Look, I have opinions on the SSPX. Who doesn’t. But… if you are not tuned in to their USA seminary’s YouTube channel for the occasional livestreamed devotion, what are you waiting for?
This is what liturgy is supposed to look and sound like… everywhere in the Latin Church.
On the little island of Patmos in Greece, where it is said that the apostle St. John lived out his last days (dying around the year 100), there is a revered cave where it is believed he lived and wrote the Book of Revelation (and presumably his 3 other letters as well – but perhaps not the Gospel bearing his name). The part that is fenced off is where John rested his head to sleep at night.
It is always helpful to remember the flesh and blood history of our Faith. Sites like this are so important to know about and to see – even if only on a screen.
Happy Feast of St. John!
Pharaoh is the archetypal bad guy. All the other bad guys in Scripture are to be measured against him. (Even poor King Solomon becomes like Pharaoh… A post for another time.)
Herod the Great is very much like Pharaoh… A great builder of monuments, a paranoid egomaniac desperate to cling to power, and a panick-stricken child-killer. He exceeds Pharaoh in that he doesn’t even have scruples about destroying his own bloodline, and deliberately so… Oddly, given his tribal background, in a twisted desire to prove just how much of a real Jew he is. It’s some kind of neurosis that is driving him…
It is important to be aware that the situation of things in ancient Israel was alive and real. The way we talk about current political, theological, and social controversies is not so different from the way people spoke in Jerusalem and its environs. Cartoonish ideas about a bunch of illiterate goat-herders with a few kings in castles need to be left behind… This was a complex world full of clever and tough people.
Here’s an excellent breakdown of what we know about the Herodian dynasty. It turns out we know quite a bit. Happy reading.
Eamonn Clark, STL
What’s hot with the young kids right now is learning Irish.
Maybe it’s part of the search for some kind of identity “qua” Irish. Now that the English aren’t oppressors, and the Church isn’t “status quo” as a point of reference for Irish culture, it is a bit difficult to nail down precisely what it is to be Irish, other than simply being born here, of a certain stock, etc. The language is one of the only major things mooring the country to itself.
Most Irish don’t speak the language. Sometimes (and somewhat incorrectly) called “Gaelic,” Irish is a very hard thing to master, or even get a grip on.
It’s a challenge, and a unifying cultural symbol which connects people to the past, in view of the future.
I think this is also why young people in general are drawn to the older forms of the liturgy. It’s a challenge, and a root which ties one to something whence one comes. There is interest in this in Ireland, albeit in a different form from the major hot-spots of motion on the old mass, namely, the USA and France. I am still getting familiarized with that situation, so I will just point out that the note is there in the song, not quite as a refrain but more as something of a leitmotif. It’s in the background, but it’s noticeable, and it means something.
I’ve been getting around to different events and places these past two weeks. The time flies – like a carpet being pulled out from my feet. A wedding, a wake, a monastery… All things that Irish do typically rather well historically.
Irish also do hospitality very well. I’ve been made quite welcome during my stay. My picture’s even been featured in a national newspaper. A story for another day…
A story I must tell is of Declan’s Rock – or, more specifically, the time a bishop tried to destroy it back in the 1800’s. St. Declan, whose feast day was two days ago, was mentioned in an earlier post. There is a whole charming narrative about this particular rock floating ashore, a connection to a bell, and the prophetic claim that connected the rock to where Declan would rise to meet Christ on the last day. Well, the local bishop some centuries ago thought all this was a load of crap. “The people with their superstitions. They need to wake up. It’s clearly from an ancient glacier, the science is obvious.” This was the attitude.
But in a country of fairy forts and Mass paths (a topic for another post), the bishop should have known better. Having found two adolescent boys to help him crush the rock down, the Bishop arrived in Ardmore to find the whole town standing up on the hill overlooking the beach where the rock sits. Staring the three of them down, silently. The kids turned to His Lordship the Bishop, and handed him the hammers, saying, “You first.” A strange reversal of the incident of the Woman Caught in Adultery! It was, in fact, the Bishop who needed to wake up. He walked away.
The people kept their rock. The initiation ritual into “Irish Catholicism” as such, which I will perhaps do myself one day, and which the Bishop was likely especially annoyed by, involves walking out to the rock, getting down on one’s stomach, and shimmying through the hole underneath to emerge from the other side. Just be sure the tide is right – or you’ll drown, as I’ve recently been informed.
