Of Catholicism, catholicity, and “A Christian Review”
September 14, 2004
New Pantagruelist Eugene McCarraher has an article on Max Weber in the latest issue of Books & Culture, which is a rather unusual contribution to the magazine. McCarraher breaks the fourth wall of B&C’s anxious though typically steady voice of false consensus and frequently halting approach to truly divisive issues, which happen to be all the important ones. I call this “voice”–which tends to elide the broad range of voices in merely the “conservative” camp of Christianity–“mere Christian monologism,” where “mere Christianity” stands for the American Protestant Evangelical’s pretense of cultural if not religious catholicity that generally masks a great ignorance of the Catholic tradition.
For instance, in the same issue, Larry Woiwode has a long review about many novelists’ and poets’ biographies of Shakespeare, including a humorous though misguided digression on Harold Bloom’s quasi-deification of the Bard. (Bloom’s utter nuttiness is ignored in favor of his fine contempt and satire for academic leftists. Ah well, I admit this does have a redeeming effect on my estimate of Bloom as well.) Woiwode’s review is called “The Faith of Shakespeare,” but Woiwode almost forgets to mention that Shakespeare is now thought to have been catholic by mental and spiritual formation if not by actual membership in the Church. Other numerous generalizations are made about the whole period with very little about the faith of Shakespeare. Woiwode thinks Shakespeare’s England was mostly opposed to “Roman Catholicism as the true church” [sic], even though the prevailing view among historians now is that the vast majority of the English were content Catholics of a conservative and often xenophobic frame of mind. They accepted a minimum of religious change when it was forced on them from above, with the exception of a few rebellions and not a few martyrdoms. They had longstanding hostilities toward Italy, France and other nations for reasons more complicated than mere theology. Regrettably, Mary Noll Venables lacked the space or inclination to tackle these matters in her review in the same issue of B&C of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation: A History, which is in any case a dull book. More impressive were Pantagruelist Christopher Shannon’s comments in B&C two years ago (“Disenchanting Voices: How not to write the history of the Reformation”) on Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. There is a good book, though hardly free of flaws. It has perhaps a tad too much idealizing enthusiasm about pre-Reformation English Catholicism, as David Aers has pointed out.
But, in any event, back to McCarraher. His novelty: exorcising the mere Christian monologism of B&C by directly addressing his “(mostly) Protestant readers” as a Catholic. From this position McCarraher contends that Weber was right to claim that Protestantism “disenchanted” the world and enabled the outbreak of a dominant secular materialist culture because Protestantism did not sustain a sacramental theology and an attendent “enchanted” mentality.
B&C is also to be commended, by this Jesuit at least, for a timely focus on marriage with strong contributions from Lauren Winner and David Gushee. Surprising as well is a positive and understanding review by Laura Merzig Fabrycky of Sam Torode’s “paraphrases” of John Paul II’s writings on the “theology of the body,” whose basis is of course the more catholic (and sacramental) thinking that Protestants have variously neglected, forgotten and rejected. Not to put too fine a point on it, Fabrycky writes:
Although this volume does not address contraception directly, the theo-logic flows from here–to deny one another by refusing to be open to procreation points to deeper spiritual trouble. It is a withholding of self from the one person with whom you image the Trinity. It is to deny the nature of God’s creation of marriage and “being known.”
Let me be clear that I am not cheering some scoring for “the team” but rather an advance in an arena of Christian intellectual discourse that must fight hard against its own parochial blinders to be worthy to the task of bringing a more full-blooded and catholic Christianity to bear on the present age. For while I agree with McCarraher’s comments on Weber in the main, it is important to notice that the enchanted, sacramental mind of the church had serious pre-Reformation problems. Protestantism and particularly its concerns over the Eucharist did not rise out of the blue. Additionally, the Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed wings of the Reformation did maintain a relatively strong sacramentalism that has undergone decline but also renewal. It is the fundamentalist and evangelical sects that are divorced and increasingly distanced from the main lines of confessional Protestantism that are most guilty of forgetting what ought not to have been forgotten and in so doing have lost what McCarraher holds forth as an alternative, Christian and catholic “story of capitalist modernity” as “the repression, displacement, and perversion of sacramentality–that is, of the capacity inherent in material things to be portals into divinity.”
