Church History « Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Church History’ Category

The Age Of The Enlightenment – Christopher Dawson

July 8, 2011

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple), 1830

I must confess that I knew so little of the history below, I was embarrassed. Or perhaps I should say more precisely, I knew the history but had no idea what it meant.

————————————-

Notwithstanding the contribution made by England to the European Enlightenment and the profound influence it exerted on French thought, it was in France itself that the Enlightenment achieved its fullest expression and from France that it was diffused throughout the rest of Europe.

This was no doubt largely due to the international prestige that French culture had already acquired during the reign of Louis XIV, when Versailles had become not only the pattern of European monarchy, but also the arbiter of European manners and taste. Moreover this classical culture was extremely rational in spirit, though not yet rationalist. It consisted indeed of two diverse and actually contradictory elements. There was the Gallican Catholic culture which flowered in Bossuet and the great preachers, in Mabillon and the Benedictine scholars, and in the spiritual culture of the mystical and spiritual writers like St. Vincent de Paul. But on the other hand there was a strong movement of scientific rationalism deriving from the thought of the later Italian Renaissance — the work of such men as Gassendi and Campanella, above all of the outstanding genius who embodied this movement, Rene Descartes (1596-1650).

It was Descartes’ aim to reorganize the world of thought on abstract mathematical principles. He was a revolutionary genius who made a clean sweep of the principles of authority and tradition, and built a new intellectual world on the basis of scientific and geometrical reason. Yet there was a profound affinity and even a spiritual identity between the rationalism of this most independent of thinkers (who spent his life in voluntary exile in Holland) and the spirit of the new classical French culture.

In spite of the opposition of all the vested interests in the Church and the universities, the Cartesian movement won the support not only of the scientific world but of all the leaders of French culture, including metaphysicians and theologians like Malebranche and Thomassin, as well as the teachers of Port Royal, like Lancelot and Nicole. So that the philosophy of the classical culture was Cartesianism based on methodic doubt and rigid mathematical reasoning, and valuing clarity above all things. Its literary ideal, as expressed by Boileau, was also a purely rational one. “Le Bon Sens” was his supreme principle, and he counsels the poet,

Aimez donc la Raison et que tous vos ecrits
Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix.

Love is the reason. As always your writing
Borrow from itself and their luster and price

Boileau understood “bon sens” and the rule of reason in a strictly orthodox form, though his orthodoxy made room for the Gallicanism of Bossuet and the Jansenism of Arnauld.

But as soon as the death of Louis XIV replaced the rigid authoritarianism of the Grand Siècle by the liberty and license of the Regency, Reason became Rationalism and “le bon sens” the kind of “common sense” which regards mystery and miracle as absurd, and defines faith as belief in what is irrational. At this stage of the French Enlightenment, the most representative figure was Fontenelle, whose long life covers the century from 1657 to 1757. Fontenelle was a Cartesian with wide scientific interests and a gift of exposition which made him the inaugurator of the new science and philosophy of the Salon, which was henceforward to be characteristic of the French Enlightenment.

The powerful movement of scientific and philosophical ideas which influenced the course of English culture during the 17th century owed little to Descartes or his school. It was a parallel movement which had similar roots in the scientific culture of the later Renaissance, but differed widely from the French development, though to some extent it shared a common social and political background. In the culture of the Enlightenment the two elements met. There was indeed more of Locke than of Descartes in the philosophy of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists.

The acceptance of English empiricism and experimentalism, however, did nothing to change the spirit of Rationalism which had been impressed so strongly on French thought by Descartes and Fontenelle. Consequently the influence of Locke in France was very different from what it was in England.

The spirit of the English Locke was readily assimilated by English Protestantism and became a bridge between science and religion, but the French Locke was made the standard-bearer of a party far more revolutionary and destructive than were even the English Deists in England. The French philosophers were not merely anti-clerical, but openly anti-Christian.

Yet the movement was not purely negative. The Enlightenment had a positive ideal which finds its best expression in the great Encyclopaedia, above all in D’Alembert’s Discours Preliminaire (1751). Nevertheless it was the negative and destructive genius of Voltaire that remained the dominant spirit of the movement. He was perhaps the most brilliant pamphleteer that has ever existed, and certainly the most long lived, for his literary productions never flagged for sixty years, and throughout the most of that time he ruled literary Europe with the scourge of his ridicule and the sword of his wit.

This destructive and negative aspect of the French Enlightenment contributed very materially to the French Revolution and the destruction of the Gallican Church. When the war against authority which the philosophes had carried on for fifty years was transferred from the sphere of culture and religion to that of politics, it was inevitable that it should carry with it the ideology which had inspired it in its pre-political phase. Indeed the relation between the two phases of the movement is to a very great extent one of cause and effect, since you cannot have a cultural and spiritual revolution without ultimately producing a political revolution also. By this I do not mean that the philosophes were political revolutionaries. On the contrary their political ideal was in general that of enlightened despotism, and the most representative figures like Voltaire and D’Alembert and Baron Grimm did their best to ingratiate themselves with the courts of Russia, Prussia and Austria.

But even if this alliance with the autocrats had been wider and more thorough than it was, it is highly doubtful if the revolutionary effects of the new ideas could have been permanently excluded from politics:

“The destructive criticism of the philosophers,” as I have written elsewhere, “had undermined the order of Christian culture more completely than they realized, and it only needed the coming of a dynamic emotional impulse which appealed to the masses for the revolution to become a social and political reality.

This element was supplied by Rousseau and his disciples, who found in the democratic ideology of the rights of man and the general will a new faith strong enough to transform the rationalist and aristocratic spirit of the Enlightenment into the passionate and democratic spirit of the Revolution. The theories of Rousseau had the same relation to the ideology of the Jacobin party as the theories of Karl Marx to the ideology of communism. Indeed there is a genetic relation between Rousseauist Jacobinism and Marxist Communism. For the history of the modern European revolutionary movement has been a continuous development, so that democracy, nationalism, socialism and communism are all of them successive or simultaneous aspects of the same process. Thus there is a socialist element in the thought of a typical nationalist like Fichte, a democratic element in Marx, and a nationalist element in Stalin.“

Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent his life in close relation with the French Enlightenment, but in bitter hostility to its great leader, Voltaire. At first sight the forces were unevenly matched — on the one side, the friend of princes and the master mind of a brilliant intellectual society, on the other a lonely persecuted neurotic, who lived an underground existence in hiding from his real and imaginary enemies. And yet this outsider and natural Ishmaelite succeeded in gaining the enthusiastic support of the French intelligentsia, and unleashed the new emotional forces that found expression more than ten years after his death in the world-shaking upheaval of the French Revolution. Rousseau, in contrast to the Encyclopaedists, had a genuinely religious temperament, and the cult of nature and humanity, to which the Deists in England and France had offered their sincere but cerebral allegiance, acquired from him a religious fervor and an emotional conviction which proved contagious and irresistible.

For a generation — during the last third of the 18th century — the Religion of Nature became a real religion and no mere ideological fantasy, a faith in which men believed with their whole souls and for which they were prepared to die. In spite of the vagueness of its beliefs — its faith in progress, its hope in the coming of an age of social perfection and universal happiness, its optimistic faith in a providential order of nature, its belief in Democracy and the doctrine of political freedom, social equality and spiritual fraternity — it would be a mistake to underestimate its religious character, since it continued to be the dominant creed of a great part of Western civilization down to the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed the present spiritual crisis of our culture is due not so much to the loss of the traditional faith in Christianity, which had already occurred by the time of the French Revolution, as to the collapse of this new religion which has occurred in the present century, especially after the two world wars.

Thus in France and the countries under the direct influence of the Revolution, it is perhaps more accurate to speak of the de-Christianization of culture than of its secularization, while in England the course of development was the reverse. However, as in all periods of religious revolt, more people were detached from the old religion than were converted to the new. A very large part of the population was left in a state of moral confusion, acquiescing in the destruction of the old order without giving any profound adhesion to the religious ideals of the new.

The French Revolution created a bourgeois society and a secular culture, and yet the average French bourgeois remained a lukewarm Catholic, and his wife a pious and practicing one. It was the intelligentsia and the urban working class which remained faithful to the revolutionary tradition. It was from these two classes that 19th century socialism originated, and its earlier “utopian” forms were still inspired by the same ideals of the Religion of Nature and Humanity which had inspired the French Revolution.

The American Revolution owed a great deal to the influence of Locke and the culture of the English Enlightenment, and it made in turn an important contribution to the French Revolution. But it also possessed its own intrinsic importance and made its independent contribution to the culture of the modern world. The classical figure of the American Enlightenment is Benjamin Franklin, who stands in an analogous position to Locke in England and Voltaire in France, and in the following generation we have Thomas Paine, an American by adoption, who is equally important as a politician and a religious (or anti-religious) propagandist, and, a little later, Jefferson, who represents the culture of the American Enlightenment in its most mature form.

All three men were Deists, and it is difficult to distinguish any clear theological differences between them, but they differed remarkably in personality and social attitude. This difference was in part due to the differences in the several colonial cultures, and in the case of Paine, to the fact that he was thirty-seven when he first came to America. Nevertheless, the American Revolution itself exerted a formative influence on American culture to a much greater degree than the English Revolution in England, or the French in France. This was partly owing to the fact that the established Church of Virginia and the other Southern colonies was almost destroyed, and there was for a time nothing to take its place, so that the organized forces of religion were weaker during the years that followed the Revolution than at any period in American History. [Cf. G. A. Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (New York, Holt, 1938) on this point.]

But, apart from this, American culture had been already secularized by the influence of the frontiers where settlements had been made beyond the control of the Churches. The Quakers at least were aware of this, and took disciplinary measures against migration into regions beyond the reach of the regular meetings. In this matter there is a sharp contrast with the tradition of Spanish and French America, where the Church accompanied the pioneers from the beginning. The responsibility lay of course largely with the Church of England, which failed to create any American bishops. But New England was founded by men who wished to get away from bishops anyhow, and there the Revolution produced less secularization than elsewhere, since the Congregational Churches kept their hold on their people.

Yet in spite of the growing secularization of culture from above through the Enlightenment which primarily affected the intelligentsia, the European masses remained faithful to Christianity throughout the 18th century; and in England where the movement of secularization had begun first, and had been least affected by political repression, the 18th century actually saw a spontaneous religious revival on a very large scale. This revival had its center in the unprivileged classes, often the poorest and the most uneducated, such as the miners of Cornwall. It did not attempt to influence Church or State directly, and it was not until the end of the century that the related evangelical movement as represented by William Wilberforce and the so-called “Clapham Sect” began to have a direct influence on public life, first by its propaganda against the slave trade and later on by an alliance with the humanitarians of the Enlightenment.

In particular Wesley and his well-organized followers powerfully affected the history of American culture. For it was largely through his influence and that of his ally Whitefield that the secularizing efforts of the Revolutionary epoch were overcome. No other non-American has ever had such a strong and lasting effect on America, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he was one of the Founding Fathers of the 19th century American culture. This is all the more remarkable since he was himself a strong Tory and an outspoken opponent of the Revolution.

One of the most important effects of this religious revival was the rise of Protestant missions. Hitherto, Protestantism had been notably lacking in missionary enterprise. But in the 18th century the Moravians, the German Pietist sect which had had a great influence on Wesley and the first stages of the Methodist movement, were the first to turn their attention in this direction in 1731. It was not until the close of the century, with the foundation of the Protestant missionary societies and Carey’s mission to India, that the movement became widespread.

Thenceforward throughout the 19th century it increased steadily, decade by decade, and had a considerable influence on world culture by its promotion of cultural contacts and the spread of Western Christian education in the East. The 19th century was in fact a great missionary age for Protestants and Catholics alike, and the secondary effects that these missions produced on culture deserve more study from secular historians than they have hitherto received.

In Catholic Europe the impact of the Enlightenment on the tradition of Christian culture was more destructive, though there also it was slow to affect the peasantry and the masses. As we have seen, the tendency to sectarian division that is the characteristic note of this period in Protestant Europe also affected the Catholics, at least in France and the Netherlands. But where the Baroque culture was strongest — in the Mediterranean lands, in Central and Eastern Europe, and in Latin America — this was not so. There the unity of religion and culture was almost complete, and it is very doubtful if it would ever have been dissolved had it been left to itself. But the change in the balance of power in the second half of the 17th century produced far-reaching changes in the sphere of culture as well as that of politics which ultimately extended to religion as well.

For the age of Louis XIV was an age not only of French political predominance, but also of French cultural prestige. The new models of classical taste and style evolved at the French court and in the salons and academies outside the old Baroque patterns, and though Louis XIV prided himself on his orthodoxy, the spirit of French classical authors was deeply influenced by Gallicanism, Jansenism, and Cartesian rationalism. From the moment that this spirit triumphed, the retreat of the mystics (as Henri Bremond calls it) begins, and from the end of the 17th century classical culture led on without a break to the culture of the Enlightenment and the great rationalist attack on revealed religion.

Moreover, since Louis XIV had succeeded in obtaining the Hapsburg inheritance of the Spanish Empire for his grandson, Spain had passed into the Bourbon orbit and had ceased to exercise an independent leadership in Catholic culture. The result was a breach in the continuity of Spanish culture which led to the divorce of Spain from her old connections with Austria and Baroque Europe and incorporated her artificially and externally in the new international society of French culture with which she had no organic historical relation.

But in parts of Europe the Baroque culture lasted far into the 18th century, especially in the Hapsburg empire, which extended from the Turkish frontier to the Rhine at Freiburg im Breisgau. Here the reigns of Charles VI and Maria Teresa witness its last great achievements in architecture, sculpture and music, though not in literature and thought. When the Enlightenment did reach this part of Europe, it did so through the Enlightened Despotism of Joseph II and encountered considerable popular resistance.

In Latin Europe, on the other hand, the Enlightenment advanced more rapidly and was more overtly anti-Christian. Though the Bourbon monarchies were everywhere officially devoted to the defense of the Christian order, their defense was half-hearted and ill-directed and the enemies of religion had powerful friends at court, especially at the court of Louis XV in the time of Choiseul (1759-70), when the Bourbon courts, after the expulsion of the Jesuits from their respective countries, took joint measures to force the Papacy to abolish the Order, which it finally did in 1773. This was the most disastrous blow ever inflicted on the Counter-Reformation culture. It weakened and disorganized Catholic higher education throughout Europe, wrecked the work of the missions in the East and in America, and destroyed the only force capable of meeting the anti-Christian propaganda of the Encyclopaedists.

Posted in Christopher Dawson, Church History | Tagged Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Latin Europe and the Enlightenment, Locke, The American Revolution, the Cartesian movement, the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers, the French Enlightenment, The French Revolution | 2 Comments »

The Secularization of Modern Culture by Christopher Dawson

July 7, 2011

Fall of the Bastille

I have introduced Christopher Dawson earlier on PayingAttentionToTheSky, during a post about Gregory Wolfe’s essay Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Catholic Writer in the Modern World, he was mentioned in passing. Dawson was a marvelous historian, a stunningly good writer whose work gives us a sense of how we got to where we are. These three essays I’m posting now show the growing secularization of western culture and how the Church found herself on the wrong side of history.

——————————————

THE WHOLE SITUATION IN WESTERN EUROPE was transformed in the 18th century by the advent of the new scientific and technological culture which was common to both Catholic and Protestant Europe. But this was far from being the only factor that made for the growing secularization of Western culture. We must also study the more general social factors of the process. Obviously we cannot understand the present situation of Christianity in Western Culture unless we have studied the causes that have led to the weakening or occultation of Christian Culture during the last two centuries. And it is not sufficient to do this in the abstract: we must trace the process historically in Protestant and Catholic Europe, and above all in England and France, where the processes of change were parallel to one another, but very widely different in their modes of operation.

The immediate cause of the secularization of European culture was the frustration and discouragement resulting from a century of religious wars, and above all from the inconclusiveness of their end. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the necessity for the co-existence of Catholics and Protestants in Europe became generally recognized, and since men still valued their common culture they were forced to emphasize those elements which were common to Catholics and Protestants, i.e., its secular aspects. This had already been recognized in the United Netherlands since their foundation by William the Silent, and to a somewhat lesser degree in France during the period of the Edict of Nantes (1598-1685), and after 1648 it became the international law of the Empire as between states (though not between individuals).

In England also the experience of the Civil Wars and of the mutual intolerance of the sectarian extremists produced an important movement towards mutual toleration supported by Cromwell himself, though the Restoration brought back a State Church and a regime of conformity. But it is noteworthy that the really successful weapon against Puritan extremism was not the persecution of Church and State, but the ridicule of men of letters like Samuel Butler in his Hudibras and Dryden in his Absalom and Achitophel.

One of the chief factors in the changed climate of opinion was the growth of a lay intelligentsia, and the creation of a class of journalists and professional men of letters in France, England and the Netherlands. On the higher social level this new intelligentsia was represented by the academies, which played a very important part in the development of scientific studies. On the lower level it covered a wide range down to the penniless scribblers who were ridiculed by Pope in the Dunciad.

In France, especially, this class tended to favor free thought and lax morals. They were the “libertines,” the forerunners of the “philosophes” of the following century, and the inheritors of the tradition of Rabelais and Montaigne. Their most distinguished representative was Saint-Evremond, who spent the last forty years of his long life in England (and Holland) and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

These influences were growing beneath the surface throughout the 17th century with thinkers like Gassendi and Hobbes, and writers like Cyrano de Bergerac, Molière, Samuel Butler, and La Fontaine, until in the 18th century they came to the surface and dominated Western culture. This growth of a lay intelligentsia was only one aspect of the rise of the middle classes which was already far advanced in Holland by the 17th century and in England and France by the 18th. The merchant class in Holland and England and the lawyers and officials in France gradually took the place of the nobility as the real leaders of culture.

Unlike the men of letters, the new middle classes were by no means hostile to religion, and they maintained much stricter standards of moral behavior than the old aristocratic classes. But on the other hand, they were apt to be critical of authority and naturally tended to adopt a sectarian type of religion — Puritans and Nonconformists in England, and Huguenots in France. Theirs was among the strongest influences making for the secularization of culture, as so many writers have argued (like Max Weber, Ernest Troeltsch, Tawney, and Groethuysen).

They regarded religion as a private matter which concerned the conscience of the individual only, whereas public life was essentially business life; a sphere in which the profit motive was supreme and a man’s moral and religious duties were best fulfilled by the punctual and industrious performance of his professional activities. As it was the ideal of the nobleman to win honor on the field of battle, so it was the ideal of the bourgeois to win profit in the field of business, and the latter often required as much courage and daring as the former.

We fortunately possess a remarkable type-specimen of the new bourgeois psychology and ethics at the moment when the great transition to secular culture was taking place, namely the life and work of one of the greatest English writers of the Augustan Age — Daniel Defoe (1661-1731). He was a professional author and journalist, who wrote, and wrote well, on every subject of public interest — history, geography, economics, politics, ethics, religion and fiction. In fact his output was so enormous and covers so many different fields, that no one can hope to read it all. Fortunately, however, his most famous and popular work, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in its three parts (most readers confine themselves to the first only) reflects almost every aspect of Defoe’s many-sided genius. It is the epic of Protestant individualism, which is not merely a story of adventure but a moral allegory or parable, which shows how the Nonconformist conscience can survive when it is uprooted from its sociological background and forced to come to terms with the realities of a wider alien world.

For in spite of Defoe’s secular temperament, he is fully aware of the importance of the religious element in culture, and the greater part of the third part of the book is devoted to a discussion of the religious state of the world, the failure of Christianity to become a world-wide religion, and the possibility of a union of Christian states to extend the boundaries of Christendom. Throughout this part of the work, it is the absurdity and evil resulting from the divisions between Christians that are most insisted on, and though he maintains the traditional medieval concept of a union of Christian princes for a crusade against the infidels, he finally admits that such projects are entirely outside the range of practical politics. But strangely enough, the concluding passage of the book in which he arrives at this pessimistic conclusion is the only one that seems to show religious feeling. “For I doubt,” he says, “no zeal for the Christian religion will be found in our days or perhaps in any age of the world, till Heaven beats the drums itself, and the glorious legions from above come down on purpose to propagate the work and to reduce the whole world to the obedience of King Jesus — a thing which some tell is not far off, but of which I heard nothing in all my travels and illuminations, no, not one word.”

This is a strange conclusion to a book which is justly praised as the most realistic story of adventure ever written, and few readers even know that this is Crusoe’s last word! For the third part of Robinson Crusoe is generally dismissed as a piece of hackwork to attract the religious public. But however that may be, it throws a very interesting light on Defoe’s mind, which reflects the whole world of his time — physical, cultural, and religious — with extraordinary fidelity. And in the passage I have just quoted, we see the new world of bourgeois individualism looking back with a pang of nostalgia towards the disappearing shores of the religious world that it had left behind it.

Defoe, in spite of his doubts and hesitations, was still loyal in his own way to the tradition of Christian culture. But already during his lifetime, and increasingly after 1685, a new type of culture was arising which was in conscious revolt against Christianity, and which aimed at the creation of a new rational and philosophical basis for a united Western culture. This was the Enlightenment, which found expression first in the English Deists at the close of the 17th century and secondly in the French philosophers and Encyclopaedists who gave the movement a world-wide diffusion in the second half of the 18th century.

There was moreover one influence which lies behind both of these movements, and was of great historical importance in many different directions. This was the influence of the Protestant refugees who left France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 for Holland, England and Prussia; indeed for every Protestant country. These refugees represented the most active and independent elements in the French bourgeoisie, and they acted as a two-way channel of cultural influence between France and the rest of Europe, especially England. For half a century they were the leading journalists and translators who made English culture, especially the thought of Locke and Newton and Shaftesbury, known in France. The refugees were thoroughly French in mentality, but were the sworn enemies of Louis XIV and of French Catholicism; so that the result of the Revocation was to create a most powerful and well-organized underground movement against Catholicism. The headquarters of this campaign was in Holland, and its chief organ was the free press, edited by brilliant scholars like Bayle and Le Clerc, which reached a European public.

The strength of these writers was their critical spirit. They did not try to defend Protestantism—indeed they no longer believed in it — but to attack at all points the intolerance and credulity of the orthodox — all the orthodox, everywhere and in all ages. In this way the exiled intelligentsia were the forerunners of the French Encyclopaedists. Their greatest writer, in fact, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), was himself an encyclopaedist in the literal sense of the word, and his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Rotterdam 1697, English translation 1730), was the indispensable vade mecum of every rationalist and sceptic from the beginning of the century to the days of Gibbon.

The influence of the Huguenot exiles is perhaps shown most clearly in the case of Gibbon. His thought and learning were nourished not by the English deists, nor the French philosophers, but by the older tradition of critical scholarship that owes its origins to the Protestant exiles in Holland and Switzerland — Bayle and Le Clerc, Basnage and Beausobre and Barbeyrac. It was not long before their influence united with that of the non-Protestant French intelligentsia to form the new culture of the Enlightenment. In this connection it is highly significant that Bayle’s disciple, biographer and editor, the Huguenot Des Maiseaux, was also the disciple, biographer and editor of Saint-Lvremond, the aristocratic free-thinker whose voluntary exile in England had nothing to do with Protestantism.

The effect of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was, however, not confined to the formation of the Huguenot diaspora in Protestant Europe. It also produced profound changes in French culture. Defoe (in the third part of Robinson Crusoe) quotes a French Protestant as saying that the Huguenots who left France had left their religion behind them, and those who stayed had done so by the sacrifice of their principles: so that a new type of Protestant-Catholic had been created, men who practiced a religion that they did not believe and “went to Mass with Protestant hearts.”

They created a center of religious disaffection and resentment in France, and especially among the bourgeoisie which remained in fairly close contact with the Huguenot refugees in Holland and England. Though this disaffected minority were unable to profess or defend their old religion for fear of reprisals, there was nothing to prevent them from criticizing Catholicism on purely rational grounds, and thus their influence combined with that of the secular rationalists to create the atmosphere of criticism, skepticism and hostility to authority which permeated French 18th century culture.