Weddings, wakes, and the cloister. All kinds of death to self to be reborn in a greater way, and, thus, all kinds of initiation. All traditions which connect us to our past, despite the struggle, pain, and change involved. And all involve – hopefully – the right kind of hospitality.
Ireland does it particularly well.
Naomh Declan, guigh orainn!
(St. Declan, pray for us!)
Eamonn Clark, STL
Dublin is a city of contradictions.
It’s a place where there are churches and bars on every street. You can see a pious old woman on her way back from mass and a gaggle of girls with the most vulgar tastes in dress standing on the same corner waiting for a bus. You can find rabble-rousers and men of the most refined manners in the same shop. There goes a priest, there goes a trans-rights activist.
It’s a city at war with itself.
In truth, Ireland is a complex country. It’s not complex like America – America (and Americans) are complex because of parts… lots of “things to do.” Ireland (and Irish) are complex because of layers… lots of “things going on in there.” (Yes, yes, it’s an oversimplification. Got it.) The subtle and amiable wit of your average Irish gentleman is counterbalanced by a charming habit of self-deprecation or at least humility. (Irish tend not to brag.)
Even the Irish flag symbolizes a conflict, represented by the layers of the tricolor – the Orange and the Green… Protestants and Catholics. White in the middle as an aspiration of peace.
Ireland is just barely big enough to be really anonymous if you want to be and small enough to be a well-known figure without being some kind of phenom. Though it’s not quite like the Middle East or Iceland, where everyone knows exactly how they are related to everyone else, there’s nevertheless only ever a few degrees of separation between any two people. Major public figures – musicians, politicians, athletes, prelates – they are just kind of part of the family, and part of the story.
Everyone is sort of in it together, in a tangible way. That means all the tensions and wounds of poor old Ireland are shared collectively somehow, too. So is a lot of the unwillingness to talk about it all. This extends from the relatively recent violence (late 1960’s-1998) between North and South during the Troubles, to the ecclesiastical abuse crises (plural) that unfolded on everyone’s watch – and in which therefore basically the whole of Irish society was complicit, in one way or another, to some degree. It’s not polite table conversation. Or polite conversation anywhere else, even on a blog. But the prolonged failure to wrestle with these important collective memories only serves to bury them deeper. What does that do to a soul, of an individual and of a country? Perhaps forms some kind of neurosis?
This theme of repressed pain over the abuse crises in particular was explored and driven home very well by Derek Scally in his recent book “The Best Catholics in the World,” a must-read for anyone interested in the Irish situation. It’s not an entirely balanced take, but it’s an important one.
Dublin, the cultural and political capital of the Republic of Ireland, is something of a symbol of the Irish psyche. There’s some kind of neurosis that is manifesting itself there. No doubt, most Irish would resent that. And that’s kind of the point. In Dublin there are plenty of “normal people,” but there is also a very vocal minority of well-funded and coddled extreme leftists, a large number of ruffians and other kinds of low-culture individuals, and now a significant influx of immigrants (many of them seemingly economic opportunists rather than refugees). Then there is also the undercurrent of the echoes of the strong piety that once animated the city, just barely hanging on, with approximately 1% mass attendance any given Sunday. Now, all that does not represent Ireland. And yet it does, because that’s a major part of what Dublin is, and Dublin is, well, Dublin. So there’s tension between what is most culturally and internationally identifiable about Ireland, and the greater part of the country, or “real Ireland.” All this gives Dublin a uniquely charged energy which is rather hard to describe. And that energy sits on top of the rest of the country, at odds with it.
Layers and contradictions.
These thoughts came to me (in a less-developed form) at the Dublin Rally for Life the other day. It was a good crowd, maybe 8,000-10,000 or so, from all over the country. I already found myself running into people I’ve met during my stay, and that without trying to meet up. It’s not the same as D.C. – smaller, yes, and also lacking the “organizational splendor” that comes with the sort of funding and personnel involved in the March for Life. It’s a much quainter operation. But it has heart.
The constitutional referendum on abortion in Ireland passed by a very slim margin a few years ago (2018). Dubliners would have been the outsized supporters of this. So there were some unfriendly onlookers as we went down one of the main thoroughfares of the city, ending up next to the River Liffey. But there were also people walking by who were openly supportive. A mix. More layers and contradictions to explore.
