Quotes – eyebeleave

Contemporary art and its enemies

To paraphrase Karl Popper, let me start by saying that it is “impossible to make art in such a way that it cannot be misunderstood.” Over the course of this last week I have come across no less than three articles in which Christian authors denounce the evils of contemporary art.

First, there is our old friend Nikos Salingaros – of Oakland Cathedral review fame, who has a go at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels this time. His argument is again the same: “We have here a celebration of asymmetry, which might be understandable if there were a sound reason for it coming either from design necessities, or from religion.¹ But there is none. The building’s asymmetry serves an essentially negative purpose: to deny coherence and harmony.²” And there is the usual litany of nonsensical gems like: “geometrical fundamentalism,” “naked concrete walls [being] ultimately unpleasant,” lacking “connective ornament,” and claiming that religion “has a natural affinity with traditional architectural expressions of coherence” before taking Antoni Gaudí’s³ name in vain. There is only one thing to say in response to this: bullspit! Instead of trying to debunk this junk head on, I think that I have a sense of the root cause of his confused misreading of this piece of architecture: an expectation of the literal. God is perfect harmony, so churches need to be perfectly symmetrical; the Church values continuity, so a church needs to look old; the soul needs to ascend to God, so there need to be vertical lines in the church’s geometry (and the list of naïveté goes on and on). What I believe this approach entirely misses are two key aspects of beauty: mystery and surprise! Why is it that an object evokes emotions, triggers reflection, prompts insight and delivers aesthetic joy and pleasure? Sure, there are plenty of theories, but periodically an artist comes along and creates a piece that breaks them, yet that is unmistakably appreciated as art. Surprise too is a key element of art, in my opinion, and the kind of literal expectations that Salingaros relies on would entirely eradicate it.

Second, I have made the virtual acquaintance of another budding art critic: Jimmy Akin, who takes it upon himself to have a go at the Vatican’s touring art exhibit: “The Vatican Splendors: A Journey Through Faith and Art,” exclaiming that the works “from the mid-2oth [sic] century onward were terrible.”⁴ Akin is much more to the point than Salingaros and doesn’t even feel the need to back up his claims – the art of the last 60+ years is just “terrible.” But what he lacks in specificity, he certainly makes up for in initiative, with the “brilliant” idea to do something about “all the lousy Catholic art” by “supporting Catholic art education so that we can get better Catholic artists.” So far so good – I am filled with anticipation of the centre of excellence he’ll propose to support and the examples of their great Catholic art, done right [no, not really]. Instead, Akin unveils the following “stupendously amazing” piece by a 12th grader:

And, just to underline the horrors of the “lousy” art we have had to put up with, he pulls out Pericle Fazzini’s “The Resurrection” situated in the Vatican’s Paul VI’s hall:

I am stunned by this guy’s barefacedness. How can he put a school-kid’s (admittedly skillfully executed) drawing of Michelangelo’s Pieta beside Fazzini’s masterpiece (a 66×23 foot bronze created it in 1977 and showing Jesus rising from the crater of a nuclear bomb) and say: more of the former and less of the latter, please! The mind boggles!

Third, I have come across a far more cogent, yet – to my mind – still misguided, piece by Francis Phillips. Here the composer James MacMillan is first quoted as saying that “[a]rt can be a window on to the mind of God. Through this window we can encounter beauty and divine truth” and I am thinking that I have finally come across a good piece on the subject, following the arid head banging of Salingaros and Akin. Sadly, Phillips decides to take us down a frustrating route too, by turning a promising piece into a crusade against the National Gallery in London showing Richard Hamilton’s “The Passage of the Angel to the Virgin.” The piece is a giclée photomontage that bases itself on Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, but with two female nudes where Fra Angelico has the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. Phillips proceeds to label it as “scandalous,” as “shocking to Catholics, who have a particular reverence for the Virgin Mary,” as skewed for “[p]ortraying the Angel Gabriel as a young woman [since] the traditional Christian understanding of angels [is] as sexless spiritual beings”⁵ and as “desecrating.” Personally, I have a profound love for Mary and a deep gratitude to her for being the model of the perfect Christian, but I have to say that I disagree with all of the above. Since some of you may side with Phillips in your reaction to this piece, I will not reproduce it here, but only provide this (NSFW) link for those of you who choose to follow it. I have to say that I am not a fan of this piece by any means, but my reaction is one of curiosity about why Hamilton made the choices he made in it. Instead of a feeling of indignation, my response is more one of boredom and I would just walk past it and enjoy the rest of the National Gallery’s exquisite collection, instead of mounting a (failed) attempt to have it taken down, as Phillips did.

A point that seems to emerge to me from these last two articles is one of a decorative and exegetical role for art. A looking for pieces that would be good interior decoration for a church or that would illustrate a passage from Scripture or the Catechism. While some great art can certainly do that, it will do so in a way that transcends the simple, literal and functional. Other, equally great art would be entirely out of place as decoration though, yet would have the capacity to “be a window on to the mind of God.” I am certainly not thinking of Hamilton’s piece here, but more of something along the lines of Richard Serra’s work, such as his “Trip Hammer”:

Relegating “the mind of God” to decoration just seems like something that not even a heathen would do …

UPDATE (12/11/2012): My bestie JM went to visit the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels, with my über-besties MR and RR, and had the following to say:

I went to visit the Cathedral last weekend, in anticipation of coming down either on the side of its supporters or detractors. Instead, while I am undeniably an outright fan of it as a place of worship, I have to say that it is so ugly on the outside that only its mother could love it. You would be forgiven for mistaking it for a car park or a storage facility, if it wasn’t for the separate bell tower carrying a cross and the rather beautiful statue of Mary above its main entrance.