In England the influence of the Deists, which was at its height during the reign of George I, was checked by three factors:

In the first place the strongest force in the English Enlightenment was not consciously anti-religious. The founders of the Royal Society, Wilkins, Newton, Boyle, Wallis, and Wren, were all professing Christians, and some of them pious. For example, Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), the historian of the Royal Society and one of the leading champions of religious toleration, was an Anglican bishop, and Boyle, the author of The Sceptical Chemist, devoted part of his property to the foundation of a lectureship in apologetics which still survives. In fact the Baconian philosophy which inspired the Royal Society in its early days — the idea of an experimental science combined with mathematics and applied to the conquest of nature and the service of man — had its roots in English medieval philosophy and was easily reconcilable with a religious view of the world and the acceptance of revelation.
In the second place the differences between the Deist advocates of a purely rational religion and the Latitudinarian divines of the established Church or the Nonconformists who tended towards Socinianism [Vocab: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14113a.htm] and Unitarianism were so small that it is often difficult to detect shades of opinion. Indeed the title of one of the ablest of the Deist works, Christianity as Old as Creation or The Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature by Tindal (1655-1733) is borrowed from one of Bishop Sherlock’s sermons.
In the third place the defenders of orthodoxy proved to be better writers and abler controversialists than their critics. Thus the tables were turned. The English rationalists had no Voltaire, whereas the Christians produced a remarkably able set of apologists and pamphleteers of all shades of opinion from Latitudinarian Whigs like Warburton, through Moderates like Bishops Butler and Berkeley, to High Tories like Swift and Non-jurors like William Law and Charles Leslie. Thus it came about that at the moment when the French Enlightenment was launching its triumphant attack on Christianity, Deism was in a state of decline and English Protestantism was undergoing the remarkable revival associated with the names of John Wesley and George Whitefield. Consequently (and independently of Wesley’s influence), the second half of the 18th century tended to be more religious than the first, and some of the greatest figures in the literary world (such as Dr. Johnson and Cowper) were exceptionally religious men.

Thus the English Enlightenment did not lead to the defeat of Christianity by the forces of rationalism. English opinion rallied from the Deist attack and found a satisfactory compromise in the moderate and tolerant Liberal Protestantism which finds its classical expression in Addison’s Spectator. On the other hand, there is no doubt that this period did see a general secularization of English social and political life. The Revolution of 1688 was followed by the triumph of the middle classes and the enthronement of private property, with the man of property as the foundation of the new social order.

After the death of Queen Anne and the establishment of the Hanoverian dynasty, the crown lost its traditional halo of Divine Right and became an organ of the new secular regime. Even the religious revival of the Wesleyan movement helped to increase the secularization of public life by emphasizing the importance of individual conversion and the private character of religion. But already in the first decades of the century the world so vividly depicted by Defoe, not only in his novels but in his Tour through Great Britain and his Complete English Tradesman, is a wholly secularized world in which individualism and the profit motive rule supreme.

Hence it was that England became regarded on the Continent, especially in France, as a political model for the New Age. The writers of the Enlightenment, headed by Voltaire and Montesquieu, saw England as an embodiment of liberal ideals: political freedom, religious toleration, free trade, and personal independence. In the eyes of the French philosophers, England had shown that these things were not only possible, but were the secret of the phenomenal prosperity and power she had achieved since the Revolution.

Posted in Christopher Dawson, Church History | Tagged Christopher Dawson, Daniel Defoe, religion as a private matter, Socinianism, the English Enlightenment, the growth of a lay intelligentsia, the Huguenot exiles, the influence of the Deists, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the secularization of European culture | Leave a Comment »

The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance And The Recovery Of The Sacred

May 20, 2011

Evelyn Waugh

A further adaption of Gregory Wolfe’s essay Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Catholic Writer in the Modern World. The focus is on one of his conclusions on how these intellectuals were able to battle for the recovery of the sacred from the grips of modernity’s secular smother hold on society. We may have lost it again, but the memory remains with us.

Who Were They?/Where Did They Come From?
In theology, there is a principle which states that the bigger and more mysterious a being is, metaphysically speaking, the harder it is to describe its nature in direct terms. When it comes to understanding God himself, it has often been said that it is better to attempt to say what he is not, and in this way inch closer to a perception of what he is. Gregory Wolfe borrows this technique to describe the modern Catholic Renaissance:

First, the Renaissance was not an expression of anything that might be called an “establishment”. The single most striking fact about the majority of its writers is that they were converts. In the earlier generation, one could point out Leon Bloy, Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Paul Claudel, Gabriel Marcel, Charles Peguy, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Edith Stein, and Adrienne von Speyr. The younger generation included such converts as Louis Bouyer and Walker Percy. Add to this such near-converts as Henri Bergson and Simone Weil, as well as the Anglo-Catholic converts T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and you have a picture of a worldview that had the capacity to draw many of the leading minds of the age.

Conversion is an experience that is in some sense unique to every convert, but it inevitably involves a process of discovery — the feeling, to quote T. S. Eliot, of arriving home and knowing the place for the first time. Ironically, many of these intellectual converts did not find ready acceptance in official ecclesiastical circles. All this goes to show that the converts were hardly submitting themselves blindly to authority figures in order to assuage their anxieties about sex, guilt, and death (a common charge of their secular critics).

Rather, they were engaged in a protracted mental and spiritual struggle that ended in a willing embrace of the central mysteries of the Faith. To all of them, their faith was an asset, a key to understanding both the highest truths and the most pressing problems of the moment. They would undoubtedly share Flannery O’Connor’s belief that “there is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery.”

If the Renaissance intellectuals were not creatures of any establishment, neither did they form a “movement”. There were, of course, “schools” of thought, including the Thomists, the Catholic existentialists, and the neo-patristic theologians, but even within these schools there were widely divergent views. This point may seem a truism, but it is, to my mind, an important corroboration of the intellectual honesty of these thinkers that, while they shared a common faith, their explorations of the world took them down disparate paths.

Finally, it is worth noting that these writers were predominantly laypeople, not clerics. We take the leadership of lay intellectuals in the Church today somewhat for granted, but it has largely been a modern development. It is a development that recent popes and the Second Vatican Council itself have strongly endorsed, seeing it as a necessary consequence of an increasingly secularized society, and also because the specific character of the laity is to know the natural goods of various forms of worldly endeavor.

The leading figures of the Catholic Renaissance moved easily and naturally in secular professional circles — a fact we may tend to forget. This is a testament not only to the greater openness of secular intellectuals in the earlier decades of the century but also to their positive rejection of the fortress mentality on the part of the Renaissance thinkers. Their place, as they saw it, was on the front lines of culture, and if they encountered some hostility, they also found a great deal of respect. As James Hitchcock has pointed out, the Catholic Thomists helped to spur a neo-scholastic movement that was taken up by such teachers as Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon at the University of Chicago, where the joke was that “atheist professors taught Catholic philosophy to Jewish students.”

Orthodoxy Responds To Heresy
It has been said that orthodoxy develops only in response to the challenges posed by heresy. But if the great orthodox thinkers have received their impetus from the need to oppose a narrowing and distortion of the faith, it is equally true that they always manage to rise above merely defensive postures to achieve a vision which reawakens in us a sense of the beauty and wonder of the world.

One need only think of a work like Saint Augustine’s The City of God, which was written as a response to the pagans who claimed that Christianity was responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire. This magisterial book not only refuted those charges but became the blueprint for the political and social order of medieval Europe for nearly a millennium. I would like to suggest that the greatest of the Catholic Renaissance writers in the modern era accomplished this twofold mission of critique and imaginative vision. One of the many themes that run throughout their writings, is what Wolfe calls “the recovery of the sacred.”

Where the Catholic novelists of the twentieth century have succeeded in providing us with intimations of grace, they have revealed it in experiences that seem to confound our normal expectations for revelation. Greene, Mauriac, Bernanos, and O’Connor, among others, have depicted grace in the lives of seemingly odious and pitiful individuals, in moments of violence, and in quiet, almost unnoticeable ways. Though these novelists were accused of being obsessed by dark visions of sin, they replied that grace is precisely an irruption of the divine into the fallen creation.

Evelyn Waugh And The Recovery Of The Sacred
Evelyn Waugh is a case in point. Known primarily for his biting satire, Waugh, in Brideshead Revisited, set himself the ambitious goal of showing “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.” Ironically, the reaction of many readers, including a good number of Catholics, to Brideshead can be summarized by a letter Waugh received from an American reader soon after its publication: “Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything. Seems more like the kiss of Death.”

A plot summary would certainly seem to support that contention. The agnostic painter Charles Ryder witnesses one member after another of the Catholic, aristocratic Flyte family die or fade away in lives that appear largely futile. Early in the novel, Ryder’s intimate friend Sebastian Flyte explains:

So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; Mommy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated — and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want . . . I wish I liked Catholics more.

By the end of the novel, Sebastian and Cordelia are also living stunted and sad lives. But, as happens so often in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh, a throwaway phrase contains the core of the novel’s meaning: “happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.”

For Waugh, the notion that the life of faith ought to lead inevitably to worldly prosperity and what the pop psychologists call “wellness” is both unrealistic and dangerous. In a fallen world, afflicted by evil and stupidity, happiness can never be a gauge of fidelity to God. To think otherwise is to confuse happiness, with its bourgeois connotations of comfort and freedom from any burdens, with blessedness, or what Catholics call the “state of grace”.

Catholics, Waugh believed, have always clung to the foot of the cross, profoundly and intuitively aware of what the Spanish philosopher Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life”. When Julia Flyte, one of the “half-heathens”, reaches a moment of crisis in Brideshead Revisited, it is the unexpected memory of the crucifix on the wall of her nursery that shocks her into a recognition of how far she has drifted from God.

As the characters in Brideshead enact their “fierce little human tragedy”, it becomes clear that they are all in some fashion struggling against God and his Church, symbolized by Brideshead Castle, that magnificent baroque backdrop to the novel’s action. Thomas Howard has spoken of the Church as the “unseen” character in the novel.

Wolfe was convinced that Waugh intended the Church to look like the “kiss of death”, not out of perversity but because he understood it to be a “sign of contradiction”. The sufferings that it seemingly inflicts, because of its laws and absolute claims, are the bitter herbs through which the disease of sin is purged. On closer inspection, the lives that the characters lead at the end of the novel, while not “happy”, are in many ways “blessed”. Sebastian is a holy fool, a drunken porter for a monastery in North Africa. When he learns of this, Charles asks Cordelia: “I suppose he doesn’t suffer?”

But Wolfe thinks he does. One can have no idea what the suffering might be, to be maimed as he is — no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him… I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much of it coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love.

Brideshead Revisited is only one example of the ways in which the twentieth-century Catholic writers sought to recover the sense of the sacred. But in its depiction of the Church as a sign of contradiction, it fulfills Flannery O’Connor’s requirements of revealing both a drama of salvation and a way of addressing “the particular tragedy of our own times”.

If you’ve never read Brideshead or seen a film adaptation spend some time here.

Posted in Christopher Dawson, Church History | Tagged Catholic intellectuals, Evelyn Waugh, The Recovery Of The Sacred | Leave a Comment »

The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance

May 19, 2011

“When the future historian describes the Catholic Renaissance of the twentieth century, it is my guess that he will pay particular attention to the emergence, during the great wars and that the darkest moment before the dawn, of the great 'doctors' who were the prophets of the new age. He will point to men like Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain and Edward Watkin and, certainly, to Christopher Dawson (picture here). Perhaps he will see that with these erudite and devoted men the Church moved out of that state of siege in which it had been living for four centuries.”

Christopher Dawson in The Reality of Christian Culture has written that “the tradition [of Christian culture] exists today, for though the Church no longer inspires and dominates the external culture of the modern world, it still remains the guardian of all the riches of its own inner life.” If our society were once again fully Christian, imagines Dawson, this sacred tradition would once more flow out into the world and fertilize the culture of societies yet unborn.

Dawson shows us that the movement toward Christian culture is at one and the same time “a voyage into the unknown, in the course of which new worlds of human experience will be discovered, and a return to our own fatherland — to the sacred tradition of the Christian past which flows underneath the streets and cinemas and skyscrapers of the new Babylon of America as the tradition of patriarchs and prophets flowed beneath the palaces and amphitheaters of Imperial Rome in its day.”

Whenever I have had the chance to visit second-hand book shops in recent years — whether they be converted barns in Pennsylvania, decaying mansions in the Corktown section of Detroit, or dank corridors in Oxford or London — I have found myself shouting out my discoveries to my friends. More often than not, my finds have been books by Catholic thinkers that have been out of print for twenty or thirty years. On their frayed dust jackets and faded paper covers, the praise of critics whose names are all but forgotten today testifies to the excitement these books once generated. The prices have been hard to beat: Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World for a dollar, Christopher Dawson’s The Historic Reality of Christian Culture for 30 pence, Chesterton’s Manalive for a quarter. Many of these books come from libraries — predominantly Catholic libraries. In fact, I have personally profited from the closing of dozens of seminaries and convents in the Anglo-American world. With a feeling that is at once elated and guilty, I run off with spoils that once lined the shelves of imposing Gothic buildings.
Gregory Wolfe, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Catholic Writer in the Modern World

These are the same books that I check out of the library and record reading selections from for PayingAttentiontotheSky — they are the writers whose works were those who made up what was once called the Catholic Intellectual Renaissance, “an outpouring of philosophy, theology, history, and literature which combined fidelity to the ancient teachings of the Church with considerable sophistication of mind and spirit.” Here were the works of the minds who dominated Catholic letters for the first half of the twentieth century, gathering dust, rejected by the current establishment, only to be discovered and then hoarded as treasures by a small segment of the young (and not so young), members of a cranky cultural underclass that you, dear reader, are part of by virtue of your reading allegiance to this blog a few times a week.

The outstanding Catholic historian James Hitchcock has termed the eclipse of these writers in the 1960s and 1970s “the slaying of the fathers”. But in cocktail parties at most Catholic universities today, the mention of names such as Maritain, Gilson, Mauriac, or Waugh would very likely evoke not so much hostility as an amused condescension for individuals who are considered thoroughly passé. Relegated to that zone of weeping and gnashing of teeth known as the “pre-Vatican II” world, the Maritains and Mauriacs are thought of as apologists for an order that has been largely left behind in our progress toward a more enlightened dispensation. “To be sure,” the cocktail chat might go, “they were men of cultivation and learning, even of wit, but, you know, they were positively medieval.”

Of course, many of the writers of the Catholic Renaissance would have been flattered to be associated with the Middle Ages, a time which to them connoted not barbaric darkness but a remarkably integrated culture, a world of light and grace, where flesh and spirit jointly mounted toward heaven. But leaving the virtues of the High Middle Ages aside for the moment, I would like to suggest that, in the long run, the thinkers who made up the Catholic Renaissance will prove to be the most authentically modern and original of all. Scratch a progressive and more often than not you will find, just beneath the language of “liberation” and “dialogue”, notions that made their first appearance during the debates of the patristic era. But show me a thinker who has faithfully grappled with the achievements of Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas, and you will likely find someone who has the ability to grasp the real challenges of the modern world.
Gregory Wolfe, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Catholic Writer in the Modern World

The paradox about the spiritual and intellectual life of the Church is its ebb and flow that Catholics periodically refer to as “reform.” Chesterton knew about it. For Chesterton, our modern master of paradox, the word reform is both meaningless and dangerous unless we recover its literal definition.

The liberal conceptions of reform as either a gradual evolution away from an older doctrine or practice or as a revolution against tradition are woefully misguided. True reform, he says, involves a return to form. Only in subjecting oneself to the rigors of the original form — a term that itself reminds us of something ordered, coherent, and specific — can the detritus of time and human folly be washed away and vitality return.

But just as one might step in at this point and argue that Chesterton’s definition is really nothing more than a slavish imitation of the past, notice how the paradox executes its boomerang turn. By returning to the original form from the standpoint of the crisis of the present, the resulting reform might well take on a radically different path when compared with the immediate past. In other words, the return to form may yield results that are startling but that remain true both to the distant past and to the conditions of the present. (Chesterton loved his self-proclaimed role as a “conservative radical”.) As the brilliant theologian Cardinal Henri de Lubac puts it in his Paradoxes of Faith: “To get away from old things passing themselves off as tradition it is necessary to go back to the farthest past — which will reveal itself to be the nearest present.”
Gregory Wolfe, Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Catholic Writer in the Modern World

Beyond the paradoxes of intellectual history and institutional reform, of course, lies the fundamental paradox of the divine nature itself, which Saint Augustine in Confessions X.27described as the beauty that is “ever ancient, ever new”. It is also the paradox of the Gospels, which remain united with the Old Testament even while ushering in the New:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
Revelation 21:1-8

The thinkers we might group under the heading of the Catholic Intellectual Renaissance embodied that paradox in their writing. It is what makes them at the same time profoundly traditional and strikingly modern. Few of these figures could be called tame or timid; ever the servants of the Church, they nonetheless were bold, occasionally shocking, figures, who were suspected by some of their less imaginative contemporaries of being imprudent or even heretical.

At times, the accusations of the super-orthodox led to excruciatingly bizarre situations, as when Evelyn Waugh, that staunchest of papal Catholics, was accused by a prominent priest-editor of writing a novel that would corrupt the morals of the faithful. Waugh’s long letter of justification to the archbishop of Westminster, with its patient explanation of his harshly ironic satire against modern secularism, makes for grimly comic reading. But these attacks from the extreme Right balance those of the Left and offer further proof of the wisdom and vision of these great minds.

More on this Catholic Intellectual Renaissance in a later post.

Posted in Christopher Dawson, Church History | Tagged Catholic Intellectual Renaissance | Leave a Comment »

The Sacred Scriptures Of The Jewish People And The Christian Bible

August 9, 2010

Some reading selections from Pontifical Biblical Commission’s work by the same name. This grew out of my post on the Easter Faith and its Meaning In History. Someone recommended this paper and I found it to be a really good read. As is my habit I have broken it into topics, deleted what didn’t seem pertinent to my interest and highlighted the good stuff.

From the Preface by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger:

The Great Promise Of The Manicheans
The internal unity of the Church’s Bible, which comprises the Old and New Testaments, was a central theme in the theology of the Church Fathers. That it was far from being a theoretical problem only is evident from dipping, so to speak, into the spiritual journey of one of the greatest teachers of Christendom, Saint Augustine of Hippo. In 373, the 19 year old Augustine already had his first decisive experience of conversion. His reading of one of the works of Cicero — Hortensius, since lost — brought about a profound transformation which he himself described later on as follows: “Towards you, O Lord, it directed my prayers… I began to pick myself up to return to you… How ardent I was, O my God, to let go of the earthly and take wing back to you” (Conf. III, 4, 81).

For the young African who, as a child, had received the salt that made him a catechumen, it was clear that conversion to God entailed attachment to Christ; apart from Christ, he could not truly find God. So he went from Cicero to the Bible and experienced a terrible disappointment: in the exacting legal prescriptions of the Old Testament, in its complex and, at times, brutal narratives, he failed to find that Wisdom towards which he wanted to travel. In the course of his search, he encountered certain people who proclaimed a new spiritual Christianity, one which understood the Old Testament as spiritually deficient and repugnant; a Christianity in which Christ had no need of the witness of the Hebrew prophets. Those people promised him a Christianity of pure and simple reason, a Christianity in which Christ was the great illuminator, leading human beings to true self-knowledge. These were the Manicheans. The great promise of the Manicheans proved illusory, but the problem remained unresolved for all that.

An Interpretation Of The Old Testament: The Exegetical Method Of Ambrose
Augustine was unable to convert to the Christianity of the Catholic Church until he had learned, through Ambrose, an interpretation of the Old Testament that made transparent the relationship of Israel’s Bible to Christ and thus revealed that Wisdom for which he searched. What was overcome was not only the exterior obstacle of an unsatisfactory literary form of the Old Latin Bible, but above all the interior obstacle of a book that was no longer just a document of the religious history of a particular people, with all its strayings and mistakes. It revealed instead a Wisdom addressed to all and came from God. Through the transparency of Israel’s long, slow historical journey, that reading of Israel’s Bible identified Christ, the Word, eternal Wisdom. It was, therefore, of fundamental importance not only for Augustine’s decision of faith; it was and is the basis for the faith decision of the Church as a whole.

Harnack’s Thesis
But is all this true? Is it also demonstrable and tenable still today? From the viewpoint of historical-critical exegesis, it seems — at first glance, in any case — that exactly the opposite is true. It was in 1920 that the well-known liberal theologian Adolf Harnack formulated the following thesis: “The rejection of the Old Testament in the second century [an allusion to Marcion] was an error which the great Church was right in resisting; holding on to it in the 16th century was a disaster from which the Reformation has not yet been able to extricate itself; but to maintain it since the 19th century in Protestantism as a canonical document equal in value to the New Testament, that is the result of religious and ecclesial paralysis”.

Is Harnack right? At first glance several things seem to point in that direction. The exegetical method of Ambrose did indeed open the way to the Church for Augustine, and in its basic orientation — allowing, of course, for a considerable measure of variance in the details — became the foundation of Augustine’s faith in the biblical word of God, consisting of two parts, and nevertheless composing a unity.

Origen’s Exegesis
But it is still possible to make the following objection: Ambrose had learned this exegesis from the school of Origen, who had been the first to develop its methodology.

But Origen, it may be said, only applied to the Bible the allegorical method of interpretation which was practiced in the Greek world, to explain the religious texts of antiquity — in particular, Homer — and not only produced a Hellenization intrinsically foreign to the biblical word, but used a method that was unreliable, because, in the last analysis, it tried to preserve as something sacred what was, in fact, only a witness to a moribund culture. Yet, it is not that simple.

Much more than the Greek exegesis of Homer, Origen could build on the Old Testament interpretation which was born in a Jewish milieu, especially in Alexandria, beginning with Philo who sought in a totally appropriate way to introduce the Bible to Greeks who were long in search of the one biblical God beyond polytheism. And Origen had studied at the feet of the rabbis. He eventually developed specifically Christian principles: the internal unity of the Bible as a rule of interpretation, Christ as the meeting point of all the Old Testament pathways.

Christ as the key to the “Scriptures”
In whatever way one judges the detailed exegesis of Origen and Ambrose, its deepest basis was neither Hellenistic allegory, nor Philo nor rabbinic methods. Strictly speaking, — leaving aside the details of interpretation – its basis was the New Testament itself. Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be the true heir to the Old Testament — “the Scriptures” — and to offer a true interpretation, which, admittedly, was not that of the schools, but came from the authority of the Author himself: “He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22). The Emmaus narrative also expresses this claim: “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27). The New Testament authors sought to ground this claim into details, in particular Matthew, but Paul as well, by using rabbinic methods of interpretation to show that the scribal interpretation led to Christ as the key to the “Scriptures”. For the authors and founders of the New Testament, the Old Testament was simply “the Scriptures”: it was only later that the developing Church gradually formed a New Testament canon which was also Sacred Scripture, but in the sense that it still presupposed Israel’s Bible to be such, the Bible read by the apostles and their disciples, and now called the Old Testament, which provided the interpretative key.

From this viewpoint, the Fathers of the Church created nothing new when they gave a Christological interpretation to the Old Testament; they only developed and systematized what they themselves had already discovered in the New Testament. This fundamental synthesis for the Christian faith would become problematic when historical consciousness developed rules of interpretation that made Patristic exegesis appear non-historical and so objectively indefensible.

Luther’s New Formula; Harnack’s Impasse
In the context of humanism, with its new-found historical awareness, but especially in the context of his doctrine of justification, Luther invented a new formula relating the two parts of the Christian Bible, one no longer based on the internal harmony of the Old and New Testaments, but on their essential dialectic linkage within an existential history of salvation, the antithesis between Law and Gospel. Bultmann modernized this approach when he said that the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ by foundering. More radical is the proposition of Harnack mentioned above; as far as I can see, it was not generally accepted, but it was completely logical for an exegesis for which texts from the past could have no meaning other than that intended by the authors in their historical context. That the biblical authors in the centuries before Christ, writing in the Old Testament, intended to refer in advance to Christ and New Testament faith, looks to the modern historical consciousness as highly unlikely.

As a result, the triumph of historical-critical exegesis seemed to sound the death-knell for the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament initiated by the New Testament itself. It is not a question here of historical details, as we have seen, it is the very foundations of Christianity that are being questioned. It is understandable then that nobody has since embraced Harnack’s position and made the definitive break with the Old Testament that Marcion prematurely wished to accomplish. What would have remained, our New Testament, would itself be devoid of meaning.

