Getting to the Point: tradition

Showing posts with label tradition. Show all posts

Monday, January 27, 2014

Cooked Food, Raw Mind

One great complaint, I think, must stand against the modern upholders of the simple life—the simple life in all its various forms, from vegetarianism to the honorable consistency of the Doukhobors. This complaint against them stands, that they would make us simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things.

They would make us simple in the things that do not matter—this is, in diet, I costume, in etiquette, in economic system. But they would make us complex in the things that do matter—in philosophy, in loyalty, in spiritual acceptance, and spiritual rejection.

It does not so very much matter if a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato; it does very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind. The only kind of simplicity worth preserving is the simplicity of the heart, the simplicity which accepts and enjoys.

There may be a reasonable doubt as to what system preserves this; there can surely be no doubt that a system of simplicity destroys it. There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.

The chief error of these people is to be found in the very phrase to which they are most attached: “plain living and high thinking…” A man approaches, wearing sandals and simple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his right hand, and says, “The affections of family and country alike are hindrances to the fuller development of human love.” But the plain thinker will only answer him, with a wonder not untinged with admiration, “What a great deal of trouble you must have taken in order to feel like that…” High living will reject the tomato.

The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart. If that be gone, it be brought back by no turnips, but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not quenched. If that remain, it matter very little if a few Early Victorian armchairs remain along with it. Let us put a complex entrée into a simple old gentleman; let us not put a simple entrée into a complex old gentleman.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

Reflection – GKC’s era saw the beginning of all the great faddism about food and crank-ism about health and lifestyle which still plies a roaring trade today. Tolstoy, whose magnificent novels and stories rise far above all of that, was commonly known in England for such views on diet, austere living, along with odd notions about the evils of patriotism, property, and family feeling.

I rather suspect that Tolstoy’s literary output was less known in Chesterton’s day, at least in the English speaking world, than his philosophical views—certainly GKC would have admired them for their artistry and profound Christian spirit, but he hardly makes allusion to them in his various critiques of Tolstoyism.

I have to admit to a certain amusement at trying to blog about this passage. Madonna House is not unknown, after all, for its raw tomatoes and turnips. Grape-nuts are not on the menu so much, but oatmeal and plain yogurt are. Perhaps not so much as a matter of abstract scientific principle as of plain thinking practicality and evangelical poverty, though.

It is hard in our time, when it is widely accepted that we should be very careful and fussy about our food, and scientists endlessly inform us alternately that butter and eggs are very very bad for us, except that they are very very good for us (or not). And of course, GKC was living in the era before there was a great deal of processed ‘food’ that is not really food at all in any real sense. There is a general sense today that we do have to fuss a bit around the food question.

I don’t think that is the main point he is making, of course. He himself says to eat the raw tomato if you please… just not with a grilled mind. And it is probably a matter of considerable meditation and thought as to just what a ‘grilled mind’ looks like and whether or not you and I may have one.

Chesterton, I know, had a great suspicion for anyone who devised complicated philosophical rationales for spurning that which the great mass of mankind considered obvious goods. Marriage and family and the home, love of one’s own people and nation, the ‘copybook maxims’ of honesty and integrity and courage, along with the simple capacity to enjoy life and its ordinary pleasures and joys—these are the self-evident goods that all normal people can recognize and embrace without difficulty.

It is the grilled mind that introduces levels and layers of complexity into the mixture, that deconstructs everything (without any clear plan, seemingly, for its reconstitution) and subverts everything in an endless hermeneutic of suspicion, that wants to tear down the simple ancient edifices of human life and happiness in some vague and ever-changing quest for a more scientific system of housing.

‘We’ll figure it out yet, the formula for a happy, good life. If not this year, next year – just so long as it’s anything except what our ancestors passed on to us.’ This is the grilled mind that needs to be healed in the tears and fires of purgation, I think, and it is no small question whether or not you and I suffer from this kind of grilling.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Talking to Clever Ducks

Even more hotly debated was the problem of Revelation. At stake here was the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, and it was the exegetes above all who were anxious for greater freedom; they felt themselves somewhat – shall we say – in a position of inferiority with regard to the Protestants, who were making the great discoveries, whereas Catholics felt somewhat "handicapped" by the need to submit to the Magisterium.