Like the Troubles or the abuse crises, abortion by this point has touched just about everyone in Ireland somehow. Will the awful reality of 31,000 unborn being killed be yet another deep wound to leave alone for now and later psychologically bury? Or will this tragedy be too much to ignore and suppress, something that runs up too hard against the deeper cultural values which “real Ireland” still possesses deep down? Only time will tell. In the meantime, the Liffey keeps on flowing, and Dublin keeps on changing.
Eamonn Clark, STL
Nobody knows what the round towers were for.
Were they defense towers, or some kind of refuge for monks hiding from Viking raiders? Unlikely, but possible. Were they watchtowers? Belltowers? Astronomy towers? Communication towers? Maybe some of all of this? Who knows. These towers, so distinctive to Ireland, are a mystery.
On my last visit to this island, I had an extended visit to Ardmore, which boasts one of the most well-preserved round towers in the country.
Ardmore is where organized Christianity really began in Ireland. There had already been a small smattering of Christian presence on the island when St. Declan was born, as he was baptized by a priest. But there was no real structure yet, just individual Christians here and there. The bishop Palladius had been sent on a mission by the pope in 431, but no real apostolic efforts seem to have meaningfully penetrated what was then a thick forest covering essentially the entire land.
Declan was educated in Rome and ordained a bishop by the pope, and he returned to Ireland as perhaps its first proper missionary, after meeting with and agreeing to a strategy with none other than St. Patrick, who would follow behind him in some time. (There are four pre-Patrician saints of Munster, each a bishop.) The legend of the return of Declan is its own fascinating tale, nestled in the murky gap between fact and fiction. I’ll save the story for another time, as well as the anecdote about the local bishop in the 1800’s who had a different take on the popular piety associated with “Declan’s Rock” and his comical endeavor to destroy it.
The site of Ardmore became homebase for Declan, where a monastery was built according to Patrick’s instructions. Eventually he retreated into the wilderness nearby, where he lived in a small house as a hermit. Ardmore overlooks the sea, where Declan made his famous landing.
The “pattern” at Ardmore involves walking around some of these locations while reciting certain prayers, and, most distinctively, marking the wall near “Declan’s Well” (very likely the same spring he used, next to his house) with crosses by using a small stone. This has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Soon after Declan came Patrick, whose missionary endeavors were more successful and thus more famous. You’ll notice, however, that Patrick concentrated his efforts in the northern part of the island – that’s because Declan had already been quite successful in the south.
St. Declan is now buried in a small tomb adjacent to the monastery which was for centuries the center of perhaps the most powerful ecclesiastical territory in Ireland. Now the monastery is in ruins, and the Diocese of Ardmore has long been swallowed, not even memorialized by a hyphenated name, as so many such dioceses are… it’s just gone.
The ground around it is host, most likely, to approximately 10,000 graves, almost all of them unmarked, and many of them likely quite ancient.
It’s a mesmerizing place. Haunting, almost.
I find myself increasingly fascinated both with graveyards and with archaeology. There is something so existentially alarming about old things and people, and the markers that indicate them. We stand on top of an entire world that has come and gone, and one day others will stand on top of ours. No doubt, there will be “digital archaeology” in a thousand years… But there will still be a need to dig stuff up and touch it. I’ve been privileged this past year to get my hands on some very interesting texts in various archives around Rome… the thrill of holding a manuscript or book that you know you are the first to handle in 50, 100, 200 or more years, is just really special. And I have a tactile mindset about even my own past – I want to be in this place and that, just to feel connected with my own life, to help make sense of it, and somehow thereby to see what it means. I’ve noticed that not everybody cares about that the way I do. I guess this same sort of impulse is at least part of what attracts me to the older liturgy… It connects me to those who’ve gone before, makes them alive again in some way, helps me to understand where I am from – and where I am to go.
I was at a gathering of priests a few days ago; the men were celebrating various major ordination anniversaries. I sat in on the mass. It was pointed out that there were a few hundred years of priesthood between them all. While contemporaneous, the cumulative experience of priests is nevertheless a bit like Ardmore. How many secrets held under the Seal… dead things, which are hidden underground now – finished, out of sight, out of mind. How many words or encounters which for them were not significant enough to remember, but were so powerful for others that they changed someone’s whole life and even saved their soul. How many repetitive but intentional rituals done, over and over, prayers and signs repeated on and on, to the edification of the faithful who devoutly attend to them. How many unique and always somewhat mysterious ministries – whatever they are, always reaching up towards God in service of His people… like a round tower.
And a saint lies buried within each one.
