On True Belief, False Mysticism, and Reading the Cosmos
Part V: Tradition, properly understood
I have seen reported (I am intentionally obscuring some details here) that an epically corrupt cleric temporarily forestalled further investigation of his grave crimes by swearing an oath of innocence before the Blessed Sacrament. Up to that point, I would have had a strong a priori conviction that that kind of mendacity was simply not possible; I would naively have thought, given the ontological character of soul effected with valid ordination, that in abusing the truth and the sacraments to that degree: a.) there would be psychic distress, and b.) that distress would be sufficient to manifest the truth of the matter. It opened my eyes to how deeply even the Eucharist can be abused, co-opted to appear as the highest stamp of approval, on some individual, organization, or movement, as the case may be. It is a tactic I believe I have seen many times since, although the specific case stands as a nadir deeper than the Mariana Trench.
Coming to terms with deception and duplicity has been among the more excruciating tasks of maturing in the faith. Human agents fail, though. We know this. I would have thought that where the buck stopped, where the rubber met the road as it were, would be the hard-won intellectual tradition of the Church’s theology. The 8th century Willibald’s Life of St. Boniface tells the story of the felling of Donar’s Oak, Donar being the Germanic “god of thunder.” Boniface committed the ultimate taboo, violating the sacred in such a way that these Teutons feared disaster. However much the saint’s methods would stand in need of updating to fit current sensitivities, the absence of the anticipated thundery retribution made the people rethink old Donar a bit, interrupting a necessary consequence in the expected chain of causality.
The aberrations which I have been outlining have the effect, for me, of seeing an axe taken to everything I have valued most. There are realities so holy – like the death utterances of the Savior, the words of institution, or points of high Christological import – that toleration, much less praise and promotion, of their being messed with leaves one bereft. I would have thought the holy fear surrounding such things would render further debate or discernment superfluous where they are altered willy-nilly. (Fortunately, only once or twice have I attended a Mass about which I had questions regarding validity; suffice it to say, the words of consecration cannot be taken too far off script before it gets really, really jarring.)
Apostasy, heresy and schism all carry a penalty of automatic excommunication. (I don’t want anyone to suffer such a penalty, ever!) But how can inserting thousands of pages of verbiage where angels fear to tread, or imputing elaborate, invented monologues to Christ on the Cross – monologues which contain fictional characters, no less – not carry its own implicit anathema, or at least raise the collective hackles of the sensus fidelium? Has anyone noticed this? If Donar’s Oak falls in the forest, does anyone have ears to hear its sound?
If I can lean on an analogy, for St. John Paul II shame in the sexual sphere “has a fundamental significance as regards the formation of ethos in human society.” Rightly ordered, it is salutary and instinctive, setting the laws and boundaries of mutual relationship. How can there be no shame to set boundaries with regard to the holy? How have we lost the ethos of awe and reverence for all that is most sacred?
In Fides et Ratio, a foundational work for this current series, the same John Paul II explores the mechanism by which belief is inculcated as second nature; of human persons he writes, “[f]rom birth... they are immersed in traditions which give them not only a language and a cultural formation but also a range of truths in which they believe almost instinctively.” An unmistakable sense of the sacred attends this formation; for “[w]ho in the end could forge anew the paths of experience and thought which have yielded the treasures of human wisdom and religion?” This natural awe can be correlated to the gift of fear, which governs reverence. If I can go out on a limb a bit, I see here a sort of secondary, communally derived synderesis (synderesis being the innate universal principles of moral life, prior to their particular application) – in this case, an inherited appreciation and evaluative capacity toward transcendent realities, deep in the core of the psyche.