The interior is another story and is an unreserved and total success. The space is vast without being overpowering; it is light and welcoming and beautifully laid out not only in the main nave but also with its numerous chapel-like spaces that face out and away from the building’s main volume. They, like the whole church, are bathed in natural light and house content as diverse as a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Día de los muertos arrangement, a temporary exhibit by a local painter, artifacts from Pope John Paul II’s visit to LA and the confessionals. Outside too, the space is at the service of the community, with a great playground and a cafe/grill on the other side of a large square adjacent to the Cathedral.

In many ways this church is like one of those great Northern European cathedrals turned inside out. Instead of an ornate exterior and a plainer interior, here money has been spent on the interior space that church goers enjoy (including a great set of tapestries showing the communion of saints – and not only of canonized ones) while leaving the exterior plain and purely functional. Would I have preferred a more pleasing external architecture? No doubt! But, I believe the diocese spent their money where it matters to its members and visitors. This is a church that embraces those who come to it, instead of advertising itself to all. Not that the latter has little value, but I see why they would have favored the former. For some photos of my visit, see this Flickr set.

¹ I wasn’t going to engage with this nonsense, but – come on! – to claim that there is no “religious” reason for asymmetry! How about the following (vastly incomplete) examples: good – evil, infinite – finite, uncreated – created, selfless – selfish. And the list could go on and on.
² How about: to show movement, ascent, growth, a pull towards God?
³ To invoke Gaudí in an argument for traditional, symmetrical, literal architecture is just beyond nuts!
⁴ The hubris here would easily make Achilles’ dragging Hector’s lifeless body behind his chariot in front of the gates of Troy an act of level-headed diplomacy.
⁵ Not noticing the irony of this objection. Would the sexless angel better be portrayed as a man? Why?

Dei Verbum: a first look

As set out in a previous post, I have embarked on a journey through the 16 Vatican II documents, starting with the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum here.

Before getting into it, let me start with a few words to those of you – my friends! – who hold no or other beliefs about God than me. Without meaning to tell you what to do, I’d say that probably the best attitude to have when reading this post (and the rest of the series that will follow on Vatican II) is that of Thomas Nagel in his well-known paper entitled: “What is it like to be a bat?”¹ I don’t mean to get sidetracked here into his superb challenge to how consciousness is to be approached, but would just like to take some pointers from him on how one can consider the words of another, who holds different beliefs (and I am talking purely about understanding, without meaning to reduce relationships to knowledge alone). Nagel has the key insight that the question of what it is to be a bat is not about what it would be like for me to be a bat, but what it is for a bat to be a bat. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.” Just to avoid any misunderstanding, I believe these limitations apply in both directions. I too lack the direct experience of not believing in God or of holding other beliefs to my own, and therefore can only get so far with understanding what it is like to be an atheist or agnostic using my own “inadequate resources.” Sticking to Nagel’s example, trying to understand another person with whom I don’t share a key characteristic is like trying to understand from a bat what it is like to have sonar. Even if the bat could speak English, we wouldn’t have a shared vocabulary for it to quite get that across to me. In spite of such limitations, I hope that you will find interest in how Catholics look at the way they believe God has revealed himself to the world, which is precisely the subject of Dei Verbum.

Where else would the discourse start but with a quote from the New Testament, where John says the following:

“We announce to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us. What we have seen and heard we announce to you, so that you may have fellowship with us and our common fellowship be with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:2-3)

This puts us in a very clear context from the word go: that of continuity with Jesus’s disciples desiring to share what they have “seen and heard,” for the sake of building relationships with others and with God. The purpose of Dei Verbum then is to clarify how the above revelation of God to the world is to be understood. This revelation, where “the invisible God out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends and lives among them, so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself.”

Dei Verbum proceeds to present different ways in which God has revealed and continues to reveal himself:

Nature. “God, who through the Word creates all things and keeps them in existence, gives men an enduring witness to Himself in created realities” and “he ceaselessly kept the human race in His care, to give eternal life to those who perseveringly do good in search of salvation.” The message here is clear: God can be found in his creation,² “known […] by the light of human reason” and all who live for others rather than themselves will find him.
The people of Israel. “Then, at the time He had appointed He called Abraham in order to make of him a great nation. Through the patriarchs, and after them through Moses and the prophets, He taught this people to acknowledge Himself the one living and true God, provident father and just judge.” The books of the Old Testament “give expression to a lively sense of God, contain a store of sublime teachings about God, sound wisdom about human life, and a wonderful treasury of prayers, and in them the mystery of our salvation is present in a hidden way.” Even though these books “also contain some things which are incomplete and temporary, [we] should receive them with reverence.” “God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New.”
Jesus. “He sent His Son, the eternal Word, who enlightens all men, so that He might dwell among men and tell them of the innermost being of God.” God sends his Son, Jesus – the “eternal Word” – and through his life, teaching, death and resurrection, God shows himself directly to us and reveals himself in full intimacy.
The Holy Spirit. For someone to “freely assent to the truth revealed by Him […], the grace of God and the interior help of the Holy Spirit must precede and assist” and “[t]o bring about an ever deeper understanding of revelation the same Holy Spirit constantly brings faith to completion.” While revelation is complete in the person of Jesus, the Holy Spirit (“the Spirit of truth”), whom Jesus sent to his followers after his resurrection, continues to deepen our understanding of it.

How is it then, that God’s revelation is preserved, maintained and spread? Jesus commissioned the Apostles to share with others “what they had received from [His lips], from living with Him, and from what He did, or what they had learned through the prompting of the Holy Spirit.” They were also prompted to “commit the message of salvation to writing” and, “to keep the Gospel forever whole and alive.” “[T]he Apostles left bishops as their successors, “handing over” to them “the authority to teach in their own place.” (St. Irenaeus, Against Heretics III, 3)” Since the words of the Gospel are put into practice by Jesus’ followers, and since the Holy Spirit inspires them, “there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down.” This to me is quite a key passage – the account of Jesus’s life and teaching is not a static piece of text, frozen in time, but instead a source of growing understanding and new insights brought about with the help of the Holy Spirit in those who follow Jesus: “[T]hus God, who spoke of old, uninterruptedly converses with the bride of His beloved Son; [through the] Holy Spirit, through whom the living voice of the Gospel resounds in the Church, and through her, in the world.” The upshot of this is a very tight link between Scripture (a record of Jesus’ life and teaching) and Tradition (Jesus’ followers’ growing insight into Scripture from putting it into practice and with the help of the Holy Spirit), interpreted over time by the successors of the Apostles.

How is one to understand the nature of Scripture though? Dei Verbum first reaffirms the Church’s belief in “the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, [being] sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.” However, since they were written by men, we “should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.” Here, a distinction needs to be made between passages that are “historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse.” “[We] must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. [… D]ue attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.” This is as far from literalism as you can get – instead it is a teasing out of intention from a text anchored in a specific period of history and in a specific geographical location. No wonder its understanding has the potential to grow and for “new insights [to be] brought about”!

An important warning follows next in Dei Verbum: “serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out [and t]he living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith.” Understanding what was meant by a passage from Scripture mustn’t be done on the basis of picking a couple of phrases out of the whole and trying to make sense of them from scratch. They are part of a textual corpus and there is a rich body of existing insight into them and interpretation of them, to which any new understanding can add. Preserving the message God sent us through his Son and the Holy Spirit – and understanding it in the context I am in – requires a careful and critical interaction with all of Scripture, in which the Church’s judgment plays a key guiding and interpretative role too. Ultimately, the aim is “that we may learn the gentle kindness of God, which words cannot express, and how far He has gone in adapting His language with thoughtful concern for our weak human nature” (St. John Chrysostom, On Genesis).

Within the New Testament, the Gospels have a special “preeminence,” “for they are the principal witness for the life and teaching of the incarnate Word.” Their authors wrote the four Gospels, “selecting some things from the many which had been handed on by word of mouth or in writing, reducing some of them to a synthesis, explaining some things in view of the situation of their churches and preserving the form of proclamation but always in such fashion that they told us the honest truth about Jesus. For their intention in writing was that […] we might know “the truth” concerning those matters about which we have been instructed.” To make these “words of God” “accessible at all times, the Church […] sees to it that suitable and correct translations are made into different languages, especially from the original texts of the sacred books.” Preference is given also to producing translations “with the separated brethren[…, so that] all Christians will be able to use them.”

Finally, all Christians are called to a frequent reading of Scripture and to accompany it with prayer, “so that God and man may talk together; for “we speak to Him when we pray; we hear Him when we read the divine saying.” (St. Ambrose, On the Duties of Ministers I)” In this way “the treasure of revelation, entrusted to the Church, may more and more fill the hearts of men.”

So, these are my 1500 word notes on the 6000 word Vatican II text 🙂 – if you are interested, do read it in full. I certainly got a lot out of it and feel very comfortable with what the Church teaches about Scripture: they are believed to be the true Words of God, but since they were recorded by humans and within the “literary forms” and cultural conventions of a specific place and time, the task of understanding what the authors’ intentions were and what God meant to communicate, is a delicate process. That it is a process is also key, to my mind – it is not like these 2000 year old texts can just be internalized immediately (no text can!). Instead, they require knowledge, discernment, an open mind and the willingness to hear what God has to say to me – here and now.

Lumen Gentium is up next, and since it has 27000 words, I reckon it will occupy me for a while :).

¹ Thanks to my bestie, Margaret, for introducing me to this paper a good 10 years ago! If you are interested in consciousness at all, I highly recommend it in full.
² Note, that this does not imply the lunacy of Creationism – instead, I read this as, with our best knowledge today, God sustaining a universe that he made to follow the (his!) Standard Model.

From individual to person

I am feeling quite “meta” today and have no less than four reasons for it: first, what I am about to discuss is fundamentally meta, second, the act of writing about it to you is an instance of it, third, it ties several of the strands that I started in previous posts together, and, fourth, it has come to me in a way that illustrates the topic itself (thanks to my bestie, Margaret, of ‘the God of Explanations’ fame). If that is not enough to pique your interest, let me add that it is centered around a talk given by one of my favorite contemporary thinkers – Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The subject of the talk is an exploration of what it means to be human and revolves around the distinction between an individual and a person. In customary magisterial fashion, Archbishop Williams ties together the thinking of St. Augustine, Orthodox and Catholic theologians (Vladimir Lossky and Robert Spaemann), a Russian and a French philosopher (Mikhail Bakhtin and René Descartes), a French thinker (Alexis de Tocqueville), a psychotherapist (Patricia Gosling) and an LSE sociologist (Richard Sennett). The argument begins by claiming that the relevant polarity is not between individualism and communitarianism but between the concepts of an individual and a person.

Here an individual is simply an example of a certain thing: e.g., Bob is an example of a human being, just like Fido is an example of a dog. Seen from this “atomic” perspective (where, incidentally, “individuum” is merely the latinized version of the Greek “atomos”), the individual is the center of their own world – its solid core. Even when they engage in relationships with others, they always have “the liberty of hurrying back home,” and the best relationship they can have with the world, that is separate from them and beyond them, is control. The consequences of such a view of what it is to be human are alienation, non-cooperation and unease with limits. This view is summed up clearly by de Tocqueville saying that “[e]ach person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger in the destiny of all the others.” It is also the psychological and anthropological parallel of the epistemic approach pioneered by Descartes (and driven to its limit in the “brain-in-a-vat” scenario), that I also adapted in an earlier post and that, in art, is mirrored by Antony Gormley’s approach to sculpture.

The other concept of a human being is that of a person, where there is “something about us as a whole that is not defined just by listing the facts that happen to be true about us” and where a person is a “subject [that is] irreducible to its nature” (Lossky). Williams argues though that while “we know what we mean by personal/impersonal and persons in relation, […] we struggle to pin down what we mean that we cannot be reduced just to our nature.” He then goes on to postulating that “what makes me a person and distinct from another person is not a bundle of facts, but relations to others. I stand in the middle of a network of relations.” This leads to the definition of a person as the “point at which relationships intersect.”

Williams then moves on to the question of how one is to determine whether another is a human person and, following from the previous analysis, concludes that this cannot be done on the basis of a checklist for whether a given set of pre-requisites are present. Instead, we need to “form a relation, converse, to determine whether another is a person” and that language helps us to decide. He is quick here to move from a narrow concept of language as verbal only to a broad one that includes gestures and the “flicker of an eyelid.” This means that “[p]ersonal dignity or worth is ascribed to human individuals because, in a relationship, each of us has a presence or meaning in someone else’s existence. We live in another’s life. Living in the life of another is an implication of the profound mysteriousness about personal reality. Otherwise you end up with the model where somebody decides who is going to count as human.” Such a test of human personhood based on relateability very much reminded me of Turing’s test of machine intelligence, where the basis again is not a predetermined set of criteria, but the ability for a machine to converse with (relate to) a human person and for that person to recognize the machine as a person. Williams’ point about “each of us [having] a presence or meaning in someone else’s existence” also brought back echoes of Martini’s “the other is within us.”

How does the individual (which is by far the position with the strongest epistemic justification) see themselves as a person though? Here Williams quotes the following passage from Spaemann:

“Each organism naturally develops a system that interacts with its environment. Each creature stands at the center of its own world. The world only discloses itself as that which can do something for us; something becomes meaningful in light of the interest we take in it. To see the other as other, to see myself as his “thou” over against him, to see myself as constituting an environment for other centers of being, thus stepping out of the center of my world, is an eccentric position. […] As human beings in relationship, we sense that our environment is created by a relation with other persons; we create an environment for them and in that exchange, that mutuality, we discover what person means.”

How do you “step out” and assume an “eccentric position” tough? Here, Williams admits that such “stepping beyond one’s own individuality requires acts of faith. Living as a person is a matter of faith.” And I completely agree with him – strictly from a position of introspective enquiry, from Gormley’s “darkness of the body,” there is no fact-based way out. There is a need for a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith,” but I would like to argue that it does not require a belief in God and in fact is akin to Eco’s communist acquaintance’s belief in the “continuity of life” discussed in an earlier post.

Finally, let’s also look at what Williams says about the aspect of personhood that is revealed as a consequence of belief in God:¹

“Before personal relations, we are in relation with God. I am in relation to a non-worldly, non-historical attention which is God. My neighbor is always somebody who is in a relation with God, before they are in a relation with me. There is a very serious limit for me to make of my neighbor what I choose. They don’t belong to me and their relation to me is not what is true of them or even the most most important thing that is true of them. Human dignity – the unconditional requirement that we attend with reverence to one another – rests firmly on that conviction that the other is already related to something that isn’t me.”

In summary, a very clear picture emerges here, where I can think of myself as an individual – a world unto myself – or as the intersection of relations with others that allows me to go beyond myself and recognize in others that they are part of my world and I part of theirs. As a Christian this eccentricity also reveals to me that the relations I have with others build on the relations He has with them already and allow me to relate to Him not only in the intimacy of my self but also through my neighbors.

¹ As an argument, this is essentially a variant of Bishop Berkeley’s response to the following challenge to his philosophy, where being is predicated on perceiving:

There was a young man who said God,
must find it exceedingly odd
when he finds that the tree
continues to be
when noone’s about in the Quad.

To which Berkeley responded with another limerick:

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I’m always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
Since observed by, yours faithfully, God

:)))

Other truths

Beyond being sheep, Catholics are often also accused of claiming a monopoly on the truth – that it is exclusively them who have it and that everyone else is simply wrong. Sadly there is some basis in this accusation, if you look back over the history of the Church – peaking in shameful crimes like those perpetrated by the Inquisition and for which Blessed Pope John Paul II has unreservedly apologized.

Thankfully the Second Vatican Council has restored a much healthier view of appreciating Truth, wherever it is found, and seeking to learn from and live with those who profess other religions or none. At its root, this newfound openness derives from the event described in last Sunday’s Gospel, where John runs to Jesus to complain: “Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.” It is impressive to see that already at the time of Jesus, his disciples were jealous of Jesus’s actions and teaching and wanted to keep tight control over it. I believe there is a positive motivation for this in that they recognized it as being very valuable and didn’t want it to become distorted by those who did not also have a personal relationship with Jesus.

The response Jesus gives is very clear though: “Do not prevent him. There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time speak ill of me. For whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mark 9:38-40) Again there is the emphasis on orthopraxy and on the Truth being universal, accessible to all, albeit in different ways and expressed using different language and concepts. The Catechism here states that “the Church considers all goodness and truth found in [other] religions” to come from Him “who enlightens all men.” (CCC, §843).

This challenge is far from dealt with though, and Pope Benedict XVI has spoken about it with great openness and honesty at a meeting with Portuguese artists and scientists during his visit in 2010:

“The Church, in her adherence to the eternal character of truth, is in the process of learning how to live with respect for other “truths” and for the truth of others. Through this respect, open to dialogue, new doors can be opened to the transmission of truth.”

He is very frank about this post–conciliar openness being new, and like with all new things, is the beginning of a process where the Church needs to work out how to behave. In his book, Truth and Tolerance, published in 2003 before he became pope, the then-cardinal Ratzinger lays out the pre-requisites for effective inter-religious dialogue and indeed for a true adherence to one’s own religion:

“Can or must a man simply make the best of the religion that happens to fall to his share, in the form in which it is actually practiced around him? Or must he not, whatever happens, be one who seeks, who strives to purify his conscience and, thus, move toward—at the very least—the purer forms of his own religion? […]

The apostles, and the early Christian congregations as a whole, were only able to see in Jesus their Savior because they were looking for the “hope of Israel”—because they did not simply regard the inherited religious forms of their environment as being sufficient in themselves but were waiting and seeking people with open hearts. […]

[I]t is the dynamic of the conscience and of the silent presence of God in it that is leading religions toward one another and guiding people onto the path to God, not the canonizing of what already exists, so that people are excused from any deeper searching.”

The message here is clear: what is needed is a persistent striving for a conscience that is purified of distractions and impediments (which also requires the practice of charity in its broadest sense) and which will then lead one to God and all people closer to each other.

Civil disobedience

One of the most common charges against “religious” people in general and Catholics in particular is that they surrender the use of their critical faculties and follow orders from their leaders like sheep. In other words: they are no trouble, they won’t break rank and are all-round model citizens.

Today I’d like to argue that this is as far from the truth as possible, and I will take advantage of the Vatican’s foreign secretary, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti’s address to the United Nations from last Monday, which in many ways tracks Pope Benedict XVI’s speech at the German Bundestag, delivered last year.

He starts by acknowledging the dangers that follow from the “financial crisis, which is worsening some humanitarian and environmental emergencies, does not seem yet to be over, and may even herald new and dangerous conflicts” and that spreading “the rule of law by every means becomes a particularly urgent task for a just, equitable and effective world governance.” Then, he fully aligns himself with the UN’s insistence on: “the unbreakable link between the rule of law and respect for human rights, […] the judicial control of laws and of executive power, […] transparency in acts of governance and the existence of public opinion capable of expressing itself freely.” Mamberti’s key point comes next though:

“The rule of law is also put at risk when it is equated with a legalistic mentality, with a formal and uncritical adherence to laws and rules, in an attitude which can even paradoxically degenerate into a means of abusing human dignity and the rights of individuals, communities and states, as happened during the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Furthermore, in the phrase “rule of law”, the concept “law” should be understood as “justice”.”

The first thing to note here is that it calls for critical thinking and, I believe, that, as far as they are rules, this warning also applies to Church teaching. Taking even the ‘rules’ that the Church presents to its members and applying them with a “legalistic mentality, with a formal and uncritical adherence” can lead to their perversion. The Church has very rightly emphasized a focus on deepening one’s relationship with Jesus during the upcoming Year of Faith, rather than talking about making oneself familiar with Church “rules.”

In case you think that this is just my own interpretation of Church teaching, as opposed to the official line, let me point to one of my favorite lines from the Catechism:

A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself. (CCC, §1790)

In fact, this brings us back to Mamberti’s talk, where he affirms that justice is “proper and inalienable to the nature of every human being.” Bringing all of this together in fact puts a Catholic into a position of having to critically assess laws and being called both to strict adherence to those that are aligned with their conscience and to resistance against those that don’t. This is neither a position of blind obedience, nor one of disregard for the law, but a more complex, but far more personally and socially rewarding one, where discernment and prudence need to be exercised.

Let’s get back to Mamberti though and see what he has to say about justice:

“Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled, and it is only in this way that we can speak truly of the rule of law.”

The key here, to my mind, is that freedom is not arbitrary. You can’t just decide, with disregard for human nature and your conscience, what behavior to follow and expect that it will allow you to remain free.

Just to avoid giving the impression that this topic is in any way simple, Mamberti rightly recognizes that “[t]he question of how to recognize what is truly right and thus to serve justice when framing laws has never been simple, and today in view of the vast extent of our knowledge and our capacity, it has become still harder.” The more you know the more difficult certainty becomes, which echoes Socrates’ “The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know.” And, finally, he postulates a very clear link between a subversion of the law and the economic crisis that the world is in today:

“It is well known that, at the international level, there are interest groups present who, by means of formally legitimate procedures, are impacting on the policies of states in order to obtain multilateral norms which not only cannot serve the common good but which, under the guise of legitimacy, are in fact an abuse of norms and of international recommendations, as has been seen in the recent financial crisis.”

Even just the last 100 years have been addled with abuses of the law that were fully legal in the sense of not exhibiting procedural violations. It would be a mistake to think though that this is all in the past or that it only applies to regimes notorious for human rights abuses. Even in the “civilized West” there are attacks on the rights of peoples to express their desire for self-determination and on the practice of religious freedom. As St. Augustine said “Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?”

Serving the Church

I am starting from scratch after having written a lengthy post on this topic already and realizing – after talking to my besties YYM¹ and PM – that I was approaching the topic all wrong. I can still use all the research, but the tone had to change from the playful and partly sarcastic to what I am going to try next.

