I’ve been a little slow on the uptake with this, but I see Katharine Jefferts Schori has managed to pull off yet another gap. Father Bryan addresses this here and here. Not surprisingly, Father Barron has a good take on this:
Is there no limit to what this woman could get wrong? Yikes…
[By the way, my laptop recently bit the dust and I have limited access to computers at the moment, hence these short posts...more to come sometime next week]
Lord of the Dance was one of Father Greeley’s favorite hymns (and, incidentally, one of mine). Note Father Barron appears at 0:17. Also look at the face of Cardinal George (0:42)-if that isn’t grief I don’t know what is.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, Father Barron’s article “In Defense of Father Greeley” has generated a backlash, both on the comments page of the article and on the various Facebook pages to which it was posted. Reading comments such as these always gives me heartburn-indeed, I kick myself anytime I bother to open the comments field of online articles (I do the same with the seemingly endless diarrhea of the mouth one finds on Yahoo articles-something about the Internet really brings forth the worst in people). Just before I began writing this post I opened the CUA Facebook page and glossed over Carlton Pearson’s umpteenth exhortation that institutional religion is fear based, unreasonable and bankrupt, and another poster who solemnly declared that Orthodoxy/fundamentalism (?!) is a greater enemy of love than atheism and accordingly deserves a “good public flogging.”
I’m not here to talk about that today though. Today’s screed is inspired by Father Greeley. In his book The Jesus Myth Father Greeley briefly summarizes the 4 groups in the time of Christ (the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes and the latter-day named Zealots), and wisely notes that the tendencies represented by these 4 groups are in some sense perennial. Their descendents can still be discerned in the life of the Church, even now. I’d like to parse that a bit. I’ll begin by noting that it is exceedingly common to label the Church hierarchy as “Pharisees”, obviously in a pejorative manner. Actually this characterization is wide of the mark. The hierarchy, which is to say the establishment, are the Sadducees of today. The Pharisees were in fact the ‘liberal’ reformers of their time. If one wishes to apply the label today it belongs not to the hierarchy but to a myriad of groups, movements, organizations and individuals-many of them lay-who are calling for renewal.
Father Greeley himself used the word ‘Pharisee’ to describe liberal renewal groups (i.e. Call-to-Action) but I think the term more appropriately belongs to the “right” wing of the Church today-to Bill Donahue and Michael Voris, to Mother Angelica and EWTN, to Cleansing Fire and Communion and Liberation, to the National Catholic Register and on and on. One should take note that many of these groups put a heavy emphasis on renewal (some, such as George Weigel, eschew labels like ‘conservative’ or ‘traditionalist’) and do not hesitate to criticize bishops or the Pope for being “soft” on this or that doctrinal matter. Some go further, castigating cardinals as “modernists” or accusing archbishops of scandalizing the Church. The point is that these folks-who some call “more Catholic than the Pope”-are not just conservative members of the “institutional Church”, they are frequently some of the most passionate reformers of the Church.
A few things need to be said here. First, the Pharisees have gotten a bad rap. Everyone knows the Woes of the Pharisees, we all remember Jesus indicting them as a “Brood of Vipers.” Nonetheless, the actual Biblical picture is more nuanced than we often realize-Nicodemus, for instance, was a Pharisee and there is no indication the Pharisees were involved in Christ’s death (again, it was the Sadducees that dominated the Sanhedrin). Moreover, modern Judaism descended from the rabbinic Judaism that descended from-wait for it-the Pharisees. The other groups did not survive the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70; it was the Pharisees (principally those of the House of Hillel) who were able to reinvent Judaism for a post-Temple age. Perhaps most intriguingly, some have speculated that Christ himself was a Pharisee and the Woes were a sort of intra-familial dispute.
[Christ has also been identified with the Zealots (the revolutionary Jesus is still popular in some circles) and with the Essenes (oddly both psychic-fraud Sylvia Browne and the Pope Emeritus seem sympathetic with this idea-religion, like politics, can make for strange bedfellows). That being said, I've never been much persuaded by these arguments-I think Father Barron was right in noting that Jesus was in a sense a "layman" who belonged to none of the above, and Hans Kung had it right when he noted that in the last analysis all of the factions in the Second Temple cauldron were at odds with Jesus.]