Thus, understanding tradition is vital. No one is superficially more associated with the notion than Pope Benedict XVI, stereotypically portrayed as the premier bulwark of the old ways, an ideological if not actually chronological peer of the Grail Knight encountered by Indiana Jones. Benedict is indeed an advocate of tradition, but is sorely misunderstood on this point, as on almost every other one, owing presumably to the absence of any actual study of his work on the part of opinion-makers. The Ratzinger I know, love and read is no part snarling Rottweiler, all genius professor – perspicacious, whimsical and avuncular, given at times to delightfully quirky writing:
[T]here arises the question of the kind of spacesuit we should have in order to sustain the cosmic tempo with which we are fleeing faster and faster from the gravitational pull of tradition, and we wonder what ground controls would be necessary to prevent our burning out in the vast expanse of the universe, our bursting asunder like a homunculus of technology – questions that cannot be brushed aside today as stubborn obscurantism, for they are being raised most urgently by those who know the most about the tempo of our alienation from tradition and who are most keenly aware of the problems associated with man’s historic spaceflight.
There is a certain sounding of the alarm over contemporary technological humanity’s attempt to outpace tradition, revving up to Mach speeds and jolting the environs with sonic booms in its wake. Yet this genuine caution is wrapped in an intentionally comic image which draws on a merely conventional equating of tradition and past. For Ratzinger, tradition is in truth man’s capacity for transtemporality. It is “the transcendence of today in both directions.”
Ratzinger affirms in animals fairly high intelligence, including the power of invention. Intellect, the factor specifically distinguishing humans, is for Ratzinger memory – and here is meant by “memory” a faculty much fuller and broader than the recall of bygones connoted in ordinary usage. Memory is the power to break out of the confines of the present moment, a “context that fosters unity” beyond the moment’s limitations. To make this clearer, according to Ratzinger, a chimpanzee can be fully innovative in its use of a tool, but it cannot be in dialogue with the past, or the future. The human now must exist as dialogue and continuum; “tradition can evolve only if the whole of time has been discovered.”
Francis’s first encyclical, Lumen Fidei – co-written with Benedict – speaks in passing of the mysterious memoria futuri. We “remember” the future, just as the past is gathered up into our now. This is achieved through communication. In an utterly brilliant move, Ratzinger forges an analogy: memory is to tradition as speech is to time. Speech and the present are each fleetingly ephemeral, yet mediate efficaciously disparate realities which would otherwise remain locked off, one from another. Tradition is not about attaching oneself to olden ways, but consists in overcoming the alienation of a temporal diaspora and laying claim to humanity’s inherent interconnectedness.
However, Ratzinger does not consider tradition an unalloyed positive, which might defy expectations. Original sin, which stands as the counterpart to primordial revelation, is “not a matter of heredity or of bad example solely from without” – it stands as testament that humanity holds the capacity for transtemporal communal formation innately. Original sin is “the anti-human element in all traditions.” It may surprise us to learn that Ratzinger puts serious caveats on tradition itself: “Man must hold fast to tradition if he is to hold fast to his humanness, but in so doing, he inevitably holds fast to the forces of alienation... Tradition is the precondition of man’s humanness, but it is also its peril.”
The role of faith is more the remembrance of the future than any retrogression to past states of affairs. There is indeed an evolutionary thrust toward the eschaton, that liberates man from the anti-human by stages. Only when man loses his rootedness in the full grandeur, extension and eternal resonance of his humanity must faith “hold it down” on his behalf: “Given this full-fledged space flight of the spirit, the Church must be, as it were, something of a ‘ground control’, the seat of tradition, even though she is, properly and under other circumstances, the heavenly terminal that draws man from the closed world of his traditions and teaches him to be self-critical.”
As I see it, an objection immediately arises: Is the Mass not fully anamnetic? Yet this is where things can open up and get really interesting. In my last post, I pointed out how Merton distinguishes sharply between decoration and symbol, naming the crucifix not a mere historical representation, but the eschatological sign of Christ’s victory. What is implicit here is a “non-linearity” to time itself. The “fullness of time” which energizes the progression of salvation history comes from within the timeline; the culmination does not coincide with the denouement. Or, if you will, the inbreaking of the eternal and the call to perfection themselves are the rocket fuel which propels the journeying, even where the mission ceases to be nominal.