St. Declan of Ardmore, pray for us.
Eamonn Clark, STL
It is in the news that Pope Francis is enrolling 21 men who were killed by ISIS some years ago into the Roman Martyrology.
Here are some questions and my own (quick but hopefully not sloppy) answers, and there are also some “arrows” for more reading.
What happened?
The basic story is that 21 Christian men were executed by ISIS on a beach in Libya in February of 2015. Some of them were calling on Christ as they were put to death. 20 of them were known to be Coptic Orthodox, one man, from Ghana, is less clearly identifiable as Coptic. It is not actually totally clear that the executions were strictly motivated by the religion of the men, nor is it so clear that each of the men went to their deaths voluntarily – these are two of the normal requirements for being recognized as a martyr. If anyone can help me with more details on this, I would be thankful.
Who are the Coptic Orthodox?
The story is very long. In short, the Coptic Orthodox Church is a schismatic group that split from Rome in the wake of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451) over the doctrine of Dyophysitism, which is the teaching that Christ is “in” or “has” two natures, a human nature and a Divine Nature, rather than being “of” these same two natures. This may seem unimportant, until you realize that we are talking about the fundamental character of Who and what exactly it is that we are worshipping – which is automatically a big deal. There were 13 Egyptian bishops who refused to accept the Chalcedonian formulation, protesting that the recently deceased bishop St. Cyril of Alexandria (Egyptian), had condemned those who held to this position in his 3rd anathema. (The issue here comes down to the precise meaning of the word “physis.”) In the end, the Egyptians were not persuaded by the other Fathers of the Council that Cyril was not a “Miaphysite” but was actually a Dyophysite using vague language. You will have to do the hard work of reading the history in detail to get more of the story, sorry.
Have there been attempts to reconcile with the Copts?
Yes, many. The issue of the Coptic schism was an agenda item of the Ecumenical Council of Florence (1431-1449). The Copts ultimately did not want to come back on board, despite their representatives at the Council wanting to do so. Pope Eugene IV wrote a “Bull of Union with the Copts” called “Cantate Domino,” which it turns out is very relevant for our consideration and which we will look at later. There is also a group of Coptic Catholics, who have reunited with Rome, and there were several joint declarations between the Holy See and the Coptic Orthodox some decades ago on Christology – and though they are significant steps toward unity, they did not use the magic words, “in two natures.”
What is the Roman Martyrology?
This is the Catholic Church’s official list of martyrs. It is not a list of all Catholic saints. However, one who is in the Martyrology is usually also revered liturgically as a Blessed or a Saint.
Have there been non-Catholics treated as saints before?
Yes. I know of a few, thanks to this article by Fr. Ed McNamara: St. Stephen of Perm (1340-1396), St. Anthony of Kiev (983-1073), St. Theodosius of Kiev (1029-1074), St. Sergius of Radonezh (1314-1392), and St. Gregory of Narek (950-1003). The latter has also been named as a Doctor of the Church. In these cases, as Fr. McNamara explains, given the complex historical circumstances and the time in which these men lived, union with Rome was not necessarily as clear-cut an issue as it is today. So maybe the better answer is, “No, but sort of.”
Are canonizations infallible?
This is a deeply disputed question. There is a whole book of essays recently published on this matter, which I have not read myself but can nevertheless recommend based on what I have read about it, here. The opinion which I take myself is, “No.” However, nobody will sin by venerating someone held up by Rome as a saint, including in the liturgy.
What about Eugene IV?
The Bull “Cantate Domino” does not mince words on the issue of non-Catholic martyrs. It says they don’t exist. Again, without getting into the settled debate over Feeneyism (yes, it is possible to be “in the Catholic Church” without necessarily manifesting this explicitly by outward signs), here is the relevant part of the text: “The most Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into the eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgivings, their other works of Christian piety and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the Name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.” This echoes St. Augustine’s teaching on the same question, along with a host of other Fathers.
What about Feeneyism?
Feeneyism is indeed wrong, that’s settled. But the entire point of canonizations is to hold up individuals as extraordinary examples of heroic Christian virtue. It strains credulity to think that this would be appropriate of anyone who has at least dubious Christology, and openly rejects the primacy of the See of Peter (the Pope of Rome).
Is this the only strange thing going on at the moment relating to canonizations in Rome?
No. But we will cross that bridge if and when we get there.
Aren’t you just being mean and nasty?
