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The Importance Of Ritual Part III — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 9, 2011

“Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so…”

That is also very much the Gospel according to the English Catholic social anthropologists who have devoted thought to our issue: Professor Mary Douglas of London University and the late Professor Victor Turner, who at the end of his professional career crossed the Atlantic to a chair at the University of Chicago.

Mary Douglas opened her study Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology with an essay entitled Away from Ritual, which had appeared in somewhat different form in the house journal of the English Dominicans as The Contempt of Ritual in the summer of 1968. [M. Douglas, The Contempt of Ritual, New Blackfriars 49, nos. 577-78 (1968)] She warns that contempt for ritual forms eventually leads people to take a purely private view of religious experience, from where it is only a short step to the frank avowal of humanism.

One feature distinguishing social anthropologists from sociologists is that the former have a much more formidable, not to say sometimes impenetrable, conceptual apparatus at their disposal. The most easily grasped aspect of Douglas’ essay is her critique of the abolition by the bishops of England and Wales of compulsory abstinence from fleshfoods on Fridays, and this contains at any rate some major clues helpful in unraveling her approach.

The Friday abstinence is the only ritual that brings Christian symbols into kitchen and larder. Taking away one symbol that means something in that domain is, she pointed out, no guarantee that the spirit of a generalized charity will reign (as the bishops piously hoped) in its stead. It would have been preferable to have built upon this weekly ritual rather than to have sought platitudinous substitutes for it. Her explanation, as an anthropologist, for the bishops’ decision to abandon Friday abstinence is not especially flattering.

Owing to the manner of their education — she refers to the embourgeoisement of those whose families were once working class — the bishops were predictably peculiarly insensitive to nonverbal signals. The decision symptomizes this age of the Church: “It is as if the liturgical signal boxes were manned by color blind signalmen.” [M. Douglas, Natural Symbols].

The issue of Friday abstinence raises for her the whole question of the contemporary Church’s approach to ritual — to symbolically intense bodily activity as used in the worship of God. Her deeper argument is that the cosmos — the fundamental order of reality, including social reality — is always seen through the medium of the body, and notably through the kinds and range of actions in which the body intersects with nature and other people. Appealing to the exploration of family structure made in the 196os by her secular colleague Basil Bernstein, [B. Bernstein, Social Class and Psychotherapy, British Journal of Sociology 15 (1964)]

Douglas proposes that children whose families are “personal” rather than “positional” — children, that is, who come from families where common life and hierarchy are minimized in favor of, at least ideally, a unique communication between parent, on the one hand, and, on the other, each individual child — are likely to grow up with ears unattuned to the unspoken messages of ritual codes. And yet, as there is in fact no human being whose life does not need to “unfold in a coherent symbolic system”, those who resist ritual are missing out on something essential to humanity as such.

Such non-verbal symbols are capable of creating a structure of meaning, in which individuals can relate to one another and realise their own ultimate purposes…. Alas for the child from the personal home who longs for non-verbal forms of relationship but has only been equipped with words and a contempt for ritual forms. By rejecting ritualized speech he rejects his own faculty for pushing back the boundaries between inside and outside so as to incorporate in himself a patterned social world. At the same time, he thwarts his faculty for receiving immediate, condensed messages given obliquely along non-verbal channels.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

This statement, incidentally, tells us much about the new phenomenon of Catholic individualism understood as the systematic disparagement of common structure, hierarchical authority, and traditional liturgy alike.

Among the causes of anti-ritualism, then, Mary Douglas places first and foremost social change. But if social change naturally tends to prompt a new cosmology, a new set of spectacles for looking at the world, then those concerned for the health of Catholic Christianity, which has its own cosmology based on traditional ritual, on the sacraments, and ultimately on the Incarnation, must try to break this causal chain.

The slackening of group and grid whereby change in social patterns, especially in the family, brings about contempt for rite, the lack of strong social articulation in an increasingly amorphous, excessively personalized, individualized, and de-hierarchicalized world: these processes, left to themselves, will tend to produce a “religion of effervescence”, incompatible with a sacramental faith. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the appearance of a euphoric Western European and North American radicalism in the late 1960s, she comments:

This is the sector of society which we expect to be weak in its perception of condensed symbols, preferring diffuse, emotive symbols of mass effect. The religious style is spontaneity, enthusiasm and effervescence. Bodily disassociation in trance, induced by dance or drugs, is valued along with other symbols of non-differentiation. Distinguishing social categories are devalued, but the individual is exalted. The self is presented without inhibition or shyness. There is little or no self-consciousness about sexual or other bodily orifices and functions. As to intellectual style, there is little concern with differentiated units of time, respect for past or program for the future. The dead are forgotten. Intellectual discriminations are not useful or valued.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

And she concludes:

The general tone of this cosmological style is to express the current social experience. In the latter there is minimum differentiation and organization: symbolic behavior reflects this lack. In the field of intellect it is disastrous.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

Relating all this to the Church, Douglas maintains that anti-ritualism is of a piece with the “generous warmth” of the “doctrinal latitude” of “reforming bishops and radical theologians”, their “critical dissolving of categories and attack on intellectual and administrative distinctions”. [M. Douglas, Natural Symbols] In her view, all these developments are generated by a particular social experience, that of unrestricted personalism, but the cosmology they promote is manifestly deficient from the standpoint both of the life of the mind at large and more especially that of the Christian intelligence.

In her own idiom, “The value of particular social forms can only be judged objectively by the analytic power of the elaborated code”: in other words, to decode that remark (!), the mediocrity of the spiritual and theological life typically produced by an anti-ritualist Church is the best possible proof of the inadequacy of the form of life in civil society that such a Church presupposes and represents.

The implication of Douglas’ work would seem to be, then, that we shall not get back an authentic liturgical life until we recover a rightly ordered society on the level both of the family, the micro-society, and of macro-society, society at large. A “rightly ordered society” in this context is one that gives due place to common life, hierarchy, and shared authoritative public doctrine as well as to personal freedom and creativity.

Here we can recall how for David Martin it is the error of the ideology of spontaneity not to realize that the second set of these terms positively requires the first. If this thought, that liturgical malaise will not be fully rectified until a Christian society is reinstituted, seems somewhat daunting, we can turn for counterbalance to a last British anthropologist, Victor Turner, who appears to allow a greater autonomy or shaping power to what he calls in the title of a major book “the ritual process”. [V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, 1969)]

In Turner’s view, traditional liturgy, precisely because of its archaic quality, has a power to modify and even reverse the assumptions made in secular living.

If ritual is not to be merely a reflection of secular social life, if its function is partly to protect and partly to express truths which make men free from the exigencies of their status-incumbencies, free to contemplate and pray as well as to speculate and invent, then its repertoire of liturgical actions should not be limited to a direct reflection of the contemporary scene.
[V. Turner, Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas, Worship 46(1972)]

Insisting that the archaic is not the obsolete, Turner maintains that, on the contrary, archaic patterns of action are necessary to protect what he calls “future free spaces”.

In this perspective he finds the de facto liturgical reform of the 1960s and 1970s somewhat incongruous. The reformers failed to appreciate the need of believers for repetition and archaism. He would not have appreciated the emphasis of Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, in his chronicle of the reform, on the “effort to make the rites speak the language of our own time”, [A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, 1948-1995 (Collegeville, Minn., 1990)] even though Bugnini wrote his exhaustive account from a commanding height as Secretary Of The Commission For Liturgical Reform established by Pius XII in 1948; Secretary Of The Preparatory Commission On The Liturgy At The Second Vatican Council (1960-1962); Peritus of that Council and its Commission On The Liturgy; Secretary Of The Concilium For The Implementation Of The Constitution On The Liturgy (1964-1966); and Secretary Of The Congregation for Divine Worship (1969-1975).

Like Flanagan later, Turner held that pastoral liturgists were intimidated by the reigning “structural functionalism” in sociology. For that school, just as ritual structure reflects social structure, so ritual should change as society changes. Turner’s own anthropological scheme, by contrast, privileges significant intervals where we cross what he calls limina (thresholds) in our passage between social experiences. In so doing, we periodically find ourselves separated from our statistically normal experience of identification with some limited group and enter at least for a while a state of what he terms communitas, a form of sociability where our capacity for identification with others is unrestricted by space, time, and even their biological dying, and we enter the experiential continuum he names “flow”.

Typically, ritual stands out from mundane culture in its use of a high language that abounds in lexical and grammatical forms no longer current in everyday speech. Optimally, ritual is a symphony of expressive genres, rather as opera works simultaneously through a multiplicity of art forms in prose and poetry, music and acting. Unlike opera, however, ritual escapes theatricality by the seriousness of its ultimate concerns.

In principle, what Turner says could be applied to the ritual activity of any society, Christian or not, in its religious dimension, and indeed his ideas were in part formulated through fieldwork among the Ndembu in Zambia. But in his essay “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Turner applies these notions more especially to the Western Mass.

The traditional liturgy displayed an essential concern for proper form in the representation of sacred mysteries and the performance of symbolic acts. This was the fruit of popular wisdom fertilized by developing doctrine, and shaped by esthetic as well as legalistic principle. Ritual traditions of any depth or complexity represent the consolidated understanding of many generations. They embody a deep knowledge of the nature of flow, and how and where to break it in order to instill truths about the nature of time, the human condition, and evil. They reveal an understanding of the religious benefit of flow as much for individuals in their interior meditations as for eliciting the spirit of communitas, or shared flow, in congregations at worship.
V. Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Worship 50 (1976)

And he continues:

A complete liturgical system represents an organized system of spiritual and rational achievements. It is a work of ages, not a hackwork of contemporaneous improvisation. In its multiplicity and variety (controlled, nevertheless, by hard-won rules), it exemplifies the many-faceted yet single spirit of mankind at prayer, of homo religiosus. Although each nacreous [vocab: 1: consisting of or resembling mother-of-pearl;2: having a play of lustrous rainbow-like colors.] increment which composes this pearl has been laid down at a particular time, the total liturgy is liberated from historical determinations. When men and women enter the “liminality”, the tract of sacred space-time, which is made available to them by such a traditional liturgy, they cease to be bound by the secular structures of their own age, and confront eternity which is equidistant from all ages.
V. Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Worship 50 (1976)

Whereas, so Turner pessimistically proposes, the “flow” elicited by the reformed Liturgy too often “bubbles on the surface” as a “transient communication”.

A motif running through all these authors is the claim that the theological strategy of cultural modernism is misconceived. Modernism — I use the word in the sense of an intellectual style, not that of a heresy in the doctrine of revelation — is too indebted to those features of the Enlightenment and Romanticism that set those movements at odds with the Catholic Church or at any rate presented obstacles (as well as, to some extent, opportunities) for an authentic ecclesial reform and renewal.