The bottom line is that the Pharisees were not the big bad boogeymen of popular consciousness. To that end the term shouldn’t be taken simply as a straightforward pejorative rip on legalists as is quite popular in our time (e.g. Bruce Bawer interpreting the Woes in Stealing Jesus as an example of the Lord getting angry at “legalism”). As I noted above the Pharisees of today are not simply straightforward “conservatives”, anymore than their ancestors were. Like their ancestors their approach can seem quite accessible and appealing to the masses in contradiction to the practices of the “elite.” If history is any indication, the renewal groups of today are the ones to watch-there is a vibrant life there that one does not find in the rapidly graying quarters of progressive Catholicism that still linger in the American Church. As Peter Steinfels has observed, liberalization may not have accelerated the hemorrhaging of the Church as conservatives charge, but it has done nothing to stem the bleeding either. If renewal will come in my generation I know where it is coming from-the writing on the wall is clear to see.
Nonetheless, Phariseeism, old and new, is prone to particular dangers. The term ‘legalism’ points in the direction, but that term is so trite it strikes me as being more unhelpful than not. A more helpful explanation comes from monk I know at the Abbey of the Genesee, who once remarked to me that the Trappists were good examples of modern Pharisees, precisely because of “all those rules.” But, he told me wisely, the rules per se are not the problem. It is when the rules become the focus in their own right, instead of a means to a greater end, when the heart of the Gospel is buried beneath a mountain of practices and doctrines, when compassion and-to use the Confucian term-”human heartedness” is suppressed, droned out, even completely muted-that we should begin to hear the words “Woe unto you…” echo resoundingly in our minds.
The modern liberal mistake of Bawer & Co has been to chuck the rules in favor of “spontaneity” and “authenticity” (I just finished N.T. Wright’s After You Believe if you couldn’t tell). The modern Pharisee mistake, as I see it, has been a rejection of compassion, in the sense that patient, loving responses to the human struggles with faith are set aside in favor of a militant attitude that brandishes words like “Heretic” and phrases such as “Leading people astray” in a manner that is all too befitting of negative Catholic stereotypes. At times it goes as far as Youtube commentators arguing that the Inquisition-even the executions-were justified-the purpose of saving souls. The spirit of much modern renewal strikes me as having lost the forest for the trees, as not quite grasping the full Spirit of Christ.
I am trying to be charitable here, which is difficult to do when one’s knee-jerk reaction is to go off an angry rant about “Those conservatives” or to lash out at “over-zealous reformers” for being judgmental and small-minded. As it happens I genuinely respect many of these folks, precisely because they are so serious about their faith and that they see the truths of Christianity as something objective to be treated with reverence. What I do find frustrating and less admirable are tendencies such as:
What to say in conclusion? Though they don’t think so, the Pharisees of today have a lot of work to do in the charity department. This doesn’t mean capitulating on orthodoxy, it doesn’t mean replacing the Magisterium with a Quaker-style “inner light” and it doesn’t mean that Rome should begin recalling unpopular teachings. As Fr. Rolheiser, another target of the modern Pharisees, has recognized the Church needs to recover a sense of holding fast and firm to its ideals but in a compassionate way. Being uncompromising and being human are not mutually exclusive of one another, though would would certainly have a hard time believing that in this ever more polarized and polemical world. The answer is not to shrink back from polemics and “hold hands while Father Time ticks away” (as someone once accused me of wanting!) but to instead live by the admonishment that love delights in the Truth. The trick, of course, is not to be a brood of vipers while doing so.
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NOTES:
THE POPE EMERITUS ON REVELATION
First, a quote from the Catechism, Part One, Section One, Chapter Two, Article I, III:
God has said everything in his Word
65 “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.”26 Christ, the Son of God made man, is the Father’s one, perfect and unsurpassable Word. In him he has said everything; there will be no other word than this one. St. John of the Cross, among others, commented strikingly on Hebrews 1:1-2:
In giving us his Son, his only Word (for he possesses no other), he spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word – and he has no more to say. . . because what he spoke before to the prophets in parts, he has now spoken all at once by giving us the All Who is His Son. Any person questioning God or desiring some vision or revelation would be guilty not only of foolish behaviour but also of offending him, by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ and by living with the desire for some other novelty.27
There will be no further Revelation
66 “The Christian economy, therefore, since it is the new and definitive Covenant, will never pass away; and no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”28 Yet even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made completely explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries.
67 Throughout the ages, there have been so-called “private” revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.
Christian faith cannot accept “revelations” that claim to surpass or correct the Revelation of which Christ is the fulfilment, as is the case in certain nonChristian religions and also in certain recent sects which base themselves on such “revelations”.