The Pontifical Biblical Commission
The Document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission introduced by this Preface declares: “Without the Old Testament, the New Testament would be an unintelligible book, a plant deprived of its roots and destined to dry up and wither” (no. 84). From this perspective, one can appreciate the enormous task the Pontifical Biblical Commission set for itself in deciding to tackle the theme of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. If the impasse presented by Harnack is to be overcome, the very concept of an interpretation of historical texts must be broadened and deepened enough to be tenable in today’s liberal climate, and capable of application, especially to Biblical texts received in faith as the Word of God. Important contributions have been made in this direction over recent decades.

The Pontifical Biblical Commission made its own contribution in the Document published in 1993 on “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church”. The recognition of the multidimensional nature of human language, not staying fixed to a particular moment in history, but having a hold on the future, is an aid that permits a greater understanding of how the Word of God can avail of the human word to confer on a history in progress a meaning that surpasses the present moment and yet brings out, precisely in this way, the unity of the whole. Beginning from that Document, and mindful of methodology, the Biblical Commission examined the relationship between the many great thematic threads of both Testaments, and was able to conclude that the Christian hermeneutic of the Old Testament, admittedly very different from that of Judaism, “corresponds nevertheless to a potentiality of meaning effectively present in the texts” (no. 64). This is a conclusion, which seems to me to be of great importance for the pursuit of dialogue, but above all, for grounding the Christian faith.

In its work, the Biblical Commission could not ignore the contemporary context, where the shock of the Shoah has put the whole question under a new light. Two main problems are posed:

Can Christians, after all that has happened, still claim in good conscience to be the legitimate heirs of Israel’s Bible? Have they the right to propose a Christian interpretation of this Bible, or should they not instead, respectfully and humbly, renounce any claim that, in the light of what has happened, must look like a usurpation?
The second question follows from the first: In its presentation of the Jews and the Jewish people, has not the New Testament itself contributed to creating a hostility towards the Jewish people that provided a support for the ideology of those who wished to destroy Israel? The Commission set about addressing those two questions.

It is clear that a Christian rejection of the Old Testament would not only put an end to Christianity itself as indicated above, but, in addition, would prevent the fostering of positive relations between Christians and Jews, precisely because they would lack common ground. In the light of what has happened, what ought to emerge now is a new respect for the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament. On this subject, the Document says two things. First it declares that “the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Scriptures of the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian reading, which developed in parallel fashion” (no. 22). It adds that Christians can learn a great deal from a Jewish exegesis practiced for more than 2000 years; in return, Christians may hope that Jews can profit from Christian exegetical research (ibid.). I think this analysis will prove useful for the pursuit of Judeo-Christian dialogue, as well as for the interior formation of Christian consciousness.

Reproofs Addressed To Jews In The New Testament
The question of how Jews are presented in the New Testament is dealt with in the second part of the Document; the “anti-Jewish” texts there are methodically analyzed for an understanding of them. Here, I want only to underline an aspect which seems to me to be particularly important. The Document shows that the reproofs addressed to Jews in the New Testament are neither more frequent nor more virulent than the accusations against Israel in the Law and the Prophets, at the heart of the Old Testament itself (no. 87). They belong to the prophetic language of the Old Testament and are, therefore, to be interpreted in the same way as the prophetic messages: they warn against contemporary aberrations, but they are essentially of a temporary nature and always open to new possibilities of salvation.

From The Introduction
What relations does the Christian Bible establish between Christians and the Jewish people? The general answer is clear: between Christians and Jews, the Christian Bible establishes many close relations. Firstly, because the Christian Bible is composed, for the greater part, of the “Holy Scriptures” (Romans 1:2) of the Jewish people, which Christians call the “Old Testament”; secondly, because the Christian Bible is also comprised of a collection of writings which, while expressing faith in Christ Jesus, puts them in close relationship with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures. This second collection, as we know, is called the “New Testament”, an expression correlative to “Old Testament”.

That an intimate relationship exists between them is undeniable. A closer examination, however, reveals that this is not a straightforward relationship, but a very complex one that ranges from perfect accord on some points to one of great tension on others..

Jewish Roots
It is above all by virtue of its historical origin that the Christian community discovers its links with the Jewish people. Indeed, the person in whom it puts its faith, Jesus of Nazareth, is himself a son of this people. So too are the Twelve whom he chose “to be with him and to be sent out to proclaim the message” (Mark 3:14). In the beginning, the apostolic preaching was addressed only to the Jews and proselytes, pagans associated with the Jewish community (cf. Acts 2:11). Christianity, then, came to birth in the bosom of first century Judaism.

Although it gradually detached itself from Judaism, the Church could never forget its Jewish roots, something clearly attested in the New Testament; it even recognized a certain priority for Jews, for the Gospel is the “power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

Old Testament and New Testament
A perennial manifestation of this link to their beginnings is the acceptance by Christians of the Sacred Scriptures of the Jewish people as the Word of God addressed to themselves as well. Indeed, the Church has accepted as inspired by God all the writings contained in the Hebrew Bible as well as those in the Greek Bible. The title “Old Testament” given to this collection of writings is an expression coined by the apostle Paul to designate the writings attributed to Moses (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:14-15). Its scope has been extended, since the end of the second century, to include other Jewish writings in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The title “New Testament” takes its origin from a message in the Book of Jeremiah which announced a “new covenant” (Jr 31:31), the expression is translated in the Greek of the Septuagint as “new dispensation”, “new testament” (kain diathk). The message announced that God intended to establish a new covenant. The Christian faith sees this promise fulfilled in the mystery of Christ Jesus with the institution of the Eucharist (cf. 1 Co 11:25; Heb 9:15). Consequently, that collection of writings which expresses the Church’s faith in all its novelty is called the “New Testament”. The title itself points towards a relationship with the “Old Testament”.

The New Testament recognizes the authority of the Sacred Scriptures
The New Testament writings were never presented as something entirely new. On the contrary, they attest their rootedness in the long religious experience of the people of Israel, an experience recorded in diverse forms in the sacred books which comprise the Jewish Scriptures. The New Testament recognizes their divine authority. This recognition manifests itself in different ways, with different degrees of explicitness.

Implicit Recognition Of Authority
Beginning from the less explicit, which nevertheless is revealing, we notice that the same language is used. The Greek of the New Testament is closely dependent on the Greek of the Septuagint, in grammatical turns of phrase which were influenced by the Hebrew, or in the vocabulary, of a religious nature in particular. Without a knowledge of Septuagint Greek, it is impossible to ascertain the exact meaning of many important New Testament terms.
This linguistic relationship extends to numerous expressions borrowed by the New Testament from the Jewish Scriptures, giving rise to frequent reminiscences and implicit quotations, that is, entire phrases found in the New Testament without any indication of origin. These reminiscences are numerous, but their identification often gives rise to discussion. To take an obvious example: although the Book of Revelation contains no explicit quotations from the Jewish Bible, it is a whole tissue of reminiscences and allusions. The text is so steeped in the Old Testament that it is difficult to distinguish what is an allusion to it and what is not.
Explicit Recourse To The Authority Of The Jewish Scriptures
This recognition of authority takes different forms depending on the case. Frequently, in a revelatory context the simple verb legei, “it says”, is found, without any expressed subject, as in later rabbinic writings, but the context shows that a subject conferring great authority on the text is to be understood: Scripture, the Lord or Christ. At other times the subject is expressed: it is “Scripture”, “the Law”, or “Moses” or “David”, with the added note that he was inspired, “the Holy Spirit” or “the prophet”, frequently “Isaiah”, sometimes “Jeremiah”, but it is also “the Holy Spirit” or “the Lord” as the prophets used to say. Twice, Matthew has a complex formula indicating both the divine speaker and the human spokesperson: “what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet…” (Matthew 1:22; 2:15). At other times the mention of the Lord remains implicit, suggested only by the preposition dia “through”, referring to the human spokesperson. In these texts of Matthew, the verb “to say” in the present tense results in presenting the quotations from the Jewish Bible as living words possessing perennial authority.
In his doctrinal arguments, the apostle Paul constantly relies on his people’s Scriptures. He makes a clear distinction between scriptural argumentation and “human” reasoning. To the arguments from Scripture he attributes an incontestable value. For him the Jewish Scriptures have an equally enduring value for guiding the spiritual lives of Christians: “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope”.
The New Testament recognizes the definitive value of arguments based on the Jewish Scriptures. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus declares that “Scripture cannot be annulled” (John 10:35). Its value derives from the fact that it is the “word of God” (ibid.). This conviction is frequently evident. Two texts are particularly significant for this subject, since they speak of divine inspiration. In the Second Letter to Timothy, after mentioning the “Sacred Scriptures” (2 Timothy 3:15), we find this affirmation: “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Specifically referring to the prophetic oracles contained in the Old Testament, the Second Letter of Peter declares: “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pt 1:20-21). These two texts not only affirms the authority of the Jewish Scriptures; they reveal the basis for this authority as divine inspiration.

The New Testament attests conformity to the Jewish Scriptures
A twofold conviction is apparent in other texts: on the one hand, what is written in the Jewish Scriptures must of necessity be fulfilled because it reveals the plan of God which cannot fail to be accomplished; on the other hand, the life, death and resurrection of Christ are fully in accord with the Scriptures.

Necessity of fulfilling the Scriptures
The clearest expression of this is found in the words addressed by the risen Christ to his disciples, in the Gospel of Luke: “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you — that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms must (dei) be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). This assertion shows the basis of the necessity (dei, “must”) for the paschal mystery of Jesus, affirmed in numerous passages in the Gospels: “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering…and after three days rise again”; “But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled which say it must happen this way?” (Matthew 26:54); “This Scripture must be fulfilled in me” (Luke 22:37).
Because what is written in the Old Testament “must” be fulfilled, the events take place “so that” it is fulfilled. This is what Matthew often expresses in the infancy narrative, later on in Jesus’ public life and for the whole passion (Matthew 26:56). Mark has a parallel to the last mentioned passage in a powerfully elliptic phrase: “But let the Scriptures be fulfilled” (Mark 14:49). Luke does not use this expression but John has recourse to it almost as often as Matthew does. The Gospels’ insistence on the purpose of these events “so that the Scriptures be fulfilled” attributes the utmost importance to the Jewish Scriptures. It is clearly understood that these events would be meaningless if they did not correspond to what the Scriptures say. It would not be a question there of the realization of God’s plan.
Conformity to the Scriptures
Other texts affirm that the whole mystery of Christ is in conformity with the Jewish Scriptures. The early Christian preaching is summarized in the kerygmatic formula recounted by Paul: “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared…” (1 Corinthians 15:3-5). He adds: “Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach and this is what you believed” (1 Corinthians 15:11). The Christian faith, then, is not based solely on events, but on the conformity of these events to the revelation contained in the Jewish Scriptures. On his journey towards the passion, Jesus says: “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him” (Matthew 26:24; Mark 14:21). After his resurrection, Jesus himself “interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures”.19 In his discourse to the Jews of Antioch in Pisidia, Paul recalls these events by saying that “the residents of Jerusalem and their leaders did not recognize him [Jesus] or understand the words of the prophets that are read every sabbath, they fulfilled these words by condemning him” (Acts 13:27). The New Testament shows by these declarations that it is indissolubly linked to the Jewish Scriptures.
Some disputed points that need to be kept in mind may be mentioned here. In the Gospel of Matthew, a saying of Jesus claims perfect continuity between the faith of Christians and the Tôrah: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). This theological affirmation is characteristic of Matthew and his community. It is in tension with other sayings of the Lord which relativizes the Sabbath observance (Matthew 12:8,12) and ritual purity (Matthew 15:11).
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus appropriates a saying of Isaiah (Luke 4:17-21; Is 61:1-2) to define his mission as he begins his ministry. The ending of the Gospel expands this perspective when it speaks of fulfilling “all that is written” about Jesus (Luke 24:44).
On that point, it is essential, according to Jesus, to “hear Moses and the prophets”, the ending of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:29-31) drives home the point: without a docile listening, even the greatest prodigies are of no avail.
The Fourth Gospel expresses a similar perspective: Jesus attributes to the writings of Moses an authority comparable to his own words, when he says to opponents: “If you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?” (John 5:47). In a Gospel where Jesus affirms that his words “are spirit and life” (John 6:63), such an assertion gives primary importance to the Torah.
In the Acts of the Apostles, the kerygmatic discourses of the Church leaders — Peter, Paul and Barnabas, James — place the events of the Passion, Resurrection, Pentecost and the missionary outreach of the Church in perfect continuity with the Jewish Scriptures.
Conformity and Difference
Although it never explicitly affirms the authority of the Jewish Scriptures, the Letter to the Hebrews clearly shows that it recognizes this authority by repeatedly quoting texts to ground its teaching and exhortations. It contains numerous affirmations of conformity to prophetic revelation, but also affirmations of conformity that include aspects of non-conformity as well. This was already the case in the Pauline Letters. In the Letters to Galatians and Romans, the apostle argues from the Law to prove that faith in Christ has put an end to the Law’s regime. He shows that the Law as revelation predicted its own end as an institution necessary for salvation. The most important text on this subject is Romans 3:21 where the apostle affirms that the manifestation of the justice of God in the justification offered by faith in Christ is brought about “apart from the Law”, but is nevertheless “attested by the Law and the Prophets”. In a similar way, the Letter to the Hebrews shows that the mystery of Christ fulfils the prophecies and what was prefigured in the Jewish Scriptures, but, at the same time, affirms non-conformity to the ancient institutions: the glorified Christ is at one and the same time in conformity with the words of Psalms 109 (110):1,4, and in non-conformity with the levitical priesthood (cf. Hebrews 7:11,28).
The basic affirmation remains the same. The writings of the New Testament acknowledge that the Jewish Scriptures have a permanent value as divine revelation. They have a positive outlook towards them and regard them as the foundation on which they themselves rest. Consequently, the Church has always held that the Jewish Scriptures form an integral part of the Christian Bible.

Scripture and Oral Tradition in Judaism and Christianity
In many religions there exists a tension between Scripture and Tradition. This is true of Oriental Religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) and Islam. The written texts can never express the Tradition in an exhaustive manner. They have to be completed by additions and interpretations which are eventually written down but are subject to certain limitations. This phenomenon can be seen in Christianity as well as in Judaism, with developments that are partly similar and partly different. A common trait is that both share a significant part of the same canon of Scripture.

Scripture and Tradition in the Old Testament and Judaism
Tradition gives birth to Scripture. The origin of Old Testament texts and the history of the formation of the canon have been the subject of important works in the last few years. A certain consensus has been reached according to which by the end of the first century of our era, the long process of the formation of the Hebrew Bible was practically completed. This canon comprised the Torah, the Prophets and the greater part of the “Writings”. To determine the origin of the individual books is often a difficult task. In many cases, one must settle for hypotheses. These are, for the most part, based on results furnished by Form, Tradition and Redaction Criticism. It can be deduced from them that ancient precepts were assembled in collections which were gradually inserted in the books of the Pentateuch. The older narratives were likewise committed to writing and arranged together. Collections of narrative texts and rules of conduct were combined. Prophetic messages were collected and compiled in books bearing the prophets’ names. The sapiential texts, Psalms and didactic narratives were likewise collected much later.
Over time Tradition produced a “second Scripture” (Mishna). No written text can adequately express all the riches of a tradition. The biblical sacred texts left open many questions concerning the proper understanding of Israelite faith and conduct. That gave rise, in Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism, to a long process of written texts, from the “Mishna” (“Second Text”), edited at the beginning of the third century by Jehuda ha-Nasi, to the “Tosepta” (“Supplement”) and Talmud in its twofold forms (Babylonian and Jerusalem). Notwithstanding its authority, this interpretation by itself was not deemed adequate in later times, with the result that later rabbinic explanations were added. These additions were never granted the same authority as the Talmud, they served only as an aid to interpretation. Unresolved questions were submitted to the decisions of the Grand Rabbinate.In this manner, written texts gave rise to further developments. Between written texts and oral tradition a certain sustained tension is evident.
The Limits of Tradition
When it was put into writing to be joined to Scripture, a normative Tradition, for all that, never enjoyed the same authority as Scripture. It did not become part of the “Writings which soil the hands”, that is, “which are sacred” and was not accepted as such in the liturgy. The Mishna, the Tosepta and the Talmud have their place in the synagogue as texts to be studied, but they are not read in the liturgy. Generally, a tradition is evaluated by its conformity to the Torah. The reading of the Torah occupies a privileged place in the liturgy of the Synagogue. To it are added pericopes chosen from the Prophets. According to ancient Jewish belief, the Torah was conceived before the creation of the world. The Samaritans accept only the Torah as Sacred Scripture, while the Sadduccees reject every normative Tradition outside the Law and the Prophets. Conversely, Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism accept, alongside the written Law, an oral Law given simultaneously to Moses and enjoying the same authority. A tract in the Mishna states: “At Sinai, Moses received the oral Law and handed it on to Joshua, and Joshua to the ancestors, and the ancestors to the prophets, and the prophets handed it on to members of the Great Synagogue” (Aboth 1:1). Clearly, a striking diversity is apparent from the manner of conceiving the role of Tradition.

Scripture and Tradition in Early Christianity

1. Tradition gives birth to Scripture
In early Christianity, an evolution similar to that of Judaism can be observed with, however, an initial difference: early Christians had the Scriptures from the very beginning, since as Jews, they accepted Israel’s Bible as Scripture. But for them an oral tradition was added on, “the teaching of the Apostles” (Acts 2:42), which handed on the words of Jesus and the narrative of events concerning him. The Gospel catechesis took shape only gradually. To better ensure their faithful transmission, the words of Jesus and the narratives were put in writing. Thus, the way was prepared for the redaction of the Gospels which took place some decades after the death and resurrection of Jesus. In addition, professions of faith were also composed, together with the liturgical hymns which are found in the New Testament Letters. The Letters of Paul and the other apostles or leaders were first read in the church for which they were written (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:27), were passed on to other churches (cf. Colossians 4:16), preserved to be read on other occasions and eventually accepted as Scripture (cf. 2 Peter 3:15-16) and attached to the Gospels. In this way, the canon of the New Testament was gradually formed within the apostolic Tradition.
2. Tradition completes Scripture.
Christianity has in common with Judaism the conviction that God’s revelation cannot be expressed in its entirety in written texts. This is clear from the ending of the Fourth Gospel where it is stated that the whole world would be unable to contain the books that could be written recounting the actions of Jesus (John 21:25). On the other hand, a vibrant tradition is indispensable to make Scripture come alive and maintain its relevance.
It is worth recalling here the teaching of the Farewell Discourse on the role of “the Spirit of truth” after Jesus’ departure. He will remind the disciples of all that Jesus said (John 14:26), bear witness on Jesus’ behalf (15:26), and lead the disciples “into all the truth” (16:13), giving them a deeper understanding of the person of Christ, his message and work. As a result of the Spirit’s action, the tradition remains alive and dynamic.
Having affirmed that the apostolic preaching is found “expressed in a special way” (“speciali modo exprimitur”) in the inspired Books, the Second Vatican Council observes that it is Tradition “that renders a more profound understanding in the Church of Sacred Scripture and makes it always effective” (Dei Verbum). Scripture is defined as the “Word of God committed to writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit”; but it is Tradition that “transmits to the successors of the apostles the Word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and by the Holy Spirit to the apostles, so that, illumined by the Spirit of truth, they will protect it faithfully, explain it and make it known by their preaching” (Dei Verbum 9). The Council concludes: “Consequently, it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws its certainty about everything which has been revealed” and adds: “That is why both — Scripture and Tradition — must be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence” (Dei Verbum 9).
The Limits Of The Additional Contribution Of Tradition
To what extent can there be in the Christian Church a tradition that is a material addition to the word of Scripture? This question has long been debated in the history of theology. The Second Vatican Council appears to have left the matter open, but at least declined to speak of “two sources of revelation”, which would be Scripture and Tradition; it affirmed instead that “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture constitute a unique sacred deposit of the Word of God which is entrusted to the Church” (Dei Verbum 10). It likewise rejected the idea of a tradition completely independent of Scripture. On one point at least, the Council mentions an additional contribution made by Tradition, one of great importance: Tradition “enabled the Church to recognize the full canon of the Sacred Books” (DV 8). Here, the extent to which Scripture and Tradition are inseparable can be seen.
Relationship Between The Two Perspectives
As we have shown, there is a corresponding relationship between Scripture and Tradition in Judaism and Christianity. On one point, there is a greater correspondence, since both religions share a common heritage in the “Sacred Scripture of Israel”.
From a hermeneutical viewpoint, however, perspectives differ. For all the currents within Judaism during the period corresponding to the formation of the canon, the Law was at the centre. Indeed, in it were to be found the essential institutions revealed by God himself governing the religious, moral, juridical and political life of the Jewish nation after the Exile. The prophetic corpus contains divinely inspired words, transmitted by the prophets and accepted as authentic, but it contained no laws capable of providing an institutional base. From this point of view, the prophetic writings are of second rank. The “Writings” contain neither laws nor prophetic words and consequently occupy third place.
This hermeneutical perspective was not taken over by the Christian communities, with the exception, perhaps, of those in Judeo-Christian milieus linked to Pharisaic Judaism by their veneration of the Law. In the New Testament, the general tendency is to give more importance to the prophetic texts, understood as foretelling the mystery of Christ. The apostle Paul and the Letter to the Hebrews do not hesitate to enter into polemics against the Law. Besides, early Christianity shared apocalyptic currents with the Zealots and with the Essenes apocalyptic messianic expectation; from Hellenistic Judaism it adopted a more extended, sapientially oriented body of Scripture capable of fostering intercultural relations.
What distinguishes early Christianity from all these other currents is the conviction that the eschatological prophetic promises are no longer considered simply as an object of future hope, since their fulfillment had already begun in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. It is about him that the Jewish Scriptures speak, in their whole extension, and it is in light of him that they are to be fully comprehended.

Jewish Exegetical Methods employed in the New Testament

1. Jewish Methods of Exegesis
Judaism derived from the Scriptures its understanding of God and of the world, as well as of God’s plans. The clearest expression of how Jesus’ contemporaries interpreted the Scriptures are given in the Dead Sea Scrolls, manuscripts copied between the second century B.C. and 60 A.D., and so are therefore close to Jesus’ ministry and the formation of the Gospels. However, these documents express only one aspect of the Jewish tradition; they come from within a particular current and do not represent the whole tradition.
The earliest rabbinic attestation of exegetical method based on Old Testament texts, is a series of seven “rules” traditionally attributed to Rabbi Hillel (d. 10 A.D.). Irrespective of whether this attribution is well founded or not, these seven middoth certainly represent a codification of contemporary methods of argument from Scripture, in particular for deducing rules of conduct.
Another method of using Scripture can be seen in first century historical writings, particularly Josephus, but it had already been employed in the Old Testament itself. It consists of using biblical terms to describe events in order to illuminate their meaning. Thus, the return from the Babylonian Exile is described in terms that evoke the liberation from Egyptian oppression at the time of the Exodus (Is 43:16-21). The final restoration of Zion is represented as a new Eden.24 At Qumran, a similar technique was widely used.

2. Exegesis at Qumran and in the New Testament
With regard to forms and method, the New Testament, especially the Gospels, presents striking resemblances to Qumran in its use of Scripture. The formulae for introducing quotations are often the same, for example: “thus it is written”, “as it is written”, “in conformity with what was said”. The similarity in scriptural usage derives from an outlook common to both the Qumran community and that of the New Testament. Both were eschatological communities that saw biblical prophecies being fulfilled in their own time, in a manner surpassing the expectation and understanding of the Prophets who had originally spoken them. Both were convinced that the full understanding of the prophecies had been revealed to their founder and transmitted by him, “the Teacher of Righteousness” at Qumran, Jesus for Christians.
Exactly as in the Dead Sea Scrolls, certain biblical texts are used in the New Testament in their literal and historical sense, while others are applied in a more or less forced manner, to the contemporary situation. Scripture was understood as containing the very words of God. Some interpretations, in both texts, take a word and separate it from its context and original meaning to give it a significance that does not correspond to the principles of modern exegesis. An important difference, however, should be noted. In the Qumran texts, the point of departure is Scripture. Certain texts — for example the pesher of Habakkuk — are an extended commentary on a biblical text, which is then applied, verse by verse, to a contemporary situation; others are collections of texts dealing with the same theme, for example, Q Melchisedeq on the messianic era. In the New Testament, in contrast, the point of departure is the Christ event. It does not apply Scripture to the present, but explains and comments on the Christ event in the light of Scripture. The only points in common are the techniques employed, often with a striking similarity, as in Romans 10:5-13 and in the Letter to the Hebrews.