In the realm of liturgiology, if the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century discussion of liturgical revision had been better known and its lessons more fully pondered, if the foundational principles suggested by Trapp and shared by such leaders of the interwar liturgical movement as Casel and Guardini had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, much harm might have been avoided. As it was, and despite the wonderful erudition liturgical scholars brought to the remaking of the rites, liturgists, in Flanagan’s words, “managed to back modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism”. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

This statement at least makes the point that there is now nothing particularly modern about cultural modernism. It may also be interpreted as hinting that the postmodernist phase into which, in literary theory, philosophy, and a wider sensibility, a significant portion of the Western intelligentsia has now passed could have formed a happier context in which both to transmit and in various discreet and prudent ways to enhance a traditional rite.

Statements of what postmodernism is are generally both elliptic and obscure, so much so that questions of how precisely it differs from modernism, what intellectual virtues it recommends, and whether it contains, at least implicitly, any broad truth-claims about the nature of reality are, at least for the present writer, unanswered. But let me mention on the basis of recent research at Cambridge some ways in which one liturgist writing in a confessedly postmodernist manner would find neglected resources in a traditional rite. Catherine Pickstock, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in her analysis of the old Roman Eucharistic rite, stresses the mobile character of the liturgical “I”, the self that worships. In liturgical action, I am not simply and in straightforward fashion myself: hence the inappropriateness of attempting to fit the Liturgy to the needs of the extra-liturgical personality, to make liturgy “relevant” to the ordinary persona of the self. Commenting on the Fore-Mass of the 1962 Missal, from the prayers of preparation to the Gloria, Pickstock writes:

By means of its dispossessed and impersonating character, its taking on of the roles of other characters thereby unsettling the claim to a secure poetic voice, the worshipping I is designated by the act of forgetting itself, by the forgetting of ordinary identity.
[C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis: Language, Death and Liturgy (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1996)]

And again:

This complex assuming of different voices leads to an interlacing of voices or polyphony at whose centre [here she refers to the opening of the Gloria] are the seraphic voices which are heard, alluded to, and intermingled with the human voices.
[C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis]

Impersonation, she stresses, “precedes an authentic voice”: that is, our Christian persona is formed by the way an extra-liturgical sense of the “I” is modified and extended by the Liturgy itself. “This is a de-centered `I’ which constantly moves from one identity to another, from immanent to transcendent locations, breaking the quarantining of the two worlds, but without ever compromising their difference” [C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis] In a pithy axiom: “In giving (doxologically) we become (ontologically).” In other words, by worship our Christian selves are forged; so worship is not to be judged by what our secular or non liturgical identity may desire or demand.

In her critique of the reform of the Roman rite, Pickstock argues that criticisms of the mediaeval Liturgy by conventional historians of the rite such as Theodor Klauser are misplaced. [T. Klauser, A Short History Of The Western Liturgy, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1979). One may add to Klauser's name that of the Italian liturgiologist influential in the drafting of the new anaphoras, Dom Cyprian Vagaggini, for whom the historic Roman Canon is disunified and illogical: "hardly a model of simplicity and clarity", The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform (London, 1967), 96. But note the criticism of these criticisms by the Anglican liturgiologist Geoffrey Willis, who wrote that they may arise from a "failure to understand the processes by which the Roman Canon Missae reached its present form and even a failure to apprehend the basic principles of its structure": The New Eucharistic Prayers: Some Comments, in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994), 91]

For Klauser the repetitious and sometimes seemingly random structure of the pre-conciliar rite (one thinks especially of the often attacked Offertory prayers) bears witness to a debasement of pure Liturgy, as does the concomitant emphasis on purification and requests for mercy. Pickstock, on the other hand, treats a certain randomness and repetitiveness as reassuring signs of the oral provenance of the Roman Liturgy, intrinsic aspects of a flow typical of speech rather than a written structure whose meanings are “spatially” compartmentalized in discrete sections. In similar fashion, she takes the repeated requests for purification as signs of an underlying apophaticism [vocab: the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not] that stresses our distance from God, not just our sinfulness, and emphasizes what she calls “the need for a constant re-beginning of liturgy because the true eschatological liturgy is in time endlessly postponed”. [Pickstock, The Sacred Polis]

That early fourth-century text so important for the makers of the reformed Roman rite, the Paradosis apostolike, or Apostolic Tradition, ascribed to Hippolytus, being as it is more of a treatise on Liturgy than a Liturgy itself, proved misleading, she thinks, for the program of liturgical recovery, not least in these respects.

Rather like Douglas, Pickstock holds that to reform an ancient Liturgy successfully in radical guise would ultimately entail remaking the entire social order, for earlier Liturgies formed part of a culture itself ritual in character. What the Church could have done, however, was to refrain from assimilating “linguistic and structural forms” from modernity, for these are precisely the elements most inimical to liturgical goals. The “clear and linear purpose” of modern Liturgy is, in her view, sadly of this age of the world and hence in its connotations immanent when compared with traditional rites she characterizes as “a liturgical stammer in the face of the sublime excess of God”.

For a Catholic Christian, in matters of the mind illumined by grace it is theology — sound and solid theology, drawn from Scripture and tradition under the guidance of the Magisterium — that is the queen of the sciences and not the cultural sciences that the writers whose ideas I have been rehearsing represent. That is not to say, however, that these benevolent warning voices can safely be disregarded.

On the basis of her bi-millennial experience, the Church has in the past been credited by sympathetic observers with a definite store of human wisdom. Like her divine Founder, she has known what is in man. The largely independent and convergent testimony of the men and women whose work I have described in this chapter suggests that of late the Church, which must mean here her members, has shown an uncharacteristic deficiency of such wisdom, in part in the conception of the liturgical reform, but even more in its execution. This is something the clergy and laity of the next century will eventually need to address.

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The Importance Of Ritual Part II — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 8, 2011

Hagia Sophia had been built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian between the years 532-537 AD and was the largest church in the world.

The first concept to be rendered questionable by both this definition [To repeat from the previous post: Liturgy [wrote I. H. Dalmais in Principles of the Liturgy] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order.] and the sea change in sociological thinking charted by Flanagan is the notion of simplicity as a criterion for sound liturgical practice. To the sociologist, it is by no means self-evident that brief, clear rites have greater transformative potential than complex, abundant, lavish, rich, long rites, furnished with elaborate ceremonial. Noble simplicity of rite has been a theme of liturgical reforms since the Enlightenment, as the previous chapter noted. It had not commended itself, however, purely as an anthropological desideratum. It was also regarded as a hallmark of the primitive Church. Though falling outside the sociologist’s provenance, this too is now a matter of question.

The decision of the post-conciliar reformers to return to a pre-Carolingian Roman tradition as earlier and therefore simpler and so better was predictable given the influence on the tradition of liturgical scholarship of the “comparative liturgy” approach pioneered by the South German historian of liturgy Anton Baumstark. Baumstark’s book with that title was both liturgiologically pioneering and enormously successful; it was translated into various languages and enjoyed numerous reprintings. However, the work of F. S. West on Baumstark’s Comparative Liturgy [A. Baumstark, Liturgie comparee, 3d ed. (Chevetogne, 1953); the work's original is French, since it began life as lectures to Bauduin's monks at Amay.] in its intellectual setting has shown that his comparative method was itself drawn, somewhat strangely, from the biology of the German Naturphi!osophen (like Goethe) as well as from the comparative anatomy of such nineteenth-century natural scientists as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. [F. S. West, Anton Baumstark's Comparative Liturgy in Its Intellectual Contex", doctoral thesis (Notre Dame, Ind. 1988), described in P. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Origins of Early Liturgy (London, 1992)]

It assumed as a law, consequently, that liturgical evolution moved from simplicity and brevity to richness and prolixity, even though Baumstark had to admit that one could also see evidence of a contrary movement, a tendency later to abbreviate what earlier had been fuller. As the Anglican liturgiologist Paul Bradshaw, now professor of Liturgy at Notre Dame, Indiana, has pointed out:

This admission that liturgical development might in fact proceed in either direction robs [Baumstark's] classification of any predictive power. We cannot judge a liturgical phenomenon …..’late’ simply because it exhibits prolixity.
[Bradshaw, Search for the Origins]

Nor, a fortiori, can we make an adverse value judgment on some liturgical rite, text, or practice because it lacks that dubiously reliable hallmark of primitive authenticity. One member of the post-conciliar Consilium who found the eagerness to apply the criterion of simplicity quite excessive, the Premonstratensian liturgist and author of a standard study of the sources of the Roman Liturgy Dom Boniface Luykx, signified his displeasure rather strongly by transferring to the Byzantine ritual church where he is now abbot of the Byzantine-Ukrainian monastery of the Transfiguration in northern California. [18R Galadza, "Abbot Boniface Luykx as Liturgist and liturgisatel", in Following the Star from the East: Essays in Honor of Archimandrite Boniface Luykx, ed. A. Chirovsky (Ottawa, Chicago, Lviv, 1992)].

A second concept that Flanagan would see as treated by Churchmen with a marked degree of sociological naivete is that of intelligibility in rite. The notion that the more intelligible the sign, the more effectively it will enter the lives of the faithful is implausible to the sociological imagination. It cannot simply be assumed that people will naturally assent more deeply once they have comprehended.

As Flanagan explains, a certain opacity is essential to symbolic action in the sociologists’ account, so that to attempt to render symbols wholly transparent is, to their mind, a thoroughly misguided proceeding. “[Symbols] proclaim that which transcends the conditions under which clarity through intervention is possible. They embody that which is unavailable to rational manipulation. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] And if total vernacularization of liturgical language and the insistence on translation styles that win comprehension at the cost of banality were too frequently the result of the principle of immediate comprehensibility in the realm of the spoken word, an insistence on the complete visibility of every detail of what was happening at the altar (and hence not only the removal of rood screens but also the eventual victory of versus populum celebration) was its counterpart in the visual realm.

Here, as Flanagan remarks, it was not realized that, sociologically, “veiling”, “marking a distance”, and “tactful reticence” are necessary to reverence. But such terms as reverence, with its connotations of restraint, deference, and awe, soon became prominent by their absence in liturgical discussion.