The Pope Emeritus commented on this in Introduction to Christianity:
Christian faith says that in Christ the salvation of man is accomplished, that in him the true future of mankind has irrevocably begun and thus, although remaining future, is yet also perfect, a part of our present. This assertion embraces a principle of finality that is of the highest importance for the form of Christian existence, that is to say, for the sort of existential decision that being a Christian entails. Let us try to work this out in more detail. We have just established that Christ is the beginning of the future, the already inaugurated finality of the being “man”. This idea was expressed in the language of Scholastic theology by the statement that with Christ revelation is concluded. Naturally this cannot mean that a certain number of truths have now been imparted and God has decided to make no further communications. On the contrary, it means that God’s dialogue with man, God’s entry into mankind in Jesus, the man who is God, has achieved its goal. The point of this dialogue was not, and is not, to say something, many kinds of things, but to utter himself in the Word. Thus his purpose is fulfilled, not when the greatest possible sum of knowledge has been communicated, but when through the Word love becomes visible, when in the Word “You” and “You” make contact. Its meaning does not lie in a third thing, in some kind of factual knowledge, but in the partners themselves. It is called “union”. In the man Jesus, God has once and for all uttered himself: he is his Word and, as his Word, himself. Revelation ends here, not because God deliberately puts an end to it, but because it has reached its goal; as Karl Rahner puts it, “Nothing fresh is said, not in spite of there being still much to say, but because everything is said, indeed, everything is given, in the Son of love in whom God and the world have become one.”
If one looks more carefully at this conclusion a further point emerges. The fact that in Christ the goal of revelation and, thereby, the goal of humanity is attained, because in him divine existence and human existence touch and unite, means at the same time that the goal attained is not a rigid boundary but an open space. For the union that has taken place at the one point “Jesus of Nazareth” must attain the whole of mankind, the whole one “Adam”, and transform it into the “body of Christ”. So long as this totality is not achieved, so long as it remains confined to one point, what has happened in Christ remains simultaneously both end and beginning. Mankind can advance no farther or higher than it has, for God is the farthest and highest; any apparent progress beyond him is a plunge into the void. Humanity cannot go beyond him—to that extent Christ is the end; but it must enter into him—to that extent he is the real beginning.
Subtle dynamite in there folks.
THE POPE EMERITUS ON ECCLESIOLOGY
Here, I first quote lay Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard (Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition):
…all human nature-in fact, all created being-participates in divine life, whether single individuals are aware of it or not. Each single human being, through energizing in his individual life that original Adamic in each of us which has been fully restored or resurrected or transfigured in and through the incarnation of the Logos, can realize his own participation in the life and character of Ultimate Reality itself.
Unfortunately this understanding, rooted in the doctrine of the universal Logos inherent in the creation that He has brought into existence, succumbed to an ecclesiology which identified the Church on earth more or less exclusively with a corporate collective institution operating in history and with a definite outlook on history. In short, ecclesiology was historicized. The Church took on a increasingly sociological form, identified with Christendom. Christendom-the Christian society or the Church-was the dwelling-place of peace, light and knowledge. The non-Christian world was the dwelling place of war, darkness, demons. The area outside the Church, outside the historical, institutional, sociologically defined community of the Church, had to either be christianized-saved by being incorporated into Christendom-or it would perish. Non-Christians, heretics, and schismatics had to be brought into or returned to the Church by all means available-by missionary activity, by proselytism, or by cultural colonialism when persecution and war and military occupation became impracticable or unacceptable-for only in this way might the reality of “one flock and one shepherd” be achieved.
The establish institutional Church becomes the entre of the world. The history of the Christian Church, as a sociological entity, becomes history itself. What occurs in the experience of the Christian world fashions history. The rest of the world is a-historical until it accepts and adopts Christian experience and Christian modes. This experience and these modes are in fact to dominate the world. Non-Christian religions-religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam-are regarded as by definition inferior and even diabolical. Consequently those who adhere to these religions can be saved only by becoming historicized and by adopting the superior hierarchial form of Christianity. The rest of the world must come into the time-continuum of the Church through a salvation achieved by universal extension of the Christian way of life founded on the authority of the Christian tradition.
This attitude stems from a linear view of history bound up with a monolithic ecclesiology which sees Christianity as a series or succession of salvation events destined to culminate in the appearance of Christ as the end of the history of the Old Covenant and as the end of human history.
Compare this indictment of Western ecclesiology with these thoughts of the Pope Emeritus frin Introduction to Christianity :
If Jesus is the exemplary man, in whom the true figure of man, God’s intention for him, comes fully to light, then he cannot be destined to be merely an absolute exception, a curiosity, in which God demonstrates to us what sorts of things are possible. His existence concerns all mankind. The New Testament makes this perceptible by calling him an “Adam”; in the Bible this word expresses the unity of the whole creature “man”, so that one can speak of the biblical idea of a “corporate personality”. So if Jesus is called “Adam”, this implies that he is intended to gather the whole creature “Adam” in himself. But this means that the reality that Paul calls, in a way that is largely incomprehensible to us today, the “body of Christ” is an intrinsic postulate of this existence, which cannot remain an exception but must “draw to itself” the whole of mankind (cf. Jn 12:32).