Maybe, but I am concerned with the integrity and meaning of canonizations and ultimately of their purpose, which is the proposal for the imitation of the lives of those who are canonized. To drive the point home: nobody should be Coptic Orthodox. And sure, it is possible that God could have worked an extraordinary grace in the souls of these individuals and brought them to Himself with a high amount of merit (awesome!), but that does not mean that they are fit for public veneration as saints in the Catholic Church. If you think I’m being mean and nasty, go read the link above on the Fathers and this question. I’ll stick with those guys.
End of Q and A.
There’s more to the story, and I hope the readership will point out if I am getting any details wrong. But this at least gets the discussion moving in the right way. There is plenty of good ecumenism going on, but I fear that this is not an example of it. The lines need to be very clear. This will mostly just confuse people in the long-term, it seems.
My own question is rhetorical, and I hope it’s not too biting… How is it that people who like the 1962 Roman Missal are “too divisive,” but people who openly reject the entire idea of Petrine primacy can be put into the Roman Martyrology?
St. Josaphat, Thief of Souls, pray for us! St. Mark the Evangelist, pray for us!
Below is a talk I gave at the Angelicum’s annual student theology conference last week. Enjoy!
Eamonn Clark, STL
A fallen away Lutheran’s Kantian appropriation of Platonic forms hardly seems like the place to look for shocking insight into Christology, but today I will make the case that it is.
In this paper I will argue that psychologist Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes gives us tools for deepening our understanding of Christ as a Person within the narrative given to us in Sacred Scripture, in particular by examining two archetypes which have been well-treated in mythological and psychological literature: the hero and the trickster. I take all of the classical definitions of the Councils for granted – Jesus Christ is truly God the Son, and fully a man born in Bethlehem. There is much to talk about within the paradigm of Chalcedon and the Alexandrian-Antiochene controversies which occasioned the advent of our cherished credal formulas – but since we do indeed possess revealed data, we have solid ground from which to jump into areas yet unexplored. We can be like Theseus – not running into the labyrinth and becoming lost, food for the minotaur, but not simply staying safe and sound outside either. We can take hold of the cord of tradition and bring it with us to keep ourselves oriented – we can slay the minotaur.
An archetype for Jung is a kind of impression of deeply meaningful symbols upon the collective unconscious – a sort of echo of Averroist anthropology that has somehow taken in data and leaves its mark within us. Jung rejects entirely the “tabula rasa” of St. Thomas and Aristotle. We are born with these ideas already deep within our psyche, and their use in stories or encountering them in our life moves us in particular ways. We expect certain things from certain kinds of characters – a witch-queen is altogether different from a wizard-king, whether they are good or evil. Most people automatically perceive this, even if they can’t articulate it, which is normally the case.
While I am not an Averroist, there is something to be said for the observation that so many peoples across time and space seem to use extremely similar kinds of characters and tropes in their great myths – everything from wise old men to floods to heroes who go on quests.
One might be inclined to dismiss the Jungian thesis outright by saying, “It’s just the way that stories work.” But why is it that we want these kinds of characters and these kinds of stories? We can’t say it’s coincidence. We could try to chalk it up to cultural conditioning, but again, this elides Jung’s main premise: we see these patterns in practically every story-telling culture across time and space, and it is unlikely that all of our common ancestors were telling stories which were sufficiently advanced and powerful to populate our minds with this amount of similar ideas so profoundly. One might also posit that we experience life, and life has its rhythms and structures which our emotions and imagination correspond to in such a way that we are attracted to particular sorts of narratives. This is not wrong, but it still doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, as our emotions and imagination receive the world and process it in a particular way with identifiable patterns which do not explain themselves. We simply return to the same question with different terms: why these kinds of emotional responses, and these imaginative structures? There must be something deeper.
I would suggest the following limited analogy: Christ is to our perception of Him as mathematics is to music. Music has certain rules, which, if violated, create a kind of dissonance which we find jarring; these rules can be laid out in mathematical formulas. The classical liberal arts proceeded from mathematics to music, just as it proceeded from geometry to astronomy and from grammar to rhetoric: the latter studies are of the object of the former studies put into motion, that is, music is mathematics in motion, astronomy is geometry in motion. Christ is the Word, the eternal Logos, the Wisdom of God, through Whom all things are made. Our encounter with Him flows from the “rules” found within Him, the natural law and law of grace finding their origin in Him, the Eternal Law, and thus our encounter with Him is the Logos “in motion,” just like music. However, musical taste is much more deeply informed by culture than is our relationship with Christ – this is where the analogy begins to break down. For example, Westerners intuitively find minor chords “dark,” but this is not the case for others. The rules for our encounter with Christ, where not totally individual, are totally universal, that is to say, a culture does not get to tell us Who Christ is or what He wants, despite shaping the style and circumstances in which we approach Him to some degree; and yet, of course, because charity is a personal friendship with God, its pursuit and activity will also have a dynamic unique to each person.
