Sunday, July 8, 2012

Willa Cather, Death Comes For The Archbishop

I often think that if I had read Death Comes For The Archbishop back in 2007, when it was first recommended to me, I should have discerned my vocation to the priesthood much, much sooner. I should have read it many, many times and written much about it, in my journal and elsewhere. As it stands, I have read it at last and am extraordinarily impressed. For it is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read - I have only seen Melville paint such beauties with words in American literature. Short phrases like, "his diocese lay within the icy arms of the Great Lakes" fill me with wonder each time I return to them, and her evocative descriptions of New Mexico are something truly wonderful to behold. I could scarcely believe it to be the work of a Protestant (Cather was Episcopalian, I think), for it is so reverent in its portrayal of the Church and her practices (especially the veneration of the Blessed Mother) that I might have thought it the work of a devout Catholic.

Death is about the reign of New Mexico's first bishop, Jean Marie Latour, a French missionary, and his decades-long tenure. He upholds the true faith of the Fathers through political intrigue, dissolute, rebellious priests (some of which live in open concubinage), and his own loneliness. It is a portrait of a man who left what was comfortable and familiar in order to follow God's call no matter where it led. Bishop Latour is gentle as dove, subtle as a serpent, and courageous as a lion as he spreads and protects, as a True Shepherd ought, the apostolic faith of the Catholic Church.  As such, Latour is an inspiring figure, one whom I very much wish to emulate (I had a similar reaction to Dostoevsky's Alyosha), but one who already reflected much of my soul, which I cannot yet say of the third Karamazov. Sometimes I think that these two men from literature, Raistlen and Father Latour, though from drastically different novels, when taken together, illuminate my soul with startling, even frightening accuracy. For Raistlen is often what I am, but Father Latour is what I am beginning to be and hope most of all to become. Perhaps I ought instead to wish to emulate his lifelong friend, Father Joseph Vaillant, but I have less the simple, honest love that a man of the people possesses and more the courteous, earnest soul of a lonely aristocrat. For its illustration of such a man that is as profound as it is stirring, I owe Willa Cather a great deal.

"What will your new bishop drink in the country of bison? And what will he eat?"
"He will eat dried buffalo meat and frijoles with chili, and he will be glad to drink water when he can get it. He will have no easy life, your Eminence. That country will drink up his youth and strength as it does the rain. He will be called upon for every sacrifice, quite possibly for martyrdom. That is how things stand in New Mexico."

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity

Introduction to Christianity is another 'installment' in the series of books I have read over the years concerning what Lewis calls 'mere Christianity' and Chesterton 'orthodoxy': the elements of Christian faith, elucidated perhaps most famously in the Christian West by the Apostles' Creed. Cardinal Ratzinger (now our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI) contributes an impressive, if rather densely written (he is German, after all), exposition on the Creed, with the specific purpose of making the spirit of faith intelligible to modernity. Through long essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation-Passion-Resurrection, he illuminates through natural reason what the Church has professed, and how her fundamental doctrines may be understood so as to be accessible to the modern mind. It is a book that begins from what is most evident to us, and proceeds step by step to the faithful orthodoxy of the Church, interpreted in a thoughtful way. This orthodoxy is the ancient, apostolic faith in Christ as revealed through his Church, and it is this which Ratzinger endlessly elucidates as from the outside.

But faith in Christ as revealed through his Church, is today, as Ratzinger rightly notes, rather problematic. Even if the stumbling blocks of Jesus himself (born of a Virgin, true God and yet also true man, suffered death for the sake of redeeming man, raised from the dead, etc.) can be overcome, the stumbling blocks of the Church Herself are even greater, in a certain way. For the Church is, as the Creed proclaims, Holy and Catholic. To say that the Church is holy seems to mean that her members are holy; for is not the Church her members? And yet nothing could be more obvious than the sin, even grave, grievous sin, of her members. Even when one ignores the popular, false decries against her (the Crusades, the trial of Galileo, etc.) and moves into real transgression (parts of the Inquisition, the 15th century simony and corruption, the curent sexual abuse scandals, etc.), it is clear that the Church is grievously sinful, and that her members are most certainly not holy - at least not yet. The so-called Catholicity of the Church is another occasion for scandal, for even more obvious than her sin is that the Church is not visibly one; after every major council (the Seven Ecumenical Councils, for example), a schism results. The 16th century schisms have resulted, four hundred years later, in many tens of thousands of churches, all claiming to be the One True Church. It seems as if the Church has become as rent as our Lord's garment at the Crucifixion, and that when the nonbeliever sees the Church, he sees men doing naught but sinning, often grievously, and concerned with the human lusts of power and control; most manifestly not practicing what they so earnestly preach.

Ratzinger does address these questions, and addresses them very well. The Church is not holy because her members are holy - how obviously false this is - but because she has received the gift of sanctifying grace through Christ, which operates despite her sinfulness. God is holy, and he is making his Church holy. Again, the elements of the Church are forgiveness, conversion, penance, eucharistic communion; in sum, the one Word and the one Bread. The episcopal organization of the Church exists as a means to this end, the union of the faithful with our Lord and his mysteries. The Church is one because Christ is one, and thus the Church is invisibly one with those who profess our Lord in the manner of the Creed stated above, in addition to being visibly one with those churches which are part of her episcopal organization.

It seems today that for many, the life of the mind (or science, as we might begin to say) and the life of faith are increasingly seen as contraries, even polemically engaged adversaries. I might be inclined to suspect this is a result of the Protestant schisms (for Luther declared that reason was a whore, and his position was by no means condemned among his compatriots), and that a greater friendship between the two might be possible. I shall write later of the relation between faith and science, for those who hold these two to be incompatible are far more ignorant than those who hold reason (i.e. philosophy) and revelation (faith in what the divine has shown to man) are incompatible, and this objection is quite minor and secondary. Ratzinger ambiguously treats both in Introduction, but that is, I suspect, because modern man erroneously conflates 'reason' with 'modern empirical science'.

In the first pages of his book, Ratzinger hits on a profound truth that Leo Strauss also illuminates; the fundamental question of how to live, and the two contrary ways of answering that question: belief in divine revelation and belief in the sufficiency of reason. But as Strauss also notes, the one cannot refute the other: reason cannot demonstrate that revelation is impossible simply, and revelation cannot establish itself as the truth beyond any doubt on purely rational grounds. Ratzinger concludes from this that "there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man" and thus offers his reflections on the Creed to stimulate and provoke discussion about the merits and plausibility of a life lived in accordance with revelation, even in an age so seemingly distant from such a possibility as our own.

"Just as we have already recognized that the believer does not live immune to doubt but is always threatened by the plunge into the void, so now we can discern the entangled nature of human destinies and say that the nonbeliever does not live a sealed-off, self-sufficient life either...just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt, so the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole."