‘Mystery on the cheap.’
March 30, 2007, 9:22 am
Posted by Grant Gallicho
Bill Cork has a post on the rumored universal indult for the Tridentine Mass that put me in mind of Cathy Kaveny’s phrase describing those who are eager for the “restoration” but don’t know Latin, or–as Bill points out–don’t want to learn Latin.
Don’t even get me started……………. :)
One swallow doesn’t make a summer. I.e., there’s all of one commenter at CWN who actually said that a priest say the Tridentine rite without knowing Latin. The other commenters don’t suggest any such thing (one suggests training in the rubrics, with no implication that this should be done absent knowledge of Latin; another notes a priest’s expression of regret that he doesn’t know Latin, again with no implication that he intends to perform the Tridentine rite regardless.)
Gee, I thought liberal Catholics were all about diversity and inclusiveness; the snarky Cork post seem to indicate otherwise. If one doesn’t like the Tridentine mass, don’t go. Rather simple I would say…
Here’s what I don’t get. Warning: stereotypes ahead.
The usual stereotype is that liberals are more interested in matters of high culture than conservatives. This is by no means a general rule, of course, but the world of classical music/ballet/opera/fine arts strikes me as much more liberal on average than the world of country music/NASCAR, etc.
So how come this stereotype so often seems to be reversed in matters of Catholic liturgy, music, and architecture? Again, this is a stereotype that is by no means universally true, but I get the definite sense that it’s conservative Catholics who are most enthralled with all of the high culture that the Church’s history has to offer — Latin, Gregorian chant, Palestrina, beautiful mosaics and sculptures in cathedrals, etc.,
By contrast, liberal Catholics seem to have spent decades promoting dumbed-down versions of the liturgy (“Don’t say ‘consubstantial’! It’s such a hard word!”), cringingly awful folk-style music, architecture that might as well be a Holiday Inn convention center, etc.
What’s up with this?
It does seem odd in this day and age that a cleric would have to learn a foreign language (a dead one, at that :) in order to lead a worship service that people attend but cannot understand (after all, the priest prays sotto voce :) Even Jesus spoke loud enough so those around him could hear what he had to say. He even allowed — nay, insisted — that people be allowed to approach and be near him. Nothing tridentine about Jesus of Nazareth!
But, of course, Jesus — unlike some of our more pompous hierarchs and clerics — had precious little use for rank over service, appearance over substance, law over love, complexity over simplicity, stuff over message. Jesus reached out, walked among the people. I don’t see this image of the Lord in “tradition-bound” bishops/priests who are distant from the people in language, space, and action during Tridentine worship.
The Tridentine is intimately bound with development and maintenance of a clerical culture that elevated the ordained over the laity organizationally, socially, and psychologically. Given the crap that resulted, why in God’s name would anyone want to see a “restoration?”
It’s funny Stuart. At the Common Ground Initiative on liturgy a few years ago, what everyone agreed was that they liked good liturgy and hated bad liturgy. Good liturgy was prayerful, about God, not the celebrant, beautiful, and particpatory in some way–in the sene that it drew the particpants into something deeper and more profound, not merely intellectually but in every sense. Bad liturgy was trendy, trite, and an exercise in ego projection rather than humility. Bad liturgy could also be rote, and lifeless.
The particpants also agreed that good liturgy and bad liturgy cut across liberal and conservative lines. People who went to them testify that you can have “bad” tridinintine masses and “good” novus ordo masses that even incorporate a fair amount of Latin.
Since Grant started with my quote, let me explain what I meant by it. Something can seem mysterious because you can’t understand it– it can seem spooky, and odd, and dangerous. The words “hocus pocus” came from “hoc est corpus meum” –no one knew what was being said.
I think this is mystery on the cheap –or better, ersatz mystery, because it can imply that encountering the Mystery of God means dumbing ourselves down. It is an odd form of arrogance.