Faith sees in Jesus the man in whom—on the biological plane—the next evolutionary leap, as it were, has been accomplished; the man in whom the breakthrough out of the limited scope of humanity, out of its monadic enclosure, has occurred; the man in whom personalization and socialization no longer exclude each other but support each other; the man in whom perfect unity—“The body of Christ”, says St. Paul, and even more pointedly “You are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28)—and perfect individuality are one; the man in whom humanity comes into contact with its future and in the highest extent itself becomes its future, because through him it makes contact with God himself, shares in him, and thus realizes its most intrinsic potential. From here onward faith in Christ will see the beginning of a movement in which dismembered humanity is gathered together more and more into the being of one single Adam, one single “body”—the man to come. It will see in him the movement to that future of man in which he is completely “socialized”, incorporated in one single being, but in such a way that the individual is not extinguished but brought completely to himself.
It would not be difficult to show that Johannine theology points in the same direction. One has only to recall the words briefly touched on earlier: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (Jn 12:32). This sentence is intended to explain the meaning of Jesus’ death on the Cross; it thus expresses, since the Cross forms the center of Johannine theology, the direction in which the whole Gospel is intended to point. The event of the crucifixion appears there as a process of opening, in which the scattered man-monads are drawn into the embrace of Jesus Christ, into the wide span of his outstretched arms, in order to arrive, in this union, at their goal, the goal of humanity. But if this is so, then Christ as the man to come is not man for himself but essentially man for others; it is precisely his complete openness that makes him the man of the future. The man for himself, who wants to stand only in himself, is then the man of the past whom we must leave behind us in order to stride forward. In other words, this means that the future of man lies in “being for”. This fundamentally confirms once again what we recognized as the meaning of the talk of sonship and, before that, as the meaning of the doctrine of three Persons in one God, namely, a reference to the dynamic, “actual” existence, which is essentially openness in the movement between “from” and “for”. And once again it becomes clear that Christ is the completely open man, in whom the dividing walls of existence are torn down, who is entirely “transition” (Passover, “Pasch”).
Christian faith is not just a look back at what has happened in the past, an anchorage in an origin that lies behind us in time; thinking along those lines would finally end in mere romanticism and reaction. Nor is it just an outlook on the eternal; that would be Platonism and metaphysics. It is also above all things a looking forward, a reaching-out of hope. Not only that, certainly; hope would become utopianism if its goal were only man’s own product. It is true hope precisely because it is situated in a three-dimensional coordinate system: the past, that is, the breakthrough that has already taken place; the present of the eternal, which makes divided time like unity; and he who is to come, in whom God and world will touch each other, and, thus, God in world, world in God will truly be the Omega of history.
For us men of today the basic stumbling block of Christianity lies first of all simply in the superficiality to which the religious element seems to have settled down. It irritates us that God should have to be mediated through outward forms: through Church, sacrament, dogma, or even just through the Gospel (kerygma), to which people like to withdraw to reduce the irritation and which is nevertheless itself something external. All this provokes the question, Does God dwell in institutions, events, or words? As the eternal Being, does he not make contact with each of us from within? To this we must first of all simply say Yes and then go on to say that if there were only God and a collection of individuals, Christianity would be unnecessary. The salvation of the individual as individual can and could always be looked after directly and immediately by God, and this does happen again and again. He needs no intermediary channels by which to enter the soul of the individual, to which he is more present interiorly than he is to himself; nothing can reach more intimately and deeply into man than he, who touches this creature man in the very innermost depth of his being. For the salvation of the mere individual there would be no need of either a Church or a history of salvation, an Incarnation or a Passion of God in this world. But precisely at this point we must also add the further statement: Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that, on the contrary, man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, into history, into the cosmos, as is right and proper for a being who is “spirit in body”.
Being a Christian is in its first aim not an individual but a social charisma. One is not a Christian because only Christians are saved; one is a Christian because for history Christian loving service has meaning and is a necessity.
There is much, much nourishment here for ecclesiology.
As I mentioned in my previous post a good friend of mine recently bought me a copy of The Catechism of the Catholic Church (along with George Carlin books!), which I have finally began to explore. Somewhere, squirreled away in storage, I have another copy my Grandmother bought me years ago but I hadn’t taken the initiative to go looking for. Never having had any type of catechesis growing up, and having spent so much time thinking of myself as a free-thinker, I’ve been less than enthused about cracking open the Catechism. But, as has pretty much been the case for everything on my journey so far, I’ve discovered that judgments formed without, you know, actually reading things, are generally incomplete. To that end I’ve begun to discover that the Catechism, like the Church as a whole, is a treasure trove.
