January 1, 2007
My work in progress analyses a number of forms
of life derived from the metaphor of power and judgment and the distinctive
form of life which evokes a longing for intimacy and transforms that longing
into a realizable quest. Lately, I realize how much my compulsive urge to
address the same issues is framed by two sources.
One source is my fascination with the recorded
proclamations of Israel's great prophets. Forgive me for situating the
prophets in a literary background.
(1) In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus traced
the two great Commandments to the Law and the Prophets. In so doing, he
echoed a traditional understanding of theological and moral issues indebted to
the use of the utterances of the prophets to interpret the Law.
(2) In its own right, this understanding
was compatible with a belief in God's all-inclusive love. But the
Deuteronomic Tradition which grounded Israel's identity as God's Chosen People
in a strict observance of the Law transmitted a doctrine of exclusive election
which fostered a sense of righteousness.
To present the Mosaic
Law as timelessly binding on the true Israelite, storytellers in the
Deuteronomic Tradition forged literary conventions which grounded the authority
of the Law in theophanies in which God dictated a Law in face-to-face
encounters with Moses. In actual fact, this Law was codified during the
Babylonian Exile by scribes who sought to ensure that nothing in Israel’s
cultural heritage be lost.
From a literary
perspective, these storytellers used literary conventions to lend authority to
a codification of practices which prevailed over the course of centuries as a
timeless, changeless mediator between God and Israel.
(3) When Israelites returned from the
Babylonian Exile, many coalesced around readings from the Pentateuch in the
belief that the prescriptions and prohibitions inscribed in it relate the whole
of everyday life to God and set Israel apart from her idolatrous neighbors.
And since God presumably spoke to Moses as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge, the text
in which the Law was encoded demanded obedience to its dictates. The Law,
then, functioned as a mediator between God and God's Chosen People, and Israel
was well on its way to becoming the People of the Book.
(4) For Christians who espoused some
version of the Deuteronomic doctrine of exclusive election, Jesus replaced the
Law as the sole mediator between God and sinful humans. Before and during
the exiles, however, the prophets had projected metaphors which located the
moral voice of God in the cries of the oppressed, the dispossessed, the abused,
the marginalized, the silenced, the outcast and the stranger. And these
metaphors continue to speak so powerfully today because they evoke the
sympathetic imaginations expressed so powerfully in the metaphors of the
prophets.
(Two asides:
(a) Today, officials in the Roman Curia invoke a theology of
transcendence to justify their role in a hierarchically structured
institution. To frame their recent decrees concerning the celebration of
the Eucharist, they claim that the liturgical reforms introduced by Vatican II
fail to foster a suitable awe and reverence. In a futile effort to
recover an idealized past, they favor a liturgy whose structure implies that
the priest functions as a mediator between God and sinners. And to
support this definition of the priest's role in the Eucharistic celebration,
they (1) reduce the liturgy to a ritual re-enactment of Jesus' sacrifice on the
Cross and (2) suggest that the sacrament of Holy Orders effects an ontological
transformation which raises the priest to a transcendent state of existence.
From an empirical point of view, I see no
evidence that ordination transforms priests in any way. I can only hope
that a priest's ordination is an intensely personal encounter with Jesus as he
undertakes a role in the Church. Consequently, I insist that talk of an
ontological transformation effected by ordination implies that the Sacraments
work magically. On my part, I have found that my ordination involves me
with people in ways that urge me to allow Jesus to accompany me on a journey to
a more fully human and uniquely personal existence. (In Oxford terms, the
theology of Holy Orders and of Baptism which implies that we are changed
ontologically by the reception of the Sacrament is a systematic abuse of a
terminology especially invented for that purpose.) Moreover, my
involvement with other priests leads me to believe that those who pretend to
inhabit some higher realm of existence will not hear a call to conversion until
they hit the sort of bottom which shakes their trust in such a theology.
And since they can effectively insulate themselves from anyone who might puncture
their pretensions, I fear that most of them will avoid the sort of personal
involvement with wounded individuals capable of evoking in them the moral
transformation so evident in the life of Bishop Romero.
(b) I embrace an
incarnational theology which celebrates the willingness of the eternal Word to
meet each and every human being where they are and to take them as far as they
can go on a journey to deepening intimacy. I suggest, therefore, that
ordination commissioned me to be constantly open to transforming events in my
ministry. From this perspective, newly ordained priests are like young
parents who must let their little ones teach them how to be a parent.