In contrast, God’s mystery both enables all our knowledge, and outstrips it. The more we know, the more we realize that we must stand in awe before the ground of all being and knowing. We are not a Church that needs people to be ignorant in order for God to be great.
I’m all in favor of bringing back Latin–the hard way. We should imitate our Jewsish friends and neighbors, and do Latin school analogously to Hebrew school . We need to have people able to read scripture in Latin–the Vulgate, so that they can catch the intertextuality.
And I think we should consider doing the novus ordo mass in Latin from time to time.. But I don’t think Latin is the sine qua non of good liturgy.
(Okay, I’ll stop– I’m starting to tread on Bob Imbelli’s territory! I’ll post something from Colbert later today!)
Let us proclaim the mystery of Faith – the mystery is the Sacrifice of Christ we join ourselves to.
I can’t see how that’s a matter of language except that it makes sense to have it in the lamnguage those present best understand.
In some ways this is a continuation of “Why are we here?” It was noted there that the issue of liturgy gets most blog responses and the most passion.
I’d like to suggest that it’s not about Latin so much as about power and retrenchment and revionist hoitiory of Vatican II. Hence all the flap we’ve had over ICEL and the heavy handed top-down way in which liturgical change is being managed.So power issues will color feeling about all the issues around liturgy and may generate snarky coments about it and also snarky comments about those who make them.
Cathy is right about the Common Ground notion that good liturgy is what matters. But I’m not convinced that having more latin or having folks learn more Latin will make forbetter liturgy.
We’re going over the GERM in intimate detail in each week’s bulletin here -probably leading some to think good rubrics=good liturgy.
At any rate, the overriding issue of making the worship of the people of God as best understood, participated in and acted upon ought to be central.
In Finland they not only give the news in Latin. They sing Elvis in Latin. A few are listed below. Latin has its attraction but to revert to the universal language fantasy is just that. Fantasy. Latin was the language of the people and that is the reason for its use.
Certainly some beautiful music came out of it and there is no reason not to use it tastefully. De gustibus not est disputandum.
Other than that I say a loud ecce bonum for what Joseph J said above. This is high christology making a comeback.
Surrender – Nunc aeternitatis
It’s Now Or Never – Nunc hic aut numquam
Can’t Help Falling In Love – Non adamare non possum
Wooden Heart – Cor ligneum
Love Me Tender – Tenere me ama
Cathleen,
As to the origin of hocus pocus – the OED doesn’t support that it came from “hoc est corpus meum.” In fact, I have read that the origin of the origin of that explanation was a late 17th century anti-Catholic Protestant sermon mocking the consecration. Someone else may have a better idea.
Although I do think the introduction of more Latin instruction in Catholic institutions, including seminaries, is a great idea, I don’t think we need complete fluency to reintroduce some Latin into the liturgy. Those who are pushing for return to the Tridentine Mass are few and far between (although it will be a good thing to see it preserved). What some of us would like to see is more Latin in the Novos Ordo as a way to preserve some heritage and encourage unity and a sense of the sacred.
The way I figure it, I would be no more bothered by a not completely fluent priest’s rendition of the Agnus Dei than I am of some 9th grader’s badly tuned guitar played in the communion hymn.
Sean–
I hope you are right that “[t]hose who are pushing for return to the Tridentine Mass are few and far between.” My experience is anecdotal only, but in my area there is a Tridentine Mass that draws a significant number of people from a 30-mile radius. Some former parishioners in my parish attend that Mass only. It is not only the Latin that is a magnet, but also the fact that there are no lay Eucharistic ministers and no female altar servers. My concern is that too much variation in the Mass has the danger of creating distinctions among us as to who are the “real” Catholics.
A couple of points -
We have a TLM in Boston, and it draws crowds, but it hasn’t undermined the Novus Ordo Mass. That being said, I find it intersting, and of course ironic, that one of the criticisms of the TLM was that it didn’t include the people, and now an argument against it is that too many people will go to it.
As for “too much variation in the Mass” that ship sailed a long time ago.