3. Rabbinic Methods in the New Testament
Traditional Jewish methods of scriptural argumentation for the purpose of establishing rules of conduct — methods later codified by the rabbis — are frequently used in the words of Jesus transmitted in the Gospels and in the Epistles. Those occurring most often are the first two middoth (“rules”) of Hillel, qal wa-homer and gezerah shawah. These correspond more or less to arguments a fortiori and by analogy respectively.

A particular trait is that the argument often revolves around the meaning of a single word. This meaning is established by its occurence in a certain context and is then applied, often in a very artificial manner, to another context. This technique has a strong resemblance to rabbinic midrash, with one characteristic difference: in the rabbinic midrash, there is a citation of differing opinions from various authorities in such a way that it becomes a technique of argumentation, while in the New Testament the authority of Jesus is decisive.

Paul in particular frequently uses these techniques especially in discussions with well-informed Jewish adversaries, whether Christian or not. Oftentimes he uses them to counter traditional positions in Judaism or to support important points in his own teaching.27

Rabbinic argumentation is also found in the Letters to the Ephesians and Hebrews.28 The Epistle of Jude, for its part, is almost entirely made up of exegetical explications resembling the pesharim (“interpretations”) found in the Qumran Scrolls and in some apocalyptic writings. It uses figures and examples in a verbal chain structure in conformity with Jewish scriptural exegesis.

A particular form of Jewish exegesis found in the New Testament is the homily delivered in the synagogue. According to John 6:59, the Bread of Life discourse was delivered by Jesus in the synagogue at Capernaum. Its form closely corresponds to synagogal homilies of the first century: an explanation of a Pentateuchal text supported by a prophetic text; each part of the text is explained; slight adjustments to the form of words are made to give a new interpretation. Traces of this model can perhaps also be found in the missionary discourses in the Acts of the Apostles, especially in Paul’s homily in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:17-41).

4. Important Allusions to the Old Testament

The New Testament frequently uses allusions to biblical events as a means of bringing out the meaning of the events of Jesus’ life. The narratives of Jesus’ infancy in the Gospel of Matthew do not disclose their full meaning unless read against the background of biblical and post-biblical narratives concerning Moses. The infancy gospel of Luke is more in the style of biblical allusions found in the first century Psalms of Solomon or in the Qumran Hymns; the Canticles of Mary, Zechariah and Simeon can be compared to Qumran hymns.29 Events in the life of Jesus, like the theophany on the occasion of his baptism, the transfiguration, the multiplication of the loaves and the walking on the water, are similarly narrated with deliberate allusions to Old Testaments events and narratives. The reaction of listeners to Jesus’ parables (for example, the parable of the murderous tenants, Mt 21:33-43 and par.) shows that they were accustomed to using biblical imagery as a technique to express a message or give a lesson.

Among the Gospels, Matthew shows greatest familiarity with the Jewish techniques in utilizing Scripture. After the manner of the Qumran pesharim, he often quotes Scripture; he makes wide use of juridical and symbolic argumentation similar to those which were common in later rabbinic writings. More than the other Gospels, he uses midrashic stories in his narratives (the infancy gospel, the episode of Judas’ death, the intervention of Pilate’s wife). The rabbinic style of argumentation frequently used, especially in the Pauline Letters and in the Letter to the Hebrews, undoubtedly attests that the New Testament emerged from the matrix of Judaism and that it is infused with the mentality of Jewish biblical commentators.

The Extension of the Canon of Scripture
The title “canon” (Greek kan(o-)n, “rule”) means the list of books which are accepted as inspired by God and having a regulatory function for faith and morals. We are only concerned here with the formation of the canon of the Old Testament.

1. In Judaism
There are differences between the Jewish canon of Scripture29 and the Christian canon of the Old Testament. To explain these differences, it was generally thought that at the beginning of the Christian era, there existed two canons within Judaism: a Hebrew or Palestinian canon, and an extended Alexandrian canon in Greek — called the Septuagint — which was adopted by Christians.

Recent research and discoveries, however, have cast doubt on this opinion. It now seems more probable that at the time of Christianity’s birth, closed collections of the Law and the Prophets existed in a textual foRomans substantially identical with the Old Testament. The collection of “Writings”, on the other hand, was not as well defined either in Palestine or in the Jewish diaspora, with regard to the number of books and their textual form. Towards the end of the first century A.D., it seems that 24/22 books were generally accepted by Jews as sacred,32 but it is only much later that the list became exclusive.33 When the limits of the Hebrew canon were fixed, the deuterocanonical books were not included.

Many of the books belonging to the third group of religious texts, not yet fixed, were regularly read in Jewish communities during the first century A.D. They were translated into Greek and circulated among Hellenistic Jews, both in Palestine and in the diaspora.

2. In the Early Church

17. Since the first Christians were for the most part Palestinian Jews, either “Hebrew” or “Hellenistic” (cf. Acts 6:1), their views on Scripture would have reflected those of their environment, but we are poorly informed on the subject. Nevertheless, the writings of the New Testament suggest that a sacred literature wider than the Hebrew canon circulated in Christian communities. Generally, the authors of the New Testament manifest a knowledge of the deuterocanonical books and other non-canonical ones since the number of books cited in the New Testament exceeds not only the Hebrew canon, but also the so-called Alexandrian canon. When Christianity spread into the Greek world, it continued to use sacred books received from Hellenistic Judaism. Although Hellenistic Christians received their Scriptures from the Jews in the form of the Septuagint, we do not know the precise form, because the Septuagint has come down to us only in Christian writings. What the Church seems to have received was a body of Sacred Scripture which, within Judaism, was in the process of becoming canonical. When Judaism came to close its own canon, the Christian Church was sufficiently independent from Judaism not to be immediately affected. It was only at a later period that a closed Hebrew canon began to exert influence on how Christians viewed it.

3. Formation of the Christian Canon

The Old Testament of the early Church took different shapes in different regions as the diverse lists from Patristic times show. The majority of Christian writings from the second century, as well as manuscripts of the Bible from the fourth century onwards, made use of or contain a great number of Jewish sacred books, including those which were not admitted into the Hebrew canon. It was only after the Jews had defined their canon that the Church thought of closing its own Old Testament canon. But we are lacking information on the procedure adopted and the reasons given for the inclusion of this or that book in the canon. It is possible, nevertheless, to trace in a general way the evolution of the canon in the Church, both in the East and in the West.

In the East from Origen’s time (c. 185-253) there was an attempt to conform Christian usage to the Hebrew canon of 24/22 books using various combinations and stratagems. Origen himself knew of the existence of numerous textual differences, which were often considerable, between the Hebrew and the Greek Bible. To this was added the problem of different listings of books. The attempt to conform to the Hebrew text of the Hebrew canon did not prevent Christian authors in the East from utilizing in their writings books that were never admitted into the Hebrew canon, or from following the Septuagint text. The notion that the Hebrew canon should be preferred by Christians does not seem to have produced in the Eastern Church either a profound or long-lasting impression.

In the West, the use of a larger collection of sacred books was common and was defended by Augustine. When it came to selecting books to be included in the canon, Augustine (354-430) based his judgment on the constant practice of the Church. At the beginning of the fifth century, councils adopted his position in drawing up the Old Testament canon. Although these councils were regional, the unanimity expressed in their lists represents Church usage in the West.

As regards the textual differences between the Greek and the Hebrew Bible, Jerome based his translation on the Hebrew text. For the deuterocanonical books, he was generally content to correct the Old Latin (translation). From this time on, the Church in the West recognized a twofold biblical tradition: that of the Hebrew text for books of the Hebrew canon, and that of the Greek Bible for the other books, all in a Latin translation.

Based on a time-honored tradition, the Councils of Florence in 1442 and Trent in 1564 resolved for Catholics any doubts and uncertainties. Their list comprises 73 books, which were accepted as sacred and canonical because they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, 46 for the Old Testament, 27 for the New. In this way the Catholic Church received its definitive canon. To determine this canon, it based itself on the Church’s constant usage. In adopting this canon, which is larger than the Hebrew, it has preserved an authentic memory of Christian origins, since, as we have seen, the more restricted Hebrew canon is later than the formation of the New Testament.

Posted in Church History | Tagged Augustine, Christ and the “Scriptures”, Harnack’s Thesis, Luther’ Formula, Origen’s Exegesis, The Pontifical Biblical Commission, the theology of the Church Fathers | Leave a Comment »

The Fourteenth-Century Metaphysical Shift

June 11, 2010

Dr. Matthew Levering, associate professor of theology at Ave Maria University (Florida)

In his book Participatory Biblical Exegesis, author Matthew Levering explores the question why one form of biblical exegesis lost its appeal and another form became appealing. He develops strong reasons for considering a connection between biblical exegesis and metaphysical presuppositions regarding historical reality. First he explores the metaphysical shift that came about in the 14^th century:

The Catholic exegete and theologian Francis Martin has shown that biblical interpretation requires an account of historical reality informed by a scriptural metaphysics rooted in the relation of “participation” that is creation. This is so because exegesis (including much contemporary exegesis) that participates doctrinally and spiritually in the realities depicted by Scripture, and thus reads Scripture not merely as a record of something strictly in the past, requires the sense that all human time participates metaphysically (order of creation) and Christologically-pneumatologically (order of grace) in God’s eternal Providence and therefore that no historical text or event can be studied strictly “on its own terms.” Conversely, certain metaphysical presuppositions are inadequate to Christian biblical interpretation. It seems to me that Catherine Pickstock describes just such a set of presuppositions in recounting the impact of Duns Scotus’ thought:

As a “proto-modern” thinker, Scotus’ contributions had implications for the alliance between theology and the metaphysical (in the broad sense of pre-Scotist Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical realism, not in the sense of onto-theology). For within the prevailing theologico-metaphysical discourse of participated-in perfections, there was a ready continuity between reason and revelation: reason itself was drawn upwards by divine light, while, inversely, revelation involved the conjunction of radiant being and further illuminated mind. Here, as we have seen, to rise to the Good, before as well as within faith, was to rise to God. But once the perceived relationship to the transcendentals has undergone the shift described above, to abstract to the Good tells us nothing concerning the divine nature. To know the latter, we wait far more upon a positive revelation of something that has for us the impact of a contingent fact rather than a metaphysical necessity. One can interpret the latter outcome as modern misfortune: the loss of an integrally conceptual and mystical path.

Although the positions of the theological movement in which Pickstock is a prime mover have been criticized for historical sloppiness, her central claims here — that the fourteenth century marks a shift away from the patristic –medieval understanding of “participated-in perfections,” and that Scotus, although not a nominalist in the twelfth-century sense, plays a crucial role in this development — find broad scholarly agreement among experts on late-medieval thought.

Olivier Boulnois, the preeminent contemporary interpreter of Scotus’ work, refers to “the Scotist rupture.” The human will for Scotus mirrors the freedom of the divine will,” and Scotus denies that the will is an appetite that seeks its fulfillment or perfection. Scotus also rejects the teleological framework of “final causality” as “a flight into fantasy”(fitgiendo finguntur viae mirabiles). The patristic-medieval tradition prior to Scotus interpreted reality in terms of participation (Platonic) and teleological nature (Aristotelian). In contrast to Aquinas, who unites these two approaches through a metaphysics of creation, Scotus brings about “a strange fragmentation” in which goodness no longer has its Platonic participatory characters. For Scotus, too, God does not know creatures in knowing himself (the strong sense of participation), but rather knows creatures as a conceptual object of the divine mind. While participation remains in Scotus, it does so in a deracinated form: representation rather than exemplarity. Lacking a rich account of participation and analogy reality is “de-symbolized”: human time is no longer understood as caught up in a participatory relationship with God, and history becomes a strictly linear, horizontal, intra-temporal series of moments.

After Scotus, human freedom may submit to the divine will, but thereafter on the grounds of God’s obligating power rather than on participatory-teleological grounds Does the shift toward understanding human freedom and history as a non-participatory reality — the “rupture” identified by Boulnois — begin, therefore, with Duns Scotus? That question must be left to medievalists, but it does seem that we can identify in his work certain metaphysical patterns that remain influential today. The question for us is how to assess the theological effects of these patterns. Evaluating the fourteenth-century shift positively, the historian Anthony Levi describes the autonomous humanism that emerges once participation theories are displaced:

Renaissance and reformation were connected because they were each forms taken by the restatements of the view that human perfection, even religious perfection, is intrinsic to human moral elevation as judged against norms based on rational human nature itself. However surprising it may sound to say so today, the history of the renaissance and the reformation seems not only to have a moral, but a moral that gives grounds for optimism, although not for complacency. However far it may still have to go, however patchy and sporadic success may so far have been, and however compromised by the modern technology of repression, in the end it looks as if; in the best possible environmental circumstances which Rabelais, borrowing from Erasmus, envisaged for Théleme, human nature tends in the long term to construct human societies according to increasingly humanitarian ethical norms.

For Levi, denial that the human path toward perfection involves teleological participation in God (and thus participation in God’s wise and loving Trinitarian ordo allows human beings to reason out their own paths and thereby to achieve greater success in finding truly “humanitarian” ethical norms. Levi is joined in his positive evaluation by ethicists who find in the autonomous agent’s blind leap of obedience a noble and exalted “charity” that does not dare to “know” and thereby does not onto-theologically lay claim to the radically free “God,” as well as by ethicists who do not believe in God.

A very different assessment is offered by Matthew Lamb, among others. Lamb argues that the nominalist shift produces an inability to conceive of the self or of history as marked by either divine presence or human judgments that participate in transcendental truth and goodness. Instead, what remains, as Lamb shows by means of a comparison between Augustine’s and Rousseau’s Confessions, are the brute facts of dates and places, which reveal nothing but the ego confined within a strictly linear (horizontal) space-time horizon. In the logistic matrix described by Lamb, human beings stand over against the “God” (presuming his existence) whose agency is now seen as imposing limits on human agency, rather than as a participatory framework that establishes freedom. Lamb elsewhere recounts this relationship of opposition between time and divine eternity:

Nominalism paved the way for the Enlightenment to set eternal life in opposition to history, so that those seeking eternal life were despising the good life on earth. … From this loss of a grasp of the simultaneous totality of time in God’s presence, there was a dissolution of time itself into a continuum of isolated moments. The present was set in opposition to the past. Memory and tradition were disparaged; the apocalyptic expectation that awaited the advent of the kingdom of God was emptied into what Metz calls “a softened evolutionary eschatology”.

By the seventeenth century, the participatory understanding of historical reality was on its last legs among intellectuals, although the overall unity of the onward-marching linear-historical moments was still presumed.

Hans Frei finds a similar logistic conceptualism in Enlightenment biblical hermeneutics, although unlike Lamb he does not, so far as I know, draw the connection to late-medieval thought. Discussing the “super-naturalist” position on the Bible offered — within the context of the emergence of historical criticism — by the eighteenth-century Lutheran theologian Sigmund Jakob Baumgarten, Frei notes that for Baumgarten the accuracy of biblical history “can be brought to the highest degree of probability or the greatest possible moral certainty in accordance with all the logical rules of a historical proof” By the eighteenth century, logical rules of historiography took priority over the Bible’s narrative as the ground on which Christians could understand themselves. These rules envisioned God’s action as radically “external” to human action, and thus extrinsic to historical accounts of Scripture’s genesis and meaning. In patristic and medieval hermeneutics, by contrast, not logical rules of historiography, but faith in a providential God grounded the assumption that the books of the Bible displayed the divine pattern of salvation. This faith nourishes and is nourished by the Church’s biblical reading, understood as a set of embodied and liturgical practices constituting the Church’s conversatio Dei.

As Frei no doubt knew, he could have traced his insight into the ascendancy of historiography further back than the eighteenth century. Joseph Levine remarks:

By the end of the eighteenth century, theology had become dependent on history, and religion was justified by an appeal to “matter of fact.” Even such mysteries as the doctrine of the Trinity, which had eluded the reason of St. Thomas and the schoolmen and had remained dependent on the dictates of church councils from Chalcedon to Trent, had come now to depend in some fashion on the evidence of Scripture considered as history. At the same time, the removal of final causes from the narrative of human events threatened to leave it — with every other Christian doctrine and event — to the arbitrament (The judgment of an arbitrator) of ordinary scholarship.

We have already encountered in Scotus this “removal of final causes,” which Levine finds so crucial to modern understanding of history Levine traces the shift, embodied in the eighteenth century by the historian Edward Gibbon, to Desiderius Erasmus and John Colet. Levine argues that Erasmus “began to think of the Bible principally as a record of history, rather than as an arsenal of theological texts, above all as the story of Christ on earth — Christ as the supreme exemplar to be followed and imitated. Behind Erasmus, Levine finds the mid-fifteenth century humanist Lorenzo Valla: “For Valla, “grammar was the supreme science, or at least the indispensable preliminary that was required for understanding any writing, and hence any doctrine…In these crucial matters, the philologist was above the theologian.”

What happens, then, when Scripture is seen primarily as a linear-historical record of dates and places rather than as a providentially governed (revelatory) conversation with God in which the reader, within the doctrinal and sacramental matrix of the Church, is situated? John Webster points to the disjunction that appears between “history” and “theology” and remarks on “the complex legacy of dualism and nominalism in Western Christian theology through which the sensible and intelligible realms, history and eternity, were thrust away from each other, and creaturely forms (language, action, institutions) denied any capacity to indicate the presence and activity of the transcendent God.” Similarly, Lamb contrasts the signs or concepts that can be grasped by modern exegetical methods with the moral and intellectual virtues that are required for a true participatory knowledge and love of the realities expressed by the signs or concepts. Lacking the framework of participatory knowledge and love, biblical exegesis is reduced to what Lamb calls a “comparative textology a la Spinoza.” Only participatory knowledge and love, which both ground and flow from the reading practices of the Church, can really attain the biblical realities. As Joseph Ratzinger thus observes, the meaning of Scripture is constituted when

the human word and God’s word work together in the singularity of historical events and the eternity of the everlasting Word which is contemporary in every age. The biblical word comes from a real past. It comes not only from the past, however, but at the same time from the eternity of God and it leads us into God’s eternity but again along the way through time, to which the past, the present and the future belong.”

This Christological theology of history which depends on a metaphysics of participation inscribed in creation, provides the necessary frame for apprehending the true meaning of biblical texts.

In short, for the patristic-medieval tradition and for those attuned to it today, history (inclusive of the work of historiography) is an individual and communal conversation with the triune God who creates and redeems history — and the Bible situates us in history thus understood.”

Participatory spiritual exercises constitute the very possibility for reading Scripture with an adequate appreciation for the realities it describes, a “sapiential” history that goes far beyond the fragmentary, atomistic dates and places (instantiations of divine and human willing) possible within a non-participatory metaphysics. Webster depicts the impact of the nominalist loss of a Trinitarian understanding of creation and redemption: God’s “action comes to be understood as external, interruptive, and bearing no real relations to creaturely realities. God, in effect, becomes causal will, intervening in creaturely reality from outside but unconnected to the creation.”

The intrinsic relationship of participatory metaphysics to biblical interpretation (and thus to Christian doctrine) has perhaps been most richly articulated, among recent theologians, by the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. In a crucial passage from his exploration of evil and suffering, The Doors of the Sea, Hart argues:

Not only are the speculative concerns of developed Christian philosophy already substantially present in the Hellenistic metaphysical motifs and assumptions that permeate the New Testament (deny these though some might), but classical Christian metaphysics, as elaborated from the patristic through the high medieval periods, is a logically necessary consequence of the gospel: both insofar as it unfolds the inevitable ontological implications of Christian doctrines concerning the Trinity and creation ex-nihilo; and insofar also as Christianity’s evangelical vocation requires believers to be able to articulate the inherent rationality of their faith… “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5); and as he is the source of all things, the fountainhead of being, everything that exists partakes of his goodness and is therefore, in its essence, entirely good.

Such exegetically imperative participatory metaphysics, Hart shows, requires a rejection of Heidegger’s critique of “being” and “participation” as onto-theological attempts to grasp the ungraspable.” Similarly Hart’s “dogmatica minora,” comprising the bulk of his The Beauty of the Infinite, moves through the biblical and theological warrants of the Christian creed, from the Trinity through creation, the imago Del, salvation in Christ, the economy of “peace” (the Church), and eschatology. At each step, Hart shows how participation is carried through in a unity both philosophical and theological, thereby exhibiting how tightly participatory metaphysics is bound to the Church’s reading of Scripture.

————————————-

I wonder how much my reading of scripture is hampered by my inability to THINK in terms of a patristic and classical Christian metaphysical mindset. Do 21st century readers lack the framework of participatory knowledge and love when it comes to apprehending scripture? How do I know that the biblical exegesis I read is leading me into an individual and communal conversation with the triune God who creates and redeems history?

One way to understand will be to contrast the biblical exegesis we see in Thomas Aquinas with those who followed him. Levering gives some actual examples in the next two selections I will feature on PayingAttentiontotheSky.

Posted in Church History, Scriptural Exegesis | Tagged biblical exegesis, Matthew Levering, metaphysics | 2 Comments »

Book Recommendation: The Courage To Be Catholic by George Weigel

May 13, 2010

I have quoted from this book in numerous posts but never provided my reading selections. The book is an extended essay giving Weigel’s take on the sexual abuse crisis circa 2002. As one Amazon reader noted: “[George Weigel's] criticisms of past handling of sexual abuse are fearless but fair. Pope John Paul II’s own excellent teachings on the formation of priests were given good exposure. The link between good priestly formation and adherence to the general teaching on sexual ethics was beautifully drawn. Best of all was his passionate call to holiness through love of Christ and fidelity to His teaching- not just for the laity but priests and bishops alike. I finished the book with great hope and certainty that this crisis will eventually bring renewal.” As you sense from the latter comments, Weigel’s comments have a timeless nature to them, which makes the book a precious read.

Overwhelming Majority Of Abuse Cases Was Homosexual Molestation
According to press reports, confirmed by the studies of reputable scholars, the most prominent form of clergy sexual abuse in recent decades has involved homosexual priests abusing teenage boys and young men. It took editors, television personalities, and radio talk-show hosts approximately two and a half months to recognize what print reporters had, in fact, been uncovering for months: namely, that the overwhelming majority of cases of abuse did not involve prepubescent children, but rather teenage boys and young men, often in school or seminary settings. While clinical distinctions (“Fixated ephebophilia,” “regressed” or “stunted” homosexuality) may be helpful for purposes of professional study and therapy, normal English describes such abuse as homosexual molestation.

The Living Instruments Of Christ, The Eternal Priest
Vatican II taught … that ordained priests “are living instruments of Christ the eternal priest.” At his ordination, every priest “assumes the person of Christ.” The Catholic priest, in order words, is not simply a religious functionary, a man licensed to do certain kinds of ecclesiastical business. A Catholic priest is an icon, a living re-presentation, of the eternal priesthood of Jesus Christ. He makes Christ present in the Church in a singular way, by acting in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” at the altar and in administering the sacraments.
The Catholic priesthood, in other words, is not just another form of “ministry.” Ordination to the priesthood in the Catholic church radically transforms who a man is, not just what he does. In fact, in the classic Catholic view, the thins a priest does – the things lay Catholic cannot do, such as celebrate Mass or forgive sins sacramentally in confession as entirely dependent on who he is by the grace of his ordination. The old Baltimore Catechism tried to describe the difference ordination makes by saying that the sacrament of Holy Orders imprinted an “indelible mark” on a man’s soul: Once ordained, a man is a priest forever, because he has been configured to Christ the eternal priest in an irreversible way. A still older philosophy would say that a priest is “ontologically changed” – changed in his deepest personal identity – by his ordination.