I feel that my being married, working at a tech company and being a lay person allows me to seek God without limits, to fully participate in the life of the Church and to have the path to sanctity wide open to me. At the same time I realize though that some of my Catholic sisters suffer from feeling the call to the priesthood and being faced with (a now final) barrier to it:

“I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, §4)

At first sight (and maybe even after repeated reading) this might sound like an aspect of Church teaching that is simply out of date, that needs to catch up with the times and that can be summed up with the following:

“[T]here is an urgent need to achieve real equality in every area: equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancements, equality of spouses with regard to family rights and the recognition of everything that is part of the rights and duties of citizens in a democratic State.” (Letter to Women, §4)

Now, maybe this will come as a surprise, but the author of both of the above quotes is the same person: Blessed Pope John Paul II, and you may ask yourself how he can at the same time talk about women’s rights and slam the door shut on the question of women priests. I believe the answer lies in the following (and, yes, it too is by John Paul II):

“If Christ […] entrusted only to men the task of being an “icon” of his countenance as “shepherd” and “bridegroom” of the Church through the exercise of the ministerial priesthood, this in no way detracts from the role of women, or for that matter from the role of the other members of the Church who are not ordained to the sacred ministry, since all share equally in the dignity proper to the “common priesthood” based on Baptism.” (Letter to Women, §11)

When I first saw this, a light went on in my mind after I read the words “an “icon” of his countenance.” Priests are Jesus’ proxies and transmit to us his presence in the Church and his being the source of the sacraments. When I attend mass, I experience a man saying the words that bring about the Eucharist, like I would have, had I been at the Last Supper; when I go to confession, I speak to a man, as I would have, had I been among Jesus’ disciples. Jesus having come into the world as a man rather than a woman is not an accident, nor is it a consequence of social conventions. I believe, that God became flesh as a baby boy, to use the male gender in a specific way, just like he sought consent from a girl to become His mother, again because of the specifics of the female gender. To read this as in any way discriminatory against women is incomprehensible to my mind, but I’ll leave that to another post.

Let me now put my last card on the table with regard to the priesthood. God’s call is ultimately the same for all of us: to choose Him as the first priority in our lives and to follow his new commandment of love. Placing something above a love for one’s neighbor and for God is a mistake, even if that something is the priesthood. If love for God and neighbor are missing, the priesthood becomes a millstone (“The road to hell is paved with the skulls of erring priests, with bishops as their signposts.” St. John Chrysostom) and if they are present, then it becomes secondary and one seeks specifics with humility. To come at the argument from a perspective of rights is also a category mistake. No one has the right to be made a priest, whether man or woman, and it is in all cases a gift that is received rather than an entitlement that can be claimed.

For now, let it suffice that my argument is this: the priesthood is only open to men, because Jesus was a man and because he indicated to us from the very beginning that it was through men that he wanted certain aspects of his ministry to be perpetuated. In this way, his ministers’ being male is integral to their being Jesus’ proxies and no matter what social or other developments ensue, the priesthood in the Catholic Church is going to remain restricted to them.

This is not the end of the story though, since we are ultimately all being called to be Jesus’ proxies: to be the means by which He can show His love to all. As a married, lay person I don’t feel in any way limited in the extent to which I can strive to imitate Jesus’ love for humanity, even if I don’t become a priest. But, and there is a but, there is a variety of other ways in which Jesus can be imitated and and in which Catholics can serve the Church (which is fundamentally also what the priesthood is about: service). Two of these, which today are not open to women, are the diaconate and the office of cardinal, and I would like to argue that they may both one day (hopefully soon) be conferred on women.

Bishop Emil Wcela has just published a very interesting article (that I recommend in full), entitled “Why not women?” It starts where the final word on women priests in the Catholic Church ends: by making a case for exploring the possibility of ordaining women as deacons. Wcela presents a compelling case, starting with evidence for deaconesses dating back right to the time of the apostles (giving the example of St. Phoebe, whom St. Paul calls a diakonos in his letter to the Romans (16:1) – although the meaning of the term is disputed) and dotted through the history of the church (including Pope Benedict VIII writing to the bishop of Porto to give him authority to ordain deaconesses). He the proceeds to give the example of deaconesses in other Christian churches, but is also clear about the fact that this is not the case in the Catholic Church at present.

Nonetheless, there has been a desire to explore its possibility since the Second Vatican Council, including a raising of the issue by the US bishops in a pastoral letter from 1992. 2009 then saw an important change to Canon law, which differentiates between the nature of the priestly and episcopal order and that of deacons, stating that bishops and priests “receive the mission and capacity to act in the person of Christ the Head; deacons, however, are empowered to serve the People of God in the ministries of the liturgy, the word and charity.” (Canon 1009 of the Code of Canon Law). This change removes the constraints that previous legislation placed on the diaconate and historical precedent further supports a future change in this area. Bishop Wcela finally notes that women already participate extensively in the Church’s ministry and that ordaining them as deacons would provide greater official recognition, confer the grace of the sacrament on them and give them access to ecclesiastical offices that require ordination. The article ends with a call to raising awareness of this opportunity and I would personally like to add my voice to it.

On a related note, Cardinal Timothy Dolan stated in an interview last March, that the office of cardinal is in principle open to women, since it does not require priestly or episcopal orders. He then proceeded to tell the story of how someone once suggested to Pope John Paul II to make Mother Teresa a cardinal, to which he replied: “I asked her – she doesn’t want to be one.” While the John Paul II – Mother Teresa story may be little more than an anecdote, it nonetheless expresses both the Church’s newfound openness and Mother Teresa’s humility beautifully. What is key here is the acknowledgement by one of the cardinals that his office is in principle not restricted to women.