When I was an altar boy, we all memorized a fair of amount of Latin most of which we did not understand–and what we did understand we could not have parsed. Since the daily masses were mostly for the dead and often sung, I also picked up a few other prayers from hearing them over and over, the Pater noster in particular. I loved the Gospels used for the masses for the dead even without understanding them. And what ever happened to the Dies Irae? I suppose the members of today’s congregations could do the same as altar boys once did or something like it. Well I said “could”. I don’t know if they would. But would it be a good idea? Would it aim at mystery and only achieve mystification? Of course one of the advantages of using an unknown language is that it masks ineptitude. Bad phrasing of an English text is, or at least should be, obvious.
I agree that the hymns could be better, but by what standard? I suspect that some newly composed hymns that I regard as really awful are loved by others; and I recognize that what I like others may dislike. I really doubt there is any way to please everybody. Diversity of tastes is a fact!
As for priests learning Latin, I guess it would be a good idea. But I also think that they ought to learn enough Greek to read the New Testament, and enough Hebrew to do some reading in the O.T. The idea that Latin is the language par excellence of the Church is rather provincial, not to say unhistorical.
If we’re really going to recapture our religious roots, let’s go all the way back to Aramaic, the language of discourse between Christ and the Apostles. Is there an “Aramaic for Dummies” (like me)?
Sean–
It’s not the numbers attracted to the TLM, it’s that some atttracted to it may believe they are more authentically Catholic than people who do not attend the TLM. I’ve seen some of this attitude personally, but I’m not making a sweeping assertion. It’s just something that raises a red flag for me.
That is the problem. Too many people who prefer the TLM believe that all other services are invalid.
for Ms. Kaveny -
I would just like to add that the local approved Latin Mass Church here in Sacramento, California (St. Stephen’s–staffed by the FSSP) has Latin Classes for adults and for children, beginning and advanced. I find the community rather warm and strongly family oriented and the young (30ish) priests who staff the church are friendly, intelligent, prayerful, and quite congnial (besides the fact that they have a great sense of humor).
I personally attend my own parish church, but I find that this TLM parish has Masses in the evenings, and I find that Friday evenings with Mass and benediction (which draws a crowd–15 to 30 at any given time) is a nice way to end the work week to appreciate God’s blessings.
By the way, Mr. Jaglowicz – if the TLM was as bad as you say (and not reflective of the Last Supper, his Crucifixion, and Resurrection–his life, in other words), was the Liturgy invalid for at least 450 years? Was it a sham?
Also, as I attend the Eastern Rite Catholic Liturgies and Orthodox Liturgies, there is considerable simiilarity between the Tridentine liturgy and those. Again, would you complain about those as well? Should they be outlawed by Rome as being in accord with your interpretation of Jesus’ view? May our (the Church) view not be as narrow!
I personally don’t think so. We benefit from ALL of the life of liturgy of the Church.
May you all have a blessed Holy Week.
Bill,
I recall reading that the Hungarian Parliament at one period conducted its proceedings in Latin. I believe Finnish and Hungarian are remotely connected. It’s a small world.
A particular rite is not the problem. It is when it is imposed on people without regard to culture, acceptance and culture. Let people choose. We are talking about accidentals.
30 to 45 people has been the average for benediction for centuries. There is no grounds there to make it the most important after The Lord’s Supper.
See -The Vatican’s Exorcists, The devils only know Latin!
Sean,
I don’t have access to the OED from the computer I’m on, but I looked briefly at the entry on line before I left work. My sense is the following
1. “Hocus pocus” was a term used pertaining to magic and superstition. It either degenrated from, or mocked (both will do for purposes of my argument), the use of Latin phrases which no one understood for purposes of creating mystery and atmosphere and fear.