Everything Is A Ministry: A Sociological View Of The Church
By the mid-1970’, virtually everything in the Catholic Church was being described as a form of “ministry,” to the point where ushers in churches were habitually described as “ministers of hospitality.” Ideas have consequences and so do words. If everything is a ministry and everyone in the Church is a minister of one sort or another, what if anything is distinctive about the ordained ministry of the priest? Doesn’t it demean the “ministry” of baptized lay Catholics if the Church continues to insist on the unique “ministry of the ordained priest?
These confusions had many ramifications. Not least among them was the claim…that if the Catholic Church insisted that it must be governed by a “hierarchy” composed of ordained bishops and priests (all of whom were men), it ws branding itself an authoritarian, misogynist hang over form the Middle Ages. Many Catholics in the United States wondered why, if the Church was what sociologists aptly described a s a “volunteer organization,” it shouldn’t govern itself like most other voluntary organizations – by majority rule, with “offices” open to all members?

Saints and Disciples
Every Christian is called to be a saint. Indeed “saints” are what every Christian must become if we are to enjoy eternal life with God. It takes a special kind of person to be able to live with God forever—it takes saints. When the Chruch recognizes someone publicly as a “saint”, the Church is bearing witness to the truth that, in this world, a man or woman was so completely configured to Christ that this life of “heroic virtue” is now continued in heaven, in joyful communion within the light and love of God.
Every Christian fails on the road to sanctity. Some of us fail often, and many of us fail grievously. In each case, the failure is one of discipleship. Men and women who have truly encountered the Risen Christ in the transforming experience of conversion – an experience that can take a lifetime – live different kinds of lives: They lead the life of a disciple (lives of deeper fidelity).

Blaming The Crisis Of Sexual Abuse On Celibacy
To blame the crisis of sexual abuse on celibacy is about as plausible as blaming adultery of the marriage vow, or blaming treason on the Pledge of Allegiance. It just doesn’t parse.

The Relationship Of A Spouse To A Beloved Bride: Chaste Celibate Love For The Church
In the Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul describes the relationship of Christ, the eternal high priest, to his Church as the relationship of a spouse to a beloved bride: Christ the redeemer gives himself to his spouse freely, unreservedly, faithfully, and unto death. If a Catholic priest is not a religious bureaucrat who conducts certain kinds of Churchly business, but rather an icon – a living re-presentation—of the eternal priesthood of Jesus Christ, then the priest’s relationship to his bride, the Church, should be like Christ’s – the priest is to give himself to the Church freely, unreservedly, faithfully, and unto death. And he must be seen to be doing so. His commitment to his bride must be visible in his way of life, as well as in his heart and soul.
That is why the Catholic places such a high value on celibacy. Chaste celibate love for the church is another “icon” of Christ’s presence to his people. The Christ whom the priest makes present through his sacramental ministry at the altar and in the confessional is acting not simply in the name of Christ but in the person of Christ. According to ancient Catholic usage, he is another Christ, alter Christus, whose complete gift of self to the Church is an integral part of his priestly persona. Celibacy is thus not “extrinsic” to the Catholic priesthood, a mere matter of ecclesiastical discipline. There is an intimate, personal, iconic relationship between celibacy and priesthood.

The Form Of The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church believes that it has a “form” or structure given to it by Christ. The structure is composed in part of truths: truths about God, truths about human beings, truths about our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us…Doctrine is not a matter of papal or episcopal whim or willfulness. Popes and bishops are the servants, not the masters of the tradition – the truths – that make the church what it is today. … Moreover the Catholic Church believes that the truths it has been given by Christ free us as well as bind us. They are liberating truths. To accept the Church’s teaching as authoritative and binding is only a “restriction” on my freedom if I imagine freedom to be the unbridled exercise of my imagination and will.

The Shorthand Of “Pedophilia Crisis”
Pedophile priests – in the classic sense of men who habitually abuse prepubescent children – are not the majority of cleric sexual abusers; they are, in fact, a small minority of malfeasant clergy, although they are arguably the most loathsome form of the clerical sexual predator. That the shorthand of “pedophilia crisis” was being used …months after even gay activists were conceding that the overwhelming majority of the abuses reported involved homosexual men molesting teenage boys or young males suggested that the moniker “pedophilia crisis” served agendas other than factual accuracy. Were the crisis of clerical sexual abuse to be described accurately – as a crisis whose principle manifestation was homosexual molestation – other questions about gay culture might well be raised.

Betrayal
Betrayal has been part of the Church’s reality – and part of the reality of the priesthood and episcopate – from the beginning. Betrayal is not the last world in the Church’s story, however. The men who fled Gethsemane in a panic of fear were transformed by the Risen Christ and the Holy Spirit into men on fire, men who could not do anything else but witness to the truth of God’s salvation in Christ, even when it cost them their lives. God can, does, and always will always bring good out of evil, even an evil so great as the treacherous betrayal of God’s Son.

Vatican II: The Church “Opens Its Windows To The Modern World.”
One of the most important things that many U.S. Catholic priests, bishops, nuns, theologians and lay activists took away form Vatican II was that the Church had “opened its windows to the modern world.” What these Catholic leaders failed to notice at the time – and what some Catholic leaders refuse to acknowledge today — is that the Catholic church opened its windows just as the modern western world was barreling into a dark tunnel full of poisonous fumes…there were all sorts of toxins in the air. In high culture, and especially in intellectual life, the bright hopes of “modernity” were being dashed on the rocks of irrationality, self-indulgence, fashionable despair, and contempt for traditional authority. The mid century’s two premier philosophers – Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre – had it turned out, been supporters of the two great butchers in a century of slaughter: Hitler for Heidegger and Stalin for Sartre….the late 1960’s were a very difficult time for a two-way conversation between an ancient religious tradition build on the foundation of what it understood to be truths –with consequences for all humanity, and an intellectual world deeply skeptical that there was, in fact, any such thing as “truth”

Encounter With Modernity
In the 1960’s the Church met an old enemy tarted up in modern guise: Gnosticism, the ancient heresy which denied that the material world really counts for anything. For almost two millennia, the Catholic Church has insisted that stuff counts – that bread and waster, oil and salt, and sexual love within the bond of marital fidelity could be transformed into sacramental encounters with God himself. Why? Because the ordinary stuff of this world is never as ordinary as it seems; it always points itself to the extraordinary love of God for his creation. How could this kind of Church teach its message in a world that, or all its luxuriant materiality, seemed not to take the material world seriously, treating material things (including the human body) as mere toys for manipulation in an endless quest for self-expression and pleasure. Then there was the modern quest for freedom. How could a Church committed to the idea that freedom has everything to do with truth and goodness make its case in a culture in which freedom was broadly understood as license – “I did it my way.”

A Subtle, Interior, Invisible Schism
There was no overt schism in the Catholic Church in the United States of the sort Pope Paul VI evidently feared. But there was a subtle, interior, invisible schism. It is one thing for a Catholic – layman or laywoman, seminarian, priest, nun or bishop – to say of authoritative teaching, “I don not understand. Perhaps the teaching authority can make the matter clearer; perhaps we need to think about this truth in a more refined way.” It is quite another thing for a Catholic—and especially a Catholic who teaches, administers the sacraments, and governs the Catholic people in the name of the Church – to say, “The highest teaching authority of the Catholic Church is teaching falsehoods and leading the Church into error.”
The Catholic who says “I do not understand,” concedes that, in the Catholic scheme of things, the Church’s’ teaching authority is just that, an instrument of authoritative teaching. The Catholic who says, “The teaching authority is leading the Church into error,” is declaring himself or herself out of full communion with the Church. …too many seminarians and priests…fell out of full communion with the Church, whether the issue at hand was contraception, abortion, homosexuality, or the possible ordination of women to the priesthood.
If a priest is sincerely convinced that the Church is teaching falsely on these or other matters, or if he is simply lazy and absorbs the culture of dissent by osmosis, his conscience is deadened. And having allowed his conscience to become moribund on these questions, he is more likely to quiet, and perhaps finally kill his conscience on matters relating to his own behavior, including his sexual behavior. When the incident of such deadened consciences reaches critical mass in a diocese, a seminary, or a religious order, corruption – intellectual, spiritual and administrative –sets in, as the culture of dissent seeks to bend that institution to its ends.

Pedophile John Geoghan
Perhaps the most mind boggling document to be released publicly…was the last clinical evaluation of pedophile John Geoghan from the St. Luke’s Institute, a prominent therapeutic center in Silver Spring, Maryland, founded to deal with troubled clergy …The conclusion of the evaluation’s “spiritual assessment” by a priest who once headed St. Luke’s, was at first dumbfounding, and then chilling: Father Canice Connors notes that “there are no particular recommendations concerning (Father Geoghan’s) spiritual life since he is involved in spiritual direction and seems to have a good prayer life. The critical question for Father Geoghan seems to be whether he has ever integrated his psychological experience with his spiritual values.”

Posted in Book Recommendations, Church History, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged George Weigel, Modernity, pedophilia crisis, Saints and Disciples, The Courage To Be Catholic, The Crisis Of Sexual Abuse | Leave a Comment »

The Forms of Memory: Speech and Writing

April 23, 2010

Christ Carried to the Tomb, Tintoretto c.1560

Present-day readers of the NT encounter finished literary compositions. Trying to recover the process by which those compositions came into existence involves close analysis as well as a certain amount of guesswork. As a previous post has shown, it is possible to suggest plausible social settings within which the memory of Jesus was shaped and transmitted. More difficult is determining the mix of oral and written elements in the process. Certainly there is strong evidence to suggest that the memory of Jesus was conveyed orally in a variety of settings. But it must be remembered as well that the Christian movement was literary from the start — as evidenced by Paul’s letters (our earliest evidence for the existence of Christianity) as well as the letters from other early Christian leaders. Luke Timothy Johnson considers the process.

But to what extent were the memories concerning Jesus written down before being included in the compositions we call Gospels? Scholars remain divided on this issue, some emphasizing the oral process, others the written. To some extent, a rigid bifurcation is a distortion, since we know that in both Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures, literary and oral activities often overlapped: Rabbis kept notes on halachic debates that were later codified; rhetoricians wrote out speeches that were later delivered orally; correspondents read aloud the written letters that were initially dictated orally to scribes; and the lectures of philosophers were transcribed. Furthermore, in antiquity all “reading” was a form of oral performance. The distinction between “oral” and “scribal” culture, therefore, should not be made too sharply, and is useful mainly as a reminder that these modes of expression interacted in complex ways.

In the following discussion, we look first at those parts of the memory about Jesus that fit most obviously within the framework of oral tradition, without thereby denying that aspects of writing may have been at work. Then we turn to an examination of that part of the gospel story in which the process of writing, or scribal, activity may most easily be seen, without thereby implying that there was no antecedent oral tradition.

(1)Oral Memory and the Stories About Jesus
The memory of Jesus was affected not only by the social contexts of the early Christian churches, but also by certain persistent habits of human memory, particularly by the way it molds the past into usable pieces for the present. An awareness of these patterns — together with the simple observation that in the various canonical Gospels we find individual short segments of material of striking similarity being used in quite different arrangements — leads us to the recognition that the Gospels are written compositions that employ diverse traditions handed down by both oral and written transmission over a period of some forty years. Oral traditions were passed on, furthermore, not in ordered or sustained narratives, but in short sayings and stories. Their stereotypical patterns result from the process of telling and retelling in community contexts. We turn, then, to some consideration of those sayings and stories in which the memory of Jesus was mediated to the Gospel writers. The process of transmission may be grasped in its essential lines by developing a rather extended analogy, one whose anachronistic character and simplicity will remind us that these observations are not a matter of science but of appreciating the art of storytelling.

Oral Tradition: Remember How Grandma Used To Say…
We can imagine a family remembering its recently deceased matriarch. The family as a social group engages in this sort of recollection especially at ritual occasions, such as holiday meals and ceremonies of passage like graduations, weddings, and funerals. The occasion, or some part of the ritual, triggers the process of remembrance. Someone will begin, “Remember how Grandma used to say . . . ,” and then all join in. The basic form of remembrance is the short tale or anecdote. Even Grandma’s wise sayings or memorable mannerisms are related to tales that set up the significant point.

Many of the stories sound alike. The matriarch quite likely repeated herself in word and action in her long life and was observed by different witnesses on various occasions. Her repeated and characteristic behavior in the past, therefore, aids the process of forging her memory into set forms. While the stories are being told, there is also mutual correction taking place. Older members with longer memories correct errors of sequence (“No, she said that after Grandpa died”) and false attribution (“Grandma didn’t say that; Aunt Hilda did”). When eyewitnesses are no longer around, the next generation is dependent on the form and sequence of the stories that the earlier process of criticism left as established. Then an even more formal shape is given to the memories: there is a collection of Our Grandmother stories capable of being told and retold even by generations who never knew her at all except as mediated by these tales.

Closer analysis of the casual family stories shows that they tend to fall into categories. The largest of the categories are those of Things Said and Things Done. Repeated settings and patterns provide the basis for further categories: “Arguing with Grandpa” or “Advice to the Grandchildren” stories. There might even be a loose collection of Grandma’s One-Liners, sayings whose occasion no one can any longer recollect but whose bite and wit are so clearly hers that they are treasured as “typical of Grandma.” Do they resemble bits of wisdom available elsewhere? It does not matter; Grandma made them her own, giving them her own personal stamp and style.

No one is in the least disturbed by a lack of exact chronology in these stories, by a certain amount of repetition, or by the failure to get all the details straight. This is not a biography that is being researched but a family remembering its beloved founder. The memory of her makes her come alive again, just as the eating of the pumpkin pie prepared according to her secret recipe almost makes her appear in the kitchen door.

An observation of several families thus reminiscing about their grandmothers would yield an even greater stock of remarkably similar stories. Since grandmothers do tend to act alike in certain ways, cultural stereotypes of “typical grandmotherly” behavior develop. Sometimes it is hard to tell how much the shape of one family’s very real memories of its grandmother may be affected by these larger cultural patterns. That their grandmother happened to fit several of these stereotypes, however, in no way diminishes their sense of her as real and singular in her presence to them.

Oral Tradition Tendencies
Oral tradition of this sort has certain consistent tendencies.

First, the specific details of time and place are rapidly lost, for the simple reason that they are largely irrelevant. What is important is the significant saying or deed, not the occasion; the point of the story is who the grandmother was and therefore who the family is.
Second, and for the same reason, the punch line or decisive gesture is remembered far more clearly than the setup or situation in which it is now enclosed. Indeed, at times the situations almost appear to be interchangeable. Sometimes only the punch line is remembered and the family debates the appropriate setting.
Third, the more often the stories are repeated, the shorter they get. They become more formulaic, tighter in focus, snappier. As a result, over time the stories tend to resemble each other more. The first time a story is told, it is filled with extraneous detail and subjective reactions; with frequent repetition it is reduced to the essentials.

Applying The Grandma Analogy
The possibility of applying this analogy to the development of the memory of Jesus in the church seems clear. We have seen how ritual occasions and the need for community teaching stimulated the memory of Jesus among those who believed in him as risen Lord. We have also observed that the community’s need for precedent and guidance gave this memory a definite shape, even as it shaped the community’s identity.

The analogy also helps us see how a large number of stories about Jesus in the Gospels fall into stereotypical forms. However, there are limits to such an analysis. The first limit involves our analytic precision. Of course it is possible to divide the memories of Jesus into Things Said and Things Done, as it is possible to describe other subgroupings. But we must recognize that not only are forms combined (e.g., an exorcism story and a controversy story joined together into a literary whole, as in Mark 1:21–28) but also that some materials escape classification altogether. Second, care must be taken not to deduce too readily from the form of a story its life-setting or function within that setting. The real value in cataloguing these forms is twofold: it enables us to appreciate how the memory of Jesus was carried by means of short units rather than by complex discourses and narratives; and the description of a formal pattern enables us to detect deviations from it, which may prove helpful for the understanding of a particular story.

Among The Sayings Of Jesus, We Find Controversy Stories, Parables, Aphorisms, And Other Looser Discourses.

Controversy stories (e.g., Mark 2:15–3:6; 7:1–23; 10:2–9; 12:13–17, 18–27, 28–34; pars.) have a regular sequence of elements: (1) an action by Jesus or his disciples (2) stimulates a challenge from opponents, which leads to (3) a pronouncement by Jesus. The pronouncement is often a well-formed statement of more general application than the particular situation that generated the controversy.
In his parables, Jesus compares some readily observable natural or human phenomenon to the kingdom of God. Some parables are used for attack (Mark 3:23-27), others for defense (Luke 15:4-10); some attempt to enlighten (Matthew 13:24–30), others to mystify (Mark 4:3-8). They range from simple analogies (Matthew 13:44–46) to extended allegories (Mark 12:1-11), but all of them give a narrative form to metaphor.
In Jesus’ aphorisms, we find single striking statements that can easily be separated from, or are only loosely attached to, their literary setting in the gospel story. Sometimes they are found joined together by the mnemonic device of catch-words (see, e.g., Mark 8:34-37). Other sayings material is less easily categorized. The apocalyptic discourse of Jesus in Mark 13, for example, can be broken down into individual parts (aphorisms, parables), but it also holds together as a sustained unit.

Other Narratives Reveal Formal Patterns
As with the controversy stories, other narratives about Jesus also reveal formal patterns. The most regular pattern is found in the healing and exorcism stories. In healing narratives, we find the following: (1) the notice of the sickness, (2) the action by Jesus, (3) the result, (4) the reaction of bystanders (see, e.g., Mark 1:30–31, 40–45; 2:1–12; 5:21–42; 7:31–37; 8:22–26; pars.). The pattern of exorcism narratives tends to be very similar: (1) the mention of the demoniac, (2) the dialogue between spirits and Jesus, (3) the command to depart, (4) the physical sign of departure, (5) the restored state of the exorcised person, (6) the reaction of bystanders (see, e.g., Mark 1:23–28; 5:1–13; 7:24–30; 9:17–29; pars.). Some stories about Jesus, such as his nature miracles (e.g., Mark 4:35–41; 6:45–52; pars.) and his feeding of the crowds (Mark 6:34–44; 8:1–10; pars.), do not fit as easily into set forms. Still other stories, like that of the transfiguration (Mark 9:2–8 pars.), resist categorization completely.

Two further literary remarks can be made about these patterns. First, the formal shape of many of the stories suggests that they were shortened and tightened with repetition, and thus grew to resemble each other; that they preserved the essential deed or saying more accurately than the circumstance; and that they had little concern for geography and chronology. Second, the stories about Jesus also resemble stories found in the broader cultural world of the first century. The form, if not the substance, of many of Jesus’ sayings can be paralleled in parables told by rabbis, in chreia (short biographical vignettes with pronouncements) attributed to philosophers, and in controversy stories found in both traditions. The healings and exorcisms of Jesus can be paralleled by similar accounts in Hellenistic religious aretalogies and biographies.

The Memory of Jesus’ Death and the Interpretation of Torah
Jesus’ death on the cross became the most complex memory in the early church, requiring, therefore, the most interpretation. The shape and extent of that interpretation illustrate well the range of the church’s creativity in transmitting Jesus’ memory. I will begin with some general observations on the Passion narratives, which recount Jesus’ last hours from his final supper with his disciples to his burial. Then I will raise questions concerning the origination of the accounts, before once more returning to the texts.

All four canonical Gospels have Passion narratives (Mark 14:1–15:47; Matthew 26:1–27:66; Luke 22:1–23:56; John 13:1–19:42). In each, the narrative is by far the most extensive segment in Jesus’ story. This length is all the more impressive since the Passion narratives of each Gospel are coherent and sustained stories, rather than the sort of loose sequence of smaller units we find in the narratives concerning Jesus’ ministry. Each is a narrative, moreover, that pays fastidious attention to detail. Notices of time and place elsewhere in the Gospels tend to be casual and vague; here they are specific. Elsewhere, long stretches of time can be indicated by “and then,” whereas here we find virtually a minute-by-minute account.

High Degree Of Agreement Among Synoptic Gospels And The Gospel Of John
The Passion narratives, furthermore, have a relatively high degree of agreement among them. The agreement is most striking between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. The agreement of the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke) among themselves can to some extent be credited to their literary interdependence, but their accord with the Gospel of John requires a more complex explanation. Differences of detail and emphasis persist, to be sure; but by contrast to the rest of the story of Jesus, the Passion accounts show a remarkable unanimity. Even the relationship between the Passion narrative and the rest of the story of Jesus shows agreement as each Gospel meticulously prepares for the suffering and death of Jesus ahead of time, so that the course of the narrative as a whole points in the direction of Jesus’ inevitable end. In the Synoptics, Jesus formally predicts his death three times (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33–34; pars.). In John, repeated mention of Jesus’ “hour,” his “being lifted up,” and his “being glorified” serve the same function of foreshadowing the cross (John 2:4; 3:14; 7:6, 39; 12:27–32).

These observations tend to support the conclusion that the Passion narratives are the earliest sustained accounts of Jesus’ memory, indicating that the part of Jesus’ life most requiring interpretation was its last hours. This is further supported by Paul’s close agreement with a small segment of that narrative in his report of Jesus’ words at the last supper, written some twenty years after the event (see 1 Corinthians 11:23–25).

Why It Was Necessary To Crystallize The Passion Memory Of Jesus So Early In The Church’s Life
Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians also provides some insight into the reason it was necessary to crystallize this memory of Jesus so early in the church’s life. When discussing the resurrection experience earlier, the kerygmatic tradition in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 was cited. Before Paul speaks of the resurrection “according to the Scriptures,” he says that Jesus “died according to the Scriptures and was buried.” He also insists that this is the message upon which their salvation rests — unless they believe in vain (1 Corinthians 15:2).

This insistence was necessary because the cross was the most difficult part of the message to accept. Everywhere in 1 Corinthians, we meet a congregation that was richly gifted with spiritual powers (1 Corinthians 1:5, 7), understanding that this bestowal of power established them as leading members in God’s kingdom (4:8). They were, therefore, less than eager to hear a part of the message that implied the need to suffer. Indeed, when Paul refers to his preaching to them, he says that the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but “the power of God” to those being saved (1:18). He says further that the cross is “a stumbling block to the Jews and a folly to Gentiles.” Why? “Because Jews demand signs and Gentiles seek wisdom” (1:22). But Paul’s preaching did not meet those expectations: “we preach Christ crucified” (1:23; cf. Galatians 3:1). Paul here makes it plain that the preaching of the crucified Messiah reversed the expectations of his hearers’ symbolic world. Not only were the expectations of outsiders overturned, but the expectations of insiders as well. The cross was the part of their experience of Jesus that demanded immediate and detailed interpretation.
By the standards of Hellenistic heroes, Jesus’ end was obviously unimpressive. He had faced death not with apathetic calm but with fear and anguish; he had left his followers not with words of memorable grace but with a cry of utter desolation (Matthew and Mark); he had not embraced a dignified suicide but endured a grisly execution; he did not bypass death through elevation to divinity, escape it through sophistry, or use it as an opportunity to demonstrate virtue. He was simply executed as a common criminal. To Greeks, therefore, the cross was foolishness and weakness. Divine power (dynamis) did not work in this manner.
For those who lived within the symbols of Torah, Jesus’ death was even harder to reconcile with the claim to have experienced the Holy Spirit through him. When they looked to Jesus for signs of messiahship, they were disappointed. He failed miserably and palpably by any zealot test of messiahship: he did not restore kingship, he bore only its mocking title on the tree. His death was particularly a “stumbling block” (see Romans 9:33; 1 Peter 2:8; cf. Luke 20:17, with reference to Isaiah 8:14) for those Jews who had hoped for a religious messiah, one who would establish the rule of God’s righteousness under Torah. Not only did he not fulfill in any visible or significant manner the recognized messianic texts (e.g., 2 Samuel 7:11–16; Psalms 45; 89; Isaiah 9:2–7; 11:1–16; 49:8–13; 52:1–12; Amos 9:11; Micah 5:2–4; Malachi 3:1–4; 4:5), he was not even a recognizable martyr like those who resisted pagan pressure in the Maccabean accounts, thereby dying in defense of Torah (see esp. 2 Macabbees 6:18–31 and 4 Macabbees 5:1–7:23). Rather, from the beginning to the end he was a “sign of contradiction” (Luke 2:34), standing in complete opposition to their understanding of how God manifested his power and righteousness among his people. His life and death alike challenged the status of Torah as the absolute norm for life. In his manner of living, he was a sinner (2 Corinthians 5:21), and in his manner of dying, he was one accursed by God. Torah could not, on this, be clearer: “Cursed be every man who hangs upon a tree” (Deut. 21:23). In the light of Jesus’ death, this text must have been cited against the claims of the first Christians (see Galatians 3:13). Far from being the source of the Holy Spirit, Jesus was abandoned by God and his death proved it!
For those who believed in Jesus as risen Lord, the problem was no less severe. How could they ease the tension between their experience of the power of Jesus in their lives and the conviction they shared as hearers of Torah, that God did not work through sinners? Once more, we find the conflict between experience and symbolic world. And it is here we discover the impetus for interpretation: to defend their faith from outside attack and to support it against inner erosion and confusion.