So a very concrete struggle was in play here: what sort of freedom do exegetes have? How does one properly read Scripture? What is the meaning of Tradition? It was a multifaceted struggle which I cannot go into now, but the important thing, for sure, is that Scripture is the word of God and that the Church is under Scripture, the Church obeys God’s word and does not stand above Scripture. Yet at the same time Scripture is Scripture only because there is the living Church, its living subject; without the living subject of the Church, Scripture is only a book, open to different interpretations and lacking ultimate clarity.

Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Clergy of Rome, February 14, 2013

Reflection – OK, so I’m back as of yesterday in my own bed in my own bedroom in my own priest house in my own Madonna House in Combermere. Whew. While

England

was great and I loved it there… well, as Dorothy said, ‘There’s no place like home!’

Now just to remind everyone that before all this kerfuffle of the last month or so in Rome we were having something called a ‘Year of Faith’ (remember that?). Incidentally, I think this whole business of papal resignation and the historic election of Pope Francis has been a vital part of the Year of Faith, among other things calling everyone to truly deepen our faith in the Church’s origin and sustenance in God and not in human beings.

But part of the Year of Faith has been the call from Pope (Emeritus) Benedict to study and re-embrace the legacy of Vatican II in truth and in depth. And since this talk to the Roman clergy is virtually the last public statement we have of Pope Benedict on that or any other subject, I’m going to spend the next few days—perhaps until Holy Week or so—blogging my way through it. So… back to Life With a German Shepherd for a few days.

So here we have the thorny issue of Revelation, Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium and their inter-relation. It seems to me, and here I of course defer to the great scholars of the Church who have been far more immersed in these matters than I, that the whole field of critical Scripture scholarship developed primarily in a non-Catholic setting, and its development, methodologies and pre-suppositions reflect that.

Catholic Scripture scholars who wish to work in that field on an equal level with their Protestant colleagues have more often than not simply done their Scripture scholarship on those terms, and in consequence have had to compartmentalize their scholarship and their faith, to the detriment of both and to themselves above all.

It seems to me that, far from stifling the work of Scripture scholarship, the integration of Scripture and Tradition guided by the rightful authority of the Magisterium enlivens it and gives it depth and direction. So often, in my admittedly minimal exposure to historical-critical exegesis, the terminus of the work seems to be this one scholar’s speculative re-construction of the composition of this one text and its original historical intent and meaning. All very speculative—the next scholar promptly comes along and writes a completely different re-construction—and all rather fruitless.

I mean, we get to see what a clever duck Dr. Whositby is and how effectively he debunked Dr. Wheresitfrom (although the radical scholarship of Dr. Wassitmean is coming right behind to debunk him in turn), but what good does their work do in drawing out the deep meaning of the Word of God in a creative spiritual way for the Body of Christ? Especially since most of them cannot write coherent and lively prose to save their lives.

Meanwhile, Scripture scholarship can be done in a lively creative tension with the whole tradition of the Church, an approach and a method that actually takes us somewhere. Pope Benedict’s own Jesus of Nazareth books are precisely his effort to teach by showing us how to do it. My own belief is that this approach rescues Scripture scholarship (and indeed, the Scriptures) from the dusty dry hegemony of the academics and saves it from many of the outright errors and distortions it too often falls into… about which I will blog tomorrow, God willing and the crick don`t rise. See you then.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

The Unbroken Chain

There is an unbroken chain in the life of the Church, in the proclamation of the Word of God, of the celebration of the Sacraments, that has come down to us and that we call Tradition. It gives us the guarantee that what we believe is the original message of Christ, preached by the Apostles. The nucleus of the primordial proclamation is the death and the Resurrection of the Lord, from which stems the entire patrimony of the faith. The Council says: “The apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved by a continuous line of succession until the end of time” (Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, n. 8).

In this way, if Sacred Scripture contains the Word of God, the Tradition of the Church preserves it and faithfully transmits it, so that the men and women of every age might have access to its vast resources and be enriched by its treasures of grace. Thus, the Church, “in her doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes” (ibid.).