I say “catholic” rather than attribute this view, as McCarraher does, to “[Roman] Catholic theology,” since a remnant of sacramentalist Lutherans, Anglicans and Calvinists are on record as being in full agreement. What power they have to turn the general tide of disenchantment remains an open question. I am not optimistic, but it is good that there are books like Ephraim Radner’s The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Eerdmans, 1998) and Hope among the Fragments: The Broken Church and Its Engagement of Scripture (Brazos, 2004); R. R. Reno’s In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity (Brazos, 2002); and D. G. Hart’s Recovering Mother Kirk: The Case for Liturgy in the Reformed Tradition (Baker, 2003) and The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
Other comments on B&C: There is a fine review of the new books of C. S. Lewis’s collected letters. I am curious to know from readers who have read them if they think the reviewer is correct on one point. He says Lewis can adopt all kinds of voices in his letters and is “all things to all people.” BUT:
“Occasionally (in volume 1 especially [before Lewis is “saved”]) this capsizes into hypocrisy. In his late teens and early twenties, Lewis’ letters to his father were pitch-perfect pretences of filial piety; they alternate with letters to Greeves which show a very different, but equally presentable, persona. Lewis’ two-facedness in these years is the evil twin of his later ability sincerely to accommodate himself and his style to interlocutor, occasion and subject matter.”
My question is, How does the reviewer know when Lewis is really “sincere?” Why is it bad to affect filial piety but good to accommodate oneself to others–especially if in both cases Lewis is not saying “what he really feels?” Is it always right to say what one feels? Would Lewis have been more virtuous to be rude to his father? Maybe the reviewer detects a fakeness in Lewis’s communications with his father that has no virtuous goal–maybe he even thinks Lewis was fronting the old man while surreptitiously sneering at him. But how can the reviewer really know this? Without seeing the evidence I’d guess that the reviewer might be giving in to the temptation to read a “conversion effect:” Lewis became a better person after being “saved.” The reviewer does explicitly say this, and it is certainly possible, but is it accurate in this case?
Maybe I am just being overly suspicious after seeing Gutenberg’s life moralized for evangelicals in Christian History by Chris Armstrong, who thinks the historian may play at being a “theologian or exhorter” some times. Here we learn the legendary inventor of moveable type was a greedy, impetuous papist who printed indulgences. God punished him with a failed business but also saw Gutenberg’s invention into the hands of Martin Luther so indulgences could be destroyed and the gospel proclaimed. I’ll grant Armstrong the bulk of his hyperbolic claim that “[Gutenberg’s] press made the Reformation possible by providing the means for instantaneous and widespread dissemination of Martin Luther’s reforming ideas in books and broadsides.” But Luther had no such confidence in the hand of providence in the new technology–he vituperatively condemned the world of print as a place of mendaciousness, piracy and inaccuracy–and he had good reasons for this reaction. He was angered by pirated, papistical editions of his German Bible that faithfully reproduced his translation except for the omission of the word “alone” from “faith alone.” Luther was quite upset about the loss of this accurate elimination of his most important personal interpolation of inaccuracy in to scripture.*
Finally I will mention John Wilson’s editorial, which continues to perplex me. Wilson expresses weariness with liberal anti-war, anti-Bush “agitprop” publications but enjoys a Yugoslavian poet who wrote an essay about traveling in the American South: he finds it dead, except for Oxford, Mississippi but is then appalled by a pro-Christian, right-wing, anti-godless liberal letter in a local paper. The poet then warns his readers of “Protestant evangelicals.” Wilson’s closing states that he is not sure if he should inform the poet of “our” secret (thereby disclosing the implied, less-than-catholic audience of B&C) that evangelicals are double-agents who can speak the language of culture to penetrate the networks of the soon-to-be damned. The poet would not even know that he is near an evangelical of culture in a coffee shop where said evangelical might be speaking easily of Neruda. Wilson warns that the poet should be very afraid. But why? If evangelicals can pass for secular liberals, why is that dangerous? Because they really plan to take over? Or do they just want a seat at the table of liberalism? Is that the joke? That Wilson does not think evangelicals are going to take over the table? And Wilson is telling secular liberals (or evangelicals on the secularists’ behalf) that evangelicals are cultured and smart and not going to take over? That they are harmless? That they are just “there” and they think differently on politics and religion and so on, but they can play nicely at the table–and they hope that the mainstream elite media will eventually quit mocking them and mixing them up with fundamentalists?
I am reminded of “The Love Song of J. Alfred the Hep ‘Gelical Cat”–In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair–
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin–
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Note:
*It is a fascinating little bit of history that after his New Testament was published, Luther became enraged with his printer for introducing errors into the text, and then there was the problem of other printers copying it badly without his supervision. Such problems were a continuous source of worry, anger and frustration for Luther throughout his life. Luther also feared that after his death his translations would be altered and anyone would be free to make their own. Luther also expressed distaste toward the explosion of printed religious matter other than scripture several times. He does so in his preface to the Wittenberg (1539) edition of his collected works in an attempt to distance himself from the situation he did much to create.
Quality, Non-Moralized Histories Touching on Luther and Print:
Gilmont, Jean-François. The Reformation and the Book. Trans. Karin Maag. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998.
Edwards, Mark U., Jr. Printing, Propaganda and Martin Luther. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Newman, Jane O. “The Word Made Print: Luther’s 1522 New Testament in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Representations 11 (1985): 95-133.
Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther. Trans. James L. Schaff. 3 vols. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985-93.
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