A third key concept, community, has already been touched on apropos of Gueranger. To Flanagan, the concept of community as such — just like that, without any further qualification — is too vague to bear a specifically Christian meaning. Moreover, it can easily degenerate into the creation of a transiently benevolent atmosphere through (literal or metaphorical “glad-handing” (an eloquent Americanism). What liturgists needed but failed to find was a concept of community defined distinctively as the product of a ritual assembly itself keyed into a mystery exceeding that assembly’s limits.

As the English priest-sociologist Anthony Archer had pointed out in his study The Two Catholic Churches, the preconciliar Liturgy at least imposed a ritual authority on all classes and individuals, [A. Archer, The Two Catholic Churches: A Study in Oppression (London, 1986)] thus preventing the emergence of groups who would seize the Liturgy for their own purposes or of figures who would treat it as an opportunity for the display of their communications skills. It is not really clear whether clericalism, defined as the undue prominence, within an ecclesial community, of the sacramentally ordained, is less apparent or more apparent in a liturgical rite where the priest is constantly face to face with the congregation and encouraged to introduce some at least of the Liturgy’s salient parts, rather than being absorbed impersonally into a ritual role.

A fourth crucial idea, after simplicity, intelligibility, and community, an idea not so much this tune in the Council’s Liturgy Constitution or any official text as in the commentators who took it upon themselves to interpret the reformed rite to the clergy and others, was that of liturgical agency, in other words, the role, increasingly personalized and sometimes in a pejorative sense theatrical, to be played by the celebrant of the Liturgy and other liturgical ministers. Here Flanagan notes that, sociologically, a priest cannot as celebrant present himself at Mass in the same fashion as that in which he greets his parishioners afterward. The liturgical role must conceal or at least detract attention from the person, so as to focus it the more strongly elsewhere.

The liturgical actor wishes to cast glory onto God in acts of worship that somehow minimize or preclude these elements of worth falling onto himself. Like the self, the social has to be present to enable the act to appear, but it has to disappear if the end of reverence is to be realized.
[Flanagan. Sociology and Liturgy]

To the sociological eye, rites work best when they are repetitive and formalized, so that the liturgical actor can practice a certain forgetfulness of self, “playing into his role, as Flanagan puts it, “embodying the possibility of its existence”. In this he may need a certain distance, at least at points, from other worshippers. As Flanagan explains, too unilateral an emphasis on proximity is sociologically misplaced. Rites that do not allow a sense of distance deny to the people, paradoxically, a means of appropriating the act of worship, crippling them just at the point where they could be taking off Godward by a leap of religious imagination. For liturgical actors, though presented within a social frame, have to convey properties of what lies beyond that frame, a rumor of angels.

But where does this leave the notion of participation, which is so key not only to the Enlightenment and Catholic Revival discussions in their different ways but also to that modern movement begun in the years before the Great War as well as, and not least, in the papacy’s gradual acceptance of its proposals in the pontificates of the last three “Pian” popes, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII? For Flanagan, active, outward participation is to be evaluated according to “the degree to which it generates inner appropriation, interior assent”. An English Benedictine liturgist, Dom Bernard McElligott of Ampleforth, founder of the Society of Saint Gregory, had commented on the philology as early as the year of the introduction of the Novus Ordo, 1970.

By using the word “active” for actuosa the Church’s intention has been misunderstood, and generally, if perhaps unconsciously, taken to mean bodily activity; whereas what the Church really asks for is full, sincere, mental activity, expressed externally by the body.
[B. McElligott, "Active Participation", in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994)]

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has emphasized, the term actuosa participatio at the Council included silence as well as speaking and singing and hence disqualifies any activist misconstrual of “living participation” (as Trapp had called it — See his liturgical essays in The Feast of Faith (San Francisco, 1986). Flanagan’s interpretation is, evidently, not unwarranted.

The absence in the postconciliar Liturgy of the atmosphere of intense silence and devotion once so striking to observers raises the question as to whether actuosa participatio, assessed in terms of Flanagan’s criterion, is more advanced or less advanced than it was before the Council opened. Here of course tricks of memory and nostalgia, as well as wishful thinking based on ecclesiastical partisanship, may deceive us. Not every eucharistic worshipper at a celebration according to the Missale Pianum before 1962 was burning with fervor, just as not everyone at a celebration according to the Missale Paulinum after 1970 is manifestly bored. But a German sociologist’s investigation of a large suburban parish in 1960 provides an example of the relatively objective testing possible. As Flanagan comments,

Many of his subjects reported that they came to Mass to find a space in which to reestablish their spiritual equilibrium, the calmness of the rite — a re-iterated notion — giving a context in which they could adjust the proportions of an often confused existence.
[Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

Nor could one accuse Msgr. J. D. Crichton, the doyen of living liturgists in England, of insouciance toward the new rites, yet he has spoken recently of a loss of reverence which ultimately leads to a loss of the sense of the transcendent God who is the supreme Object of all worship. In a way we are in danger of forgetting what worship is about. It is not just a heartwarming experience for those who like that sort of thing. [J. D. Crichton, Worshipping with Awe and Reverence, Priests and People]

Or, as Father Anthony Conlon, a London parish priest, has put it in a paper read to the International Eucharistic Congress at Seville in 1994:

The overemphasis on active participation, which only conceives of worship in terms of the community realizing its group dynamic through a bias in favor of “doing things”, is a serious hindrance to any understanding of the Mass as essentially a liturgical setting of an historic action of divine mercy and sacrifice.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice in XLV Convenlus Eucharisticus Internationalis, Sevilla 1-13. Vi .1993, Christus Lumen Gentiuci, Euchanstia el Evangelizatio (Vatican City, 1993)]‘

Here then it is not simply a question of failing to advert properly to the divine transcendence in general. More devastatingly, when the Mass is at issue, there is inadequate advertence to that supreme act whereby the divine transcendence engaged itself in Trinitarian fashion for our definitive salvation on Calvary, when the Son offered himself to the Father in the Spirit so that his Sacrifice could be fruitful in the renewed pouring out of himself in the propitiatory intercession of the Eucharist and its foundation in his High Priestly prayer in the heavens.

Too much can be centered on the contribution made by the participants as though that alone made for the efficacy of the Eucharist and less attention — if any — may be paid to the sacramental offering of the great High Priest.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice]

The fact that in many parish celebrations the church building is evidently regarded as simply an assembly point before Mass starts and a place of concourse when Mass ends, in sharp contrast to the former practice when many people made prayers of preparation before Mass and prayers of thanksgiving after it and certainly were not disabled in so doing by other worshippers, points toward the same conclusion. If active participation is rightly evaluated by the quality of inner participation it arouses, then, it would seem, it has not yet succeeded in its task.

What from the sociologist’s standpoint has been overlooked is that, as Flanagan remarks, liturgical forms operate in the manner of icons — opening up a sense of the presence of the divine, not of course by the painterly means of color and line, but through social actions believed to be endowed and intended to be endowed with “holy purpose”.

Flanagan’s overall conclusion is that the Roman Liturgy has fallen into the hands of “convivial Puritans”. For these, procedures for worship are to be kept as simple as possible so as to maximize social relationships in the production of the rite. A ritual minimalism serves to sustain a relaxed atmosphere where all may contribute informally. “Bind us together” is the theme song of a liturgical life where hierarchy and ceremony are treated as deleterious to happy togetherness.

To Flanagan, as to Martin, this is simply wrongheaded.

Informal or endlessly adaptable Liturgy may be beau mais ce nest pas la guerre. The shape of the rite takes on “unfruitful unpredictability”, impairing its claim to constitute, indeed, a public order of worship. As the phenomenologist of religion Rudolf Otto saw at the beginning of this century, an undisciplined rite clamantly [vocab: loudly]asserting direct links with the production of the numinous has little chance of representing the latter successfully when compared with one that humbly petitions the holy in solemn mode.

Such tacit, mysterious qualities of rite, Flanagan continues, are, moreover, what permit its endless replaying. He likens to this the way a literary classic (The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick) can be endlessly reread if it be in a positive sense “ambiguous”, namely, not increasing the reader’s uncertainty about meaning but rather maintaining openness to ultimate meaning (the sacred).

Repeated use, so Flanagan concludes: “generates a passage of growth into understanding the implications of what cannot be grasped, and at the same time fuels a wish to have more revealed from what is concealed.” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The message is that the adhesive that holds rites together has become too diluted to stick, and Flanagan looks to older forms of the Latin Liturgy for assistance when he writes: “Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so .” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

Posted in Church History, Fr. Aidan Nichols, Sacraments, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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The Importance Of Ritual Part I — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 7, 2011

Fifty years earlier on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 1959, Pope John Paul XXIII had announced the convocation of a general council for the universal Church. And the Second Vatican Council was born.

Reporting on the world of British scholarship, it is a remarkable fact, which has not been as noticed as it deserves, that both Catholic and Anglican social anthropologists and sociologists have tended to take, from the standpoint of their own disciplines rather than simply from personal preference, a somewhat negative attitude toward the mid-twentieth-century liturgical reform that has had so marked an influence on both communions. They have a tendency to think that in the broader lines of its departures from the traditional Liturgy reform may, in certain of its characteristic emphases, rest on a mistake — not doctrinal mistake, but a failure in human prudence.

The idiom of the writers I shall be expounding is not easy, so perhaps we might begin relatively gently with a text written by an Anglican sociologist whose marks are, however, highly pertinent to the Catholic practice of Liturgy in the Western Church today. In Two Critiques of Spontaneity, Professor David Martin of the London School of Economics attacked what he called the “popular local heresy” of that “cult of choice” that wherever possible opts against an order of rules and roles in the name of spontaneity. [D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]

Though this “cult” has some respectable origins – he mentions religious notions of conscience and personal decision, and moral ideas of political liberty and existential authenticity, as well as the Romantic concept of genius and the psychoanalytical ideal of autonomy — the tree that grows from these roots has become stunted and deformed. Basically, one truth, or one collection of truths, has been stressed at the expense of the complementary truths that are their necessary counterpart. The result is a dangerous and destructive imbalance.

Libertarians stressing spontaneity — and Martin makes clear that such figures operate not only in civil society but also in ecclesial society and not least in its worship — ignore the preconditions of freedom in a determinate order of stable rules and defined roles that constitute, in Kantian language, the social a priori of personal identity, the latter’s necessary condition. In their anti-institutionalism, extreme personalists are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting.