Granted, the Catechism is a thick book. And I admit there is a hint of legalism about the whole process (any religion with lots of documents is open to that charge). Nonetheless (and I say this shamelessly given my education) legalism is not all bad. In the Jewish faith the oral law of the rabbis, semi-codified in the Talmud and the Misnnah, are not merely a commentary on the Torah (the written law) but lengthy analyses interpreting and applying a seemingly sterile and utterly inflexible body of rules into a living way of life. Legalism is the means by which you can have a fixed center, defined boundaries and rules, and yet have a legitimate, creative and flexible way to avoid becoming solely defined and trapped within said boundaries and rules. There is an old saying that rules are meant to be broken-in a variant of that I say simply that rules do not exist in a vacuum.
Having said this, I’d like to engage the Catechism in a holistic manner on two topics that are of particular interest to me. [Holistic = Do not take texts in isolation, consider what is not said, look for subtle dynamite] Without further ado:
#1: THE FALL
This is a surprisingly intense topic these days. Google the Catholic position on the historicity of Adam & Eve, and you’ll find many a webpage insisting that the Christian faith collapses entirely if it turns out the primal pair weren’t real people. And all this time I thought that was just a Protestant thing. Is it true that Catholicism insists that a snake spoke to a naked man and woman in a garden in Mesopotamia just a few thousand years ago? Mercifully, it seems this extreme is not the case. To know the formal teaching of the Church we turn to Part One, Section Two, Chapter One, Paragraph 7 of the Catechism, point 390:
The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.264 Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
This might seem relatively straightforward, but the language here is considerably more nuanced. The phrase “figurative language” quickly dispels the ridiculous literalistic account I outline above (and thank God for that). At the same time the Church indeed holds firm that there was a “primeval event” that took place at the “beginning of the history of man.” Now the lawyer in me speaks: What does “primeval event” mean? How are we to understood the phrase “beginning of the history of man?” One commentator on a website I browsed suggested that Adam & Eve were the first humans in the sense that they were the first individuals who had souls. This is not far off from John Polkinghorne’s theory that Genesis is describing the birth of consciousness in our species. If that is the case, there might indeed have been an Adam and an Eve.
Leaving aside that vexing question, there are two more points I’d like to make. First, there appears to be a legitimate question in Biblical scholarship about whether “Adam” is to be understood as the proper name of an individual person. Catholicism does not allow for the notion that the story is simply an “everyman/everywoman” allegory, but as Richard Elliott Friedman has pointed out, from a purely literary standpoint that is more or less how they are presented (specifically he notes Adam & Eve lack any defining characteristics or traits, they are not the developed personalities of later Biblical figures). Regardless, the term “Adam” does seem to be used in a corporate sense as well as an individual sense. Commenting on the work of H. Wheeler Robinson in Introduction to Christianity the Pope Emeritus wrote
His [Christ's] existence concerns all mankind. The New Testament makes this perceptible by calling him an “Adam”; in the Bible this word expresses the unity of the whole creature “man”, so that one can speak of the biblical idea of a “corporate personality”. So if Jesus is called “Adam”, this implies that he is intended to gather the whole creature “Adam” in himself. But this means that the reality that Paul calls, in a way that is largely incomprehensible to us today, the “body of Christ” is an intrinsic postulate of this existence, which cannot remain an exception but must “draw to itself” the whole of mankind
Translation: The term “Adam” is, perhaps, more complex than we thought. The Catechism itself acknowledges this is in 7:404. In that light 7:390 of the Catechism should not be interpreted casually and lightly. Next, the Biblical text itself is also more complex than we commonly allow for. Ross Douthat writes that the claim
that the Bible offers “no evidence that Adam and Eve were anything but the ancestors of all humanity” only holds true if you engage in a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2 and then stop reading there. If you continue to Genesis 4 (which is just a few pages later!), the text strongly suggests that other human beings were somehow contemporaneous with the first family, and that the human race probably didn’t just descend from Adam and Eve alone.
Now one can draw two possible conclusions from these difficulties. One possibility is that the authors and compilers of Genesis weren’t just liars; they were really stupid liars, who didn’t bother doing the basic work required to make their fabrication remotely plausible or coherent. The other possibility is that Genesis was never intended to be read as a literal blow-by-blow history of the human race’s first few months, and that its account of how sin entered the world partakes of allegorical and symbolic elements — like many other stories in the Bible, from the Book of Job to the Book of Revelation — to make a theological and moral point.
