Drawing the Line in Catholic Belief

When asserting the conformity of one’s ideas to reality there is always a judgment call. Although the human mind is capable of unlimited ideas, nothing necessitates that these ideas accurately represent reality. Furthermore, ideas in themselves are not very satisfying. Our desire to know is not just to know our own ideas as if reality is merely something that exists in the mind, but we want to know reality as it exists in itself. This has been the cause of much philosophical turmoil and theories. Yet, because of this primordial desire to know, there is always an inseparable question of judgment and truth -- “is it really so?” This question is not always explicit but underlines every philosophical, scientific, and everyday practical attempt to know.

The evidence available via experience always limits the content of understanding. When it comes down to knowing, there are very few things in life of which we can be certain. Rather we exist and operate most in the domain of faith. As G.K. Chesterton states, “It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” A person is not born with innate knowledge of the inner workings of the cosmos or even the faintest idea about the self. Every person is born into a relationship to a community, and all knowledge is mediated through these relationships. However, despite our limitations, our quest for knowledge is very dynamic. People want to know and believe in what is true. Humans naturally seek the Truth, and even those who would claim otherwise usually construct elaborate systems of argumentation to prove why their theory is true.

Even in the most concrete experience of a historical record, there are many limitations to knowing. Science books provide data, experiments, and theories that most people have not the first hand experience to verify but take it for granted that what is taught is true. History books give an account of past events that many readers must accept on good will that these events actually occurred. Rightfully when contradictory views of science and history occur, people question the validity of sources. This is not an exact science but a humble attempt of trying to piece together an understanding of reality. These examples do not imply that we should distrust these types of sources altogether but be aware that most of our academic instruction on matters of history and science comes through secondary sources. If nothing else, this should teach us this one thing—humility is the beginning of knowledge. All of our historical knowledge is based off witnesses whose testimony we choose to believe or not. Likewise, this same dependence on historical witnesses exists in Christianity.

A certain historic record accompanies Christian belief. As Christians, we must put our faith in God, His revealed scriptures, and the oral tradition passed on through the Church and Her saints. Without the family, without the testimony of witnesses, there would be no Church. God’s relationship to his chosen people centers on a historical genealogy, because God has a history with his people. No single person exists apart from the context of the community and that context is always constituted by the history of humanity--to understand the self is to understand it in relationship to the community. We were not physically there in Bethlehem when the Christ Child was born or Calvary when he was crucified. However, our universal experience of sin and suffering make us present spiritually to this cosmic family event that transcends time and space so that we may physically live out this event historically in our own conversion. For we all have a past that predates our physical birth. We are our parents’ children and just as we are constituted by them genetically and socially, how much more should we be constituted by our Mother Church spiritually. Undoubtedly, historical references to early Christianity exist, but in the end, we must trust that the deposit of faith passes from generation to generation preserved by the constant testimony of the Church.

All this brings me to the essential question I want to ask: where does one decide to stop in their assent to seemingly amazing claims such as those proclaimed by Christianity? The prospect of God becoming man is undoubtedly a scandal to the intellect. God who existed before all things enters creation in the form of dust and limits himself to a physical nature becoming like humans in all things but sin. God dies and suffers the consequences of all the inequities ever committed-- past, presence, and future. Although this story of salvation has its own history, inner logic and beauty, Christianity still requires faith that this knowledge is known not by natural reason alone but divine revelation. To be a part of Christianity requires not only the implicit humility of participating in a system of education but also an explicit act of humility formulated in an act of faith. For Christianity proposes more than a philosophical argument that flows from premises to conclusion, but a cosmic narrative that holds all history together in a battle of love conquering death and God redeeming man. We do not get to customize truths because we are dealing with something larger than we are. For this very same reason, neither are we entitled to understand completely the truths that are revealed because of the great mystery at work. We are a part of the narrative, not its author.

Many people claim Christianity as their religion—slightly more than one-third of the world’s population. I am amazed that this remains to be the case even though skepticism seems to permeate and dominate many academic institutions and the very educational process of most people. Many modern processes of education that will always implicitly require trust from the student has theoretically replaced this trust with skepticism and doubt. The Augustinian formula, “I believe to understand and I understand to believe,” has been replaced with doubt, and this doubt has entered the private domain of people’s religious understanding.