General Audience, 31 October 2012

Reflection – Well here we have a good little catechesis on revelation, the Church, and faith. Where the Reformation tradition of Luther and Calvin upholds sola scriptura (the scriptures alone) as the place of revelation, the Catholic faith has always been that God reveals Himself in His word and in the living unbroken Tradition of the Church, that which has been passed down to us from generation to generation.

If I can briefly dip into the field of apologetics, the fatal weakness of the Protestant position is that it is itself unscriptural. By its own argument—that the scriptures alone are the source of revealed truth—it is self-refuting. There is not a single Bible verse from Genesis to Revelation that states the principle of sola scriptura. It is, itself, an expression of Protestant Tradition, and extra-biblical. There is also, nowhere in the Bible, a list of the canonical books of the Bible (and no, the table of contents at the front doesn’t count). The very composition of the Bible, then, is an extra-biblical contribution of Sacred Tradition.

None of that is a problem for Catholics. It has always been our understanding that God comes to us in His word, in Tradition, and that all this is mediated by the living authority of His Church and its episcopal leadership. The Bible is a precious and unique place of God’s revelation, where the very words of Truth and salvation are recorded in an fixed, unchanging expression, but it sits in honour within a living communion of faith and love—the life of the Church.

Anyhow, enough apologetics. It is amazing, though, how many Catholics need to be reminded of our faith in this matter. For many Catholics, it is a serious business if a Protestant says to them, ‘Well, your beliefs about Mary (or Confession… or the papacy…) are not in the Bible!’ Really, this shouldn’t faze us. We could easily respond, with charity of course, ‘Well, your beliefs about the Bible are not in the Bible!’ and that would be the end of the matter.

Meanwhile, it is so very beautiful that God arranged things this way. It is, again, this whole business I have blogged about already this week—he really means it that we are to be a family, a body, a communion of love. He really wants us, and in fact is quite set on it, that the life of the Church will be a true life, and so He communicates the fullness of his Truth to us only in the life of the body.

Any fool can walk into a book store, buy a Bible, sit down and read it, and think they now possess the fullness of God’s truth. And, as we see so clearly, that approach to understanding God’s revelation results in—how many is it now?—thousands of little Protestant churches, each quite sure that their doctrines are 100% scriptural. A privatized, deeply individualistic, and ultimately relativistic view of faith is the inevitable result of sola scriptura theology.

Meanwhile, to receive Scripture and Tradition together as the fullness of truth means being part of the living communion of the Church. It means, yes, being submissive to the authority of the Church, but even the bishops and even the Pope must themselves be submissive to the 2000 years of unbroken transmission of faith in the life of the Church. It is the utter opposite of an individual, private, relativized faith—it is an entry, if we choose to take it as such, into the depths of communion with God and from that, with one another. And that is what God has revealed to us as His great desire for the human race.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

The Failure of Reason

We must affirm that this Enlightenment philosophy, with its related culture, is incomplete. It consciously cuts off its own historical roots, depriving itself of the powerful sources from which it sprang. It detaches itself from what we might call the basic memory of mankind, without which reason loses its orientation, for now the guiding principle is that man’s capability determines what he does.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 41

Reflection – Reason alone! This is the summary of the Enlightenment philosophy Ratzinger critiques in this passage. Rejection of authority, of tradition, of faith, of any source except its own self. The assured faith (paradox alert!) that it is by unaided and untrammeled reason that the human race will obtain happiness and security, solve all problems and heal all ills.

Well, it has failed—I don’t quite know how anyone can seriously disagree. We’ve had centuries now of reason doing its thing (a good thing in itself, let me hasten to add), and the results have beeen… well, mixed to say the least.

Antibiotics. Nuclear bombs. Organ transplants. Pollution. Improved crop yields. Zyklon B. Adult stem cell therapies. Machine guns.

Reason is a powerful tool penetrating how things work and how to make them work for us in a host of different ways. But unaided reason, reason cut off from anything outside its own narrow technological and scientific investigations, does not do so well in determining what we should do, what is genuinely for the good of humanity.

And so we see that all sorts of perfectly rational scientific men over the past centuries have used their reason to create instruments of death, terror, and destruction that in fact threaten the very survival of the human race and the planet. And that is not to mention the host of philosophies and ideologies that ‘reason’ has come up with and which have wrought carnage on a scale unprecedented in the history of humanity. Communism alone killed tens of millions of people in less than a century.