I love the way Catholics interpret the Bible, can I tell ya? In any case, while I remain convinced that an absolute literalist interpretation of Genesis simply does not hold water (see Commonweal for some insight), I hardly believe Church teaching has been put in jeopardy by science or history. Indeed, as Douthat has also written, there are multiple theological avenues that can understood 7:390 of the Catechism in a coherent manner. And, put in context, Paragraph 7′s overaching concern is the reality of human sin. As Rev. Rutledge once put it, whoever Adam was, we know for sure who he is (us).
*Incidentally, 7:388 notes that an understanding of original sin was only properly derived at in the “rearview mirror”-through the lens of the Christ-Event, as James Alison has so aptly noted.
*The topic of what “death” means in Paragraph 7 is another topic altogether (the whole physical death being a direct cause of sin still nettles me) but I will point out here that the Catechism does not seem to assert that humanity was created in a state of pure immortality prior to the Fall. Indeed, the Tree of Life is also mentioned in the Genesis narrative, which leads me to think-the spirit of Irenaeus and the words of N.T. Wright-transience was still part of the pre-Fall state.
#2: HELL/MORTAL SIN
Reflection #2. We turn to Part I, Section 2, Chapter Three, Article 12, Part 4: Hell. See # 1035:
The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.” The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.
I’d quibble a bit over the phrase “eternal separation”, as I prefer the Eastern understanding of Hell as existing in God’s presence, but given that understanding seems to be held by several Catholic theologians (including Fr. Barron) I’m inclined to say its metaphorical and move on. The deeper issue has to do with the denizens of Hell. Here, it becomes quite important to read the Catechism holistically. # 1035 states that it is those of those who “die in a state of mortal sin” who ‘descend’ into hell. What exactly does this mean? For that, we turn to Part Three, Section One, Chapter One, Article 8 (getting annoyed yet? Welcome to the legal world!), where we read the following:
1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.”131
1858 Grave matter is specified by the Ten Commandments, corresponding to the answer of Jesus to the rich young man: “Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and your mother.”132 The gravity of sins is more or less great: murder is graver than theft. One must also take into account who is wronged: violence against parents is in itself graver than violence against a stranger.
1859 Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart133 do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin.
1860 Unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense. But no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man. The promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders. Sin committed through malice, by deliberate choice of evil, is the gravest.
1861 Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back. However, although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God.
That’s a lot to unpack and digest. And I’m well aware that Catholics are regularly mocked by Protestants and others for distinguishing mortal sins from venial sins, but I have always found the distinction helpful, and in more recent years quite profound. It is not simply a question of a degrees (as a felony is to a misdemeanor) but something much deeper and more profound. A mortal sin, to use legalese, consists of 3 elements: It must be a grave matter, it must be done with full knowledge, and it must be done with complete consent. It sounds simple enough. But how simple is it really? My Grandfather always said that properly understood it is very difficult to commit a mortal sin. Some would go so far as to say impossible. I don’t go that far-as # 1861 says it is a “radical possibility.”
Yet, as noted in #s 1859 and 1860, the Church does acknowledge that apparently free choices are often not so free after all, especially when social, biological, cultural and genetic factors are taken into account. Indeed in Part Three, Section Two, Chapter Two, Article 5, we read the following:
2282 If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law.
Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.
Two takeaways here. First, the Catechism is considerably kinder-I’d dare say even more optimistic-than those whose idea of a good pastoral response to a suicide is to muse that we “Don’t know what happens between the bridge and the water.” Second, and to the point here, the Catechism acknowledges the reality of “grave psychological disturbances, anguish, and grave fear” as diminishing one’s free responsibility. In essence, Church teaching is not standing in defiant opposition to the determinants that limit our freedom more than we ourselves often admit. If anything I think my Grandfather was right-under Church teaching it is far from easy for one to commit a mortal sin. Again, not impossible. But not easy. As Rowan Williams (I think) put it those who truly intend to turn the moral world upside down are really rather few and far between.
One more thing needs to be said here. The Catechism declares that “a willful turning away from God…and persistence in it until the end” is necessary for consignment to Hell (# 1037); that the teachings of hell are above all else “a call to the responsibility incumbent upon man to make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny” (# 1036) and the duty of the Church is to pray for God’s mercy (# 1037). This is, as I have said before, a responsible and reasonable approach. Overconfidence on the matter of final salvation-in either direction-poses grave dangers. Though I recognize the evangelical criticism of this view, Orthodox spirituality advises (wo)man to be on guard against hell until the moment of death. Responsibility and humility are not nurtured in overconfidence.
*On a related note, Vox-Nova has an excellent commentary on the media uproar about the remarks made recently by Pope Francis. I’d blame the media for never getting things right, except they are catering to a soundbite generation, and a soteriology that can be collapsed into soundbites would immediately raise alarm bells for me. The Economist has also addressed this.