The other day in conversation with friends, the issue of Mary’s perpetual virginity arose. Everyone present in the conversation professed to be Catholic. However, two of these individuals expressed non-belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity. I reminded them that they profess this truth in the Creed every Sunday. They accused me of being close-minded and that I shouldn’t accept everything the Church tells me. I was bewildered at the implication because the truth in question was not an issue of Church teaching but of Church dogma. Even though I have labored over many theological questions, my faith in Christ and His Church has not always come easily and my intellectual and spiritual conversion have a long history that is still in the making. But I learned years ago that my faith in Christ and His Church was all or nothing. For this is what Christ requires out of us, faith. It is true that Mary either is or isn’t a perpetual virgin, this is a matter of historical record that either occurred or didn’t. Arguing over it as theory will not change the history and we cannot go back 2000 years and ask Mary. Rather we must trust the deposit of faith entrusted by God to the Church. My issue is why do many assume the Church is lying or ignorant about things like this especially when it is a matter of historical record? I am not promoting absolute unquestioning obedience but practical reason—“I wasn’t there. It either happened, or it didn’t happen. No amount of theory will change that historical record one way or the other. The Church who transmits the deposit of faith says it happened a certain way. Who am I based off of nothing more than a whim of my fancy to deny this?”

Furthermore, given all the other off the wall things Christianity requires you to believe such as the incarnation and transubstantiation, why question something as sane as the possibility of a celibate woman? They exist, believe it or not, today. People can in fact survive without having sex. This really is not a scandal to the intellect like so many other things Christianity professes. I address this because this really seems epidemic among many Catholics. They have no problem believing all the seemingly hard matters of faith but gawk at the things that I would think should be easier to believe. “God became a man, of course, but a human person remaining a virgin? Outrageous!” Why draw the line here? Why not abandon all the things the Church claims to be true? If she is lying about Mary’s Virginity, in my mind it only makes sense that she may not be reliable about other things. If she is not faithful in small things, how can we expect her to be faithful on larger matters of faith?

Surely the limitations of the mind open it up to something greater than itself that it cannot merely reason to as some lower principle. Humility is a proper response. Reality is much too mysterious to understand definitively. We cannot be at all places at all times testing the historical validity of everything we are told. Either Christ rose from the dead or he did not. We can believe he rose, but we cannot go back and watch. As easy as it is to become lost in one’s own abstract speculations about the ultimate principal of all that is, there is something infinitely comforting to know that a truth exists that is not merely a figment or creation of one’s own imagination, although it may be known with the imagination. There is an exclusivity of belief because there is an exclusivity of the will. You cannot truly believe what you don’t live, and you can’t live what you don’t believe, at least in a total sense. You may try but the heart will struggle to follow. A person may claim to believe a certain action is wrong and still perform that action. The problem is somewhere deep down inside the wrong that person does is perceived as a good. This is not merely a problem of the intellect but of the will. What we really believe reveals itself in the way we live. Christianity is an act of the will more than an act of the intellect, but the two are not separated. The process of conforming our mind to the mind of Christ must be willful. In love, knowing and doing meet in perfect union.

"You suffered with them, and now you are theirs."

I Heard the Owl Call My Name by American author Margaret Craven is a very short novel (just over 150 pages), but don’t let its thin spine fool you – its themes run deep: a community’s experience of suffering and death, the struggle to preserve tradition in the face of progress, the growing generation gap, the fruits of spiritual simplicity, and the essence of the priestly vocation.

Craven’s novella, set in the 1960’s, follows Mark Brian, a young Anglican cleric sent by his bishop to be pastor in Kingcome parish, a remote First Nations (Native American) village in British Columbia. The Bishop has learned that Mark only has a few years left to live, but he chooses not to tell Mark this; instead, the Bishop assigns Mark to the most difficult parish in his bishopric in hopes that the assignment will teach the young priest the true nature of his vocation.