As I learned this lesson, I
was filled with gratitude for the many individuals who taught me that Jesus
comes to me through those I would have preferred to exclude from my life.
And I have found joy in my priestly involvement in a Sacramental system which
assures us of Jesus' intimate involvement with us in our quest for a more fully
human and uniquely personal existence, not magical events that elevate me into
a supernatural realm. From this perspective, I always hope to celebrate
the Eucharist in a way that heightens an awareness that Jesus, the wounded
Healer, is intimately involved with all who are present in all facets of their
lives, especially their involvements with other wounded individuals anywhere
and everywhere.
(c) The theology which
defines sanctifying grace as a created "something" which transforms
us into Christians or priests is the product of a philosophical
tradition. In ancient Greece, this tradition replaced drama as the voice
of authority when inquiries governed by the rule of the One succeeded in
formulating questions which mute nature could answer. As Nietzsche
showed, however, any use of the fictive voice of reason involves an exercise of
power and judgment. In marked contrast, Hebrew storytellers forged an
equally fictive narrative voice which enabled them to give voice to the tangled
depths and mysterious freedom of human beings. And with rare genius, the
prophets placed this literary construct at the center of metaphors of intimacy,
as a tool designed to enable them to enter sympathetically into the experiences
of those who did not know how to speak for themselves. Intriguingly, the
storytellers in the Deuteronomic tradition remain anonymous, while their
metaphors enabled the prophets to speak in distinctively original voices.
(d) The influence of
the prophetic tradition is particularly obvious in two passages of the Gospels.
(1) Echoes of the metaphor of intimacy can be heard in the formulation of
the criteria that would be used in the Last Judgment scene found in Mt.
25:31ff. In the Sermon on the Mount, the author of Matthew uses a
literary convention to present Jesus as the new Moses speaking from the
mountaintop. In its own right, this convention suggests that following
Jesus involves obeying prescriptions and prohibitions. But in the parable
of the Last Judgment, Jesus adds words which identify following him as an
involvement with the wounded, abused, silenced and outcast and as the call to
intimacy with him: "Whatever you do (or do not do) to the least of
my brothers and sisters, you do to me."
The implications
of this assertion are obvious to anyone who reads it through a code derived
from a metaphor of intimacy. He hurts with us when we are hurt, and he
rejoices with us when we rejoice in the love we have for one another.
(2) The other echo, a product of many decades of theological reflection,
can be found in the account of the Last Supper in the Gospel attributed to
John, the beloved apostle. In this highly literary composition, Jesus
speaks in a different voice than the voice attributed to him by the Synoptic
Gospels. Nonetheless, the evangelist could not develop the full
implications of the Prologue which gives form and direction to his story of
Jesus. Most obviously, he often puts words into the mouth of Jesus which
juxtapose echoes of the metaphor of intimacy with seemingly incongruent
passages in which Jesus situates himself in a hierarchical relationship with
the Father. Taken abstractly, the passages centered in Jesus'
relationship with the Father can be used to support a theology of
transcendence. But the Prologue inscribes a conception of divine love
which, when the doctrine of the Trinity emerged, implied that three divine
Persons were so intimately involved with one another that there is only one
divine life, and the unprecedented formulation of the Commandment of Love,
"Love one another as I have loved you," is clearly a call to intimacy.
This call goes beyond a mere paraphrase of the Second Great Commandment
recorded in the remembered sayings of Jesus woven into the Gospels of the
synoptic authors. And since my journey into the unknown has been
illuminated by the Gospel of John rather than the synoptic Gospels, I must
believe that the call to love one another as Jesus loves each of us emerged
from the evangelist's vision of a community centered in the incarnate
Word. From this perspective, the evangelist inscribed a dawning awareness
that only individuals who were willing to be intimately involved with the
Incarnate Word could become intimately involved with one another.
("Without me, you can do nothing.")
(e)
The conviction that God's love is ever-faithful makes it impossible for me to
suppose that a sin of Adam severed a relationship with God. And the
conviction that God's love is all-inclusive reminds me that natural law theory
of Aquinas devalues the sympathetic imagination which enables me to be
compassionately involved with the wounded people I encounter as a priest.
Looking back, I believe that my suspicion of the theology of transcendence was
provoked by my rejection of the moral discourse it validated. In this context,
the suspicion was magnified when I came to appreciate the postmodernist
critique of unquestioning submission to authority in any shape or form.