Jesus’ Death Was “In Accordance With The Scriptures”
Now we can return to Paul’s puzzling statement that Jesus’ death was “in accordance with the Scriptures.” This was a bold claim, especially if Torah itself called his death a curse. Because of this contradiction, the first Christians turned again to the normative texts of their symbolic world. They reread Torah in search of meaning. This was an instinctive move. The same texts that condemned Jesus were the normative texts by which they understood their experience as well. But now they had to read them in the light of both the resurrection and the manner of Jesus’ death. And this led them to texts they had never before considered messianic, causing them to read old texts in new ways. It was as though their eyes had been opened. Indeed, two Gospels make this aspect of the resurrection experience quite clear. In John’s Gospel, it was when Jesus was raised from the dead that the disciples began to understand both what he had said and done and the Scripture (John 2:22; 12:16; 20:9). In Luke’s appearance accounts, the risen Lord “opens the eyes” of the disciples to the real meaning of Torah: “Beginning with Moses and the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27; cf. 24:44–46).

Several key texts became newly visible as a result of the experience of the crucified and raised Messiah. In light of the resurrection, the first Christians appropriated the text that spoke of a king exalted to dominion but whose rule was not yet fully achieved (Psalms 110:1; cf. Mark 12:36; pars.; Acts 2:34; 1 Corinthians 15:25; Hebrews 1:3). In light of the suffering, they discovered texts that spoke not of a dominating king but of a lowly one (Zechariah 9:9), and of a stone that was rejected by builders but had become the cornerstone (Psalms 118:22). Above all, they read with fresh eyes passages speaking of a just person who suffered at the hands of others not because of misdeeds but because of an allegiance to the Lord, hoping all the while for vindication from God for his fidelity (passages such as these they found in Psalms 69 and 22; cf. also Wisdom 2:12–3:11; 4:7–18). In the Suffering Servant songs of Isaiah, they found almost the precise pattern of what, in fact, they had experienced in Jesus: a righteous one whose shameful death was in obedience to God and an offering for others (Isaiah 42:1–4; 49:1–7; 50:4–11), the result of which led to his being “exalted and lifted up” by God (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). In the encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:29–40), the God-fearer who was reading Isaiah 53:7–8 asked Philip of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke, himself or another. In answering, “Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture, he told him the good news of Jesus” (Acts 8:35).

Reinterpretation Of The Texts Of Torah
Such rereading and reinterpretation of the texts of Torah enabled Christians to place the experience of Jesus within their symbolic world. The way they read these texts would never find agreement among those Jews who did not share their experience or their conviction. But for them, the interpretive process was effective and convincing. They were not manipulating or distorting the texts; they were simply and truly seeing them in a new way.

These perceptions had to affect both the way they remembered the story of Jesus’ last days and the manner in which they told that story. Now, the death of Jesus appeared to them not as accursed, but as a death in which he bore the curse of others (Galatians 3:13). Jesus was not a sinner but a righteous man (Luke 23:47; Acts 3:14), whose death was not a punishment but a sacrifice for others (Romans 3:24–25; 1 Corinthians 15:3). His death was not an accident but a fulfillment of God’s will (Ephesians 1:5–10). Rather than being the result of disobedience to Torah, his death was, in fact, the outcome of radical obedience to the God who revealed Torah (Philemon 2:8; Hebrews 5:8), and, in light of it, Torah would now need to be reevaluated as the ultimate norm of righteousness. These convictions they found confirmed by Torah itself. The categories of interpretation became their categories of perception, and these progressively became the symbols by which they told the story itself.

In Jesus’ Passion predictions, we find expressed the conviction that not only did Jesus know of his fate and accept it but that this fate was part of God’s plan: “the son of man must [dei] suffer” (Mark 8:31; Luke 9:22; 17:25; cf. Luke 24:26; Acts 17:3). In the Passion narrative itself, Jesus tells his disciples at the meal that “the son of man goes as it is written of him” (Mark 14:21). As he gives them the cup of his blood, he says it is “for many” (Mark 14:24; cf. 10:45), words that directly recall the death of the servant “for many” in Isaiah 53:12. After the meal, Jesus himself cites the Scripture concerning his disciples’ betrayal (Mark 14:27, citing Zechariah 13:7):

You will all fall away, for it is written, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.” But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.

The impact of this rereading of Torah shows itself most emphatically in the description of Jesus’ death. It was the moment of greatest scandal; it appears meaningless as fact. Yet, for the early believers, it was the meaningful revelation of “the power of God.” In this scene, then, we find the very words of Torah shaping the story of Jesus’ last moments. There is considerable variation between the Synoptics and John at this point. While John also uses the words of Torah to narrate the story, he utilizes entirely different texts to do so. I take notice only of Mark’s account here.

In Mark’s account, at the moment of his own death, Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark cites this in Hebrew and has the bystanders, ironically, misunderstand it. The readers hear it translated and understand. They recognize it as the beginning of the psalm of God’s servant who suffers and is vindicated (Psalm 22), and they know the end of the story. A closer look at Mark 15:23–37 indicates that the words of Torah have provided more than a mere citation. Woven into the bare facts of the account are details that are shaped directly and unmistakably from the very words of the Psalms: Mark 15:23 = Psalms 69:21; Mark 15:24 = Psalms 22:18; Mark 15:29 = Pss. 22:7, 109:25; Mark 15:31 = Psalms 22:8; Mark 15:34 = Psalms 22:1; Mark 15:36 = Psalms 69:21). In this way, the Story of Jesus’ Death is truly “according to Torah.”

Jesus’ Death In The Light Of His Risen Power
How did the continuing experience of Christians affect this memory of Jesus’ death? They saw it from the other side of the resurrection and so remembered the death in the light of Jesus’ power and the conviction that he was the Just One and God’s Son. They saw it, further, in the light of their responses to Jewish counterclaims that Jesus’ death was that of a sinner. Finally, in the process of recollection, they interpreted the death through their reading of Torah.

But did they invent or create this memory of Jesus’ death? Precisely the need for interpretation — indeed, the problematic nature of that event — argues for its basic historicity. This community would not have invented a crucified messiah, since it showed itself so eager to escape the implications of that proposition. When we read the Passion narratives of the Gospels, therefore, we find a memory that, while unquestionably selected and shaped by the experience of the church, is equally a memory that itself shaped the church.

What we have discovered here can be applied, one suspects, with a somewhat lesser degree of certainty to the other memories of Jesus. Something happened, but the search for its meaning must recognize the element of interpretation that is always present. Indeed, only as interpreted could it be remembered at all.

Posted in Church History | Tagged Formal Patterns, Jesus “died according to the Scriptures and was buried.”, Memory, Oral Tradition, the Interpretation of Torah, The Sayings Of Jesus | Leave a Comment »

Jesus in the Memory of the Church — Luke Timothy Johnson

April 20, 2010

Professor Luke Timothy Johnson

I guess one of my problems with Luke Timothy Johnson is that he writes about things that interest me greatly. I am also totally aware that he can distort the Catholic message and lead me astray. Here he attempts to provide “a viable and defensible account of the generative experience that makes intelligible both the need to remember Jesus and the shape those memories took.” Granted that such an attempt must always be more suggestive than conclusive; but perhaps that is its value. It provides us the process of the composition of the writings of the New Testament.

When we read these diverse writings we call the New Testament, it should be with the following realizations:

They are crystallizations of traditions that developed in complex and multiform contexts;
They were written as witnesses and interpretations for other believers;
They continue to engage, in their various literary forms, the symbolic world of first-century Judaism and Hellenism as they translate the story of Jesus for the continuing life of the church.

This following is adapted from a Chapter in his volumnuous work “The Writings of the New Testament.”

Coming To Grips With Jesus’ Story To Comprehend The Powerful Bestower Of The Spirit
The nature of the Christian experience demanded interpretation as well as proclamation, and this interpretation inevitably centered on the person of Jesus. The reason is simple: the one who appeared to the disciples as the risen Lord was identified with the same Jesus who had died by execution on the cross. The man they had known as one who preached, healed, and suffered, they now knew as the powerful bestower of the Spirit. If the community was to advance its own story, it was necessary first to come to grips with Jesus’ story. The identity of the community and the living memory of Jesus were, therefore, inextricably intertwined. It is to the shaping of that memory that our investigation now turns.

Anamnesis: A Recollection Of The Past That Enlivens And Empowers The Present
In quite different ways, the letters and Gospels of the NT represent crystallizations of memory, the literary distillation of traditions about Jesus that were transmitted and developed during the years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. In the Gospels, the story of Jesus is obviously central and explicit, while the instruction of the church and the interpretation of its story are only implicit.

Our present consideration of the memory of Jesus in the early church therefore serves as a natural transition to the reading of those documents. But it should be asserted that the memory of Jesus was no less important for the Book of Revelation and the epistolary writings. Though the instruction of the church and the interpretation of its story are central and explicit in them, the memory of Jesus still plays an integral, albeit implicit, role.

When we speak of the memory of Jesus in the church, we do not mean simply a mechanical recalling of information from the past. We mean, rather, the sort of memory expressed by the Greek term anamnēsis (cf. Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24, 25). It is a recollection of the past that enlivens and empowers the present.

Such memory is not restricted to the mental activity of individuals; it is found above all in the ritual and verbal activity of communities. We found that such was the case in the Jewish Passover Haggadah: the recital of the events of the exodus long ago made the power of those events contemporaneous to the present generation (“Let everyone regard themselves as having come out of Egypt”). Anamnesis in earliest Christianity was even more complex, for the one remembered from the past was also being experienced as present here and now. Jesus was not simply called back from the past by mental activity. Thus the present experience of his power threw constant light on the recollection of him from the past.

Memory such as this is intimately bound up with the identity of both individuals and communities. An individual’s story defines one as a person. The myth of a people defines it as a community. Individual or communal amnesia is a terrifying phenomenon precisely because anamnesis is identity. Without a past, we have no present and little hope for a future. The early church’s identity was bound up with the memory of Jesus. It sought an understanding of its present in his past, just as it was motivated to search out his past by the experience of his presence.

Personal memory is inevitably selective. Not all of the past is remembered, for not all of the past is pertinent to the present. But selectivity is not random; it derives from the continuing experience of those who remember. The present situation stimulates the memory of the past. It was at least partially because the church faced opposition from its fellow Jews that it remembered how Jesus faced such opposition and responded to it. Some things are remembered, of course, simply because they were so important and impressive then, and continue to be important and formative now. It did not take the breaking of bread to make Christians remember what Jesus said and did at his last meal with his disciples, though the breaking of bread was an appropriate occasion for perpetuating that memory.

The memory of the past is also shaped by the continuing experience of the community. As new experiences place old ones in different perspective, the human story is constantly revised. As our present situation shapes our past, that which was formerly obscure becomes clear and that which was previously insignificant now looms large. The meaning of a past crisis is affected by our present perception of it as preparatory or analogous to the crisis we are now going through. Our grasp of the present moment enables us to perceive a more intelligible and universal shape in past events.

So also was the memory of Jesus selected and shaped by the continuing experience of Christian communities. The process was made more complex by the distinctive nature of their continuing experience: the one they remembered was present to them now in power. Everything the believers remembered about his past words and deeds was colored by their standing on the other side of the resurrection experience. However faithful they intended to be to the past, their memory could not help being marked by their present perception. The one who spoke then in parables, speaks now through prophets; the one who healed then, now heals through the hands of believers. The interpenetration of past and present experience made the development of Jesus traditions extraordinarily complex.

Nor was the memory of Jesus unaffected by contact with the diverse and changing circumstances of the first Christians. Their need to confront themselves, one another, and their world during a period of turbulent growth and conflict also colored their perceptions of Jesus. A number of these circumstances are located in the social contexts of the early church. What were these social contexts and how could they help select and shape the memory of Jesus?

The Social Contexts of Tradition
The specific social settings of earliest Christianity must themselves be placed within the framework of the missionary expansion over the forty-year period preceding the writing of the first Gospel. The Acts of the Apostles provides the only sustained narrative of the spread of the gospel. Its treatment is selective and affected by its theological purposes, but it provides invaluable information that is corroborated by other NT writings.

In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the apostles, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Luke uses this prophecy as an organizing principle for his narrative. He shows the “word of God” progressing from its center in Jerusalem (chaps. 1–8) to Judea and Samaria (chaps. 8–10), then to Antioch (chap. 11), and from there, through the missionary work of Paul and his companions (chaps. 13–28), to Rome, the “end of the earth” (28:16). Luke’s theological concern accounts for two emphases in this picture: he demonstrates the peaceful continuity of the mission from Jerusalem to the gentile world; and, he shows that the preaching began in synagogues and moved to the Gentiles only after its rejection there (13:46–47; 18:6; 28:25–28).

Acts oversimplifies in many ways. It tells us nothing about missionary activity in some areas of obvious historical interest. Concerning Egyptian or Galilean Christianity, Luke tells us almost nothing (see Acts 9:31); of Syrian Christianity (apart from the brief notes on Damascus and Antioch), very little. As a good Hellenistic author, furthermore, Luke is interested mainly in cities; he never mentions rural evangelization. His irenic purpose leads him to downplay conflict and discord in the earliest communities, even though they can be spotted readily between the lines of his narrative (Acts 6:1–7; 9:26; 11:2; 15:1–21, 39; 21:21). And from Acts 13 onward, his focus is so tightly on Paul that all other developments vanish. The reader discovers that when Paul arrives in Rome as a prisoner, there is already a Christian community there (28:16) even though Luke did not describe the evangelization of the empire’s capital city!

Understanding The Spread Of Christianity Through Acts
Despite its limitations, however, Acts provides an important framework for understanding the spread of Christianity. First, it makes clear that the movement grew by the establishment of churches. Christianity was a movement of social groups. The social setting for tradition is, therefore, intrinsic to the nature of the movement itself. Second, Acts shows how rapidly the message sped across vast geographic areas. Within seven or eight years after the death of Jesus, separate communities existed in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and Syria. In twenty years there were communities in Cyprus and Asia Minor; after twenty-five years, communities flourished throughout Macedonia, Achaia, and possibly Dalmatia. Thirty years after Jesus was killed, there was a Christian community in Rome. These are conservative estimates, and the time frame could be even shorter.

Rapidity Of Growth
The rapidity of Christianity’s growth had real implications for the memory of Jesus. It meant that his memory had to be transmitted and preserved through new and changing circumstances. An immediate and fundamental transition was from a predominantly rural setting — presupposed by most of Jesus’ words — to the urban contexts addressed by Paul and Peter. Some linguistic adjustments were also required. Greek was spoken throughout the empire, and there were Greek-speaking Christians even in the earliest Jerusalem community. But the present Greek form of Jesus’ words often suggests the presence of an Aramaic substratum. Insofar as his words required translation, therefore, subtle shadings of meaning would be both gained and lost. The movement’s rapid spread into the pluralistic culture of the Diaspora meant as well that the memory of Jesus could be affected by contact with other traditions, such as those of Diaspora Judaism and Hellenistic philosophy and religion.

No Long Period Of Tranquil Recollection And Interpretation By A Single Stable Community
The point of these observations is simple: the evidence of the NT does not suggest that after the resurrection there was a long period of tranquil recollection and interpretation carried out under the tight control of a single stable community that, having forged the memory of Jesus into a coherent and consistent form, transmitted it to other lands, languages, and cultures. The evidence points in the opposite direction: there was no long period of tranquillity. The first community was from the beginning harassed and persecuted. The spread of the movement was carried out by many messengers and required flexible adjustment to new circumstances. In the light of this evidence, what is surprising is not the diversity found in the traditions concerning Jesus but that there is any consistency at all.

Community Context: Preaching
Three community contexts were particularly important for both the growth and the stabilization of the Jesus traditions in the early church: preaching, worship, and teaching for the common life. To these we now turn.

Preaching The historical importance of this context is clear, but the determination of how much Christian preaching found its way into the NT writings or how much it transmitted the memory of Jesus is very difficult. Early Christianity was a missionary movement, and the proclamation (kēryssein = to proclaim) or kerygma (the content of what is proclaimed) of what God had done in the death and resurrection of Jesus soon brought communities into existence (see Galatians 4:13; Philemon 1:5; Col. 1:3–7; 1 Thessalonians 1:5; Hebrews 2:1–4; James 1:21; 1 Peter 1:22–25).

Letters May Have Originated As Homilies
Because letters were written to churches already in existence, they presuppose, but do not contain, that earliest proclamation. Even letters like Hebrews and 1 Peter, which may have originated as homilies, move well beyond the first stage of missionary preaching (see Hebrews 6:1–3; 1 Peter 2:2). These sermonic letters do, however, pay relatively explicit attention to the significance of Jesus’ earthly life and suffering (see Hebrews 5:7–10; 12:1–3; 1 Peter 2:21–25). Paul also appears to make reference to the narration of Jesus’ death in his mention of the initial preaching made to the Galatian churches, “before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly displayed as crucified” (Galatians 3:1). Otherwise, we find only fragments of actual preaching (see 1 Corinthians 15:1–8; Romans 10:14–17; Galatians 4:4–7; and 1 Thessalonians 1:9–10). These texts suggest that preaching was what turned hearers from their former lives to belief and commitment to the God who made Jesus both Christ and Lord (Acts 2:37; 10:44; Galatians 3:2–5; Hebrews 6:1; 1 Peter 1:13–22). It is in this sense that preaching was foundational for early Christianity: faith came through “hearing” (Romans 10:5–17; Galatians 3:5).

How Important Was Preaching For The Preservation Or Formation Of The Memory Of Jesus
A decision on this depends to some extent on one’s judgment concerning the missionary speeches found in the Acts of the Apostles. Similar speeches are put into the mouth of both Peter (Acts 2:16–36; 3:12–26; 10:34–43) and Paul (Acts 13:16–41; 17:22–31). Paul’s sermon to a pagan audience in Athens (17:22–31) is distinctive, but the others are strikingly similar. They maintain with more or less consistency that the age of fulfillment has dawned in Jesus, who, as a descendant of David, carried out a ministry among the people of Israel; that he was crucified and raised by God as the messiah; that the Holy Spirit confirmed God’s vindication of Jesus; and that Jesus would return again to judge the world. On the basis of this message, a call is made for repentance. In Peter’s speech of Acts 10:34–43, moreover, one can discern an outline resembling the Synoptic account of Jesus’ ministry.

The critical question here is the extent to which Acts uses genuinely traditional materials or patterns of preaching. The answer is made more difficult by observing Luke’s substantial literary creativity. That both Paul and Peter follow this pattern of preaching would seem to indicate its traditional character. But then we notice that Luke has Peter and Paul work very similar miracles and that, together with all the first leaders of the community, they are described in stereotypical terms for theological purposes of Luke’s own. We further observe that Luke, as a Hellenistic historian, uses speeches to interpret and advance his narrative; that he systematically reworks any source he uses; and that he is generally fond of archaizing the language, especially in the sayings material (see the canticles of Luke 1–2). On purely literary grounds, determining what is traditional and what is not becomes nearly impossible.

To challenge the antiquity of the speeches, however, does not deny that their pattern may have been traditional. In their focus on the death and resurrection of the Messiah in fulfillment of the Scripture as the basis for repentance, they agree with the summary statements of the kerygma one finds in the NT letters. Further than this one cannot go. While it is more than likely that some account of Jesus’ words and deeds was found even in the initial preaching, it is not possible to specify more closely what sort of materials would have been used, whether they would have been part of a standard repertoire, or what function they might have performed.

The Apologetic Function Of Preaching
A somewhat surer point of contact between the activity of preaching and the memory of Jesus may be found in the apologetic function of preaching. At least some early Christian preaching was done in Jewish synagogues (Acts 13:13–16; 14:1; 17:1–3; 18:4–5; 19:8). At times, it led to disputation with Jews who opposed this proclamation of a crucified messiah. Acts mentions several public controversies between the Christian Messianists and their fellow Jews (6:9–10; 9:22, 29; 18:4, 28). In two of them it is explicitly stated that the argument was over the messianic claims of Jesus, involving a disputation over the proper understanding of Torah (Acts 17:1–3; 18:4–5).

Early Christian preachers would have been required to respond to objections from other Jews such as we find answered in the Passion narratives of the Gospels: Was Jesus a sinner and a criminal? Did he die as one cursed by God? Was he rightly condemned as a seducer of the people by a legal Jewish court? Was his body stolen from the tomb by his disciples to perpetrate a fraud? If the death and resurrection of the Messiah was the focus of the early kerygma, it would also be the obvious point of attack for those rejecting its message, and therefore the first part of Jesus’ story requiring interpretation.

Worship
In worship, the convictions and experiences of religion come alive, and this context was integral for developing the memory of Jesus in the church. The community’s ritual and myth centered on what God had done through the death and resurrection of Jesus, so its memory of him played a significant role in its worship.

Places Of Worship: The Temple
The Christian community remembered that Jesus had cleansed the temple as a prophetic act (Mark 11:15–18; pars.) and had taught in its precincts before his death (Mark 11:27; 12:35, 41; pars.). In the narrative about the earliest Jerusalem church, Acts depicts the disciples attending temple services together (2:46; 3:1) and the apostles both preaching and healing in its courts (3:11–12; 5:42). We cannot be sure how long this continued, though it obviously came to an end with the destruction of the temple in 70 c.e. The practice seems to have had little effect on the memory of Jesus or even on the use of temple symbolism, which was employed early on (see 1 Corinthians 3:16-17; Ephesians 2:19-22; Hebrews 10:19-25; 1 Peter 2:4-8; Revelations 21:22).

Places Of Worship: The Synagogue
Both in Jerusalem and in the Diaspora, Jewish Christians shared in the worship of the synagogue, at least for a time. Acts portrays Christians as preaching Jesus in that context. At least some early messianists remained in the synagogue, since references in the NT indicate that these Christians were expelled from the synagogues by other Jews (Mark 13:9; Matthew 23:34; John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2; Acts 6:11–15; 18:7–17)—a practice that preceded the formal composition of the birkat ha minim (the “benedictions against the heretics” formulated sometime after 85 c.e., which finally forced the Christians out altogether). In the NT, “synagogue” is used only once for the Christian worship assembly (James 2:2; although cf. Proseuchē, “place of prayer,” in Acts 16:13, 16). The usual term is ekklēsia (e.g., 1 Corinthians 14:23; 1 Thessalonians 1:1). The main contribution of the synagogue to Christian worship was to supply the forms of prayer and the practice of reading and interpreting Torah.

Places Of Worship The House
The dominant place for Christian worship in the NT period was the house (oikia, oikos). Even before Pentecost, Acts shows us the Galilean disciples gathering in an “upper room” for prayer (Acts 1:13), and the first believers who attended temple services were also “breaking bread in their houses” (Acts 2:46). People gathered in households to hear preaching and break bread (Acts 10:33; 16:32; 18:7; 20:7–12) and to pray (12:12). Since the basic societal unit in the Roman Empire was the household, it is not by chance that “whole households” converted at once to the Christian faith (Acts 11:14; 16:15, 31; 18:8; John 4:53; 1 Corinthians 1:16), with the heads of such households probably providing the place for worship as well as leadership. In the NT, we find repeated mention of “the church” that meets at a certain individual’s house (Romans 16:5; 1 Corinthians 16:15, 19; Colossians 4:15; Phlemon 2).
The house setting probably had some impact on the self-identification of the community as the “household of God” (Ephesians 2:19; 1 Tim. 3:15; 1 Peter 4:17) and on the use of household ethics for exhortation, such as were employed in Hellenistic moral philosophy (see Colossians 3:18–4:6; Ephesians 5:21–6:9; Titus 2:1–10; 1 Peter 2:13–3:7). Moreover, this setting also had an influence on the use of terms like “edification” (oikodomein), which was used for the activity of establishing and maintaining community identity (Matthew 16:18; Romans 14:19; 15:2, 20; 1 Corinthians 3:9; 8:1; 10:23; 14:4, 17; 2 Corinthians 10:8; 13:10; Ephesians 4:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:11), and “steward,”(oikonomos), which was used for the leadership role within the community (1 Corinthians 4:1; 9:17; Col. 1:25; Titus 1:7; 1 Peter 4:10). This context is also reflected in some of Jesus’ sayings, where the household, the steward, and the master of the household all figure prominently (Mark 10:29–30; 13:34–35; Matthew 7:24–27; 12:25–29; 13:27, 52; 20:1; Luke 12:39–48; John 8:35; 14:2).