Reason—untrammelled, autonomous reason—is incomplete, as Ratzinger so summarily puts it.

We need context. We need a framework: what is humanity for? What is our good, anyhow? What is the meaning, the purpose, the goal? What is the value of man and his works? From this, which is what Ratzinger means by the ‘basic memory of mankind’ we can determine how technology and scientific progress can truly serve the good of humanity. Without this, we are simply thrashing around aimlessly and doing ourselves great harm in the process.

We cannot kill some human beings to benefit other human beings, even if the humans we are killing are very, very small. We cannot give the power to deal out life and death to the medical profession, as euthanasia advocates would have us do. We cannot by legal fiat change the fundamental realities of human life and its origin and nurturing. Man and woman come together, and this is how babies are made—the state has an interest in strengthening those relational bonds. The state has no interest whatsoever in any other relational bonds among people.

Underneath the Enlightenment philosophy is a sense that reality is infinitely malleable, that there is nothing ‘real’, really, that we can change and shape things without limit, or the only limit being our own power to do so. This is false, and the falsehood is currently driving our society to the brink of poverty and ruin.

There is reality; there is truth; and truth comes to us down the centuries from the sum total of human experience and reflection. We reject this traditional wisdom and insight at our own peril, and I fear this peril is imminent and grave in this year of 2012. Let us come to our senses, and allow our reason to be shaped by wisdom, and our wisdom informed by the witness of the centuries, before it is too late.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Tradition! Or, why Tevye the milkman was right.

In Rome, St. Paul

encountered the type of moral decadence that comes from the total loss of tradition: people were deprived of that interior evidential character that in other times had been offered to man form the outset of this life by usages and customs. Where nothing can be taken for granted, everything become possible, and nothing is impossible any longer. Now there is no value capable of sustaining man, and there are no inviolable norms. All that counts is man’s ego and the present moment.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, p. 93

Reflection – This is from the beginning of an essay entitled “The Natural Knowledge of God” which is so utterly relevant to our times that I will probably be quoting most of it in short bits and pieces on this blog. (Really, though, if you’re going to buy one book of the pope’s, make it this one – it is short and superb!)

We touch in this passage upon another major theme in Ratzinger’s writings – the historical amnesia of Western Civilization, our being cut off from the vast wisdom of tradition accumulated and passed down through the centuries. It is this sundering of the individual from ‘usages and customs’ that draws us down into moral decadence and chaos.

Simply put, when nothing is passed on, everyone is left having to figure it all out themselves. Since this is rather difficult, to say the least, most of us end up parroting whatever the majority opinions or fashionable gurus of the day tell us, in easy to remember slogans. Hence we are trapped in the present moment and whatever 'wisdom' it has to offer us.

Of course human traditions are flawed—after all, slavery is a venerable human tradition, as is child sacrifice. But when tradition is discarded whole cloth, which is certainly the case in much of North America and Europe today, then the sole counterbalance to the force of the ego and the spirit of the age is lost. We are left trapped in our own desires and devices, our own projects, agendae, and plans, with no actual experience of a standard, a rule, a social norm to check or correct us.

Social convention, for all its flaws, has a capacity for curbing the unbridled egoism of the human person. That there are things that 'one simply doesn't do' is more important than we like to admit. Its loss (largely) in our day is a terrible one. The amnesia of our inherited moral wisdom is even worse; each person has to laboriously work their way through the whole mess.

I will never forget the young woman who triumphantly pointed out to me that the idea of a binding absolute moral law could not possibly be right since people have to steal food if they are starving to death and kill in self defense. It had simply never occurred to her that both starvation and violent attacks are not recently discovered phenomena, and, just perhaps, the very moral theologians and philosophers who argued for an absolute moral law had noticed those facts and given those questions some thought over the millennia.

Ratzinger has repeatedly called us to a radical anamnesis (remembrance) of the moral tradition of our civilization, so that we can rebuild a bulwark against the moral decadence of the unfettered ego and a defense against crushing conformism to current fashion. His life work is dedicated in many respects precisely to this.

So is this blog.