*The Catechism also addresses the question of Christ Descending into Hell, another area where the Western understanding (“Christ descended into hell not to deliver the damned” seems to butt up against my more Eastern understanding (that the Lord in some sense reached out to all the spirits in prison). Without delving into the “Holy Saturday controversy” again, I will say that #634 (“The descent into hell brings the Gospel message of salvation to complete fulfillment. This is the last phase of Jesus’ messianic mission, a phase which is condensed in time but vast in its real significance: the spread of Christ’s redemptive work to all men of all times and all places, for all who are saved have been made sharers in the redemption.”)-is the real meat and is perfectly congruent with the Eastern understanding. Whether there are in fact any damned that Christ did not (does not?) deliver is another question, and-perhaps-an open one.
The Lord has called a great man home. Father Greeley, know that you were one of the key reasons I came home to the Church. I’m not moved easily by the deaths of those I do not know (e.g. I could have cared less when Steve Jobs died) but today learning about Father Greeley’s passing I had to choke back tears. At a loss for other words I say simply “May Christ who called you take you home and angels lead you to Abraham, give him eternal rest O Lord and may light unending shine on him.“
UPDATE (6/4): As I hoped/knew he would Father Barron has written a moving piece in memory of his friend.
UPDATE (6/7): A moving obituary from The Economist.
I have often mused that comedians are the prophets of our time, but I’ve never given it all that much thought. Not surprisingly, this sentiment isn’t widely shared. An interlocutor on one my former blogs once submitted to me that she was a charitable person because she tolerated those who disdained Catholicism, including “every comedian you admire” (I wanted to ask if she wanted a cookie for her tolerance but my tact prevented me from saying so). In any case, I’ve continued to muse on this a bit. I’d still love to write The Gospel According to South Park (beneath the offensive and scatological veneer South Park actually has some quite brilliant socio-political commentary, unlike, say, Family Guy, which very well could be written by manatees pushing random balls around-South Park fans will get the reference).
The real subject of this post however is another comedian. A friend recently stopped by a book sale and bought me some books for my birthday. Among them was the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which I’ll be musing on next), as well as all three books written by the legendary George Carlin: Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, and of course, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops. Now I’ve always been a Carlin fan-I’ve seen the shows on Netflix, I’ve Youtubed his classic bits, and even had the honor of seeing the old man in 2005 during his next-to-last tour. It was only over the last week, as I read Brain Droppings during my breaks at work, that I finally understood exactly what it was that made Carlin a prophetic figure. No doubt Carlin himself would shudder if he knew I was co-opting him in this way, and no doubt my militant brethren might call for my excommunication for enlisting support from a man who declared he rejected Catholicism when he reached the age of reason and that he had “just as much authority as the Pope” but not as many people who believed it. So why was Carlin a prophet? I offer into evidence the following:
He Understood Human Nature.
Carlin might not have believed in original sin, but he understood it. Over and over again in his books and bits he rips into humanity-for hypocrisy, for selfishness and vanity, for the corruptions, violence and lies that have defined our species. Folks, take it from this fan: St. Augustine has nothing on Carlin when it comes to understanding the raw messiness of humanity. Carlin ripped into every aspect of humanity at some point or other, but I always found myself beaming when he ripped into liberal New Agers. I have no patience for modern spirituality-be it New Age or liberal Christianity-and its blubbering sentimental bullsh*t about how human nature is basically good. Just visiting the CUA’s Facebook these days and reading this nonsense is enough to make me vomit.
Carlin never bought into that sentimental nonsense. His entire career was dedicated to exposing the full picture of human nature, and he did so in a hilarious-and admittedly quite vulgar-way that strikes a chord with people because it’s true. Indeed, the fact that many of us laugh at some of his crudest humor is an uncomfortable reminder of the visceral primal beastliness that lurks in all of us as well. Mother Teresa’s discovery of the Hitler within is something that can easily be confirmed in all of us-that is, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Towards the end of his life Carlin himself seemed to descend into a darker and more disturbing humor than his early work-when I saw him in 2005 he was a shell of his former self, coming across as a bitter, sick old man determined to be as disturbing as possible. Suddenly it didn’t seem so funny anymore.