2. The phrase was used by several anti-Catholic polemicists to mock the action of priests, particularly at the consececration –”hoc est corpus meum” are some words of the consecreations, and it was a hypothesis that these words in fact the words used or mocked. Whether or not this hypothesis about origin is true (you’re correct that the OED is skeptical about the origin), it shows that there was early on a connection between superstion and Catholicism, in part because of the use of a language that few people understood.
More generally the use of Latin, mumbled, at mass, not understood by the congreation, created a sense of “hocus pocus.” Catholicism was considered “mumbo jumbo” superstition by its critics, precisely because it facilitated the equation of mystery with ignorance.
3. While the anti-Catholic polemicists were wrong to mock the Church –it was uncharitable — I think Vatican II did express a legitimate concern that people understand that which they participate in as a form of worship. Real mystery cannot be made to depend on ignnorance
4. I think it’s important to separate the Latin part for the Tridintine rite part. I’m less sympathetic to the arguments for the tridintine rite than I am to the arguments for a novus ordo Latin mass. But if we’re going to do the mass in Latin, it had better not be “hocus pocus”– mystery on the cheap.
In regard to the hocus/pocus controversy (and by the way, congratulations to all involved for using the correct corpus meum instead of corpus meus as I have seen), it is of some interest that one of the concerns of the Council of Trent was to establish norms for the education, particularly Latin literacy, of priests, and to revamp and extend the seminary system to achieve that. It’s unfortunate that there seems currently to be a desire to undo that major achievement of Trent in the interests of an almost superstitutious reverence for the surface texture of the Tridentine rite. The area of clerical education and understanding of the Latin is yet another one where Catholic (and other) scholarship has been able to point out that reform from within the Church was as significant as from those usually called “reformers.”
On the use of Latin in the Hungarian parliament (as one who learned Latin from Hungarian monks), I believe the issue was that the Austrians (better the ruling elite of the Habsburg empire) wanted to discourage the use of Hungarian (perhaps as much to avoid having laws past in a language they didn’t understand as out of bigotry), the Hungarians wanted to avoid German for reasons of ethnic consciousness, and Latin proved a workable compromise for a while. What’s interesting is that there seem to have been enough landowners able to handle Latin to make it work for a while.
I think Cathleen’s first post above is one of the most interesting and sensible things I’ve read about Latin and the Church. And I agree with Sean that adding some Latin might allow us to connect with our past.
How are you going to get kids interested in it? I’ve found that the good CCD ladies capable of wringing every iota of interest and excitement out of church that’s possible. My kid is always getting yelled at to sit down, do your work book, and recite your prayers! You will NOT get your juice and crackers if you can’t say the Our Father by the end of this class.
I can only imagine how much spiritual formation he’ll get out of having to learn Latin from these people.
For the record. My eleven year old, eldest son is taking Latin next year at a public school in Baltimore County, over the suggestion from his father that he take Spanish. I think he heard that there is less homework in Latin. I will be attempting to follow along with his lessons.
This is just a footnote to Joe Gannon’s post about his altar-boy days, serving all those daily masses for the dead. His fond memory of the Dies Irae turned out to be of great practical use to us as young parents. When our baby daughter was teething and fretful, he would croon the Dies Irae to her while gently rocking her in her carriage. (No cradle in our graduate student budget, and I can’t carry a tune.) Joe’s singing had a truly miraculous effect! She didn’t seem to take any harm from exposure to this somewhat gloomy lullaby. But one Halloween when she was in about the third grade Vicky came home raving about a fantastic piece of music she had heard in school. It turned out to be “Danse Macabre.” As the twig is bent….
It looks like Joe Gannon was able to top one of my peculiar habits from way back — when my baby daughter was teething and irritable (I’m afraid we did have a cradle, namely the one I had had when I was a baby) I use to sing Posa’s final scene (Per me giunto…) from Verdi’s Don Carlo to soothe her. But the dies irae definitely has that beat.
On the other, since it is my wife who has the voice in our family maybe she thought if she’d be quiet I would too.