At first, Mark does not feel at home in Kingcome, but gradually, the priest and his people learn to accept one another’s differences, to work together to provide for one another’s needs, and most of all, to live together as the Body of Christ. Throughout the book, Craven makes it abundantly clear that the village lives as one body, and its people suffer and survive as a community. In one particularly beautiful passage, she writes that, as the village prayed together at sunrise after a hard winter, “it seemed to Mark that he felt the burden of winter lift as from a common shoulder, and heard the sigh of gratitude rise from a common heart” (140). It isn’t long before Mark realizes that he and the tribe must work together – not to prosper, but merely to survive.

As Mark observes the life of the community he shepherds, the tribe’s appreciation for simplicity teaches him the importance of voluntary poverty in the priestly vocation. When Mark first arrives in Kingcome village, the old vicarage where he must live is falling down, but he refuses to let a new one be built when he sees the condition of the other dwellings in the village. After Mark has served in Kingcome for some time, the men of the tribe offer to help him build a new house. Mark writes to his bishop to tell him the good news, and the bishop replies: “You suffered with them, and now you are theirs, and nothing will ever be the same again” (87). That, Mark learns, is the heart of missionary life, and of his priesthood: entering into the lives of the people one has been sent to serve, giving oneself over to them, and learning to suffer together, to “bear one another’s burdens” for Christ’s sake (Galatians 6:2).

The greatest burden Mark and his people are asked to bear is death, but even that burden is lightened when death is seen for what it really is: the door to eternal life. The death myth of the people of Kingcome – the myth of “the talking bird, the owl, who calls the name of the man who is going to die” (19) – helps Mark to see death in a new way, and more importantly, to realize that to live his vocation, he must constantly die to himself; he must lose his life in order to find it (Matthew 16:25).

Near the end of the novel, the Bishop comes to visit Kingcome village, and his words to Mark resonated with me in a special way. As a missionary, I've learned that it is always hard to say what one has learned from an encounter with Christ’s poor, but the Bishop seems to get it right:

“Always when I leave the village,” the Bishop said slowly, “I try to define what it means to me, why it sends me back to the world refreshed and confident. Always I fail. It is so simple it is difficult. When I try to put it into words, it come out one of those unctuous, over-pious platitudes at which Bishops are expected to excel…

“[F]or me it has always been easier here, where only the fundamentals count, to learn what every man must learn in this world.”

“And that, my lord?” [Mark asked.]

“Enough of the meaning of life to be ready to die.” (144)

I Heard the Owl Call My Name is a must-read for missionaries, seminarians, and avid Catholic readers alike. Its story may be simple and brief, but its presence will linger long after you've finished the last page.

T.S. Eliot and Community: Part II of III

Part I from last week.

In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot furthers his description of the fragmented community. In the opening lines of The Waste Land, April is considered the “cruelest month” [1]. Rather than its traditional symbol of renewal and rebirth, April becomes an aching reminder of a better past in the midst of a wintery present. In other words April becomes an unfriendly reminder of the unhappiness that permeates the present. The past holds an account of our sins and acts as a conscience that brings man into contact with the true nature of the wasteland. The memory functions to make us painfully aware of the current ruins that surround us. But this experience has been deemed as cruelty because of the desire to be disconnected with the past. Accountability becomes unbearable. In turn this disconnection with the past has blinded man to his own nature and cut him off from the means of knowing and fulfilling his own natural end. Quite literally, the poem brings this image to life by showing people as ghost of their former selves.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winder dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. [60-64]

People surround each other, but there is no communication and no community. People are more dead than they are alive, but unable to recognize that lack of life because they are unable to recognize each other. As with Prufrock, they are stuck in the world of the self.

This isolation takes concrete forms in the two unloved women of The Waste Land. In section II the aristocratic lady waits hopelessly for love and human affection. However, even the bird of love becomes meaningless.

Yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears. [100-103]

The voice of the nightingale is nothing more than a meaningless cry that ceases to signify. The symbol of love no longer signifies love; in other words, the sign is not signifying. This action with no meaning personifies the hopelessness of the women waiting for love. On the other extreme, the description of the second lady shows another type of isolation even more discontenting. The lady dreads the return of her husband from war who only wants “a good time” regardless where he has to go for it. Her husband will not sexually leave her alone. Despite this physical intimacy she feels alienated and used by her husband. Both women are not really loved and these two antidotes juxtaposed together identify two perspectives on the disconnection between people.

In the poem The Hollow Men it seems the best we can achieve is communal meaninglessness.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Learning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar [part I]

Here Eliot indicates that language no longer signifies and communicates meanings. We are without substance and stuffed with learning that only gives off the semblance of communication. Language is depraved of its creative power to transcend the physical and inspire the soul. This fragmented culture is left with “Shape without form, shade without colour,? Paralysed force, gesture without motion” [part I]. These contradictory pairs show how the meanings signified by certain actions are being divorced from their sign. Common language is destroyed and communion becomes impossible. One by one all things begin to lose their meaning: education, relationships, the singing nightingale, love, physical intimacy, and eventually language.

So if Eliot's poetry is correct about the current state of language, where does this leave the possibility for meaningful communication? I will look at this question in the next post.

T.S. Eliot and Community: Part I of III

In the midst of the English literary tradition comes a prophetic figure, T.S. Eliot, warning against the destruction of language and community. T.S. Eliot pushes language to new horizons in his attempt to critique and expand the cultural consciousness and conscience of his generation. This awareness comes through his exploration of man’s folly and failure in bringing about a better world through feeble attempts at education and so called “objective” accounts of the world through reductive science. Rather than informing and deepening man’s understanding of himself and the cosmos, these attempts wedded to intellectual pride create a wasteland that engulfs society and undermines the mystical bonds of community. Through his poetic and mystical writings, Eliot can be understood as attempting a literary and cultural renewal by warning against the dangers of his society and its direction towards destruction and human isolation.

At the heart of any community lies a framework in which people share common experiences such as historical events, desires, insights, and goals. All these things are mediated among individuals within the community through language. As experience and thoughts are translated into symbols and communicated through verbal, oral, and physical gestures, language develops into the heart of a community. Because of the intimate connection between language and community, the destruction of one may lead to the destruction of the other. Likewise the renewal of one may lead to the renewal of the other.

T.S. Eliot realized that the present situation of a society in ruins must be understood and assessed for what it is in order to understand the fullness of the calamity that the community faces. However, because this process involves coming to terms with the problem and naming man’s folly, the difficulty of the prophet’s task increases when the means to express this calamity, namely language, has been intimately affected by the very destructiveness that T.S. Eliot hopes to identify. This may account for Eliot’s reliance on poetic verse and powerful images as primary tools of relating his insights in the context of symbolic narratives. When the very language system to be used to express meaning is fragmented, then expression within this system must be done with fragmented language. Thus, even Eliot’s style of poetry resonates with the fragmentation and alienation he identifies within his society.

Eliot’s dramatic monologue, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, gives an illuminating account of an isolated mind separated from the community. Alfred Prufrock tries to apply his rational knowledge of scientific relationships to the area of human relationships. At some sort of evening party he spends his time calculating possible interactions with women. He begins with his own inadequacies, such as thinning hair and undesirable physical traits, and concludes the inevitable failure of any possible interaction with the opposite sex. The logical end of his reasoning is to resist entering into a dialogue at all.

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume? [5]

Prufrock’s consciousness of being judged prevents him from action. He falls into the problem that he cannot calculate how to begin. There can be no calculation of a beginning, therefore he stagnates into non-action. His ‘scientific’ need for certainty undermines his human need for community. Thus he pins himself to a wall and fulfills his own fears. Prufrock becomes trapped in the hell of the isolated mind with no hope of escape.

Education embodied in reason alone has rebelled against its master. Prufrock embodies the impotence of the educated by living in his head rather than in everyday human interaction. His intellectual musings become a hindrance to community rather than an aide. His mind has predetermined his end to be lonely. Limiting the scientific inquiry to the positivistic sciences has in turn divorced the academic mind from the community and human relations. Prufrock becomes unable to interact in community and has exiled himself.