“Institutions”, in the various senses of that word, are needful if persons with a definite sense of identity are to exist at all. When all is said and done, man, though he may not be as context-bound as an animal, is not as context-free as an angel. It is then the embedded character of freedom that is ignored by the partisans of spontaneity, and here we must include liturgical advocates of multiple choice, of endless adaptation and unscripted presidential intervention for the establishment of free rapport with others. For such libertarians, “the noumenal self [Martin means the underlying or essential `self'] is already full of experiential potency. Traditional modes are mere automatic transfers: everyman must start afresh.”[D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]

In the critique Martin is rejecting, traditional churches (that is, churches with traditional worship) are regarded as diverting the impulse to authenticity into “silted channels of alienated tradition and super-imposed forms”. Their “received rituals” and “automatic repetitions” are “frozen icons of freedom, stories from which the dynamism has been drained”. What the proponents of spontaneity would substitute for these Martin writes of scathingly as a “total and easy immersion in the All”. As he warns, “total immediacy produces total relativity.” Where each and every chosen experience is regarded as equally valuable, each by the same token may just as well be described as equally worthless.

Writing as a sociologist, Martin asserts the imperative need to defend discipline, habit, continuity, the located and familiar, the bounded and particularized, rules, roles, and relations. A rule, as he puts it, indicates the “existence of a regularity”: something that enables one to anticipate and so to act. Anticipating, acting, knowing where and who you are turn on the due existence of rules. The stability and definition of the latter are generative of psychological health, just as authority and hierarchy, rightly exercised, are necessary for the flourishing of that social health which Scripture calls “justice”. Without rules there would be only what Martin terms “unidimensional determination by peers”, the law of the jungle. [D. Martin, Two Critiques]

Martin regards the ideas of meaningful relationship and significant personal encounter as wholly impotent when considered as bases on which to found the life of groups or even individuals. Why? Because these concepts are virtually without content. “One seeks for the personally significant [but] nothing is signified.” The ideology of the experiencing self, in whose name traditional forms, including traditional liturgical rites, are rejected, is “literally self-defeating”, for beyond a certain point the emphasis on direct experience diminishes the very possibility of experience at all. How constricting, not least experientially, is a liturgy that insists on expressing the experience, the concrete self-understanding, of the immediate group that enacts it.

The experiential illumination of the Gospel depends, Martin considers, on rote and rite. As he puts it: “What is done by rote and performed in ritual provides the necessary substratum of habit on the basis of which experience becomes possible.” And invoking the literary critic George Steiner, [G. Steiner, Bluebeards Castle (London, 1971)] he asks what must it mean for a civilization to hear the Gospels repeated time and time again in the central rites of the Church. Not only, then, are repetition and ritual form not to be set over against authentic identity. More than this, they cannot be counterposed to creativity either. As Martin writes: “The shortest way to creativity is habituation to technical means of expression and steady soaking in an historical context.”[Martin, Two Critiques] And in a daring comparison with the Incarnation of the divine Word, he concludes: “Those who have accepted the conditions of confinement find they are present at a miraculous birth, limited by time and place, fully human, before which even angels cover their faces.” [Martin, Two Critiques]

A fuller account in the shape of a Catholic counterpart to Martin’s criticism is Kieran Flanagan’s Sociology and Liturgy, which marries an Anglo-American sociological tradition to the Germanophone theology of Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy: Representations of the Holy (London, 1991)] Flanagan, an Irishman who is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bristol, rejects what he regards as a consensus of practical liturgists who favor the maximizing of active participation so as to confer a democratic quality on rite and would keep liturgical symbols and actions as simple and intelligible as possible.

Stressing by contrast the ceremonious, formal, and allegorical qualities of ritual as well as what he terms ritual’s “ambiguity”, Flanagan describes the pastoral-liturgical consensus in bald terms as “sociologically misconceived”. It ignores the question of “how the cultural is domesticated and harnessed in a ritual performance that proclaims a distinctive witness.” [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] Emphasizing the functions of ceremony, the opacity of symbols, the complexity of actions, and the qualities of beauty and holiness that give the social form of rite a distinctive coloration, Flanagan echoes Martin in deploring

the rise of consumer-friendly rites and a demand for loose and lax “happy clappy” events full of meet and greet transactions. These trivialize the social, preclude deeper meanings being read into the action, and skate along the surface of some very thin ice where all attention to danger, awe and reverence is bracketed. These are rites of the immediate that demand instantaneous theological results.”
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

“Liberal” liturgists are in fact dismantling the entire sacred superstructure that rites exist to serve.

The apparent theological strong point of such pastoral liturgical approaches lies, Flanagan remarks, in the notion of the missionary significance of duly adapted rites. A century and more earlier, Dom Gueranger had also spoken of the evangelical power of the Liturgy, but he had seen this as expressed indirectly in its spiritual beauty. Now, however, it is to be expressed directly in a conscious opening of the Church to the world.

Unfortunately, so Flanagan explains, this “delivers Christianity to a school of sociological thought that regards rituals as social constructions shaped to express and to mirror the ideological sensitivities of the age”. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The result is that the rite comes to be seen as the projection of the dispositions of the actors involved in the act of worship rather than as first and foremost the work of grace, a bestowal of transcendence that (to be sure) makes use of human agents for its enactment but does not, Pelagius-like, consist of such agency. In favor of traditional ritual, by contrast, is the fact that the quality of habit (one of Martin’s favorite words) endows liturgical action with “an impunity, an absence of worry about the credibility of what is represented”.

As Flanagan would see things, the Second Vatican Council simply took place too early so far as the history of sociology is concerned. In a retrospective view of the revisionist phase of the liturgical movement in the period from the Second World War to the Council and the subsequent reform, he writes:

Theology inserted the notion of cultural praxis into its approach to liturgy, but failed to secure the sociological instruments through which this could be monitored and understood. The relationship of rite to the cultural was far more ambiguous and complex than had been understood at the time of the Council. The question of the significance of the social came from within theological efforts to renew liturgical form — not from sociology. Only recently has a form of sociology emerged that could offer a means of understanding liturgical operations in a way that is compatible with their theological basis.’
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

The principal schools of sociology “available” when the Council opened were positivist, empiricist, or functionalist. Only in the course of the 1960s and 1970s did the stress of the late-nineteenth-century German philosopher of method Wilhelm Dilthey on the distinctive nature of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) have its impact on sociology, as sociologists began to realize the need for a sociological imagination if they were to grasp the meaning of social forms for those human subjects who live in and with them. At last they started to ask themselves how belief systems, now taken seriously even or especially if they were religious, succeed in having cultural expression. Alas, it was then too late for such sociologists to be of use to the actual liturgical reformers. The postconciliar Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia was wound up in 1975 through absorption into the Congregation for Divine Worship, that year coinciding more or less with a real turning point in the anthropology of religion as new schools of thought began to emphasize meaning, not explanation, the non-rational as well as the rational, and ritual’s transformative power: all of which led to a new respect for the formal, ceremonious ordering of rite, the very thing that avant-garde liturgists most abhorred and the liturgical reform itself preserved only in severely truncated guise.

Yeats’ rhetorical question “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?” was suddenly grasped in the academy as it ceased to be understood in the Church. And Flanagan suggests (albeit cautiously) that the consequent mishandling of the modernization of rite accelerated the decline of such traditional churches as his own.

He contrasts the impoverished concepts used to “deliver rite to the cultural” — simplicity, intelligibility, adaptation to “modern man” — with the subtle description of the Liturgy given by the Dominican liturgiologist Irenee-Henri Dalmais in his contribution to Canon Aime Martimort’s four-volume study The Church at Prayer.

Liturgy [wrote Dalmais] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order. [I. H. Dalmais, "The Liturgy as Celebration of the Mystery of Salvation", in Principles of the Liturgy, vol. 1 of The Church at Prayer, ed. A. G. Martimort (London, 1967)]

 

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The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe – Fr. Aidan Nichols on Gerard Manley Hopkins II

August 31, 2011

 

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe
                Gerard Manley Hopkins

                Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

                 I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name. 
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air. 

                If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

                  Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.

                So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

                Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Just the point at which to introduce the comparison with Mary: Hopkins characterizes this other mother by two features of her role as Catholic Christianity sees it. The first is her divine motherhood, by which she became the Theotokos or God-bearer, giving welcome in “womb and breast” to the “infinity” of the person of God the Word, now become what the medievals called Verbum abbreviatum, the “abbreviated Word”, inasmuch as his divine hypostasis, from the moment of the Annunciation onward, acts as the personalizing subject of an instance of human nature.

Thus is the Godhead of the Son “dwindled to infancy” in the Christ-child — without, for all that, suffering the loss of those divine attributes which make him the foundation of the universe and of the moral law. The role of our Lady at the Annunciation is so essential to Incarnation robustly conceived that it already justifies, in classical Christian vocabulary, the exalted language of channel of divine grace, which, in point of theological fact, Hopkins will use for her under a second distinct heading.

Drawing on a doctrinal tradition, which has never (yet) attained dogmatic status, he affirms that she “mothers each new grace / That now does reach our race”. The inclusion of the words “each new” here goes beyond what Mary’s divine motherhood by itself could lead us to say; it is a confession of Mary’s “sub-mediation” of the grace of Christ to individuals here and now. Were we in any doubt on the matter, Hopkins himself dispels it for us in a sermon:

Now holiness God promotes by giving grace; the grace he gives not direct but as if stooping and drawing it from her vessel, taking it down from her storehouse and cupboard. It is in some way laid up in her.
The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)

So “Mary Immaculate” — a title which had surged in popularity through the ex cathedra definition of the all-holiness of the Mother of God in 1854, delighting those who followed the via Scoti, “Scotus’ way” — is “Merely a woman” and yet her “presence” and “power” is “great as no goddess’s / Was deemed, dreamed”.

This is a deliberately uncomfortable paradox, and Hopkins is positively willing us to ask whether he has not mired himself in contradiction. Can Mary of Nazareth, someone whose being is altogether finite (as the being of the Word incarnate is not), have so divine a role without calling into question her finitude or God’s infinitude or both? Hopkins resolves the issue by reimagining this role as that of a pane of glass which has no more — and no less — to do that letting the Light shine through it. She “This one work has to do —  / Let all God’s glory through”, and even this is feasible only by the divine antecedent will and covenant: “God’s glory which would go / Through her and from her flow / Off, and no way but so”. St Bernard, a major articulator of this tradition, remarks simply in his sermons: “It is God’s will that we should receive all graces through Mary”. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo VII de Aguaeductu.

The following lines (35 to 45) develop one of the loveliest titles for Mary in Latin devotion: Mater misericordiae, the “Mother of mercy”. Hopkins finds a functional identification between Mary and mercy: We are “wound / With mercy round and round” just as we are by air, and that is because we are also so wound by the “wild web, wondrous robe” of Mary as it “Mantles the guilty globe”.

