What being Catholic means to me
Dec. 31st, 2005 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbAt the heart of bufo_viridis' response lies Bufo's view of me: I don't think you a person who'd accept a dogma before thinking it over. It raises a certain amount of basic questions that I think I would do well to clarify.
I think that almost every one of us who has any experience of the life of the intellect, or has any ability to admire and praise, knows what it is like to have a great master. A great master does not have to be someone you met. In our society, it is most of the time a person who has left a large written body of work. Once you met that body of work, you had the feeling of a revelation, or, more accurately, the feeling of having it made clear to you what you really always knew, but had for some reason been unable to recognize, or to conceptualize, or to admit. And as you go on with his or her work, you find that s/he is so often and so ringingly right, so thought-provoking in the right way, so energizing and stimulating, that you are motivated to follow, in some way, in his or her footsteps. One does not have to have only one great master; in my case, I would mention the cartoonists Jack Kirby and Hayao Miyazaki, the philosopher Karl Popper, the historians Georges Dumezil and Alexis de Tocqueville, the literary historians C.S.Lewis and Ann Taylor, the critic A.C.Bradley, the journalist and polymath Gilbert K.Chesterton, the ecclesiastic John Henry (Cardinal) Newman.
Underlying Bufo's view of me is the view that a reasonable man does not accept a teaching without testing it. This is a modern commonplace, but I do not believe it is either desirable or possible. We assume millions of things on authority, from the fact that there is such a place as China (I have never been there, so all my knowledge of it is based on authoritative accounts bybufo_viridis and his likes) to the fact that translations from the Hebrew or from the Armenian mean exactly what they say, to the existence of protons. But even if it were possible, the idea of testing every teaching would not describe in any way our encounter with a great master. As the great master seems to clarify and give voice to things you had always felt without necessarily being able to express them, you instinctively trust his/her account of things. You tend to repeat his/her views and order the world according to his/her categories. It is only after a while, perhaps a long while, that you come to notice that the great master, for all his/her greatness, has limits, problems of temper, gray areas, prejudices. This represents your coming of age with respect to him/her; but it does not in the end break your relationship of trust and love.
Now the relationship of a faithful Catholic with the teaching of the Church is the same. As G.K.Chesterton describes it in Orthodoxy, once you begin to see the point of Catholic teaching, you find that it fits the universe as you know as a key fits the lock that it was meant to open. (This observation will be clear only to Catholics. I therefore would be grateful if the non-Catholics who read this would refrain from answering that it does not for them. Chesterton and I both knew that. It is what is implied by being or not being a Catholic.) You start trusting its views ever where you cannot check them, for you find that wherever you can, they are valid. I grew up in an atmosphere where the "right" to abortion was taken for granted and never questioned, and I was in the Church for years before it even occurred to me to wonder whether the fact that the Church opposed abortion meant that I had to look at it again. It is not, in my case, because I opposed abortion, that I entered the Church: to the contrary, it was my slowly growing confidence in the teachings of the Church - in their order, sanity, beauty, and truth - that made me, first doubt, and then turn against, abortion. My parents are still not reconciled to this change of mind.
However, the Church, unlike any of your great masters, is not a person. We use the female pronoun of her, but that is in some ways a metaphor, in others a statement of an otherworldly rather than physical reality. One does not quite relate to the Catholic Church as one does to a person. And by the same token, the teachings of the Church are not quite of the same kind as the teachings of a single master, however inspired. From the beginning, she spoke with a plurality of voices. Jesus never wrote a line that we know of, except in the sand (John 8.6); and from the beginning we are faced with the towering personalities of Paul and John and the lesser but still notable figures of Luke, James, Peter and Jude. The Church, from the beginning, speaks with a plurality of voices. And as history goes on, the number of great voices multiplies. The Church currently acknowledges 33 Doctors of the Church - teachers with a special authority - and this still does not include giants such as Newman and Chesterton, who will surely enter the canon at some future date.
