The power of the word, Part II
Placed within a full historical context, faith in a Supreme Being who speaks and hears creation is extraordinary. A dialogical God is a true cause for Christian gratitude, and the worldview that belief in such a God calls forth is among the greatest gifts of our faith to the secular world.
Yet perhaps as a global culture we have all become a little too blasé with regard to the dignity of the word. Those who talk the loudest, the fastest, the most, and with the least commitment to truth generally get the widest hearing. YouTube videos, as the algorithm deems apt, appear in the feed under our recitation of the Office – short-form promotions of absurd theological notions, condemned apparitions, fantastical conspiracies and outright hatred, tagged as Catholic. These videos – much of their content too disedifying, and too downright wild, to waste words on here – seem to draw tremendous viewership.
It is difficult for me personally to read what Catholic pundits/authors/journalists publish in the mainstream media. In a sense, the new phase of writing which has found expression as this Substack began with a response to an opinion piece printed in the New York Times by the belligerently Catholic Matthew Walther, in which he saw fit to extol an extremely blasphemous horror movie of the 1970’s – one of a certain notoriety, documented to have been the cause of no little disturbance – as a devotional act toward the sacraments, because clearly manifestations of the preternatural à la Hollywood, dispatched with operatic grandiosity in renegade departure from the spirit and mind of the Church, should be exploited to instill the fear of God. (Such übercatholicism is so top-heavy in its own self-authorizing piety that it esteems itself walled in like the deus otiosus, exempted from the evil it would utilize toward its imagined ends.) The newspaper did not accept my reaction, though it was tailored and condensed to their editorial specifications (which allowed for no more than 400 words).
But seriously, what is it to have a voice? To have a platform – a national, an international platform, in a secular context! – by which to reach others in respect, in dialogue, in affirmation? And this is what you do with it? Court justly merited shame, ridicule, and mockery, thus bringing lapidary assuredness to already existing division, doubt, and denial? Add a further burden of confusion to the poorly catechized? Foment superstition?
This was the letter I sent to the New York Times, met with silence:
“The Exorcist” represents “an expression of a transcendent moral and metaphysical order,” writes Matthew Walther. Yet neither its morals nor its dualistic metaphysics (weighting good and evil equally, at best) are those of the Catholic Church, however they may reflect a folk piety Walther holds dear.
Walther name-checks Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict notes that the ancients experienced liberation from the fear of demons precisely in the Christian Logos: “[C]reative reason is the only true power over the world and in the world.... To ‘exorcise’ the world – to establish it in the light of [reason]... is a permanent, central task.” Benedict rejects ugliness and vulgarity as the criterion of truth, as well as religious “magic.”
Walther sees an antagonism between transcendence and justice, not a necessary complement. Christ himself is the “hermeneutic of continuity,” mediating both.
That Walther implicate the Eucharist here is egregious. Catholicism reveres a Presence which is unspectacular and temporally powerless – no leverage in a mythological clash, but abiding love, prophesying that every particle of the cosmos is destined for light-filled glory.”
Our Holy Father Pope Francis wrote, in the splendidly liberating Apostolic Exhortation on the proclamation of the Gospel, Evangelii Gaudium, “an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral!” My goodness! – what of someone returning from a nightmare, a hellscape in which two priests were taken down by a demon? (I’m laughing uproariously as I type this, by the way.) Has it occurred to Catholics, vouchsafed small slots in the secular press, that they themselves are intended as strawmen, a lure for the outrage that generates clicks?
While the world rings with the clamor of all this distortion, I turn and read books and documents of exceeding beauty, am led to contemplate ideas of sacred grandeur – so how could I not long, thirst for, the voice, the reach, with which to communicate this legacy to others, to the whole world? How could I not cherish deeply, as a treasure, the voice I have, and cherish with it you who are reading? So many doors close on us, one after another. More doors slam shut within the Church than outside of it: too defiant of easy categorization, too intellectual, too far removed from the incendiary rhetoric and apocalypticism that really get people going, too liberal, too conservative, too theological... and ultimately, and this is the clincher, unable (or unwilling, as may be) to offer the testimony of numbers and money. Should a door open, it proves both illusory and unsustainable, and, often enough, even the scraps are taken away. I, too, know something of screaming against the monolith.
By special arrangement with the department, I enjoy the privilege of an ancillary role in all of Paul’s secular teaching. We are scrupulous to maintain total neutrality. The student community, which I will call vertiginously diverse, is engaged, enthusiastic and questing. In contrast, the men in formation for priesthood whom Paul teaches often seem to have no use or respect for anything besides what they deem formulae of “the right answers.” In the past months, I invited a particular priest to peruse the blog. “I don’t like theology,” he admitted, “all the questions are settled; there’s nowhere to go with it.” Thank you, Father, for your honesty; basic catechetical propositions may well be settled, but not mysteries.
And yet: to whom shall we go? I cannot get around the singular power, beauty, and logical cohesion of the Faith. Only a cosmos created of Reason-As-Love – only a trinitarian whirlwind of Eros-and-Caritas-As-Identity – makes sense. And besides, by such my heart is consumed. If, in the end, none of it were true, what rebellion would I have coveted? And what do I do with a burning faith, a faith in the beauty of Christ? I am proud to confess a faith which resists a hypothetical empirical verification offered by evil, a faith not to be parlayed for self-interest, a faith whose content can be neither mastered nor exhausted for all eternity.