Today, I profoundly regret my unquestioning acceptance of the dogmatic and
moral theology that I had been taught and my many judgmental reactions which
only increased the toxic guilt of wounded individuals. And I still find
that my ability to be involved with individuals without judgments and agendas
is flawed and that the flaws are magnified in my writing.
(To any discerning reader, it must be evident (1) that I seek to deepen my
analyses of experience by situating them in the inter-textual dialogue which
transmits the western literary tradition and (2) that I use a polemical
structure designed to present an incarnational theology as the authorized
version of the Christian story. I can only offer a flimsy defense.
If I am to live with integrity, I am compelled to question my analyses of
experiences, convictions and beliefs as relentlessly as I question the analyses
of others, and I try to avoid saying anything that I cannot hold with
intellectual integrity. But I find joy in the quest, especially when I
encounter an intriguing question, whatever its source.
Pope Benedict's Regensburg Lecture and his Encylical on love formulate
theological and moral issues and provide a paradigm example of the way I must
wrestle with the texts of others. The Pope assumes that a wedding of
faith (as a quest for union with God) and reason (as a god-like perspective)
will yield doctrinal formulations which reveal precisely how God has been and
is active in human history. He also presents himself as the anointed
guardian of a tradition generated by Aquinas' wedding of faith and
reason. However, since I am convinced that the conception of reason he
espouses legitimates a hidden will to power, I find Cardinal Newman's
magisterial work on the development of doctrine far more fruitful.
Years ago, my encounter with this text evoked a
suspicion that the theological inquiries which promised a comprehensive and
closed belief-system were responsible for doctrines which reduce Jesus' saving
activity to a single event in his life and for the theology that defines the
Eucharistic celebration as a sacrifice for sin. Newman's understanding of
tradition as a process freed me to embrace the vision encapsulated in Scotus'
dictum, "In processu generationis humanae semper crevit notitia
veritatis." [editor’s translation: “throughout human history,
knowledge of the truth has constantly increased.”]
From this perspective, Pope Benedict's lecture at Regensburg (1) echoed
metaphorical references to a "deposit of faith" entrusted to the
institutional Church personified in the person of the Pope and (2) assumed that
Aquinas was an authentic interpreter of that (fully present, if concealed)
deposit. To lend authority to the Thomistic tradition, Benedict blamed
Scotus for the triumph of will over intellect. In a rhetorically
despicable way, caricature of Scotus's philosophical framework was designed to
clothe the accusation with authority. However, since it offers a
polemically structured reading of medieval theology, it is a little more that a
ploy designed to absolve its author of the need to become intellectually
engaged with Nietzsche's dictum, "Nothing is true; everything is
permitted."
My thesis here is simple. The Pope must dismiss Nietzsche's re-reading of
the western literary tradition if he is to pretend that an objective morality
is the only viable response to the violence that erupted everywhere in the
twentieth century and in the years of this twenty-first century. From a
postmodernist perspective, however, an objective morality is merely a disguised
totalitarianism. As such, it is merely yet another example of the way
that a will to power clothed with religious trappings does violence to
individuals.
As is customary among Thomists, the Pope targeted Scotus. As a matter of
mostly historical interest, I note that Ockham rather than Scotus used Aristotle's
dictum, "Reason is of the universal," to subvert Aquinas's
supposition that, since human beings are made in the image of a rational and
purposive God, they are rational animals. In his analyses of moral
discourse, Scotus refers constantly to the rule of "right
reason." (He was among the first, however, to view reason as a
useful tool but harsh master.) Consequently, it was Ockham who formulated
the question which provoked Descartes's shift from metaphysical to
methodological inquiries. The question can be simply stated: "There
are individuals; how, then, can we form valid universal concepts?"
To address the epistemological issues raised by this question, Descartes
transformed the interrogatory stance at the core of reason into a methodical
doubt which, in turn, inscribed the rule of the One in an abstract conception
of a solipsistic individual framed by an unbridgeable chasm between
subjectivity and objectivity. Centuries later, Kant transformed the
solipsistic individual into the autonomous individual who used reason to
harness passion and desire to moral purposes. Still later, Nietzsche
located individuality in a discrete quantum of a will to power and used this
metaphor to trace the course of the western literary tradition to the hidden
operation of an all-pervasive will to power. In each instance, these
authors responded to significant questions with metaphors which illuminated
moral issues at the core of human actions and assertions.