Interestingly, Ratzinger in an entirely different context effectively accommodates this very notion of anamnesis to the capacity for truth itself. John Paul II uses the exact same word for sexual shame and for the patrimony of human belief: “instinctive.” Taken together, this shows that what is at hand is an interface with the eternal, deep within man: man individually and man collectively. This brings us all the way to the Ratzingerian conclusion: “[T]he Church knows only one tradition: the tradition of Jesus, who lives his life from the Father, who receives himself from the Father and continually gives himself back to the Father.” The tradition offered by faith is the creative loving dynamism of the eternal now. Recalling the link between speech and time, we see the Logos who has absorbed time into himself offering an ever more radical actualization of that connection.
Returning to the assessment verum quia factum, we can now postulate a legitimate primacy of history, but only insofar as the dimensions of the historical are expanded vastly, to include not merely the unfolding of temporal sequence, but the encompassing of that unfolding by the eternal at every point. History must become transparent to something greater than itself.
However, in a modern context, the historical is usurped at every point by techne. The verum quia factum inevitably succumbs to the model of the faciendum, which entails a twofold consequence. First, in the merely human sphere, the discipline of history is itself craft; how one tells the story – perspectives, judgements, values, inclusions and exclusions all factored in – shapes the story itself. Moreover, it imposes on the historical a paradigm of interest, of a programmatic planning which reduces actual circumstance to a mere launching pad into an undirected future.
All this brings us back to the problem of false mysticism, and of the modern bias. By the very dislodging of itself from theology, false mysticism articulates its denial of the theological tradition, and appoints itself its judge. In so doing, it thwarts the formation of the Christian ethos by fracturing continuity. It provides an alternate history – or rather a panoply of alternate histories, for these accounts can be found by the dozen and rarely dwell unadmixed in the minds of their devotees. The accommodated sense of shame – the propriety which would bid us remove the sandals from our feet before treading holy ground, which should be as second nature, as instinct – is impeded from taking root in individual conscience and in the collective alike. The unitary set of essential truths is dissipated and confused through endless and indiscriminate widening; we have lost the canon and the criterion. Even the most sublime moments of salvation history are devolved into the model of the factum: events are rendered in greater and greater detail – and God is even one of the actors – but on the window to transcendence, the curtain is drawn. Inauthentic end times prophecies presume the same number line of earthly days and simply work backward, but the mentality is the same. Both present the historical life of Christ and his return as a matter of the miraculous by mode and not by substance: Everything is a matter of superpowers, terrestrial paradise and/or the type of fiery and cataclysmic destruction which preoccupies the Kim dynasty, but the divine life of the Trinity in its otherness we do not see.
These histories – even if they be history in prospect by foreknowledge – are imaginatively composed to the point of being not history at all, but a species of techne. But, as with the Enlightenment revision to the concept of truth itself, the restless desire to manipulate reality is engendered, as the reality it presents is not gratifying, out of proportion with the human spirit. False mysticisms blind – however much Biblical personages may be (look!) over here or (look!) over there – to the wonder, the mirandum, of the adventus medius, the perpetual coming-among-us of Christ – sacramental, transcendental, meek, gentle and unspectacular, here in the midst of our now. Techne unhinged from tradition, tradition properly understood, in the end paradoxically transmits only tradition’s anti-human element. It is the power of invention of the very clever animal, locked into the mundane and, with it, the never-ending oppression of the needs of the body.
The problem, as I see it, with man’s historic spaceflight is not at all his overreach. Language owes the coining of the word “transhuman” to none other than Dante. It is that, for man, the universe is too small – and here is revealed an aptness to having developed this series through the Easter season. From Jesus of Nazareth, Volume II: “[I]t is of the essence of the Resurrection precisely to burst open history and usher in a new dimension commonly described as eschatological. The Resurrection opens up the new space that transcends history and creates the definitive.”
I need to find anew the path to faith in the one sacred tree that resists felling, for its being the infallible sign of eschatological victory. In the prophetic voice of Benedict: “If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of reality altogether? Is not creation waiting for this last and highest ‘evolutionary leap’, for the union of the finite with the infinite, for the union of man and God, for the conquest of death?”
Paul wrote his doctoral dissertation on the present and time. I’m looking forward to his responding and elaborating on the themes I’ve introduced here. He intends to do so, as soon as he gets through his end-of-semester grading. Stay tuned; a deeper look at faith will follow thereafter.