There are two implications. First, the mercy which is first and foremost an attribute of God, both in Himself and in the saving economy whereby the Holy Trinity reaches out to us, is more palpably itself — that is, so far as human experience is concerned — when God wills that mercy to be mediated by Mary.

Human beings respond more fully to the mercy of God when they receive it from the hands of a mother. Hopkins as believer experiences the Mother of the Lord not merely as an occasional dispenser of divine mercy but as that very mercy: “more than almoner, / The sweet alms’ self is her”. (Of course that must be understood in terms of the interrelation of finite and infinite discussed above.) The second implication can be stated more shortly, as Hopkins himself states it: “men are meant to share / Her life”. It is an appeal to Christians who benefit from Mary’s attention to make some effort consciously to reciprocate.

In lines 46 to 72 Hopkins restates the problem of a confession of the Blessed Virgin’s universal mediation and develops, this time at more length, an explicitly Christological attempt to solve it. First, he reiterates the omnicompetence of Mary’s gracious sub-mediation: “She holds high motherhood / Towards all our ghostly good” (emphasis added). It is her “part” to “lay” — allay, or lay low — concupiscence, man’s potentially fatal trend, even after baptismal regeneration, toward evil, the “deathdance in his blood”. This is the heart of what the ascetic tradition calls holy warfare, and nothing could be more pertinent to our final salvation. So, once again, how can a mere creature receive this role? Hopkins proposes an answer in terms of the mystery of Jesus Christ, the one and only (non-subordinated) “Mediator between God and men” (1 Timothy 2:5).

Any “part” Mary has consists, in one or another way, in disposing us to be the “place” where Jesus Christ comes to be in us. She has no part that will not be “Christ our Savior still”. He continues to take on — mysterically — substantial life in the faithful, as once he did biologically in the womb of her who is, in the words of ancient litany, the “Faith of all the faithful”, the mother of all believers. Hopkins cries out with wonder — “O marvelous!” — at this truth of mystical theology, namely that Christ makes of his members “New Nazareths”, “New Bethlems”.

And he finds here the key to the puzzle of Mary’s universal task in our regard. Her role is precisely to “conceive / Him, morning, noon and eve” in us. And this explains how her mediation is both utterly comprehensive and yet altogether without derogation from the mediation of Christ. Hopkins emphasizes that this is no abstruse theory, since it concerns the ultimate issue in practical reason: my personal raising to nobility of stature. What is at stake is “New self and nobler me”. In his essay “On Personality, Grace and Freewill”, Hopkins called the divine action in sanctifying a person and bringing him to the condition of deification “a lifting him from one self to another self, which is a most marvelous display of divine power”.[The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)] God appropriately does this through Christ by way of Mary, since the unique Mediator is “Both God’s and Mary’s Son”.

Hopkins would hardly be Hopkins if, thinking about air and its translucence, he did not look up at the sky. And so he bids the reader, “look overhead / How air is azured”. On a fine day, the air above us is shot through with blue, “sapphire-shot”, but that can hardly be said to “stain” light, to detract from its purity. Well, so it is with the grace of God when it comes to men through the hands of our blessed Lady. So far from distorting the real relations of God, man, and the redeemed creation, this Marian impregnation enables them to stand out with greater distinctness. “The glass-blue days are those / When every color glows”. And he adds that “this blue heaven / The seven or seven times seven / Hued sunbeam will transmit / Perfect, not alter it”. Hopkins had worked out this aspect of the controlling analogy of the poem in a sermon given at Leigh in 1879:

St Bernard’s saying, All grace given through Mary: this is a mystery. Like blue sky, which for all its richness of color does not stain the sunlight, though smoke and red clouds do, so God’s graces come to us unchanged but all through her. Moreover she gladdens the Catholic’s heaven and when she is brightest so is the sun her Son.
Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)

As Hopkins declares in the poetic version of this claim, if some change in the light conditions on earth does have an effect in terms of “Bloom breathe” — encouraging the opening of buds into blossom, then that “one breath more / Earth is the fairer for”.

Without that translucent yet protecting atmosphere, by contrast, our earth would be unlivable, such as we can assume planets of thin atmosphere too close to their own suns to be. In an extraordinary disruption of tone, producing an infernal effect worthy of Milton (lines 94 to 102), Hopkins imagines how, if air did not “slake” the sun’s “fire”, the heavens would be transmogrified into a “grimy vasty vault”, the centre of the solar system a “blear and blinding ball / With blackness bound”.

And lest we miss the point he rubs it in. That is how men would look at deity were it not for the Incarnation: “So God was god of old”. The “limbs like ours”, which the humanized Word developed from the body of the Virgin, are what endear the dreadful God of the cosmic spaces to us. Were his glory — his majestic radiance — shown us “bare”, either it would “blind” our minds or at least “less would win” them. The interposing hand of Mary, through which the glory shown in Christ is showered down on us “leaves his light / Sifted to suit our sight”.

The poem ends with a personal appeal from the poet to the Mother of Christ to be with effect for him what he by his words has declared her to be in principle for everyone.

 

 

Posted in Fr. Aidan Nichols, G. K. Chesterton, Mary, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe – Fr. Aidan Nichols on Gerard Manley Hopkins I

August 30, 2011

Gerard Manley Hopkins depicted by Irish sculptor Rowan Gillsepie

I had featured this poem under another post “Anthem Poems” before but I’ve been reading Fr. Aidan Nichols’ seminal work on Gerard Manley Hopkins  and he featured it in his collection of Hopkin’ poetry, so here it is again. A little longish so I chopped into two posts.

I confess that I have learned most of my theology through literature and writings like Fr. Nichols and Anthony Esolen. See if you don’t see what I mean:

 

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe
                Gerard Manley Hopkins

                Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

                 I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name. 
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air. 

                If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

                 Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.

                So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

                Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Written in May 1883 at Stonyhurst, this is another example of the “May offerings” to the Mother of the Lord to set beside “The May Magnificat.” This poem was not a great favorite of Hopkins (Hopkins’ friend and future Poet Laureate to whom we owe the great debt of knowing anything about Hopkins at all), who probably considered its meter too unadventurous. It is written in trimeter couplets, which are quite common among the Latin hymns of the Roman Office. But Bridges, despite his Protestantism — or Protestant agnosticism — found it admirable, rather to Hopkins’s surprise. (Of course a more doctrinally committed Protestant might not have so well kept his literary cool.) In the third (1948) edition of the poems, W. H. Gardner summarized the theme. In this paean to the Blessed Virgin, Hopkins:

says that just as the atmosphere sustains the life of man and tempers the power of the sun’s radiation, so the immaculate nature of Mary is the softening, humanizing medium of God’s glory, justice and grace. Through her the ineffable Godhead becomes comprehensible — sweetly attuneable to the limited human heart.’
The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner (London 1948).

Here Hopkins places himself square in the tradition of the seventeenth-century “Metaphysical” poets, who delighted to work out sustained analogies between utterly disparate aspects of experience: in this case, the air in which our biological life functions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the gracious intercession of the Virgin, crucial as that is — so Hopkins maintains — to our spiritual life. Gardner’s summary raises a major question of theological sensibility: in pursuing this analogy how well has Hopkins succeeded in avoiding the impression that the “softening, humanizing’ effect of the Mother of Jesus in her distinctive role in the economy of salvation might actually threaten to replace, in this regard, of the humanity of her Son?

The opening is very striking. The air to which Mary will be compared is no gentle breeze. Rather is it “Wild air”, and the adjective is repeated twice more, once in identical if inverted terms — “air wild”, and once when the Mother of Christ is described directly as a “wild web”. Norman MacKenzie points out how, in Hopkins’s distinctive language use, “wild” always has some reference to the way a being expresses its own nature in (more or less consummate) freedom [N. H. MacKenzie, A Reader's Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins].

This air — which so far is simply the physical atmosphere of planet Earth — is, Hopkins continues, “world-mothering air”. No life is possible without the atmosphere that surrounds the planet. Hence all the complexly interrelated organisms which compose our world may be said to have their nurture in this element. Hopkins draws our attention to the exquisite delicacy with which the air enters our physical environment, so gently and unremarkably that I am almost always unaware of the atmosphere around me: “Nestling me everywhere”, girdling each eyelash or hair”. In the outdoors cold (in the Pennines there could still be snow in early May) the air “goes home betwixt / The fleeciest, frailest-flixed [fluff-like] / Snowflake”, nor is this anything unusual for it “is rife / In every least thing’s life”.

Hopkins has now positioned himself so as to be able to explain the “world-mothering” accolade with which he began. Manifestly, the air is “This needful, never spent, / And nursing element”. One would look odd without it: “This air, which by life’s law / My lung must draw and draw”. And now, says the poet, he is drawing it so as to sing air’s praise.

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CREATION (part two) by R.R. Reno

August 26, 2011

The immediate reasons in support of a traditional interpretation and translation are strong, but we should broaden the argument, not only because further reasons are important in their own right, but also because we need to be clear-minded about the expansive scope of interpretation. A theological reading needs to approach scripture in such a way as to sustain a coherent, overall view of God’s plan and purpose. What is entailed in sustaining such a view is complex and opaque. No one can set criteria ahead of time, and there are no particular methods that will guarantee good results.

Sound interpretive arguments are always varied and cumulative. In this case, three broad considerations speak in favor of the traditional translation. A substantive interpretation of “beginning” will allow us to approach the larger question of creation in a way that

(1)     helps us avoid a false conflict between creation and science,

(2)     facilitates a fruitful engagement of faith with reason, and

(3)     gives a proper spiritual focus to our interpretive concerns.

The first advantage of the traditional approach to Genesis 1:1 concerns the relation between Genesis and modern cosmology. Modern physics analyzes the movements of matter and energy, and it operates with the notion of “beginning” as temporal sequence. For this reason, an approach to Genesis 1:1 that emphasizes the temporal sense in which “God began” will run afoul of modern science and its account of the beginning of the cosmos. In contrast, a theological reading of “beginning” as source and basis need not directly and primarily concern itself with modern cosmology. We can interpret Genesis with reference to the beginning out of which and for which God creates, and we need not coordinate the seven-day sequence with the complex physical processes that modern scientists think best explain the evolution of the universe. In other words, to adopt the tradition translation, “in the beginning:’ helps us focus on the divine purpose for creation rather than on the physical processes that gave rise to the created world.