Today,
postmodernist critics use the literary forms of the archeology of knowledge and
genealogy of morals to expose the assumptions which function as the literary
foundations of the myth of Modernity. In its pristine form, this myth
depicts autonomous individuals as creators of their own unique identities,
co-authors of ideal social contracts, masters of the universe through advances
in science, lords of history and arbiters of their own destiny.
Sadly, theologians can easily dismiss re-readings of the western literary
traditions which proclaim the death of both God and the autonomous individual
since so many adherents of the postmodernist movement use the empty literary
space provided by these literary forms as a playground for texts which do
little more than parade their literary virtuosity. (The game: I can find
more echoes of other texts and more literary allusions in any linguistic
formulation than you can.) But these literary forms can also be used to
show (1) that the western literary tradition, including a theological strand
impregnated by a medieval synthesis of faith and reason, has been dominated by
a reading code derived from the metaphor of power and judgment and (2) that the
biblical tradition was a flawed effort to probe the implications of the
metaphor of intimacy projected by Israel's prophets which theologies validated
by a metaphor of power and judgment must silence or ignore.
On my part, I use the literary forms devised by Nietzsche to read the interplay
among literature, philosophy and theology in the western literary tradition
through a code derived from the metaphor of intimacy. I trace my
fascination with this metaphor to childhood glimpses of my own longing for
intimacy and to involvements with wounded individuals which convince me that
this is the deepest and most elusive longing of the human heart. As I
explore the metaphor, I trust everyday English more than philosophical or
theological discourse, since everyday usage has subjected the language which
transforms this longing into a realizable quest, to the test of experience in
changing conditions of life. And I find (1) that, in Wittgenstein's
terms, intimacy is a distinctive form of life designed to realize a distinctive
purpose and (2) that an incarnational theology encodes an ethics of intimacy
and exposes the will to power in the ethical theories grounded in a metaphor of
power and judgment.
In my reading of the medieval period, therefore, the hermeneutical code derived
from an incarnational theology leads me to attribute the failure of both Scotus
and Ockham to articulate a language of love to the lack of a critical apparatus
capable of probing the different concerns and irreconcilable visions of the
philosophical and biblical literary traditions. As children of their
time, they were captive to a recoil of reason upon itself. As they
wrestled with the implications of this recoil, they could not have imagined a
hermeneutical code enriched by Ong's analysis of the restructurings of thought
engendered by the transition from orality to literacy.
As I have noted repeatedly, the ancient Greeks filled the hollow center of the
restructuring of thought which governed philosophical inquiries with a
conception which presents "reason" as a detached, god-like
perspective on language, experience and reality, while the restructuring of
thought in the Hebrew narrative tradition was designed to illuminate
interactions between an incomprehensible God and unique individuals endowed
with a mysterious freedom. From the latter perspective, the conception of
reason baptized by Aquinas is the literary offspring of the shot-gun wedding
between the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and the
totalizing thrust of languages structured by the emergence of continuous prose.
Clearly, Aquinas subjected the detachment inherent in writing and reading to a
principle of logical identity implicit in the totalizing thrust of language,
while Scotus and Ockham listened more carefully to an interiorized
interrogatory stance. In this context, Aquinas's constrictive
belief-system serves as a paradigm example of the totalizing import of reason,
while the empirical analyses formulated by Scotus and Ockham are paradigm
examples of the recoil of reason upon itself when the interrogatory stance at
the core of the abstract conception of reason recoils upon the totalizing
thrust of the rule of the One. (In effect, Scotus and Ockham use reason
to expose the limits of the use of reason.)
In my understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology, I have
advantages that Scotus and Ockham lacked. I have been able to dwell
within an on-going dialogue among the texts of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,
Scotus, Ockham, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Luther, Calvin, Rousseau, Hume,
Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Wittgenstein and Ong, and I
have access to biblical studies designed to meet the requirements of a
sophisticated critical apparatus indebted to the rationalist strand of the
western philosophical tradition.
As a result, I disagree vehemently with Pope Benedict's characterization of
secularism as the enemy. Clearly, postmodernist critiques which echo
Nietzsche's "God is dead" can be viewed as secularism run amok.
But these critiques encode the Exodus-theme which, with the Covenant-theme,
lends coherence to the biblical narrative tradition. Sadly, papal
pronouncements which attempt to bind the future must pretend to a timelessness
which suppresses the Exodus-theme. And in the same vein, postmodernist
proclamations of "the death of the author" merely secularize the
repeated assertions by Augustine in his Confessions that only God could understand his
tangled depths and hidden motivations. Again, sadly, papal pronouncements
pretend that the assumption that human nature has a teleological structure
justifies their condemnations of homosexuality. And even the collapse of
Communism offers a lesson which members of the hierarchy must ignore, since it
reveals that any totalitarian form of government, religious or secular,
inevitably fosters institutional deceit and self-deception on the part of
self-anointed authorities.