Funny how that happens isn’t it? Many fans of the show Seinfeld were bitterly disappointed in the series finale, in which a series of flashbacks made it painfully clear what terrible people Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer really were-selfish, vain, utterly indifferent. One of the most telling signs of the departure of classical Christianity from our culture is how resentful we become if anyone dares to remind us that even us “basically good folks”-you know, those of us who aren’t Nazis or child molesters-really aren’t really so good when you get down to brass tax. We really don’t like that being pointed out to us. Unlike Carlin, I’m of course willing to grant there is intrinsic goodness in humanity too-the imago Dei still survives somewhere in the muck and mire. Yet, even he was railing against the idea of God, Carlin had more insight than most when he plaintively declared “The more you look around you, something is wrong here…something is ****ed up!”
In short,Carlin was a realist, who had no truck the blubbering, simpering blabber we hear so much today about human nature. Carlin’s great humor-vulgar and disturbing though it may be-is a prophetic wake-up call to those of us who are tempted at times to bury ourselves in the pseudo-spirituality of our age and thereby do whatever it takes to avoid confronting the sobering reality of the human condition.
He Showed Us Nihilism.
OK, you may say. So Carlin understood original sin. Fine. But wasn’t he a godless heathen who more or less openly rejoiced at human suffering, even calling terrorism “entertainment” at one stage? Well…yes. But that’s my very next point. In addition to being a misanthrope, Carlin was a true nihilist. And to keep using big words, nihilism is the soil in which schadenfreude grows. Some might dismiss Carlin as a cynical crank, but I don’t think so. To the contrary, Carlin had the clarity and intellectual honesty to see that in a universe shorn of transcendence, where humanity is the result of a series of fortuitous cosmic and biological evolutionary outcomes, there really is no such thing as meaning. To the contrary, all constructs of humanity-religion, politics, human rights, families, language, customs-are purely meaningless, arbitrary mechanisms. “Rights”, Carlin declared near the end of his life “are made up…like the boogeyman, Mother Goose, sh*t like that.”
And here’s the kicker: Carlin’s view has a logical consistency to it I find badly wanting in many atheist or secularist arguments today. If “all is meaningless” in the ultimate sense than Carlin was right to “call bullsh*t” on just about every aspect of humanity. It was John Polkinghorne who noted that science, at its best, is only able to offer us an island of self-made ‘meaning’ in a vast ocean of meaninglessness, with the waters about to overwhelm us at all times. To some, perhaps, self-made meaning is enough to get by, but I think Pope Emeritus Benedict had it right when he proclaimed that “Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning.” Carlin, I think understood this point. In such a universe, nihilism is really the only perspective that is grounded in objective reality (which is rather ironic considering that nihilistic philosophy is predicated on the lack of objectivity). If even the most illustrious of human ideas are nothing more than subjective constructs, well, as Carlin would say they amount to little more than so much bullsh*t.
None of this is meant to disparage science (which fills us with wonder and awe the universe) or to argue that non-believers are sadists who derive pleasure at the pain of others (that applies to everybody, including us believers-see the previous section). Carlin himself had two loving marriages, and it was obvious Christopher Hitchens had a strong moral compass (even if it didn’t exactly point due north). Much less is it meant to argue that only Christianity or even theism is needed as a bulwark against nihilism-Confucianism pretty well disproves that. What it IS meant to show is that without some transcendental grounding, without some “metaphysics of meaning” (the redundancy there is deliberate), nihilism is the only outcome that strikes me as being commensurate with reality. Anything else is grasping at straws .
Nihilism, I think, is the great unspoken crisis of my generation, one that is not helped by Richard Dawkins & Co. dismissing questions about the meaning of life as worthless. Pace the Christian Right, I’m not worried about a complete moral implosion in a post-Christian society. Pragmatism seems to be part of human nature too, as is self-interest, and one can construct a fairly coherent morality out of them. Even so, something about humanity gets lost if that’s all we’re left with. David Bentley Hart caustically observed that Western Europe’s trend toward self-extinction for lack of reproduction stems from a “metaphysical boredom.” One can detect something similar in Carlin’s gleeful hope that evolution would eventually “take care” of humanity, in the way the Mafia takes care of a rat (as NT Wright noted in Surprised by Hope evolution does not always work in our favor as modern spirituality seems to think).
Perhaps that’s why Carlin is so refreshing on this point. He told us exactly how it is (if the nihilists are right). Cynical? To the contrary, if Carlin was right he might just have been more of a realist than the rest of us.
A Coda
I need to add that I am well aware that Carlin told many a joke at the expense of religion, and it goes without saying I thought he was wrong. At the same time, when comedians mock they hypocrisies of religion I’m inclined to forgive them (albeit perhaps more than I should). In the end, however, whatever Carlin got wrong about religion he made up for by
exposing the truth of human nature and giving us a full-throated expression of nihilism. When someone presents the truth to us in a way that makes us exceedingly uncomfortable, I can think of few better titles-even where the someone mist resit it-than prophet. Those who have ears, let them hear.