“We should imitate our Jewsish friends and neighbors, and do Latin school analogously to Hebrew school . We need to have people able to read scripture in Latin–the Vulgate, so that they can catch the intertextuality.”
The problem with this approach is that Latin in our tradition is *not* analagous to Hebrew in the Jewish tradition. In Judaism, Hebrew is a sacred language, the language of scripture (always read in Hebrew) and the language of a specific people and culture. Latin is not a sacred language. It is not the language of our scripture and is not the language of any existing national culture that is synonymous with the entire Christian body. In the same way, Arabic is considered a sacred language in Islam because its scriptures exist in Arabic and cannot *technically* be translated and remain scripture. So to say it would be a good idea for people to learn to read the Latin Vulgate seems odd and arbitrary to me — much better, it seems, to have them learn Greek if the idea is that an ancient language can help in advanced study of scripture.
Now, Latin *is* the traditional language of the Roman Rite. And I’m all for tradition (but not a “traditionalist”). So at our parish we occasionally use a Latin Sanctus or Agnus Dei, or a Taize chant like “Ubi caritas” or other Latin phrase in a song (always translating it in the worship aid so people know what they’re singing). I like it, the people like it, and it fits in with our tradition used in moderation. But if we were to try a Mass entirely in Latin — 1962 or 1970 — the parishioners wouldn’t stand for it, and they shouldn’t. Nor have we ever had a parishioner ask for a Latin Mass. And if they did, I hardly think a parish such as ours would consider 15-30 participants a “crowd” when we are trying to find room for 700 people at a regularly-scheduled Sunday Mass.
Of course, it’s typical in our polarized mode of discourse today that such a middle way is rarely discussed. We are presented with the false choice of a clown Mass or the 1962 missal — take your pick. This is a controversy that does not exist for 99 percent of our parishes.
How do we get kids interested in Latin? I don’t know, but believe it’s important to get the basics of any language in early.
I’m not saying you’re a “better” Catholic if you know Latin. I’m saying, if you think yor vocation (or your kid’s vocation) includes being an educated person, think of an educated person as someone who (ideally) knows more than one language–living and dead. Spanish and Latin are both good.
I say this partly out of envy: I envy the good old Jesuit education. I’ll never forget having lunch with an older a friend of mine (who has such an education) and bringing along one of Reginald Foster’s infamous “sheets”–they take several hours to complete, at least for most people –even Oxbridge grad students in classics. Although he doesn’t work in Latin materials, he picked it up, and sight translated about half of it between placing the order and getting the lunch at the Morris Inn.
I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the “but it’s hard” aspect of things. I recently interviewed high school students who were applying to Princeton, and it’s amazing what bright, motivated, young people can accomplish if they think it’s important.
I’m not whining about how hard it is; I personally like the idea.
But I’m trying to be practical.
I live out here in the sticks cows outnumber humans by 10 to one and the parish already does a bad job with more important (imho) aspects of faith formation.
I can’t imagine a better way to quash any linguistic curiosity in my kid than to let the CCD ladies pummel him with Latin.
Moreover, a lot of adults feel they’re getting information overload in RCIA, and adding a layer of amo, amas, amat to the whole thing would seem puzzling and intimidating–too much like school.
How does it help people deepen their faith to learn Latin when they hardly know what’s going on in English, is all I’m asking.
Yes, I don’t want that either.
I don’t know what to do about CCD. On the one hand, it was really rough. On the other, as I get older, I really appreciate the fact that these women (mainly) who had an awful lot to do, took the time to try to pass on the faith to other people’s kids.
I just hate seeing the tradition of the church used by people who don’t know it in order to club other people over the head. I hate it just as much as I hated seeing people use the latest trends to club other people over the head.
The operative thing, in both cases, seems to be the urge to club other people over the head.
The helmet, the remedy–self-protection, if you will, to both extremes, is knowledge of the tradition.
But a bit of common sense, a tin ear, and an ability to write off self-proclaimed spiritual guides as parish fruitcases probably is just as effective.