Of course, a modern scientist may assert, as does Richard Dawkins, that there is no intent or purpose undergirding the world. [Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Penguin, 1990)] But a metaphysical pronouncement of this sort reflects the judgment that what modern science can or cannot investigate is coextensive with what is or is not the case. This highly implausible view undergirds the materialist claim that physical processes cause and explain everything, a claim that is an important and influential tenet of modern metaphysical ideologies. But as a clear distinction between “beginning” as first instance in an unfolding process and “beginning” as ultimate source and purpose helps us to see, materialism is neither entailed by nor part of modern scientific cosmology.

Thus, a Christian faith that reads Genesis as outlining the substantive rather than temporal source of creation is well prepared to endorse modern science while rejecting the faux metaphysics of modern scientism. [For a clear explanation of the import of modern cosmology and its relationship to classical doctrines of creation, see Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). A PayingAttentionToTheSky reading selection from that work here.]

The second broad issue at stake in our approach to the beginning concerns the proper focus of interpretive anxiety. If we adopt a reading of Genesis  1:1 that follows the direction of Rashi’s use of Exodus 12:2, as well as John 1:1, then our interpretive question is forthright, and it brings us directly to the spiritual centers of both Judaism and Christianity. What is the purpose or intention from which God, as it were, counts back as the beginning? The New Testament writers were well aware of the crucial importance of this question. The author of John’s Gospel was not the only one to frame creation in terms of the divine plan. St. Paul writes: “There is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). Paul’s formulation is a direct interpretation of Genesis 1:1. In (through) the beginning (Christ), God (the Father) created heaven and earth.

With this account of creation, St. Paul and the subsequent Christian tradition give priority to the specific revelation of the divine plan in Christ, but in a way that harmonizes faith with reason. Knowing the Lord Jesus is crucial to knowing the beginning in which and out of which all things come to be. As Augustine exhorts, “Mark this fabric of the world. View what was made by the Word, and then thou wilt understand what is the nature of the world” (Tractates on John 1.9 in NPNF’ 7.10). [The theological judgment is by no means merely antique. See Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2.27: "The story told in the Gospels states the meaning of creation."]

Christ is the master plan; he is the “beloved Son” who is “the first-born of all creation.” Christ is the beginning, “for in him all things were created” (Colossians 1:13-16). His saving death was planned “before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:20). The Lord Jesus is the “bright morning star” (Revelation 22:16) by which the faithful take their bearings, and “in [him] are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). In sum: the world has a beginning by and in the divine Word, and we best orient ourselves to reality when we focus on Christ.

This affirmation of the priority of Christ would seem to set up a painful conflict between faith and reason, between knowledge of revealed truth and the sort of knowledge we acquire by scientific study of reality. But a substantive sense of beginning” prevents just such a conflict. Faith brings us to an ever more intimate union with the logos of creation, and as a result, theology is rightfully queen of the sciences. Theology orients our minds toward the truth of all things.

Yet, since Christ is the beginning or source of reality, theology does not take our minds to strange places and inculcate antiscientific attitudes. Rather, because Christ is the beginning from which and for which God creates, accurate knowledge of reality (what medieval scholars called philosophy and what we usually refer to as science) can help guide us toward the originating Word. Wisdom of Solomon 9:1 teaches that God has made all things by his word, and Psalms 104:24 proclaims: “O LORD, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all.” Endowed with intellectual powers that can see the outlines of wisdom in creation, our reason can prepare us for faith.

The third warrant for privileging a substantive sense of”beginning” bears directly on a central problem in Christian theology: the relation between nature and grace. A Christ-centered reading of God’s creation explains a perplexing, double affirmation that characterizes apostolic Christianity. On the one hand, everything is good — on the other hand, everything must change under the lordship of Christ. Not only are human creatures finite and natural aspects of the created order, they are also chosen and called. As the Genesis story moves forward, Abraham must leave home. He must transcend the natural bonds of filial love and the safety of his clan. This leave-taking is focused and intensified in Christian discipleship. Consider the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. The ordinary, worldly stuff of life — our bodies, our desires, our loyalties, our identities as social creatures — all this has a divinely ordained destiny that stretches well beyond what seems natural and normal.

There is a similar double affirmation in a Torah-centered reading. It leads to the classical rabbinic project of transforming everything into legal problems to be brought under the authority of divine law. In both the Christian and Jewish views, therefore, a problem emerges. There is an apparent contradiction between the goodness of creation and the drive toward sanctification. How can God call creation very good — and then turn around and continue to act upon it for the sake of pushing the human creature forward toward an even higher goal? How can the human body be good — but nonetheless require the commandment of circumcision for the sake of covenant? How can we harmonize the divine directive to “be fruitful and multiply” with the Pauline exhortation to prefer the celibate life?

These sorts of questions capture a deep worry that religious faith encourages in inhumane form of life, an aggressive attack on the natural limitations of our created condition. If God must act upon us by way of commandment rather than simply meet us in our desire for fellowship, then isn’t our hoped-for rest in God extrinsic and compelled? Isn’t the final end sought in faith an enslaving and alienating state of obedience?

The problem has perplexed Western Christianity ever since Augustine. How in the necessity of the outer pull of divine command be affirmed without supplanting the inner push of desire for God? How can we do justice to both the “attractive” and “imperative” dimensions of the Christian life, the sense in which faith is both exactly what the human creature needs and wants and, at the same time, something new, frightening, and unexpected? How can our free decision of faith be compatible with the sovereign grace of God that is necessary for any true and saving participation in Christ crucified and risen? [For a clearly developed account of this problem, keyed to the moral life, see Gilbert Meilaender, The Way Leads There: Augustinian Reflections on the Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, .2006), 71-76.]

These difficulties are resolved if we adopt a substantive sense of “beginning.” Christ is the master plan of all creation, and his call is necessarily toward a fulfillment rather than effacement or denial of creation. As Athanasius observes, “There is no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the one Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting salvation of the world through the same Word who made it in the beginning” (On the Incarnation 1). In following Christ toward an end that is supernatural, we will not (to echo Nietzsche) vivisect our fragile, finite, natural lives. That which is created and mortal shall not be defeated or destroyed; it will “be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4). In the words of T. S. Eliot:

“And the end of all our exploring /
Will be to arrive where we started /
And know the place for the first time.”
T. S. Eliot, “Little Giddings” lines 240-42, in Four Quartets
   (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1943), 59.

To put this truth in its popular Thomistic formula: grace perfects rather than destroys nature.

There is more. But we must stop here, because it should now be clear that the traditional translation is part of a fully developed and well-considered theological outlook. A decision in favor of a substantive beginning rather than a temporal sequence sets the interpretive agenda for the Bible as a whole. Creation is for the sake of something prior and more fundamental: the divine project or plan.

In the beginning, God subjected all things to his final purpose, just as an archer strings a bow in order to pull it back and load it with a force that strains forward toward its target (Romans 8:20-21). Thus, the very first verse of the Bible encourages us to read forward, plotting the trajectory of the text in all its extraordinarily rich diversity as it aims toward the fulfillment of the Word that is eternally spoken by the Father “in the beginning;’ out of which and for the sake of which all things were created.

Unlike the worldly archer, however, we do not possess the divine, consummating target of scripture as an item of knowledge that we can use in syllogisms, which is why wild apocalyptic discourse in the Bible can never be distilled into predictions. The plan and purpose of God is love, and it is revealed in its fullness in the person of Jesus Christ. As we are baptized into his body and follow his way, we participate in his truth rather than examine it as a fact or theory. We live amid the final realization of the divine plan, and we cannot stand still and coolly line up the endpoint of human history in our theological crosshairs. For this reason, our reading of Genesis (or any other book of the Bible) is not a simple retrospective calculation. One does not approach the days of creation with a slide rule, reasoning backward from a fixed point.

Instead, to begin Genesis “in the beginning” gives our interpretation a double quality. At every moment in the unfolding of the divine plan we rightly devote ourselves to the details. But the project of exegesis is not simply to settle purely local questions of meaning. Our goal should be to move forward ever more deeply into the beginning, into the mystery of Christ.

For this reason, theological interpretation necessarily combines a global framework with local color. Our overall take on the divine plan interacts with particular moments of scriptural evidence. The best possible reading of any verse of scripture will be one that allows us to both make sense of the words in front of us and see their role in guiding us toward fulfillment in Christ.

 

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CREATION (part one) by R.R. Reno

August 25, 2011

The Mountains Of Creation

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

This time-honored translation follows the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation widely used in early Judaism and Christianity. The verbal formula plays an explicit role in John 1:1 (“in the beginning was the Word”), which itself provides an obvious interpretation of Genesis 1:1, emphasizing a beginning that is absolute and foundational. It is precisely this sense of “beginning;’ as well as its close association with John 1:1, that is muted by recent translations, which shift the word order: “in the beginning when God created” (NRSV) or “when God began to create” (New Jewish Publication Society Bible).

It is important to realize that we do not possess a quick way to settle the question of which translation is accurate. As Jews began to speak languages further and further removed from ancient Hebrew, a tradition evolved that provided vowel markings to guide pronunciation. This tradition culminated in the Masoretic Text, the oldest manuscript of which dates back to the ninth century after the time of Christ. By and large, modern scholars treat the Masoretic Text as definitive. But consulting the Masoretic Text is not always the obvious way to get to the original sense. The most influential Greek translation, the Septuagint, was made sometime in the third or second century before the time of Christ. In this version, the translators sometimes suggest readings of keywords that differ from those in the Masoretic Text. So, when it comes to the historical question of how to translate in such a way as to be faithful to the original text, the answers are not always easy.

When considering Genesis 1: 1, the problem becomes still more difficult, because the concept “beginning” has different shades of meaning. A point of departure can refer to a discrete moment in time. We might say, for example, “The train began its trip at 7:25 p.m.;’ and following this usage, the preference of contemporary translators for a more temporal and restricted sense of “beginning” is certainly plausible.

Yet a point of departure or beginning can also refer to a basis or a rationale, a purpose, or a reason. A scientist can say, “The second law of thermodynamics is the basis — the beginning — of cosmology.” Or, “Professor Smith’s class was the basis — the beginning — of my love of science.” This sense of “beginning” as source and origin is associated with the Greek term arche, the word used to translate Genesis 1:1 in the Septuagint and repeated in John 1:1. Of course, the sense of “beginning” as an origin or source rather than first instance in time is not simply a Greek idea. When scripture teaches that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalms 111:10), the claim is substantive, not temporal. Fear of the LORD is the origin of the wise life, not in the sense of the first step that is superseded by the second and third, but in the lasting sense of providing its basis or root. [For a full development of the possible senses of "beginning," see Origen's Commentary on John 1.16-22 (ANF 9.305-8). I follow Origen in also rejecting a temporal sense of "beginning" for interpreting Genesis 1:1: see his Homilies on Genesis 1.1 (FC 71.47-48).]