This is the difference between the Catholic Church and every other Christian body, with the exception of the Orthodox Churches. Apart from the Orthodox, every other body separated from the Church under the impulse of a single teacher - Montanus, Arius, Donatus, Eutyches, Nestorius, Pelagius, Peter Waldo, Jan Hus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, etc. - or at least of a group of teachers who all recognized themselves in a single doctrine. The functional equivalent of Protestant Churches is not the Catholic Church as a whole, but those movements within it - particularly but not exclusively monastic orders - which identify with the teachings of a single great teacher, from Thomas Aquinas for the Dominicans to Joseph Escriva de Balaguer for Opus Dei.
And it follows that the sense of trust one has in the teachings of the Church is larger and deeper even than what one has for any one of one's own great teachers. The Church, in a sense, gathers them all in. Taking each of the great Doctors of the Church and other giants of Church history, there is always some feature of their teaching with which one would be less than thrilled, one which, if cultivated unopposed or unargued, would lead to error. For instance, the greatest of them all, Augustine of Hippo, could easily be read to support double predestination - the Gottschalkian and Calvinistic doctrine that God has intended some men for damnation as well as for salvation; but Augustine, even Augustine, does not speak alone for the Church. He has at least one, perhaps two, Doctors of equal rank and greatness - Thomas Aquinas, John Chrisostomos - and many others who, though comparatively smaller, still count as great teachers and bearers of the Church's message.
It is practically impossible for any Catholic to individually absorb each area of the Church's teaching and debate; even the Catechism of the Catholic Church, encyclopedic and thorough as it is, does not contain it all - for instance, I have recently had to search elsewhere for some features of the practice of Baptism. Perhaps only Thomas Aquinas, in the entire history of mankind, ever had the intellectual apparatus to deal with it all. But when we find that the teaching is time and time again valid, wise, penetrating, sane, and truthful, then we build a trust in it that is as deep, and more confident, as that in any of our great teachers.
bufo_viridis' response lies Bufo's view of me: I don't think you a person who'd accept a dogma before thinking it over. It raises a certain amount of basic questions that I think I would do well to clarify.I think that almost every one of us who has any experience of the life of the intellect, or has any ability to admire and praise, knows what it is like to have a great master. A great master does not have to be someone you met. In our society, it is most of the time a person who has left a large written body of work. Once you met that body of work, you had the feeling of a revelation, or, more accurately, the feeling of having it made clear to you what you really always knew, but had for some reason been unable to recognize, or to conceptualize, or to admit. And as you go on with his or her work, you find that s/he is so often and so ringingly right, so thought-provoking in the right way, so energizing and stimulating, that you are motivated to follow, in some way, in his or her footsteps. One does not have to have only one great master; in my case, I would mention the cartoonists Jack Kirby and Hayao Miyazaki, the philosopher Karl Popper, the historians Georges Dumezil and Alexis de Tocqueville, the literary historians C.S.Lewis and Ann Taylor, the critic A.C.Bradley, the journalist and polymath Gilbert K.Chesterton, the ecclesiastic John Henry (Cardinal) Newman.