I just hope they don’t throw the baby (the faith) out with the bathwater.
Eric, you raise an interesting question–but I don’t have time to think about this tonight. Tomorrow, after my seminar.
But I do have time to ask another question: Are you the Eric Stoltz who was Stoner Bud in Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
It doesn’t really matter, of course –except that it would be really cool.
On imitating our Jewish friends — for close to ten years my daughter was fortunate enough to attend after school care at the Jewish Community Center, which included weekly Shabbat services for which she learned the basics of the blessings and prayers in Hebrew. She loved it. In fact, when she was teenager she went back there one summer as a junior counselor and actually led prayer services.
What was interesting was to contrast the reaction of some of her Jewish classmates who absolutely hated the Jewish identity of the place and hated having to learn Hebrew (admittedly they were probably learning more than she was). On one occasion I remember one guy threw such a tantrum that the shuttle bus was unable to get the kids to the JCC.
By the way, I’ve taught Latin and I’ve (taught) RCIA and I can’t imagine combining the two. I do remember candidates who requested that we go back to some of the things I learned in my youth that are now rarely if ever stressed like the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
And to follow up one of Cathleen Kaveny’s comments, in my experience when students like Latin they like it because it is a challenge, and dumbing it down will only destroy what interest there is. After all, who wants to put off getting to Virgil or Augustine so they can grind through verb paradigms at an even slower pace?
Cathleen, I don’t think you can pass on faith to anyone, and I think that’s why CCD fails.
The women who teach it feel there are souls riding on it, and by golly, they’re going to drum salvation into these kids’ heads whether they like it or not.
In RCIA we were given several lectures about how to make our kids come to Mass. These largely involved letting the kid know who was boss and ensuring that punishments would ensue if misbehavior occurred.
In my view, you can teach kids the traditions–including Latin–and explain what Catholics believe. But if you don’t engage kids by challenging them to try to apply that faith to the world to see how it works, they tune out.
One of the things that truly bugs me about Catholic formation–which leads us to RCIA and Latin–is that it always seems to come out of a book. Not every Catholic is brainy or intellectual.
I feel sure there must be CCD and adult programs, for that matter, that emphasize living one’s faith in a more hands-on way.
Where are they?
Sorry for the rant. I cut two-thirds of it out, to try to keep it relevant.
Yes, Jean, I agree. I’m not trying to turn the Church into an enclave of eggheads.
And I agree you can’t pass on the faith by threats of authority, or even fear. It doesn’t work in our culture.
I’d like a hands-on program. But I don’t know any more than you do about where to find one.
Books are good for mass production. But even if we can’t do totally service oriented things, because of time, money and resources, what about dvd and music? What about other forms of communication? Podcasts? I really have no idea.
Faith is a gift. You may not be able to communicate it to someone else, but I think you can encourage it or kill it. I think the biggest thing is example.
My point is only that Catholics who are intellectual–and kids who are intellectual –ought to have the chance, I to appropriate their faith intellectually too.
To Gabriel McAuliffe:
Yes, the Tridentine Mass was, indeed, as bad as I described it (please keep in mind that I was a Tridentine altar boy in parochial school so I speak from first-hand experience on the altar 40-plus years ago).
Contrary to what you said, i.e., that it somehow did not reflect the life, etc. of Christ, I must remind you I made no such statement. I also made no assertion that the Tridentine was invalid for 450 or so years.
You ask, “Was [the Tridentine] a sham?” Maybe, maybe not, depending on one’s perception at any given point in history. There was a period when the church had so-called “mass priests,” who did nothing but quickly celebrate masses all day long at side altars for a fee/stipend/whatever! As far as the attendee was concerned, the higher the priest elevated the Sacred Host during the consecration, the better: “Higher, Sir John, higher!” notes pontifical liturgical historian Keith Pecklers in his book WORSHIP: A Primer in Christian Ritual (an excellent popular reference on the subject, by the way).