In sum, since the interplay of the interrogatory
stance and the totalizing thrust of language encoded in the conception of
reason is inherently secularizing, I wonder why the followers of Aquinas are so
unwilling to learn from its rigorous use. And I suggest that this use
will enable those who see the literary origin of the promise of a god-like
perspective which reasonable beings can occupy interchangeably to use reason as
useful tool for processing the experience by individuals who dare to embrace
the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.
Since I use reason as a tool rather than a
master, I was stunned when I read Pope Benedict's Regensburg Address.
Structurally, this Address implies that a wedding of faith and reason can yield
a belief-system capable of speaking authoritatively to all people, past,
present and future, regardless of the formative power of their own
cultures. From a perspective informed by Hume's empirical critique of
rationalism and Ong's analysis of issues dramatized by the restructuring of
inquiries inherent in literacy, however, this assumption reveals an abysmal
ignorance of the way that a postmodernist recoil of reason upon itself exposes
the workings of a hidden will to power inherent in any supposition that reason
functions as a detached, dispassionate, disinterested and god-like perspective
capable of providing definitive descriptive and moral judgments, universally
and timelessly.
I suggest, therefore, that honest searchers
must acknowledge their inability to escape entirely from the formative power of
the language they use to process experience and of the historicity of
experience. They may safely conclude that the future can be left to the
workings of a God of surprises and especially to the movements of the
indwelling Spirit. When I remember this, my profound disillusionment with
the hierarchy and my outrage at the violence inflicted on individuals by their
decrees does not provoke a crisis of faith. As a priest, I live my
commitment to Jesus through the sacramental system, not through conformity to
the latest promulgation issued by the Magisterium. And to understand what
commitment to Jesus asks of me, I invoke two biblical themes, the Exodus theme
(with its call to take yet another step on a journey into the unknown) and the
Covenant theme (with its promise that the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit
will accompany me as I face the consequences of my commitment to Jesus as the
Way, the Truth and the Life.) In this vein, I approach the sacraments as
living encounters with Jesus at potentially transforming moments in our
lives. And since I am constantly involved as both a minister and a
recipient of the sacraments, I continually seek to understand (1) the way that
each Sacrament voices the longing of each of the three divine Persons to be
intimately involved with us in all facets of our everyday lives and (2) the
call for a commitment on our part that allows them to love us into wholeness.
Quite obviously, I reject the understanding of
Baptism, Reconciliation, the Eucharist, Matrimony and Holy Orders inherited
from medieval theology which viewed the sacraments as rituals which confer
sanctifying grace ex opere
operato. In my participation in any sacrament, I hope that all
concerned will experience the presence of Jesus in a way that assures them that
each of the three divine Persons will accompany them on their journey into the
unknown and that the love of Jesus will come to them through one another.
And in the same vein, I reject medieval theological formulations which present
the Incarnation as a response to an original sin which severed the natural
relationship between God and creatures and left human beings
self-centered. As one whose reading of the Scriptures is profoundly
influenced by the way that Francis of Assisi lived the gospel life, I
categorically reject (1) the dualistic implications of the doctrine of original
sin, (2) the way that this doctrine generates a sin-centered definition of the
saving activity of the three divine Persons in human history and in the lives
of individuals, (3) the implicit suggestion that Jesus' saving activity was
centered in a single (and timeless) event, the cruel and humiliating death on
the cross in reparation for Adam's sin, (4) the consequent supposition that the
celebration of the Eucharist is primarily a ritual re-enactment of the
sacrifice offered by Jesus on the Cross, and (5) the depiction of God as Lord,
Lawgiver and Judge which the doctrine requires.
To focus the point at issue, I often ask
individuals whether their spirituality is defined by efforts to avoid sin (and
even expending considerable energy to protect themselves from onslaughts by the
devil) or by trust in Jesus' promise, "I have come that you may have life
and have it more abundantly." In that vein, I hope that my words and
actions bear witness to Jesus' longing to be intimately involved with us in all
events in our lives, and I invoke events in his life, including his birth,
childhood, adolescence, ministry, Last Supper, Agony in the Garden, crucifixion
and resurrection to show how he was one like us in all things but sin.
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