With these straightforward observations about the diversity of ancient traditions and the different senses of “beginning,” we face an interesting exegetical problem. The old translation brings to mind the traditional theological picture of God as the eternal, self-sufficient deity whose creative act “in the beginning” brings all time and reality into existence. The new translations that are supported by many biblical experts imply a different view. At a certain point in time and in a particular place in a preexisting cosmos, a deity set about to form this particular world. God is a power within the cosmos rather than the power that brings the cosmos into existence. Which, then, shall it be? Are we to cleave to the traditional translation and its implied theology of an absolute beginning, or should we follow contemporary scholarly judgments?

Rashi, the great eleventh-century rabbinic commentator, can help us move toward a satisfactory answer. At the outset of his commentary on Genesis, Rashi reiterates an earlier rabbinic opinion that the Pentateuch should have begun with Exodus 12:2 and not Genesis 1:1. The claim seems fanciful, but it is meant to interpret rather than correct the sacred text. The traditional rabbinic view holds that Exodus 12:2 expresses the first commandment that God gives to Israel. Thus, to say that the Bible should have begun with Exodus 12:2 is a way of dramatizing an important theological judgment: God creates for the sake of his commandments, for the sake of the Torah.

More is at work here than a general theological idea, however. It turns out that Exodus 12:2 is not just the first commandment to Israel. The verse also echoes the key, fraught word “beginning”: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.” Furthermore, the commandment about the beginning of the months is odd, and it draws attention to a richer, more foundational sense of” beginning.” Exodus 12 as a whole is concerned with preparations for the Passover, and the implied meaning of 12:2 is that the Passover festival, in a certain sense, provides the beginning of the lunar calendar.

But, of course, the verse can’t mean that Passover is the temporal beginning of lunar cycles measured by months, since there were countless months before the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. ‘Thus, the passage must mean that the Passover provides an ultimate purpose or rationale for the lunar calendar. So our attention is redirected back to Genesis 1:1 and the origin of all things. In a substantive rather than temporal way the Passover serves as the beginning point, the arche of human history. The very cycles of the moon exist for the sake of marking the time of the Passover.

We can now see, therefore, that Rashi cites the ancient rabbinic opinion that the Bible should have begun with Exodus 12:2 because he wants to reinforce that larger theological judgment about Genesis 1 as a whole: God’s plan for the people of Israel is the most elementary, most fundamental aspect of creation. As another ancient interpretation glosses Genesis 1:1, “God looked into the Torah … and created the world” (Genesis Rabbah 1.1, quoted from Kugel 1998: 45).

The deliverance and sanctification of Israel, the Passover project so to speak, is that in which and for which God creates. Still another ancient interpretation puts the priority of God’s plan in paradoxical terms and gives a full-blown account of the divine plan: “Two thousand years before [God] created the world he created the Law; he had prepared the garden of Eden for the just and Gehenna for the wicked. He had prepared the garden of Eden for the just that they might eat and delight themselves from the fruits of the trees, because they had kept [the] precepts of the Law in this world and fulfilled the commandments. For the wicked he prepared Gehenna …. [and] within it darts of fire and burning coals for the wicked, to be avenged of them in the world to come because they did not observe the precepts of the Law in this world. “[Targum Neofiti 3.24 in Martin McNamara, trans., Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis, Aramaic Bible I A (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 63-64.] God first “creates” the future consummation of creation — “the world to come” in which Torah obedience and disobedience define existence — and then God creates for the sake of bringing this future to pass in the real time of creation.

This traditional rabbinic affirmation that the revelation of Sinai precedes reality — where “precedes” is given a substantive or foundational sense rather than in .a narrow, temporal sense — lines up fairly closely with the prologue to John’s Gospel. John 1:1, like Exodus 12:2, echoes the crucial word “beginning.” It affirms the truth that God creates out of his word or purpose. It is not that Rashi or any other Jewish commentator would agree that Christ, the incarnate Word, is the basis for creation. Rather, the rabbis and the author of John’s Gospel explicitly affirm a basic theological principle. The divine plan or project, however spelled out, is the beginning out of which and for which God creates.

At this point contemporary scholars are likely to raise objections. The current formulations such as “when God began” or “in the beginning when God created” stem, at least in part, from an anxiety that traditional theological loyalties have for too long over-determined our reading of scripture. This anxiety becomes particularly acute when modern biblical scholars see the New Testament (or ancient rabbinic interpretation) functioning as the lens through which we read the Old Testament. Historians worry that later doctrinal commitments exercise an extrinsic and anachronistic control over our interpretive imaginations. The danger is that we end up simply finding what we are looking for: confirmation of our dogmatic prejudices. In the meantime, the real meaning of the biblical text is lost. After all, as biblical scholars point out, the very next verse of Genesis evokes a standard ancient Near Eastern myth of primeval combat between the power for order and the power of chaos.

No doubt it is a good thing to want to recover the integrity of the distinctive voices and historical contexts for the diverse books of the Bible. The methods of historical-critical study allow us to see the biblical text as a multilayered, internally complex document, and this is a gain. There is no reason to think that the word of God should be one-dimensional and immediately accessible. [On the contrary, the church fathers consistently observe that it is fitting that the sacred scriptures should be difficult and confusing. For an account of the patristic theology of scriptural obscurity, see John J. O'Keefe and R. R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation ofthe Bible (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 128-39; and R. R. Reno, "Origen and Spiritual Interpretation," Pro ecclesia 15.1 (Winter 2006): 108-26.]

Nonetheless, the modern tradition of biblical interpretation tends to be blind to the wealth of reasons in favor of traditional readings. Exegetical judgments do not emerge out of nowhere, achieve communal authority, and then impose themselves on the interpretive imaginations of traditional readers and translators of the Bible. In the main, traditional readers formulated and gave credence to patterns of interpretation and translation because they discerned any number of intellectual and spiritual advantages that are as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago.

We need to turn, then, to a brief survey of some exegetical reasons in support of the substantive approach to “in the beginning;’ the approach that the rabbinic tradition cited by Rashi endorses. These reasons very likely guided those who produced the Septuagint and later translations, as well as the implied reading of Genesis 1:1 found in John 1:1. Needless to say, a comprehensive account is out of reach. How we treat the beginning is so fundamental to our overall interpretation of the Bible that reasons for any particular translation are almost coextensive with the articulation of a comprehensive, biblically sensitive theology. Nonetheless, it is possible to gain some insight into why the traditional translation (“in the beginning”) best conveys the meaning of Genesis 1:1.

The larger sweep of Genesis 1 provides the first indication. The days of creation certainly move forward in a temporal sequence. One day follows another, culminating in the seventh day, the Sabbath. But in spite of this apparent focus on when things happen, the dominant rhetorical theme of the first chapters of Genesis concerns how God creates. Each day is introduced with the refrain “and God said.” This forceful rhetorical pattern is echoed elsewhere. Recalling the angels and the heavens,  Psalms. 148:5 gives all praise to God, “for he commanded and they were created.” From this picture of God’s voice as the instrument of creation, it is a very short step to something like the interpretation of Genesis 1:1 found in John 1:1: “In the beginning” — that is, in his all-powerful word — “God created the heavens and the earth “

A substantive reading of” beginning” has another, more literal form of textual support. Many ancient commentators saw an obvious difficulty standing in the way of a straightforward, temporal interpretation of the sort found in translations such as “when God began.” In Genesis 1 the sun, moon, and stars are created on the fourth day. How, then, can there be a “first day” when the sun, whose movements mark day and night, does not exist?

Furthermore, at any moment half of the earth is in darkness, while the other half is illuminated by the sun. So, we never think of the earth as a whole (to say nothing of the larger universe) as existing in the temporally distinct states of day and night. In view of these difficulties, we should not be surprised that St. Augustine worried that a strictly temporal reading of Genesis I would entangle interpreters in countless difficulties. “I fear,” he wrote, “that I will be laughed at by those who have scientific knowledge of these matters and by those who recognize the facts of the case” (Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.10 in FC 41.30; see also City of ‘God 11.7 in Bettenson 1972: 436-37). To avoid this problem Augustine subordinated the temporal sense of the day-by-day account to what he took to be the more important, substantive sense of “beginning.”

There are still further textual reasons in support of the traditional interpretation and translation of the beginning, reasons that draw on the insights of modern biblical scholarship. In the terminology of modern biblical study, Genesis 1 reflects the interests and worldview of P, the Priestly writer or writers, while Genesis 2 stems from I, the Yahwist source. ["J" comes from the scholars who first developed this theory of the composition of Genesis transliterating their vocalization of the divine name in German as Jahweh.]

This is not the place to give an account of scholarly opinions about the historical contexts for P and J or their roles in the overall composition of the canonical form of Genesis. However, it is important to know that isolating distinct traditions and assigning different sections of Genesis to one source or the other has helped modern biblical readers. It allows us to step back from a merely local reading of Genesis in order to consider how the different sections and episodes within Genesis reflect and advance particular theological concerns. In this case, to know that Genesis 1 stems from the Priestly tradition encourages us to think about how the seven-day account of creation fits with the cultic theology of ritual and sacrifice in Leviticus, as well as the emphasis on the centralized, priest-governed worship in Jerusalem found in the historical books of the Old Testament.

As a modern historian, then, the first and most important thing to say about the opening account of creation in Genesis is that it stems from a Priestly tradition that wishes to place temple and sacrifice at the center of our perceptions of the deepest logic and purpose of reality. The Priestly theology of temple and sacrifice is the arche or beginning of the P account of creation. [One need not depend on the aid of modern biblical scholarship. Canonical writers also emphasized the temple-oriented structure of creation. Thus Jeremiah 17:12: "A glorious throne set on high from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary." See also Wisdom of Solomon 9:8: "Thou hast given command to build a temple on thy holy mountain, and an altar in the city of thy habitation, a copy of the holy tent which thou didst prepare from the beginning." The same vision of a temple "in the beginning" continues in the New Testament: "We have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent which is set up not by man but by the Lord" (Hebrews 8:1-2).]

Thus we are pretty much where Rashi and John’s Gospel left us. To be sure, there are important differences. The traditional rabbinic opinion that God creates for the sake of the Torah and the traditional Christian view that the eternal Word was with God in the beginning make distinct claims about God and reality. In contrast, modern scholars direct our attention toward sociological rather than theological truths: certain ideologies and political loyalties shape the final form of the biblical text. Nonetheless, the logic of “beginning” is the same in each case. Genesis presents the days of creation in terms of a substantive, underlying source: God’s plan for traditional readers, Priestly ideology for modern historical scholars.