If we want to be true to our Roman liturgical heritage, we need to revert to Greek, not Latin. Indeed, Pecklers points out that Pope Damasus I, as a concession to Rome’s Christians (most of whom could no longer understand Greek), replaced Greek with Latin as the official language of worship. I, for one, would prefer Greek — even Aramaic — to Latin, given the relative novelty of Latin in our church’s liturgical life. That is why I find all these calls for a “return to Latin” simultaneously puzzling, sad and, yet, amusing.
While we’re on this subject, Pecklers mentions that many of our extra-liturgical services/ceremonies grew out of the gradual but certain distancing over the years between priest and people during mass. The laity understandably wanted some sense of participation in their worship life since they didn’t have this sense of “ownership” with the liturgical status quo. And the Tridentine? It was merely the formal culmination of this sad and regrettable historical development.
As for the Eastern liturgies, I’ll leave that matter up to the folks who belong to these non-Roman traditions.
In light of my personal experience with the Tridentine during my grade school years, my awareness of its role in sustaining a sinful clerical culture, and my growing knowledge of our church’s liturgical history, I can in no way share your view that the church somehow benefits from “restoring” its use. Indeed, I regard JPII and Benedict’s promotion of this obsolete liturgy as both ill-advised and arrogant in this day and age.
Re Latin, Greek, Hebrew and the intellectual appropriation of the faith: Knowing languages is, of course, good. But I don’t see their necessity for “appropriating the faith intellectually. ” There is surely more than one way of doing so. It always astonishes, and annoys, me to see how little attention teachers, priests, etc. give to the glorious texts of the prefaces and Eucharistic prayers. There, one finds extraordinarily rich expressions of our faith. So too does one find them in the orations, especially those that observe the classic two-sentence form.
To suggest that unless one has a facility with either Latin or Greek or both that one’s ability to appropriate the faith intellectually is diminished strikes me as entirely implausible. Part of appropriating the faith is bringing it into contact with the intellectual currents of our time, whether philosophy, history, science, or some other substantial intellectual disciplines.
There is no “royal road” to apropriation, so far as I can see. And Thank God!
Bernard,
I guess I have to both agree and disagree with you here. On the one hand I want to say that I don’t believe that appropriation of faith per se requires intellectual approach to it. That is the first but most important thing to say.
The second thing is, I think it is important for people who approach the world intellectually to approach their faith intellectually too–fides quaerens intellectum. I guess we need to distinguish two levels here. To be a “smart, educated Catholic” one doesn’t need to know Latin or Greek–or French or Grman or Spanish. Though all help. We are a universal Church, both temporally and geographically. This discussion merges into a discussion of why we Americans don’t know more languages well.
Supppose what you want to do is to delve more deeply into the issues the Church has faced in the past, and bring them into conversation by analogy with the present. Here, you might need more languages. Greek and or Latin? It helps I think –particularly if you’re doing theology. What the faith is, in my view, is not merely a set of propositions, but a historically and culturally embedded tradition of reflecting on and mediating a worshipful encounter with the God of Jesus Christ. The record of that tradition, the record of that encounter is largely though not exclusively in Latin. To the extent that it helps to have access to texts in the language in which they were written OR reflected on (this is why I think the Vulgate Bible is more important in some respects for the history of Christian theology than the “original text”) .
Thanks, Cathleen. I agree fully with the first two paragraphs of your April 4 message.
I also agree that it is important for the Church that some scholars continue the kind of intellectual study of the Tradition that you emphasize in your third paragraph. My point is that there are other important intellectual ways of dealing with the faith, ways that require different sorts of preparation than the acquisition of specific languages and the study of classical theological sources. Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor dealt intellectually with the faith in their writings, the good work of philosophers like Anscombe, Martin D’Arcy, etc.– who, I grant, probably knew Latin and Greek, was not in the main the outcome of their knowledge of these languages. The intellectual equipment that present day ecumenists need depends on the particular communities, e. g., the Orthodox and the Lutherans, that they study.