I hope it is clear what I am getting at: the role of women in the Church is certainly not what it ought to be, but I see clear signs of a desire to change that, including at the highest levels. What it won’t be is an opening of the priesthood to women, but the diaconate and the office of cardinal are both on the horizon (hopefully even in my own lifetime). One point I would like to emphasize though is that the role of women in the Church needs to be all-pervasive and not only constrained to “women’s issues.” When one of the 23 women present at the Second Vatican Council – one of the Council Mothers – was asked what topics were discussed that related to women, she responded “We are now interested in everything.” As Fr. Fabio Ciardi, who was taught by Rosemary Goldie (another Council Mother) during his time at the Lateran University, said: “The temptation is to constrain women in the Church to dealing with topics that are about women, not knowing that all topics are about them and that they have a contribution to make to all of them.”

¹ Thanks to YYM also for giving me probably the most acceptable label: “progressive orthodox.” It may sound like an oxymoron, but I shall wear it with pride :).

Mercy, not sacrifice

Today’s Gospel reading¹ is definitely among my favorites, as it makes one thing very clear: Jesus did not come to set up a new club for the “good.” Instead, he and the Church are here for sinners:

While he was at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat with Jesus and his disciples. The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” He heard this and said, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Matthew 9:9-13)

Maybe the word “sinner” sounds uncomfortable, antiquated and out of fashion today, but I believe it can be read more broadly here as failure, outcast, disgraced, rather than only in the moral theology sense (i.e., as someone rejecting God’s call to love (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §397)). I don’t mean set up failure in general and moral errors as an identity, but instead suggest that Jesus referred to the attitude of his “righteous” contemporaries towards those whom they considered failures. In other words, it is Jesus’ peers who equated sin not only with moral failure but also with mental or physical illness (considered to be a punishment for sin – either the patient’s own or that of their ancestors³) and with living at the margins of society.² The “righteous” of the first century (and of today), considered sinners unworthy of Jesus’ company and would have preferred to have them out of sight. “Eugh, what do you want with those types, Jesus? They are not good, decent folk, pillars of the community, like us! They are not the sort of people who come to church!”

Jesus’ response is a sharp, sarcastic jab: “Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” While I have for a long time though that Jesus refers to those that the Pharisees complain about as sinners, I now believe that a much better fit to this event is to take him as talking about the Pharisees themselves. By reprimanding them that God desires mercy, not sacrifice, he is charging them with having sinned against God’s call to love. The Pharisees are the ones in need of a physician too, but their self-righteousness blinds them to their own lack of openness and charity.

Applying this to myself makes me examine my own attitude to those that strike me as unfit for building relationships with. By sacrificing them to my own false sense of superiority (even if unwittingly at times), I place myself besides the Pharisees rather than in the circle around Jesus, where were are all weak, but where were have Him amongst us. I’ll start again tomorrow!

¹ Incidentally, it is the feast of St. Matthew today, who’s call to follow Jesus precedes the passage quoted here.
² Incredibly this attitude persists in some societies to this day …
³ See, e.g., “If you listen closely to the voice of the LORD, your God, and do what is right in his eyes: if you heed his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will not afflict you with any of the diseases with which I afflicted the Egyptians” (Exodus 15:26) and “For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their ancestors’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5), but don’t ignore the next verse: “but showing love down to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.” which is another way of saying that God’s love is disproportionately greater than any punishment :). Also, see “The son shall not be charged with the guilt of his father, nor shall the father be charged with the guilt of his son. Justice belongs to the just, and wickedness to the wicked.” (Ezekiel 18:20) – just picking a single verse tends to be a great way to come up with nonsense …

Jesus’ wife: clicks, facts and ‘children in a marketplace’

I wasn’t going to write about this, but then I received a direct (and very welcome) requests by my bestie PM, and with his help realized that there was a much more interesting angle to this story than the obvious (and not all that exciting) one.

Let’s start with the facts of the matter: a fragment of Coptic script on papyrus that may date from the 4th century AD and that consists of 49.5 words in its English translation (see the top of this post) was presented at the International Congress of Coptic Studies on 18th September. The fragment contains no complete sentences and the sole reason for its overnight fame are the following words it contains:

Jesus said to them, “My wife

Looking at reports in the media, the following picture emerges:

“Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple.” (New York Times)
“The discovery that some ancient Christians thought Jesus had a wife could shake up centuries-old Christian traditions” (Washington Post)
“A discovery by a Harvard researcher may shed light on a controversial aspect of the life of Jesus Christ.” (Huffington Post)
“A Harvard Divinity School professor’s interpretation of a scrap of fourth-century Egyptian papyrus that quotes Jesus Christ making reference to a wife could stoke new debates to the role of women in Christianity, theologians say.” (Boston Herald)
“An 4th century papyrus fragment could call centuries of celibacy into question.” (Time)

The message is clear: this is a major discovery that could alter that very foundations of Christianity in one fell swoop. As much fun as it would be to debunk statements like the above, it would be falling for a textbook straw man argument (as some have, while others, like Fr. James Martin, haven’t). Instead, let me defer any comment on the matter, until we see Dr. Karen L. King, the scholar who presented the fragment at the Congress, speak for herself. And what better way to do that than to refer to a draft of her peer-reviewed journal paper, to be published in the Harvard Theological Review (link courtesy of Harvard Magazine):

“This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, given the late date of the fragment and the probable date of original composition only in the second half of the second century. Nevertheless, if the second century date of composition is correct, the fragment does provide direct evidence that claims about Jesus’s marital status first arose over a century after the death of Jesus in the context of intra-Christian controversies over sexuality, marriage, and discipleship.
[…]
The use of the term “gospel” here regards the probable genre of the work to which this fragment belonged (see below, “Genre”) and makes absolutely no claim to canonical status nor to the historical accuracy of the content as such. This invented reference in no way means to imply that this was the title in antiquity, or that “Jesus’s wife” is the “author” of this work, is a major character in it, or is even a significant topic of discussion—none of that can be known from such a tiny fragment. Rather the title references the fragment’s most distinctive claim (that Jesus was married), and serves therefore as a kind of short-hand reference to the fragment.”