Just about the only thing I read on the Internet is a Substack by a man in his thirties, extremely intelligent, areligious, a quasi-materialist as far as I can tell. He and his wife have a profound love for each other. I have been gripped by his journey through catastrophic squamous cell carcinoma. This man awakened from surgery to find his tongue and the nerves supplying it excised, replaced with a flap of thigh muscle, which his body understands as foreign. (This draconian intervention bought him two months before a recurrence.) Certainly, I have known people with aphasia, strokes, Alzheimer’s. What is it, really, to have a voice?
This question becomes more and more pertinent as language and linguistic tasks are shunted off to AI. While there is endless complexity which I do not wish to treat of lightly, suffice it to say that words produced apart from consciousness, from interiority, pose tricky issues, psychologically, anthropologically, and otherwise – not least with respect to religion. How we communicate is – at least – equal in importance to what we communicate.
St. John of the Cross’s words on preaching are quite extensible here: “Although the preacher may speak remarkable truths, these will soon be forgotten because they do not enkindle the will. Besides the fact of their unproductivity, the sensory adherence to the gratification provided by the doctrine hinders any effect the doctrine may have on the spirit, and people are left only with esteem for the mode and accidents of the sermon. They praise the preacher and listen to him for these reasons more than for the motivation they receive to amend their lives.”
Now, this sanjuanist teaching can leave us disappointed, on several counts. To the first set of objections which are likely to arise, I will let the Mystical Doctor himself give answer: “St. Paul gives an exceptionally clear explanation of this doctrine to the Corinthians: I, brothers, when I came to you, did not come preaching with the sublimity of doctrine and wisdom, and my words and my preaching were not in the rhetoric of human wisdom, but in the manifestation of the spirit and the truth. (1 Cor. 2:1-4.) Indeed, it is neither the Apostle’s intention nor mine to condemn good style and rhetoric and effective delivery; these rather, are most important to the preacher, as they are in all matters. Elegant style and delivery lift up and restore even those things that have fallen into ruin, just as poor presentation spoils.” And so ends, abruptly, The Ascent of Mount Carmel.
A second major objection would present itself, were one to read in St. John’s words the promotion of didactic strategy, of mere utility. But no: If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love… On this earth, the love of God is superior to the knowledge of Him. St. Thomas explains: “The action of the intellect consists in this, that the idea of the thing understood is in the one who understands; while the act of the will consists in this – that the will is inclined to the thing as existing in itself. And therefore the Philosopher says (Metaph. VI) that good and evil, which are objects of the will, are in things, but truth and error, which are objects of the intellect, are in the mind.” (S.T. 1a, Q. 82, A. 3) When we are moved by love – and love is transmitted through the authentic communication of persons, and not verbiage – we are drawn upwards, out of ourselves, beyond ourselves. Roger Duncan, in a class on philosophical aesthetics, taught us the Rilke poem, The Archaic Torso of Apollo. Confronted even with artistic beauty, the last line tells us, “You must change your life.”
John of the Cross is drawing a hard line, and I think this world needs one, between instruction and encounter – intercommunion at the level of spirit. The saint laments the voice “not possess[ing] the power to raise a dead man from his sepulchre.”
In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis has written this: “The disciple is ready to put his or her whole life on the line, even to accepting martyrdom, in bearing witness to Jesus Christ, yet the goal is not to make enemies but to see God’s word accepted and its capacity for liberation and renewal revealed. Finally an evangelizing community is filled with joy; it knows how to rejoice always.” Is the Holy Father not describing exactly what was exemplified by the words of Christ? Is not this what constitutes the voice of authority in which Our Lord spoke? – the martyrdom of the King of Martyrs, in testimony to the truth, drawing all to himself, bringing liberation and freedom, rejoicing and filling all things with joy? Is this not another unfolding of the inner content of the Son’s Abba?
Our words – and our listening – can be this, by participation in his power. How much death – ignorance, prejudice, cynicism, irrationality, torpor, vapidity, lovelessness – can be called forth from the tomb, without drama or spectacle. Every serious interaction bears the potential of casting fire upon the earth, of ennobling, elevating, affirming. Every authentic word, spoken or silent, has, as its own inner intentionality, something of the Son’s primal Yes.
Where communication is personally invested as to its message and to its beauty alike, it then becomes true art, lifting up and restoring even those things that have fallen into ruin. It becomes salvific; it becomes music, poetry, craft. Ultimately, what we believe thematically or implicitly about speech, about voice, about attention and intentionality, is not neutral to what we believe about God, whose presence and power I do experience from within, as I believe we all do. I recall these words from a prose poem I wrote a few years ago:
I will be light. What is the sound, the supramaterial music, of a finite soul being dissolved into the Infinite, burning into pure light? What is the sonant expression of the inflamed adorations we make all through the night? Ours is music bearing so many groanings of spirit, seethings of Spirit, whose diapasons are elevations to the sung inner dialogues of the Godhead. The true Beloved of contemplatives and angels is, himself, silent music. And thus all these voices form one voice of music, praising the grandeur, wisdom, and wonderful knowledge of God, who is word, knowledge, song, primal and causative.
This is our common destiny, bearing a true though hidden power over alienation and futility. This is our work, our work as Christians, indeed as humans, because, as the Mystical Doctor tells us, it is the living spirit that enkindles fire.
All of you, dear readers and friends, please know how much being together in this dialogue of thought and learning is a precious gift. Please know how much all of you, and what I know you bring to your reading, are valued.