillich sought to redefine them in terms of our psychological experience. Thus God becomes “that which unconditionally concerns us” and the Incarnation is “the appearance of the new being under the conditions of estrangement.”
Barron: “In many ways, the work of Josef Jungmann is paradigmatic here. This extremely influential thinker held that almost all of the liturgical developments since the time of Charlemagne amounted to so much clutter, obscuring the pristine beauty of the church’s house of prayer. Accordingly, he recommended (and his recommendation was widely heeded) a cleansing return to the simplicity of the patristic liturgy and ritual. It is instructive that Jungmann employed the very Cartesian metaphor of the cluttered house in need of purification and not, say, John Henry Newman’s image of the developing plant requiring occasional pruning.
Once again, tradition was construed rather one-sidedly as obscuring rather than as illuminating. One would not have to look far to see this suspicion of tradition in the recent life of the church, For many years in Catholic circles an appeal to the broad tradition was seen as retrograde, dangerously “preconciliar.” In popular articles, workshops, and homilies, the “new” theology was presented in sharp contrast to a usually caricatured “classical” version, this despite the fact that the great theological Fathers of the Council — de Lubac, Danielou, Rahner — remained profoundly respectful of the tradition. There has seemed to reign in contemporary Christianity a sort of hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to traditional ecclesial practices and theological forms, a tendency to see them as a front for plays of power or systems of domination.”
Recall that the foundation for Descartes’s project is the cogito, the self-authenticating thinking subject, guided by the mathematical method. Now precisely because all sense experience can be doubted, and because the body belongs to the realm of sense, this indubitable ego can have no necessary connection to the body. The source and ground of the characteristically modern philosophy therefore is literally disembodied. Just as the Cartesian mind is removed from the environing tradition, so is it removed from muscle, bone, movement, and blood. A spirituality derived from liturgy, practice, and discipleship becomes an interior, subjective experience.
Barron: “One can spot this body-spirit dualism in so much of modern philosophy. Thus Kant radically separates sensuousness from understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason and, in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he drives a wedge between anthropology (empirical, culturally determined) and the categorical imperative (purely rational, universal, disembodied) ~ And in Hegel, we find a sharp distinction between religion on the one hand and true philosophy on the other, religion tainted by imagination and particularity and philosophy beautifully abstract and rational.
This splitting of body and mind has shaped contemporary theology precisely in the measure that certain theologians have done their work apart from the discipline and practice of the believing community. Paul Tillich, for example, composed a massive three -volume systematic theology, while admitting that he rarely attended church service. Purely academic theologians — alone with their books, immersed in the intellectual tradition of Christianity, but not practicing their faith in any measurable way — are thinking in the disembodied Cartesian mode. When Hans Urs von Balthasar calls for a “kneeling theology” rather than a “sitting theology,” he is assuming that intellectuals will theologize more accurately about Christianity when their minds are formed in the concrete (and very bodily) discipline of prayer and worship.
And this Cartesian body/mind dualism is especially apparent in the texture of ordinary Christian life. In the last thirty years (especially in Catholicism), the bodily gestures and practices of the faith, the roots of spiritual praxis — rosaries, benedictions, processions, the performance of the works of mercy, devotions to the saints, novenas, pilgrimages, kneeling for prayer, the wearing of distinctive clothes — were largely set aside and not replaced. From the height of a typically Cartesian rationalism, such things were decried as superstitious, primitive, unworthy of properly enlightened Christians.”
My page of desultory reading selections from one of his books “And Now I See” is here