Here we encounter a persistent paradox in modern biblical study. The actual implications of its methods and analysis are often at odds with its exegetical judgments (although not always; see von Rad 1972:46). Rashi, the authors of various New Testament texts and modern biblical scholars assume that the creation account has a beginning in which or for the sake of which the seven days unfold across Genesis 1. Again, it does not matter that Rashi will say that God creates for the sake of the Torah, over and against the author of John’s Gospel, who implies that God creates for the sake of the incarnation of his Word — both of whom are contradicted by the modern biblical scholar who says that the writer or writers of the creation account formulated the seven-day sequence for the sake of reinforcing a Jerusalem-oriented temple ideology. All agree that creation emerges out of a prior plan or purpose — traditional readers putting the plan in the mind of God, and modern readers putting it in the mind of the tradition that stands behind the P source. This striking consensus militates against the contemporary preference for a thin, temporally focused reading of Genesis 1:1 and strongly supports the substantive sense of the traditional translation: “In the beginning.”

 

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The Meaning of Old Age – Fr. Romano Guardini

July 28, 2011

 

Old Woman Dozing by Nicolaes Maes (1656)

A reading selection from Fr. Guardini’s The Faith and Modern Man (1944).

What … is the meaning of old age? This can best be determined by proceeding from the most important element in the preceding period — the experience of reality. In old age something special happens to reality. Its hardness is softened by the experience of transitoriness. Persons who once seemed indispensable die. One after another disappears — parents, teachers, onetime superiors first, contemporaries next. One has the feeling that a former generation has come to an end and that the following, one’s own, is beginning to crumble. Many enterprises one has seen collapse, many organizations break down. One has lived to see the end of trends and fashions and standards of values. Concepts of what is right and fitting that had appeared unshakable and part of existence have lost their validity.

These impressions will be particularly strong in a period of historic upheaval, all the more so if the formative years belonged to the period preceding revolutionary change. Reality then becomes questionable — not as in youth, when time seems endless, but rather because now reality has been found not to be as real as it appeared in the realistic period of mature life. The view of things widens out. Under the pressure of reality, a person was limited to the present moment. But toward the end the whole comes again into view.

As in autumn, when the leaves fall from the trees, the view expands, and one is conscious of wide space. Reality engages the will in what is at the moment to be sought, done, mastered. But as the years go on one learns to loosen one’s hold. The urgency of will begins to slacken. Detachment is the next phase, and a person’s nature opens up to the whole, to a general view of existence.

Again we have reached a point that calls for decision, as, indeed, life continually calls for decision. Being is, in essence, ambiguous. It can always go right or left. The same feeling can turn out to be good or bad. The same virtue can work fruitfully or destructively. Just so here. The same detachment from reality, the loosening of one’s hold on things, the sense of the unimportance of whether a thing is done this way or that, the accumulation of disappointments, the many renunciations of a long life may simply point to the end.

Old age is that period of existence which life has been dreading all along — death spread out over years. That sense of the whole which more and more weighs upon us becomes the pitifulness of collective existence — the indifference of nature which kills as mercilessly as it gives life; the lack of consideration on the part of the persons around one who are put out by the presence of old people; the cruelty of the young who press ahead into life demanding space for themselves.

But this is not the true meaning of old age. That the will should lose its hold on things and on tasks generally, and that the hands be left free, should bring about a wider perspective in which that final thing, that real thing should become luminous. Out of that new condition grows a new form of belief. The danger in which aging men and women find themselves is that of capitulating to transitoriness, of having no more future, of living in their memories, of giving in to an existence which is ever more growing empty, of clinging to the fortuitous, of growing weak and tyrannical and at the same time powerless and helpless.

The same danger threatens their religious life. There is a kind of skepticism possible only to the old — the cynicism of hopelessness which also affects their faith. It is the attitude in which mutability has conquered. In it nothingness rules. Death of body and heart has assumed spiritual form. In direct opposition to this attitude stands the true faith of old age. It has cast aside the dreamy aloofness of childhood, renounced the endless demands of youth; it has experienced the transitory and seen how fleeting is human life, how questionable its works and its ways. Ever-changing life takes a new turn. Something final, something real has come through.

At first it appears to be life itself, or, as we say half humorously, half wryly, life as it really is. But behind that looms something else — eternity. Beyond the mere drifting toward the end lies nothingness, dark, empty horror. To save themselves from it the old grasp at the nearest thing, this special food, that particular armchair, their bank account, their having the last word at home. But nothingness is not eternity. Before eternity stands death, but eternity itself is pure reality, endless fulfillment.

To be sure, it must continually be won anew through courage and struggle. But, the conquest made, there comes into existence a breadth, a quietness, a clarity of a new kind.

This struggle presses on into wisdom. Wisdom is insight into things as they are, and is acquired only when one is near the end. It cannot be taught; each must learn it for himself or herself through their own folly and out of the bitterness of their own end. It is the understanding of the relationship of the particular to the whole, and this understanding is achieved only when the whole comes into view — that is to say, at the end.

It is the sense of what is important and unimportant, of proportion, of what is ultimately rewarding, and it is to be gained only when it is too late to change anything, but when there is still time for forgiveness, for contrition and for leaving everything in God’s hands. Of this nature is the true faith of old people. Their attitude grows very simple, one might almost say childlike. Childishness is the ugly form of something which can be very beautiful. Second childhood, like first childhood, feels that all is one, that everything is under protection, that all will be well. Such faith is broad, understanding, tolerant.

It is experience to the fullest — when it has humor in it. It is a wonderful thing, the humor of a religious person who carries everything into the boundless love of God, including the inadequate, the strange, the queer; who hopes for a solution when reason and effort can do no more, and who discerns a purpose where earnestness and zeal have long since given up hope of finding one.

Posted in Fr. Romano Guardini, Reflections | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

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Faith and Doubt in the Stages of Life – Fr. Romano Guardini

July 27, 2011

Saint Luke as a painter, before Christ on the Cross, Francisco de Zurbarán, 1635-1640

A reading selection from Fr. Guardini’s The Faith and Modern Man (1944).

Christian men and women are situated in life exactly as are all other human beings. Their bodies are made up of natural elements and are subject to natural laws. They live in the community of family and nation. They participate in the events of history, and share in the economic, scientific and artistic life of their days. Their dreams, thoughts, ethical motives, standards of right living, hopes of fulfillment, are like those of everybody else. But in their consciousness they have thoughts of another kind too — of the heavenly Father who created all things and guides people by his providential wisdom, thoughts of redemption and of a new, holy life which springs from it, which begins here on earth and finds its fulfillment in eternity.

These thoughts do not derive from human knowledge and experience, at least not if they are taken in their proper sense. The truth that underlies them, the kind of mind they bespeak, the way of life to which they call, go back to one definite person — Jesus Christ. He claims to be the living revelation of the hidden God, the redeemer of the lost, the bringer of new life…

The Christian believer of whom we are speaking has, in some way, come upon Jesus Christ, either by steeping himself or herself in the sources which relate his history, or by having learned from others of his person and doctrine. They are convinced that Jesus Christ alone brings truth and salvation, that he alone sheds light upon the riddle of existence, that by his spirit alone can moral problems be solved, that he alone affords a final refuge to the human heart.

The lives of such men and women consist of a whole in which two worlds intermingle — the natural life with its realities, and everything which Christ makes known of truth and wisdom, and the strength which he imparts. This unity let us call simply the Faith. It constitutes a very highly organized, unified life — if it really is what it claims to be, the highest life of all. It comprehends ideas, values, powers, has strong purpose, and provides a certainty beyond any other certainty. At the same time, like every other highly organized life, it is extremely vulnerable — vulnerable, indeed, in a very special way.

When we consider how the gospel of Christ places a person under God’s judgment, how it demands of that person a change of heart, how it requires him or her to give up much to which human nature clings for some distant goal, it is clear from the start that these changes cannot come about simply as the result of almost automatic development, but only through decisions and conquests, continually renewed. Since faith is life itself, life in the fullest sense, it must undergo repeated crises, crises which concern not merely a single part of a person’s life, but their whole nature – their mind and all their potentialities…

Much more could be added on this subject; but this much probably has been made clear — that crises in faith are not simple matters. Only rarely are they concerned with uncertainties in understanding — the interpretation of this or that point of Christian doctrine, or this or that passage of scripture. Questions of this character can be readily disposed of. But usually, as the whole nature of the situation shows, they concern something quite different. When one has discussed these things with many people, one soon notices that the arguments put forward are in no proportion to the conclusions drawn from them.

They are, for the most part, characterized by a peculiar overemphasis, passion or bitterness or defiance, which points to something deeper than the reasons that are advanced — all the more so since the language which the objector uses is generally that of mere intellectual discussion, in which deep personal experience has no part. Doubts of faith almost always signify inner shifts of position, and the person whose religious life is at stake must recognize this fact — as must also those who have the responsibility for helping such persons.

The church says that people so afflicted may not set aside their faith, even for the time being. The ruling, in individual cases, may be felt as very severe, but it is right. It is based on the conviction that faith proceeds primarily not from human beings, but from God, whose power helps them to see as far into the question as is necessary and still to remain so closely bound to God that they will be able to persevere. Then, too, the ruling speaks from the knowledge that humans believe not merely with their intellect — that part of their nature which doubt seizes upon — but with their whole living being, so that they may place the center of gravity of their faith deeper, or at another point, and endure the difficulty until it solves itself.

However, when doubt has penetrated so deeply that conscience can no longer give assent, the situation changes. Here also one can only advise that a person take no rash steps to destroy the bonds which hold together the deepest meaning of life. There is a virtue which is of the utmost importance in the business of living, namely patience, and here it is particularly called for.

There are two sides of the relation of a person’s heart to God. On the one side is longing for God, longing for his sacred truth. But on the other side is aversion, distrust, irritation, revolt.

It is this twofold aspect which makes religious doubt dangerous. The moving force in the doubt is hostility toward God. This we need to know. Therefore, in any wrestling with doubt, one must resort to prayer. The most effective kind of prayer is that in which we place ourselves, in our hearts, before God, relinquishing all resistance, letting go of all secret irritation, opening ourselves to the truth, to God’s holy mystery, saying over and over again, “I desire truth, I am ready to receive it, even this truth which causes me such concern, if it be the truth. Give me light to know it, and to see how it bears on me.”

Posted in Book Recommendations, Fr. Romano Guardini | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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