Forms Of Worship: Cultic Actions

Cultic actions are natural occasions for the transmission of communal memory. The two main cultic activities of the early church were baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Each attracted to itself a body of tradition. Baptism, of course, was the ritual of initiation into the community (Matthew 28:19; Acts 2:38, 41; 8:12, 36; 9:18; 10:48; 16:15, 33; 1 Corinthians 1:15–16) that, over time, replaced the Jewish ritual of circumcision (Col. 2:11–12). Aspects of the ritual action may be reflected in symbols of washing (Acts 22:16; 1 Corinthians 6:11; Ephesians 5:26; Titus 3:5; Hebrews 10:22), light (Ephesians 1:18; 5:8–9, 14; 2 Tim. 1:10; Hebrews 6:4; 1 Peter 2:9), the taking off and putting on of garments (Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22–25; Col. 3:8–10; James 1:21; 1 Peter 2:1), and the unification of opposites (1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:28; Col. 3:11). The symbolism of death and rising appears to be connected to baptism even before Paul (Romans 6:3–11; Col. 2:12) and is implied by the sayings of Jesus (Mark 10:39) as well as by the accounts of his baptism by John in the Jordan (Mark 1:9; Matthew 3:16; Luke 3:21; John 1:32–33). The Christian experience of baptism also provided a perspective for the reinterpretation of Torah, as in the typological reading of the exodus story in 1 Corinthians 10:1–5 and of the Noah story in 1 Peter 3:20–21.
The second cultic context for the development of the memory of Jesus was the meal. Acts lists “breaking bread in houses” as one of the activities of the first believers (2:42, 46) and describes one occasion of such activity at which time Paul also preached (Acts 20:7, 11; cf. 27:35). This meal was celebrated on the first day of the week (Sunday), which Paul also specifies as a “day of assembly” (1 Corinthians 16:2) and the Book of Revelation calls the “Lord’s day” (Revelations 1:10). As we have seen, all meals in Judaism had a certain sacred character and were accompanied by blessings. Such was undoubtedly also the case with these special meals, which are called love feasts (agapai) in Jude 12 (cf. 2 Peter 2:13, where there is a pun on this word in the Greek). Some if not all of these meals derived their special character from the remembrance of Jesus’ final meal with his disciples. Paul calls such a meal the Lord’s Supper (kyriakon deipnon; 1 Corinthians 11:20), and specifically connects the sharing of bread and wine at it to the actions and words of Jesus the night before his death (1 Corinthians 11:23–25):
I received from the Lord Jesus what I also delivered to you, that the Lord on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body…”
As the remembrance of the exodus at the Passover meal made that event real for every Jew, so the remembrance of Jesus’ words and gestures at his last meal makes effective the presence of the Lord.

Three Types Of Stories About Jesus
Three types of stories about Jesus would naturally attach themselves to this setting of the Lord’s Supper.

First, Paul’s use of this tradition is obviously close to the accounts of the last meal at which time Jesus performed those actions and said those words (Mark 14:22–25; Matthew 26:26–29; Luke 22:19–20).
Second, the meal context was also an appropriate setting for the memory of Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the multitudes (notice the language of blessing and breaking in these accounts; Mark 6:34–44; 8:1–10; Matthew 14:15–21; 15:32–39; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–14, 53–58).
Third, the conviction that Jesus was truly present as risen Lord among those who shared these meals (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:27–32) made them a fitting setting for the remembrance of the resurrection accounts in which Jesus ate and drank with those to whom he appeared (Luke 24:28–35, 41–43; John 21:9–14; cf. Acts 10:40–41).

Prayer
Influence Of The Synagogue Liturgy
Communal worship also involved the use of set prayer forms. In these we find the influence of the synagogue liturgy on early Christianity, as well as the decisive impact of the experience of Jesus in the lives of believers.

This is seen at once in the blessing formula (berakah), which, as we saw, was the standard form of Jewish prayer (cf. Rom 1:25; 9:5; 2 Corinthians 1:3–7; Ephesians 1:3–14; 1 Peter 1:3–9). In the NT occurrences, the stereotypical opening of “Blessed be the Lord” is fundamentally modified by the Christian conviction that Jesus is somehow also Lord (“Jesus is Lord”; Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 12:3; Philemon 2:11), so that these blessings begin, “Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The special filial relationship between Jesus and God is woven into this prayer formula (cf. Romans 15:6; 1 Corinthians 8:6; 2 Corinthians 11:31; Col. 1:3; 2 John 3).
A similar blessing formula is found in a prayer of Jesus, wherein he addresses God as Father (Luke 10:21; cf. Matthew 11:25–26):
I thank [exhomologoumai] thee Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yes, Father, for such was thy gracious will.
God is also addressed as Father in the prayer that, according to Luke 11:2–4 and Matthew 6:9–13, Jesus taught to his disciples. The two versions of the prayer are different, and Matthew’s seven-sectioned rendering more closely resembles the form of Jewish prayer. On major feasts, the amidah (prayers said while standing) consisted of seven rather than eighteen benedictions. The phrases of the Matthean version (esp. the fifth, sixth, and ninth) resemble parts of those benedictions, especially the doxological kaddish (sanctification of the name): “Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world which he created according to his will. May he establish his kingdom during your life.” The use of set prayer forms seems to have been a persistent feature of early Christian worship.

Maranatha
The mutual influence of the prayer forms of the early church and the living memory of Jesus can be seen especially in the preservation of three Hebrew and Aramaic expressions in early Christian worship. In 1 Corinthians 16:22, writing to a Greek-speaking, largely gentile community, Paul says, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come.” The phrase “our Lord, come!” (maranatha) is in Aramaic. That Paul can employ the Aramaic in this context and presume its intelligibility is fascinating. It indicates first that it was a foreign-language phrase used by the community itself, in all likelihood in its liturgy of the Lord’s Supper (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:26: “. . . you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”). Second, it means that Paul, who founded the community, handed on to it a tradition (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:23) that had its origin in Aramaic-speaking circles, probably in Palestine. Third, it indicates that Jesus was called Lord (maran) in the early Palestinian communities as well as in the Diaspora.

Abba
A second Aramaic expression quoted by Paul is “abba,” an affectionate term for “father.” Paul cites it in Galatians 4:6 (cf. Romans 8:15):

Because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying “Abba, Father.”

This is probably also a liturgical expression, as indicated by the context in Galatians (see 3:23–29). What is most striking here is not simply that the Spirit enables the cry, or that it is spoken in Aramaic by Greek-speaking Christians, but that the content of the cry, “Abba,” is most distinctively associated with Jesus in his earthly life. The most significant occurrence is when Jesus prays to God before his death (Mark 14:36):

Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me. Yet, not what I will, but what thou wilt.

Amen
The third expression is in Hebrew, and in it the interrelationship of the church’s prayer and the memory of Jesus is particularly complicated. It is the simple word “amen.” As used in Jewish prayer, it expressed an affirmative response (“so be it” see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 14:16) to a statement or wish made by others or to a prayer said by oneself. Typically it came at the end of a statement and in this form is used throughout the epistolary writings of the NT (Romans 1:25; 11:36; 15:33; 1 Corinthians 16:24; Galatians 1:5; Ephesians 3:21; Philemon 4:20; 1 Thessalonians 3:13; 1 Tim. 1:17; Hebrews 13:21; 1 Peter 4:11; 2 Peter 3:18; Jude 25; Revelations 1:6–7). On the other hand, one of the most distinctive aspects of Jesus’ own speech, as reported in all four Gospels, is his use of “amen.” Jesus, however, used it to affirm the truth not of another’s statement but always of his own, and he never said it at the end of a declaration but always at the beginning: “Amen, I say to you” (see, e.g., Mark 8:12; 11:23; Matthew 5:18; 16:28; Luke 4:24; 21:32; John 1:51; 5:19). In the light of this, one can only wonder at the characterization found in Revelations 3:14. The risen Lord, seen in a vision, employs the phrase “The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.” And in 2 Corinthians 1:18–20, again with specific reference to Jesus, Paul says,

As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been yes and no. For the son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not yes and no; but in him it is always yes. For all the promises of God find their yes in him. That is why we utter the Amen through him, to the glory of God.

Hymns
Alongside the prayers, the Christians also sang “hymns” to Christ (see the interesting reference to this practice in Pliny the Younger Letters 10.96.7). The worship services undoubtedly included the singing of songs, psalms, and hymns (1 Corinthians 14:26; Ephesians 5:19; Col. 3:16; Revelations 5:9; 14:3; 15:3). Through certain formal features—use of an introductory relative pronoun and rhythmic strophes—it is possible to detect at least fragments of such hymns in the NT epistolary literature, where they are used as the basis for exhortation (Philemon 2:6–11; Col. 1:15–20; 1 Tim. 3:16; 1 Peter 1:22–25; 3:18, 22). Of these, the hymns in 1 Peter and Philippians show the clearest interest in, and resemblance to, the memory of Jesus as described in the Gospels. Several of the hymns in the Book of Revelation (e.g., 4:11; 5:9) are addressed to both God and “the Lamb,” and are almost purely songs of praise.

Spiritual Utterances
The pervasiveness and importance of this aspect of early Christian worship are difficult to assess. There is scattered evidence of speaking in tongues and prophecy in several writings (see Mark 16:17; Acts 2:4; 11:27; 21:9–10; Romans 12:6; 1 Thessalonians 5:20; 1 Tim. 4:14; Revelations 19:10). We also hear of prophets as persons with gifts sufficiently regular in their manifestation to be recognized together with apostles and teachers (Acts 13:1; 1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 2:20; Revelations 10:7). We find a detailed account of these activities, however, only in 1 Corinthians 12:1–14:40, which is devoted to the problems generated by an unstructured expression of these gifts. We cannot even say whether the manifestation of these gifts took place in conjunction with, or separate from, other forms of worship, such as the Lord’s Supper. The distinctive feature of these forms of speech is that they are regarded as directly inspired by the Holy Spirit—in effect, by the Spirit of Jesus (1 Corinthians 12:4–11). Speaking in tongues was fundamentally an ecstatic mode of prayer (see 1 Corinthians 14:2, 14–16). Prophecy, in contrast, although it was equally inspired (1 Corinthians 12:10), had a rational element to it (1 Corinthians 14:19) and issued in speech intelligible to others (1 Corinthians 14:16). Paul therefore views prophecy as speech that can build up (oikodomein) the community in its faith (1 Corinthians 14:4–5, 12, 17, 24–25). This much is clear.

Prophetic “Revelations
More difficult to determine is the content of prophetic “revelations” (1 Corinthians 14:26, 30) and the relationship of these sayings to the memory of Jesus. If, on the pattern of oracles in Torah (Isa. 1:10; Jer. 2:2; Amos 7:16), “prophetic words” (2 Peter 1:19) were introduced as a “word” (2 Thessalonians 2:2), or the “word of God” (Revelations 1:2, 9; 19:9), or the “word of the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:15), then there could easily develop complex relationships between what came from the Lord as life-giving Spirit now present to the community (see 2 Corinthians 3:18) and what came from the Lord by way of the memory of what Jesus said in his earthly ministry (cf. the ambiguity in 1 Corinthians 7:10; 11:23; 14:37; l Thessalonians 4:2; 2 Thessalonians 3:6).

Example: Return “Like A Thief.”
An example of such complexity is the saying that Jesus would return “like a thief.” In Revelations 3:3b, we find it as a statement of the risen Lord, delivered through prophecy to the church:

If you will not awake, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you.

It appears as a classic case of prophetic revelation. Yet, immediately before it, comes “Remember then what you received and heard; keep that and repent” (Revelations 3:3a). Is the prophet repeating an earlier tradition in his own prophetic utterance? If so, what was its source? Next, we find the tradition in a letter by Paul, who tells the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 5:2; cf. 2 Peter 3:10):

You yourselves well know that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

Finally, we find it in the Gospels. In an eschatological discourse of the earthly Jesus (Matthew 24:42–43; Luke 12:39), there is this variation:

Watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched and not let his house be broken into.

The possible relations between these versions are obviously manifold. The prophetic utterance to the community could have initiated the saying, subsequently becoming part of the memory of Jesus reported in the Gospels. Or the prophetic word could have recalled in the power of the Spirit a word said by Jesus during his ministry, and this prophetic utterance then might have affected the way it was reported in the Gospel narrative. We cannot, it goes without saying, determine the direction of the flow of influence. But we can observe the complexity, learning from it how the memory of Jesus was undoubtedly influenced by what was said by him in the past as teacher and what was perceived to be coming from him in the present as risen Lord. The process is made even more complex when we remember that the memory of Jesus could also have been affected by cultural parallels.

Example: The Judge Is At The Door”
In another example—the expression “the judge is at the door”—the point is made even clearer. In Revelations 3:20, there is a prophetic message of the risen Lord:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him and him with me.

In the Letter of James 5:8–9, we find the same image in an eschatological warning:

Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble, brethren, against one another, that you may not be judged. Behold, the judge is standing at the doors.

We also find the image in an eschatological saying of Jesus (Matthew 24:33; Mark 13:29):

So also, when you see these things, you know that he is near, at the very doors.

The same image, in sum, occurs in a prophetic utterance of the risen Lord, in a paraenetic letter, and in the Gospels. It is thus evident that an interrelation exists between prophetic utterances in the community and the narrative development of the memory of Jesus in the early church.

Reading and Preaching
Here in all probability is a case of a practice being so well established that we find little specific evidence for it. The church remembered that Jesus had read and preached in the synagogue (Luke 4:16–30; cf. Mark 6:1–6; Matthew 13:53–58; John 6:59), as Paul had also done (Acts 13:13–16). Indeed, Acts includes an episode of Paul preaching to an assembly gathered for the Lord’s Supper (20:7–9). Yet we have no specific report of the reading of Torah in the Christian assembly for the earliest period, although Paul tells Timothy to “attend to the reading, prayer, and teaching” in the church at Ephesus in his absence (1 Tim. 4:13). The practice was so much a part of synagogue worship that we can assume its continuance in Christian worship with some confidence, particularly since it continued down into the period for which we have ample documentation (3rd and 4th centuries). Furthermore, the reading of Paul’s letters out loud to the gathered assembly (2 Corinthians 7:8; Col. 4:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:27; 2 Thessalonians 3:14) suggests that a precedent existed for such public reading. The two NT letters that have often been thought to have originated as sermons—1 Peter and Hebrews—are marked by a very vigorous use of scriptural interpretation, such as would be appropriate for homiletic midrash. It would seem that such a context could account for the creative formation of some Gospel narratives in which Torah has shaped—both explicitly and implicitly—stories about Jesus. Beyond such suggestive remarks, however, one cannot go.

Teaching for the Common Life
The memory of Jesus was also selected and shaped by the experience of churches as they tried to live out the implications of their new identity within the structures of the world. The question of how to live in the light of their transcendent and powerful transformation was real. But equally pressing were the questions posed by their mundane circumstances. The first Christians had to deal with critical and obviously spiritual issues such as the discernment of true prophecy from counterfeit (1 Corinthians 14:29; 1 Thessalonians 5:19–21; 1 John 4:1–3), but they were equally required to answer questions about the manifestations of the Spirit in their life together (Galatians 5:13–26), a life that included the realms of political and social structures, work, leisure, diet, and sexual activity. Did their new experience of God in Jesus have any implications for these aspects of their lives?

The necessity of coming to terms with such areas accounts for the development of teaching (didaskalia, didachē) in the early church. Teaching is an activity with many functions and settings, and the traditions that can be associated with it are extensive. In Acts 19:9–10, Paul is said to have spent two years in Ephesus debating in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. From Paul’s writings, it is clear that he saw himself as a teacher to his communities (1 Corinthians 4:17; cf. 1 Tim. 2:7; 2 Tim. 1:11). If he followed the practice of some Cynic philosophers, he may even have taught his close followers while practicing his trade as a leather worker (Acts 18:3; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; 2 Thessalonians 3:6–12). Paul also taught his communities through trusted delegates whom he sent to remind them of his teachings and instructions (1 Corinthians 4:17; Philemon 2:19–24; 1 Tim. 4:11; 2 Tim. 2:2; Titus 2:1). There were local teachers as well in the Pauline and other early Christian churches (Acts 13:1; 1 Corinthians 12:28; Romans 12:7; Galatians 6:6; Ephesians 4:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:12; James 3:1). In 1 Corinthians 14:26, “teaching” is placed among charismatic gifts such as tongues and prophecy, although most teaching was probably carried out in a non-ecstatic context.

Some communities may have followed the synagogue practice in which the study of Torah and prayer flowed naturally into each other; thus the synagogue was both a house of study and place of prayer. If Christian teaching took place in this context, we can locate such communal activities as midrash and diatribe, both of which appear in NT writings as the literary residue of an individual author, but also presuppose a prior process that is communal and scholastic in nature.

Such a context allows us to make some sense of the Pauline prohibitions against women speaking in the assembly (1 Corinthians 14:34–36; 1 Tim. 2:11–15), even though it is clear that they are already praying and prophesying during worship (1 Corinthians 11:5). If we take seriously the mention of teaching (1 Corinthians 14:26) and learning (1 Tim. 2:11–12) in these passages, we may find Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:2–16) clinging to the cultural perception that moral teaching was a distinctively masculine obligation, specifically associated with the transmission of moral precepts from father to son (see 1 Corinthians 4:14–15), whereas motherhood was the culturally appropriate mode for women to exercise influence over children’s formation (1 Tim. 2:15). Despite this, it is clear that women were in fact also teaching—otherwise there would be no need for correction—and taking an active part in the Pauline mission (Romans 16:1, 3, 6, 12).

Clarifying The Relationship Of Ambiguous Life To The Gospel
The ambiguities of life together, combined with the need to clarify the relationship of that life to the gospel, proved to be influential in shaping the memory of Jesus. The questions formed by the church’s life stimulated the memory of what Jesus had said and done, and the framing of those questions inevitably had impact on the eventual shape of the memory as it was passed on. At the same time, there was undoubtedly something to remember. The process was not one of untrammeled creative fantasy. The first generation of believers was not so caught up in a charismatic cloud that it could not distinguish between its own handiwork and tradition, or that it thought that such a distinction was unimportant.

The best example is Paul’s carefully qualified discussion of virginity and marriage in 1 Corinthians 7. In successive sentences, he distinguishes relative degrees of authority for his statements. In 7:8, he says “To the unmarried and widows, I say . . .”; but in 7:10, he asserts, “To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord, that a wife should not separate from her husband . . .” We see here that Paul distinguishes what he offers on his own authority and what is backed by a command of the Lord. We find, in fact, such an absolute prohibition against divorce enunciated by Jesus in the Gospels (Mark 10:11; cf. Matthew 5:31–32; 19:3–9; Luke 16:18). We do not know, unfortunately, whether Paul had that command by oral tradition from the past or by prophetic announcement in the present—or both. But he makes clear he did not invent the saying. This is made even more obvious when he continues in 7:12, “To the rest I say, not the Lord . . . ,” while in 7:25 he writes, “Concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion.”

Finding Precedents For The Community Practices
In response to the questions raised by their worldly circumstances, teachers sought to find precedent for the community’s own practices (Why do we act this way?), and guidance for the community’s decisions (What should we do in this situation?). They sought to find both in the words and deeds of Jesus. That they did so is the clearest sign of the importance of the memory of Jesus for the identity of the Christian community.

The community could, for example, find precedents for its practice of sending out preachers two by two (Acts 13:2; 15:40; 18:5; 1 Corinthians 9:6) and for the shaking the dust off their feet when rejected by their hearers (Acts 13:51) in the practice and commands of Jesus (Mark 6:7–12; Matthew 10:14; Luke 9:5; 10:1, 11). Or, as the preachers exercised gifts of healing within the community (1 Corinthians 12:9, 28–30), they could find the pattern of their healing by prayer and their anointing for forgiveness of sins (James 5:14–15) in the healing deeds of Jesus that led to the forgiveness of sins (Mark 2:9–10; pars). When they did not observe the Sabbath the way other Jews did but met together on the resurrection day, they could find precedent for their freedom from the Sabbath law in the deeds and words of Jesus (Mark 2:23–28; pars.; John 5:2–9). Those who chose not to observe days of fasting (Galatians 4:10; Romans 14:5–6) found an example in the freedom of Jesus from fasting (Mark 2:18–21; pars.). Those who did choose to fast could also find warrant in the words of Jesus (Mark 2:19; Matthew 6:16–18). Those who enjoyed open fellowship with Jew and Gentile alike (Galatians 2:12–13; Acts 11:1–18) found a precedent in the free fellowship Jesus enjoyed with sinners and tax collectors (Mark 2:15–17; pars.). In cases like these, it is impossible for us to determine whether the practice came from the narrative example or whether the narrative example was at least partially shaped by the practice.

Guidance For Future Practices
Teaching also sought to provide guidance for future practice, since the demands of the gospel were not obvious in every circumstance. Paul was able, we have seen, to apply a saying of the Lord to one aspect of sexual behavior, namely, divorce, and he could call on the whole range of Jewish precedent to exclude obvious sexual immorality (see 1 Corinthians 5:1–5; 1 Thessalonians 4:3–8). But for other aspects of sexual behavior, he could offer only advice.

We see a similar situation with regard to work. Should Christians who expect the imminent return of the Lord continue in their worldly occupations, making a living and earning money for their families? The answer was not obvious (1 Corinthians 7:29–31). Paul faced a critical instance of the problem in Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 4:11; 2 Thessalonians 3:6–12). Here he reminds the community not only of his own example of working for a living (2 Thessalonians 3:7–9) but also of his earlier command that all should work (3:10), a directive he refers to as part of the tradition they had received from him (3:6). Following upon this, he emphatically repeats the phrase, “in the Lord Jesus Christ” (3:12). Had Paul handed on to them sayings of the Lord regarding work? He was certainly aware of specific commands of Jesus concerning such practical matters as support for the gospel (see 1 Corinthians 9:14; 1 Tim. 5:18). And if so, did these commands resemble the sort of sayings we find in Luke 10:7; 12:37–48; and 17:7–10? We cannot be certain, but it is possible.

Example: The Problem Of Diet and Material Possessions
Another example is provided by the problem of diet in Corinth. Did Christians need to establish alternative sources for their food to ensure its purity, or could they purchase and eat their food anywhere without regard for its possible contact with idols? In Paul’s careful discussion of this issue (1 Corinthians 8–10), he does not refer to any decision made by the church as a whole (cf. Acts 15:23–29), nor does he refer to any sayings of Jesus. In some communities, however, a similar problem must have activated the memory of a teaching by Jesus on just this point, for in Jesus’ controversy with the Pharisees over purification, the direction of Jesus’ teaching is succinctly summarized: “Thus he declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19).

Still other practical questions required answering. How were Christians to use their material possessions? Were the commandments of Torah binding on them, and if so, how? Their memory of Jesus made it clear that the love of God and neighbor was at the heart of their obligation (Mark 12:28–34; Matthew 22:34–40; Luke 10:25–28; Galatians 5:14; Romans 13:8–10; James 2:8). But what did that mean in specific cases? Who was the neighbor? These issues are raised in the epistolary literature, and we find teachings on these issues in the sayings and stories of the gospel tradition (see, e.g., Luke 10:25–37; 12:13–34; 16:1–13). The precise connection between the questions and the apparent answers reflected in the narratives about Jesus cannot, however, be firmly established.