Wait, what?! Unlike the cat-among-pigeons reaction of the media, Dr. King’s words (maybe with a little help from the journal’s reviewers 🙂 sound rational, factual and well representative of what this fragment may be: a text recorded probably in the 4th century AD that may be a copy of a 2nd century one, situated among the ’intra-Christian controversies’ of the day. No “Christianity 2.0”, no “we have had it all wrong for 2000 years” and no “shake up.”

In this (hopefully) more complete picture, Dr. King (who, after all was speaking at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, which is part of the Pontifical Lateran University – i.e., popularly known as the “Pope’s University”!) comes up smelling of roses, while the various media reports happen to fit the topic that I actually wanted to talk about today like a glove! Namely, yesterday’s Gospel reading, in which Jesus vents his frustration with childish attitudes. In Luke 7:31-35 he is reported as saying the following:

“To what shall I compare the people of this generation?
What are they like?
They are like children who sit in the marketplace and call to one another,

‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance.
We sang a dirge, but you did not weep.’

For John the Baptist came neither eating food nor drinking wine,
and you said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’
The Son of Man came eating and drinking and you said,
‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard,
a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’
But wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”

When I read this, I could picture Jesus’ disbelief in the face of his contemporaries’ conduct (“What are they like?!”), who thought of John the Baptist as a nutter and of Jesus himself as a pig [my own words :] and who jumped at anything to push their own agendas. How little has changed in 2000 years!

Let me not finish on a negative note though as I do see this episode as positive overall. That a new fragment from the early days of Christianity has come to light is great (the more we know the better, since knowledge is power and the truth will set us free [apologies for this fragment–peddling – it just seemed fitting :]) and so is the scholarly integrity of Dr. King and her fellow coptologists, who can shed light on the history of this find and its place within the overall corpus of early Christian writings.

I know the media reports are a straw man, but a very juicy and tempting one, so let me just take one slash at it: Assuming the fragment’s authenticity (which I am in no position to question or believe in) places it into the 4th century. Taking it as a record of events from the first century is like someone discovering the following fragment from this post in the 38th century: “Newton wrote: ‘This quantity I designate by the name of aura” and considering it as a record of Newton’s words from 1687 …

On an entirely separate and unrelated note, let me just share what I found out about the following words that Jesus speaks in Luke’s Gospel: ‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance. We sang a dirge, but you did not weep.’ This intrigued me straightaway and I first though that it may come from one of the Psalms or another part of the Bible. It seems instead that they were just part of a game that kids played at the time. Two groups would be formed – one playing jolly music and another a wailing funereal tune and they’d compete in who’d gather more followers as they moved through the streets. What a bizarre (but great 🙂 game! Thanks to St. Cyril of Alexandria for the tip!

Without words

The saint, whose feast is celebrated today, stands out from among his sainted brothers and sisters in that he never preached or wrote about his faith. Instead, St. Juan Macías, who was a Dominican lay brother and spent his life performing domestic and administrative tasks as his monastery’s porter, gave witness to his faith by welcoming and feeding the needy who came to his door for help. He lived his life in simplicity and frugality, serving his neighbors more eloquently than if he had been a great orator. Reading about his life made me think of last Sunday’s second reading, which ends as follows:

“So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Indeed someone might say, “You have faith and I have works.” Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.” (James, 2:17-18)

A golden mouth against corruption

Q: Which saint had (at least) four skulls?¹
A: John Chrysostom – just ask a Russian, a Greek and two Italian churches who all claim to have it. 🙂

St. John Chrysostom, whose feast day it is tomorrow, is actually one of my favorite saints and I’m sure he won’t hold this joke against me. He is one of those saints – like Saint Pope Gregory the Great, whose thought had a wide-reaching influence on the Church during their lifetime and, even more impressively, still continues to have today (just note the 18 sections of the 1992 Catechism that cite him).

St. John’s epithet, Χρυσόστομος (Chrysostom) means “golden mouthed,” and if you start reading his many homilies and treatises you will soon appreciate his obvious rhetorical gift. The Church is fortunate to have had him on her side and to have had Jesus’ teaching so clearly, elegantly and effectively applied to his day. Take a look at the following quote on poverty and Church property (which applies today just as it did in the 4th century AD) and I hope you will agree with me:

“Do you wish to honour the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect him outside where he is cold and ill-clad. He who said: “This is my body” is the same who said: “You saw me hungry and you gave me no food”, and “Whatever you did to the least of my brothers you did also to me”… What good is it if the Eucharistic table is overloaded with golden chalices when your brother is dying of hunger? Start by satisfying his hunger and then with what is left you may adorn the altar as well.”

(Evangelium S. Matthaei, hom 50:3-4; Cited by Blessed Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, footnote 34.)

¹ Multi-skulled saints cannot be mentioned without telling a joke by an Irish relative of mine:

A rogue relic dealer kept selling skulls, claiming to be St. Oliver Plunkett’s, until one day a customer said to them: “This can’t be St. Oliver’s skull. I am a doctor and can tell you that this is the skull of a child and St. Oliver died in his fifties!” The dealer, thinking on their feet, retorted: “Well, of course it is a child’s skull. It is St. Oliver’s skull when he was a child!” 🙂