Underlying Bufo's view of me is the view that a reasonable man does not accept a teaching without testing it. This is a modern commonplace, but I do not believe it is either desirable or possible. We assume millions of things on authority, from the fact that there is such a place as China (I have never been there, so all my knowledge of it is based on authoritative accounts by
bufo_viridis and his likes) to the fact that translations from the Hebrew or from the Armenian mean exactly what they say, to the existence of protons. But even if it were possible, the idea of testing every teaching would not describe in any way our encounter with a great master. As the great master seems to clarify and give voice to things you had always felt without necessarily being able to express them, you instinctively trust his/her account of things. You tend to repeat his/her views and order the world according to his/her categories. It is only after a while, perhaps a long while, that you come to notice that the great master, for all his/her greatness, has limits, problems of temper, gray areas, prejudices. This represents your coming of age with respect to him/her; but it does not in the end break your relationship of trust and love.Now the relationship of a faithful Catholic with the teaching of the Church is the same. As G.K.Chesterton describes it in Orthodoxy, once you begin to see the point of Catholic teaching, you find that it fits the universe as you know as a key fits the lock that it was meant to open. (This observation will be clear only to Catholics. I therefore would be grateful if the non-Catholics who read this would refrain from answering that it does not for them. Chesterton and I both knew that. It is what is implied by being or not being a Catholic.) You start trusting its views ever where you cannot check them, for you find that wherever you can, they are valid. I grew up in an atmosphere where the "right" to abortion was taken for granted and never questioned, and I was in the Church for years before it even occurred to me to wonder whether the fact that the Church opposed abortion meant that I had to look at it again. It is not, in my case, because I opposed abortion, that I entered the Church: to the contrary, it was my slowly growing confidence in the teachings of the Church - in their order, sanity, beauty, and truth - that made me, first doubt, and then turn against, abortion. My parents are still not reconciled to this change of mind.
However, the Church, unlike any of your great masters, is not a person. We use the female pronoun of her, but that is in some ways a metaphor, in others a statement of an otherworldly rather than physical reality. One does not quite relate to the Catholic Church as one does to a person. And by the same token, the teachings of the Church are not quite of the same kind as the teachings of a single master, however inspired. From the beginning, she spoke with a plurality of voices. Jesus never wrote a line that we know of, except in the sand (John 8.6); and from the beginning we are faced with the towering personalities of Paul and John and the lesser but still notable figures of Luke, James, Peter and Jude. The Church, from the beginning, speaks with a plurality of voices. And as history goes on, the number of great voices multiplies. The Church currently acknowledges 33 Doctors of the Church - teachers with a special authority - and this still does not include giants such as Newman and Chesterton, who will surely enter the canon at some future date.
This is the difference between the Catholic Church and every other Christian body, with the exception of the Orthodox Churches. Apart from the Orthodox, every other body separated from the Church under the impulse of a single teacher - Montanus, Arius, Donatus, Eutyches, Nestorius, Pelagius, Peter Waldo, Jan Hus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, etc. - or at least of a group of teachers who all recognized themselves in a single doctrine. The functional equivalent of Protestant Churches is not the Catholic Church as a whole, but those movements within it - particularly but not exclusively monastic orders - which identify with the teachings of a single great teacher, from Thomas Aquinas for the Dominicans to Joseph Escriva de Balaguer for Opus Dei.
And it follows that the sense of trust one has in the teachings of the Church is larger and deeper even than what one has for any one of one's own great teachers. The Church, in a sense, gathers them all in. Taking each of the great Doctors of the Church and other giants of Church history, there is always some feature of their teaching with which one would be less than thrilled, one which, if cultivated unopposed or unargued, would lead to error. For instance, the greatest of them all, Augustine of Hippo, could easily be read to support double predestination - the Gottschalkian and Calvinistic doctrine that God has intended some men for damnation as well as for salvation; but Augustine, even Augustine, does not speak alone for the Church. He has at least one, perhaps two, Doctors of equal rank and greatness - Thomas Aquinas, John Chrisostomos - and many others who, though comparatively smaller, still count as great teachers and bearers of the Church's message.
It is practically impossible for any Catholic to individually absorb each area of the Church's teaching and debate; even the Catechism of the Catholic Church, encyclopedic and thorough as it is, does not contain it all - for instance, I have recently had to search elsewhere for some features of the practice of Baptism. Perhaps only Thomas Aquinas, in the entire history of mankind, ever had the intellectual apparatus to deal with it all. But when we find that the teaching is time and time again valid, wise, penetrating, sane, and truthful, then we build a trust in it that is as deep, and more confident, as that in any of our great teachers.