Distinguishing Between The Earthly Jesus And The Risen Lord
Today’s critical reader, therefore, faces a very real problem: it is impossible to sort out exactly what came from the earthly Jesus and what originated in the spirit-filled utterances from the “risen Lord.” This was not, however, a problem for those who lived by these utterances. For them, the same Holy Spirit at work in the deeds and words of Jesus in the past was at work among them now. Both the present worship of Jesus as Lord and the memory of Jesus as teacher shaped the identity of the church. The selecting and shaping of that memory were regarded not as betrayal or distortion but as a deeper insight and understanding of the past by those who continued to live in the presence of the beloved (see John 2:22; 7:39; 12:16; 20:9–10). The words of Jesus in his last discourse in the Fourth Gospel (John 14:25–26) give accurate expression to the religious understanding that underlies this development of tradition concerning Jesus:

These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

Posted in Church History, Jesus | Tagged Anamnesis, Community Context: Hymns, Community Context: Prayer, Community Context: Preaching, Community Context: Worship, Forms Of Worship, Luke Timothy Johnson, Maranatha, the memory of Jesus, The Spread Of Christianity, Three Types Of Stories About Jesus, Tradition | 1 Comment »

Reading Selections from “Two Thomisms, Two Modernities” by Russell Hittinger

April 6, 2010

F. Russell Hittinger

From a reader of the essay: “It is rare that an essay aids one in understanding the landscape of one’s own faith community and tradition, but Russell Hittinger’s article did just that for me. Hittinger admirably illustrates how the bifurcation of two Thomisms—one focusing on the metaphysics of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae and the second concentrating on the social and political questions of the Secunda Pars—is intellectually untenable.

The fissure caused by this bifurcated reading of St. Thomas is perhaps more radical for Catholicism in America than Hittinger hints. He writes: “We need only survey the chronic and significant differences of opinion over the systematic grounding of natural law today, as well as the extraordinarily complicated and controversial skirmish lines over questions of moral theology, to see that this is so.”

Indeed, he is correct, but I suspect that the ramifications extend to liturgical questions, doctrinal opinions, devotional practices, attitudes toward ecumenism, ecclesiological models, understandings of authority, and the general understanding of how Catholics are in relation to the world at large.

Moreover, John Paul II clearly understood the divide in terms not only of the universal Church but also of the intellectual superficiality of reading one pars at the expense of another pars. The whole of his pontificate can be seen as a magisterial effort to restore the Church to reading the Summa as a whole. Every Sunday we pray at Mass that we believe in “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” Intellectually, we should recommit ourselves to reading the whole Summa”

Russell Hittinger is an internationally recognized contributor to major contemporary debates in jurisprudence, law, and ethics and has held professorships at the Catholic University of America, Princeton University, Fordham University, and New York University. Here he traces the historical background of the rise of two Thomisms and the two Modernisms in Catholic thought over the past hundred and fifty years and then tries to untangle them.

This seminal article in First Things back in 2007 it helped me sort out some questions that had been bubbling up as I approached the topic of Personalism in the thought of Jacques Maritain and later in John Paul II. Some highlights here:

Different Approaches to the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas
The past century and a half of papal teaching on modern times often seems a tangle: any number of different strands — theology, Thomistic philosophy, social theory, economics — all snarled together. And yet a little historical analysis may help loosen the knot. In fact, a careful reading of papal documents reveals one of the main causes of the tangle. Throughout Catholic thought over the past hundred and fifty years, there have run two entirely distinct conceptions of modernity and two quite different uses of Thomism — a combination of four threads weaving in and out of the Catholic Church’s response to the strangeness of modern times.

For example, several modern popes have championed the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, but they did so in very dissimilar ways. At times, a reactionary, legislative, and disciplinary form of Thomism was deployed, directed inward at members of the Church, chiefly about uses of philosophy in the study of sacred doctrine. At other times, Thomism was allowed to play a more constructive, synthetic, and open role, directed outward to the world, chiefly on questions of social and political order.

Views of Modernity
Meanwhile, modernity came to be seen in two ways. There were the economic, political, and legal problems of modernity — the aspects of modern life that made necessary the development of “social doctrine.” And yet modernity was also understood as a philosophical and theological system that displaced, or at least threatened, what could be called the praeambula fidei — the “preambles of faith,” which include the truths of natural reason, particularly on philosophical issues close to sacred doctrine.

An examination of the historical documents can trace each of these distinct threads — and, along the way, solve some of the puzzles of Catholic intellectual history. The two Thomisms and the two Modernisms do not line up, but their interplay helps explain how St. Thomas’ moral, legal, and political thought was gradually detached from his metaphysical and theological thought. And it helps explain, as well, why John Paul II used so much of his papacy in an effort to reunite the Church’s understanding of both Thomas Aquinas and modernity.

An Early History
Until the late nineteenth century, the word modern was rarely used for describing or listing errors. Indeed, in the eighteenth century Catholicism had comfortably — perhaps all too comfortably — adapted itself to many aspects of modernity. So, for instance, with the discovery of the New World and the rush of Catholic missions to far-flung lands, many Catholics understood that they were living in a new era of exploration, industry, education, art, literature, devotion, science, and philosophy.

The Reformation and the religious wars, culminating in the 1648 treaties of Westphalia, destroyed the old medieval common law of Christendom by creating a system of states having diverse confessional allegiances. A new common law, however, evolved among the peoples under Catholic rule. It was built on a complex and evolving set of treaties, informal agreements, and legal fictions through which the Church conceded to Catholic sovereigns rights over many aspects of ecclesiastical life — in exchange for which those sovereigns protected the Church from schism and supplied the resources for missions across the world. The sovereigns were deemed junior apostles, entitled to rule “in trust” the everyday life of the Church in Europe and her colonies.

Catholicism thus developed a remarkable symbiosis with the new system of modern sovereignty — so long as it was in the hands of Catholic families. This political system is what writers in the nineteenth century called the ancien régime, because Catholics had no living memory of any other order. But it was, in fact, neither ancient nor medieval. It was, instead, something quite modern — and for the Church it worked, off and on, reasonably well.

The French Revolution, however, upended this modern system of religious and political Christendom. France’s 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy gave church governance not to the mischievous yet familiar Catholic families but to the nation, and this French model soon spread elsewhere, particularly to the former European colonies in Latin America. The clergy became civil servants, elected by democratic vote. In other words, modernity saw the transference of rights that had once belonged to the Church itself. Catholic kings received those rights first, but the nation-states would soon inherit them — nation-states that were, as often as not, governed by a doctrine of often anti-Catholic laicism.

After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Congress of Vienna attempted to restore the earlier model of a religious sovereign — the union of throne and altar, brought back to tamp down the fire of social rebellion. Thus, encyclicals of the era urged Catholics to obey legitimate authority, beginning with the pope’s own temporal authority in the Papal States. But the revolutions of 1848 swept aside the Restoration, and, with the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, something we might call the Paper Wars commenced.

The Paper Wars and The Syllabus of Errors
The Syllabus of Errors derives from one simple historical fact: In 1860, Pius IX lost his Italian dominions to the House of Savoy, and the Papal States came to an end. The immediate effect was the removal of the pope from the political problems of governing, but there was a second and unexpected effect: Along the way, the papacy lost the inhibitions about speaking on political matters that actual rulers must have. But how should the Church speak? There had been no systematic political theology for two centuries, so Pius IX and his advisers cobbled together a number of pontifical statements and admonitions, grouped them under various headings, and fired away.

The Syllabus of Errors was the result. Attached to the encyclical Quanta Cura, the Syllabus lists eighty condemned propositions, and even the most sympathetic churchmen quickly realized the problem of carrying on a theological discussion in this way. Published in a new era of daily newspapers and the telegraph, the list of errors instantly reached millions of readers, nearly all of whom were confused.

The format was particularly vexatious: Almost every erroneous proposition is stated in the affirmative, leaving the reader to puzzle out the correct Catholic view by negation. So, for example, the eightieth proposition condemns the idea that the pope is obliged to “reconcile himself to contemporary liberalism.” The negation might be that “the pope is obliged not to reconcile himself to contemporary liberalism,” or it might be that “the pope is not obliged to reconcile himself to liberalism (though he could, if he wanted).” It might even be that “the pope is obliged not to reconcile himself to contemporary liberalism (but liberalism understood in some other way might be all right).”

Still, despite such confusions, Pius IX had a clear target in mind with the Syllabus. This was not a disciplinary encyclical on matters inside the Church. Over and over, in seventy-three of the eighty propositions, the Syllabus takes aim at the modern common law of Christendom. Pius IX flatly rejects the rights once exercised by Catholic sovereigns and then by nation-states. He declares, in effect, the independence of the Church not only in matters of ordinary governance (sacraments and the episcopacy) but also with regard to schools, religious orders, marriages, families, and sodalities.

Late in 1869, the First Vatican Council convened. Parts of the Syllabus were reworked into five chapters and twenty-one canons of the first draft of a conciliar document, De Ecclesia Christi, where they seemed to add up to something like a separation of the Catholic Church from the formerly Catholic states. In the end, the chapters and canons drawn from the Syllabus were dropped when the bishops could not agree about any overarching theory to unify them. They did agree that the Church is independent of the nation-states. And, on that principle, they reconfirmed the universality of the Church, giving the papacy universal jurisdiction to try to solve the problem, and went home.

Leo XIII
The result was that, when Leo XIII was elected pope eight years later, he inherited an incomplete revolution. He had no new catechism or full set of conciliar doctrines, and no part of the revolution had been canonically codified. He inherited a fact rather than a coherent theory.

At least two things needed to be put into some kind of synthesis: the Syllabus of Errors and Vatican I’s constitution for the Church, Dei Filius. The Syllabus would need to be converted not merely into negations but into a positive civil doctrine. For that matter, Dei Filius asserted that God is the “Lord of the Sciences,” that faith and reason have distinct yet mutually supportive objects and ends, and that the “assent of faith is by no means a blind movement of the mind.” The preambles of the faith, in other words, needed to be clarified and organized for modern times.

For his answer, Leo chose to move the school he had founded, the Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, from Perugia to Rome and to make cardinals out of two of its faculty members (including his brother). A year later, in 1879, he issued his great philosophical encyclical, Aeterni Patris.

Aeterni Patris insists that a sound philosophy is needed “in order that sacred theology may receive and assume the nature, form, and genius of a true science.” He advocated the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas as the modern antidote: “While, therefore, We hold that every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a willing and grateful mind, We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences.”

What Leo saw is this: The issues of faith and reason highlighted in Dei Filius could not be advanced by philosophical eclecticism. Since the sixteenth century, he complained, philosophical systems have “multiplied beyond measure,” and even Catholic philosophers have accommodated themselves to a curricular mentality that “depends on the authority and choice of any professor.”

Leo proposed that Thomas be held out as the “Master” whose doctrines must enjoy “excellence over others” — but his purpose was not to reduce the Catholic mind to a homogeneous Thomism. Rather, it was to achieve an integrated response to issues that were both theological and political. When we read Aeterni Patris as a whole, we see that Leo framed the revival of Christian philosophy chiefly in the context of the ongoing political problems: “False conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State.” Indeed, throughout Leo’s work — in the some 110 encyclicals and other teaching letters — Thomas is rarely discussed or referenced apart from social and political problems.

Leo’s two aims — picking up the pieces from the Syllabus and fleshing out Dei Filius — were not without tension. In the subjects close to sacred doctrine, it was crucial to achieve a rather tightly organized account of the relation between philosophy and the deposit of faith. Even slight changes in the philosophy entail new estimations of the doctrine. Social and political issues, however, allow much more room for creative maneuver, and there emerged a kind of broad Thomism suitable for these issues. Thomists developed rather freewheeling accounts of the political, economic, legal, and social order, and they showed considerable ingenuity in making their accounts look continuous with the work of the Angelic Doctor.

A New Kind Of Paper War
Turning away from the example of Pius IX, Leo undertook a new kind of paper war. He took the outmoded structure of a medieval scholastic article (for example, what we find in St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, with the question, the objections, the sed contra, the response, and the replies to objections), changed the questions, and rebuilt the article in the prose of an encyclical teaching. It was in part dialectic, in part systematic, and in part apologetic. There was no need to make lists of errors that would leave Catholics scratching their heads.

The affirmations to be negated in Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus became affirmations to be affirmed in Leo XIII’s famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum — positive statements of Catholic teaching on modern social and political issues. The underlying Thomistic doctrine gave the body of work at least the appearance of coherence, and, as Leo’s papal successors, together with lay and clerical scholars, continued the project, there emerged a remarkably structured but evolving body of social doctrine.

Pius X
All of this makes more curious Pope Pius X’s sudden condemnation of Modernism, which appeared in two documents in 1907. On July 3 of that year, the Vatican published a decretum called Lamentabili Sane, containing a syllabus of sixty-five Modernist propositions to be condemned. Two months later, on September 8, the pope issued the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Admitting that his exposition was unusually prolix and didactic, Pius X insisted that such was necessary to deal with Modernism as a “whole system,” indeed as “the synthesis of all heresies.” Modernists were accused of reducing revelation to experience, Scripture to history, and doctrine to evolving symbols.

If, however, we examine the condemnations with an eye to the pattern of two Modernisms and two Thomisms, much comes clear — for Pius X had gone back into the mode of making lists of errors, but he focused his attention not on social modernity but on the doctrinal and metaphysical aspects of modern thought. Lamentabili Sane not only listed sixty-five errors; to complicate matters, it also referenced the 1794 encyclical Auctorem Fidei, which condemned eighty-five further propositions in connection with Jansenism. A scrupulous scholar under ecclesiastical discipline now found himself reckoning with 150 propositions — 230, if the Syllabus of Errors is added in. Who could keep track of all these errors?

…For Pius, the sure sign of Modernism was derogation from, or even disparagement of, scholasticism. “Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is tending to Modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for the scholastic method.” To be heard carping at scholasticism was a ground for dismissing faculty and administrators at ecclesiastical schools.

Lest there be any doubt what is meant by scholasticism, Pius X issued in 1914 a motu proprio called Doctoris Angelici, which put the Thomistic norm for studies (in degree-granting ecclesiastical schools) explicitly under precept from the Holy See. To curb the private opinions of professors, Pius X ordered that the Summa Theologiae itself be used as the text of the lectures and that professorial comments be restricted to Latin. The Thomistic fundamentals, or “capital theses,” were not to be “placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or the other.”

A few weeks later, just before Pius X’s death, Cardinal Lorenzelli, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Studies, published a list of twenty-four theses to be affirmed — including, at the very beginning, a statement of divine being as pure act, in contrast to the admixture of potency in creatures. In other words, these were metaphysical theses of just the sort that Pius X had said cannot be placed “in the category of opinions capable of being debated.” Everyone understood that Lorenzelli’s “XXIV Theses” were aimed in the direction of the sixteenth-century Jesuit scholastic philosopher Francisco Suárez, beginning with the doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence in creatures, which was not generally held by his followers.

The Two Thomisms
By the time Pius X died in 1914, the Vatican had in place two entirely different Thomisms, one broad and oriented to social questions, the other narrow and focused on capita that could not be debated. For a good example, look at the international congress in Granada that was planned for 1917, the third centenary of the death of Suárez. The Catholic press, of course, noted that the XXIV Theses had impeached the reliability of Suárez on certain questions of metaphysics. Moreover, the newly drafted Code of Canon Law (1917) required those in charge of religious and clerical formation to teach the “principles of the Angelic Doctor and hold to them religiously.” The congress did not fall under the discipline of canon law, but it was an awkward moment nonetheless, and Rome’s solution was to recommend that the congress focus on the social, political, and international-law aspects of Suárez’s thought. On these matters, one was permitted to avow an evolving line of thought and to celebrate its utility in handling modern problems.

And yet, beginning with Benedict XV, the papacy grew increasingly unwilling to enforce Pius X’s official Thomism, even within the seminaries and the religious orders. While the exhortations of Leo XIII and the precepts of Pius X were duly noted by Benedict and his successors, rigorous enforcement proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, only five months after Pius X’s death, Benedict said that there is room “for divergent opinions” so long as they constitute no “harm to faith or discipline” and so long as they are expressed “with due moderation.”

Pius XI’s Studiorum Ducem
With the disaster of the First World War and the rise of the totalitarian regimes, the papacy’s attention was funneled back into the social and political issues. The shift of magisterial attention to political modernity is particularly evident during the pontificate of Pius XI, who became pope in 1922. In the 1923 encyclical Studiorum Ducem, he approvingly quoted Pius X’s admonition that there must be no deviation from Thomas in metaphysical issues. This core of metaphysical systematics must be preserved intact, even while allowing the “lovers of Thomas” to engage in “honorable rivalry in a just and proper freedom which is the life-blood of studies.”

But what is most striking about Studiorum Ducem is the interest in the social and political issues. In Ubi Arcano (1922), Pius XI had insisted: “There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.” Accordingly, in Studiorum Ducem he emphasized Thomas’ contributions “in the science of morals, in sociology and law, by laying down sound principles of legal and social, commutative and distributive justice, and explaining the relations between justice and charity.” He noted particularly “those superb chapters in the second part of the Summa Theologiae on paternal or domestic government, the lawful power of the State or the nation, natural and international law, peace and war, justice and property, laws and the obedience they command, the duty of helping individual citizens in their need and cooperating with all to secure the prosperity of the State, both in the natural and the supernatural order.”

“It is therefore to be wished,” Pius XI concluded, “that the teachings of Aquinas, more particularly his exposition of international law and the laws governing the mutual relations of peoples, became more and more studied, for it contains the foundations of a genuine ‘League of Nations.’”

Prima Pars Vs Secunda Pars
On paper, Thomas’ metaphysics remained the standard, but in practice Pius XI focused not on the prima pars, with its metaphysical armature, but rather the secunda pars of the Summa, on human conduct. While Pius XI never separated the two Thomisms — his encyclicals are as elegantly synthetic as were Leo’s — he focused intently, in the 1920s and 1930s, on Thomistic resources for the political and social problems.

Remember the four threads we set out to untangle in the last century and a half of papal teaching — the two Thomisms and the two Modernisms. On the one hand, there was a constructive and open form of Thomism, which began as a way to discuss political and social issues. On the other hand, there was a legislative and disciplinary form of Thomism, developed originally to discuss sacred doctrines and the metaphysical preambles to faith. Meanwhile, there were two ways to understand modernity: first, as a set of social and political problems brought to a head by the French Revolution and the loss of the Papal States; and, second, as a defiantly nationalist, antireligious, and anti-Catholic philosophical movement.

It would be convenient if the two pairs lined up in what appears to be their natural order: the disciplinary Thomism used for philosophical Modernism, and the constructive Thomism used for political modernity. Unfortunately, that was not always the case, and the two Thomisms and two Modernisms cannot be aligned in papal documents without a great deal of guesswork.

Still, the disciplinary form of Thomism may have created more problems than it solved, even when properly applied to matters of sacred doctrine. Lists of errors and truths never really achieved the results for which they were designed. Whether in response to political or philosophical modernity, the syllabi sparked confusions and resentments. In the news-hungry environment of the modern media that emerged in the nineteenth century, these lists invited constant spin on the part of the Church’s friends and enemies. They did not substitute for a catechism, and they certainly did not equal the Leonine practice of encyclical teaching, which was more effective, both ad extra and ad intra.

Nor did the list-making approach play to the strong suit of Thomism, which requires not only definitions and conclusions but also a deeply textured set of questions and distinctions. The metaphysical issues were complex, subtle, and difficult on their own terms, never mind the practical questions of how to instantiate and enforce them in educational institutions. To put beyond debate the most intellectually challenging work of Thomas Aquinas did no favors for his heritage. A slight and passing familiarity with Thomas’ system, usually acquired secondhand and enforced as a party line, was almost bound to breed that kind of contempt that comes from bored students who know a little but not enough.

The Decline Of Thomistic Metaphysics
We often think of John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963), with its long list of human rights, as the epitome of the Second Vatican Council’s spirit of aggiornamento. Of the twenty-five discrete rights listed in that encyclical, however, all but three are quotations or paraphrasings of Leo, Pius XI, and Pius XII. Moreover, by the time of Pacem in Terris, lay and clerical neo-Thomists — Maritain, Murray, Rommen, Journet, Simon — had produced a widely read body of scholarly literature on these subjects.

As ecclesiastical discipline declined precipitously in the 1950s and 1960s, systematic Thomism underwent a kind of defenestration. No longer privileged in the curriculum of either seminaries or Catholic schools, Thomistic metaphysics became a scholar’s specialty consigned to a chapter in the history of medieval philosophy. But we should not be surprised that in the topics related to human action — intention, choice, the moral virtues, natural law, and political philosophy — Thomism survived as worthy of study beyond the historical cubbyholes.

And yet the gradual separation of the social doctrine from the overall system of Thomas began to create the impression that the philosophy of practical reason was freestanding: a kind of first philosophy in its own right, connected to the metaphysical system and even sacred theology only by way of dotted lines. The two Thomisms ceased to be deeply integrated — with the secunda pars of the Summa Theologiae (on human action) read separately from the doctrine of providence, the metaphysics, and the anthropology of the prima pars. We need only survey the chronic and significant differences of opinion over the systematic grounding of natural law today, as well as the extraordinarily complicated and controversial skirmish lines over questions of moral theology, to see that this is so.

John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio
When he became pope in 1978, John Paul II inherited the problem of how to put the two Thomisms back together. As outward looking a pope as we have had since Leo XIII — as socially and politically concerned — John Paul II nonetheless saw that the solution required him to emphasize, throughout his pontificate, that Thomistic metaphysics demands study. Speaking at his alma mater, the Angelicum, on the anniversary of Aeterni Patris in 1979, he said that “the philosophy of St. Thomas is a philosophy of being, that is, of the ‘act of existing’ (actus essendi) whose transcendental value paves the most direct way to rise to the knowledge of subsisting Being and pure Act, namely to God.” In his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, he again warned that theology needs both analytic rigor and a sapiential dimension drawn from a philosophy of being.

The real questions facing John Paul were, first, how to rekindle interest in sapiential philosophy without resorting to ecclesiastical imposition from on high, and, second, how to show its relevance to the practical problems. He found a solution that stood close to the genius of his magisterium. He contended in Fides et Ratio that anthropology is the nexus of the two Thomisms: “Metaphysics should not be seen as an alternative to anthropology, since it is metaphysics which makes it possible to ground the concept of personal dignity in virtue of their spiritual nature. In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”

Far from conforming human persons to a philosophical system, the Church has held Thomas as the master because humans themselves thirst for the kind of wisdom Thomas pursued and taught. The metaphysical questions are neither divine nor angelic, but human — because man himself stands at the frontier of matter and spirit. As John Paul II said: “The segmentation of knowledge, with its splintered approach to truth and consequent fragmentation of meaning, keeps people today from coming to an interior unity. How could the Church not be concerned by this? It is the Gospel which imposes this sapiential task directly upon her pastors.”

A Teacher On The Integrity Of The Human Person
Some have claimed that, in all this, John Paul II is subordinating both human action and metaphysics to a philosophy of personalism, but that misjudges his steady desire to repristinate (vocab: To restore to an original state) what Leo XIII had proposed in Aeterni Patris. We have come a long way from Pius X when John Paul II insists that the Angelic Doctor should also be called the Doctor Humanitatis. Thomas is recommended not as a tool for weeding out disorder within the Church but rather as a teacher on the integrity of the human person. There can be no social doctrine without reckoning with “the integral truth about what is real.” And there can be no efficacy in a systematic philosophy that loses sight of the vocation of the human knower to the whole of reality.

Posted in Church History, Readings, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged Catholic Views of Modernity, John Paul II, John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XI’s Studiorum Ducem, Prima Pars Vs Secunda Pars, St. Thomas Aquinas, The Syllabus of Erro, Thomistic Metaphysics, Two Thomisms | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Church History’ Category

The Age Of The Enlightenment – Christopher Dawson

The Secularization of Modern Culture by Christopher Dawson

The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance And The Recovery Of The Sacred

The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance

The Sacred Scriptures Of The Jewish People And The Christian Bible

The Fourteenth-Century Metaphysical Shift

Book Recommendation: The Courage To Be Catholic by George Weigel

The Forms of Memory: Speech and Writing

Jesus in the Memory of the Church — Luke Timothy Johnson

Reading Selections from “Two Thomisms, Two Modernities” by Russell Hittinger

Pages

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

Blog Stats

Top Posts

Subscribe

Archives

Recently Featured Books

Follow “Paying Attention To The Sky”