In sum, the intellectual appropriation of the faith is the work of a community of thinkers having diverse talent, interests, and training. It is the ensemble of the various contributions each of them makes. Each contribution has its own value. And each, by itself, is lacking in some respects.
Or so I think. Excuse me for sounding dogmatic. It’s just a way to be brief. I am more than willing to be challenged, corrected, etc.
Happy Easter tide to you, Cathleen, and to all the other people who make this blogging so worthwhile.
Whoa. I’m not sure about d’Arcy’s intellectual training, although I’m certain it involved a bit more classical studies than “probably knowing Latin and Greek,” but Elizabeth Anscombe was trained in “Greats” at Oxford, which is probably somewhat more rigorous and demanding a philogical training than the average contemporary American Classics Ph.D. That’s how they taught philosophy then. Those interested might want to look at her near contemporary Mary Warnock’s memoirs which, if you look past the parts about Eduard Fraenkel’s wandering hands, has a fascinating discussion of the education Oxford future philosophers (including Anscombe and Iris Murdock) were getting then. Also some interesting comments about Anscombe.
If you’re looking for a philosopher without a classical training, the guy to look at is Anscombe’s mentor Wittgenstein who for various comlex reasons was educated at the Linz Realschule, a place where they purposefully did not teach Latin and Greek. Since the school at one and the same time numbered both Wittgenstein and Hitler among its pupils, I can’t comment on the merits of the arrangement.
I trust that it’s clear that I was not trying to discuss the educational background of the people I mentioned. My main point is that there are multiple ways if “intellectually appropriating the faith.” Our faith calls upon us to celebrate God’s Lordship over all creation and all the work of human hands. (See the prayers at the offertory of every Mass.) If this is so, then the believer who sees his or her intellectual work as fitting under the aegis of God’s Lordship is doing something that, in my view, has every reason to be regarded as an “intellectual appropriation of the faith.” This is pretty evident, I think, in the works of those creative artists that acknowledge the place of faith in their endeavors. If this is so, why wouldn’t the work of other similarly inspired intellectuals not also count?
It strikes me as extremely unfortunate to suggest, along the lines of the old claim that “theology (or philosophy, or biblical studies, or anything else) is the ‘queen” of disciplines, that there is some particular intellectual formation which opens THE way for the “highest ” form of intellectually appropriating the faith. To claim that there is strikes me as being on the road to a new caste of “clerics” who need nothing of other intellectual achievements to complement their own “self-sufficient” appropriation of the faith. Frankly, I doubt that many serious theologians, scripture scholars, etc., would subscribe to such a strange view.
Of course are there are multiple ways of intellectually appropriating the faith. Reading the Greek New Testament is hardly mandatory for loving and serving God. But the fact remains that the old (maybe not that old — the founders of Sources Chretiens — forgive my bad French seem to have thought they were doing something new) sort of intellectual foundation for the leaders of the church produced some pretty impressive results in the period 1930 – 1970, and I’m not sure that what replaced it (Institutes for the Study of the Wisdom on John Paul II on the family — please!, although I suppose that’s preferable to Psychology Today priests of the 70′s) is going to deliver. Put differently, looking back on the last conclave in spite of the best efforts of John L Allen I don’t see any guys in the running that I would have liked to see as pope other than Ratzinger or Martini, both products of the old educational system.
Of course there is no queen of the disciplines, or royal road to intellectual appropriation of the faith. In fact, the key disciplines and forms of knowledge have varied historically — philosophical theology, patristics, scripture study, church history, have all produced transforming insights at various historical points — probably should add art and literature, although whether humanist popes from Pius II to Urban VIII did as much for faith as for culture is open to serious doubt.
To be clear about one thing, I’m talking about some sort of leaders, or maybe people that there have to be somewhere in the church for the enterprise to function. And certainly the way I see moral questions developing people with a good training in biology and genetics are going to be essential as we enter the new century.