Because our journey with the Lord is the Word “set in motion,” we can easily see how this puts us into a narrative, a story, which is more literally “words in motion,” so to speak – as from grammar to rhetoric. The fact is that the sacred story of which we are a part has rules. This means that good attempts to reach out to the sacred narrative which imbues the world with its ultimate meaning will track these rules, using particular symbols in the form of characters, tropes, and events. And indeed, we see in the narrative of Sacred Scripture the same threefold operation upon profane myth which grace has on nature: healing, elevating, and perfecting. As a result, it should not be surprising that we are somehow ourselves marked with an intuitive sense of the symbols which fill the great myths, and which even fill normal kinds of good literature. We want to tell certain kinds of stories because we are part of a story whose Divine Author is telling us to do so, whether in our nature somehow, or through the promptings of universal sufficient grace, or some combination of both. Here is not the place to explore how such a theory might respond to the theses of someone like Dupuis, but I simply note that this is a possible way to understand the “logos spermatikos,” the seeds of the Word, among the nations. The conclusion is that our mind is shaped in such a way as to recognize the hints of Christ’s truth, beauty, and goodness as hints – a point I am taking and appropriating from Fr. Pierre Rousselot.
I am concerned here with Christology – the entrance of the Author of the story into the story itself. I will focus exclusively on two great archetypes, which I think give us the beginnings of a psychological Christology: the hero and the trickster. I propose that we can understand Christ as a hylomorphic unity of these two opposing archetypes, with the hero as form and the trickster as matter. I will begin with the trickster archetype.
Claude Levy-Strauss posits that tricksters in mythology are frequently animals which eat carrion, that is, meat which is already dead. They are therefore not hunters, but they are not herbivores – they are something in-between, neither this nor that. We are inclined to be uncomfortable with figures like ravens or coyotes or vultures or snakes (and many snakes do in fact eat carrion) – we’d prefer things that we know do this or that, peaceful plant eaters or vicious hunter-killers. In fact, it is the object which they approach that unsettles us first: the corpse, the dead thing which was living. The trickster is one who cannot be trusted: he is the one who lies, who has petty motives, who will harm others for his own selfish gain, who wants to attain power over us, often by leading us into taking his own unfortunate place, such as by trapping us in a hole while climbing out of it himself. Certainly, this is not how Christ is, but we will return to this description momentarily.
Non-dietary ritual purity laws in Israel related to the state between life and non-life, or death. Thus anytime something seems to be related to crossing the divide between the two “worlds,” it is considered impure – neither this, nor that, something in between, something different. Things which cannot be categorized easily into the world of the living or the world of the “non-living” are to be rendered clearly one thing or the other. If a person becomes impure, such as through contact with a corpse, he or she must go through the symbolic stages of re-entering the world of the living. There is more to be said, but this will have to suffice – I simply point one to the thought that such a lens for studying the Passion and Resurrection could be quite illuminating.
Here are some actions of Christ which correspond to the trickster type: Shapeshifting (the Incarnation as the invisible taking a shape, the Eucharist as the visible becoming hidden in a new shape, the Resurrected Christ’s body changing into a glorified shape); Riddle-telling (parables, rhetorical responses); Gatekeeping (“I am the narrow gate,” etc.); Dwelling on the outskirts and going to the “in-between places,” which Levy-Strauss points out of coyotes, ravens, etc. (Christ does this during much of the public ministry, and especially in Bethany, just before and during Holy Week, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, Golgotha, all just outside of Jerusalem; in-betweenness is found especially in the Baptismal site, which is in between “life and death”: Israel and the nations, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, in the jungle surrounded by desert, and then going down into water which gives and takes life, in the place which is in fact the lowest point on the planet by several hundred meters); Physical evasiveness (“He passed through the crowds,” etc.; tricksters are slippery and quick, like serpents); Touching impure things (i.e. the lepers, the woman with the hemorrhage, the dead girl – “Talitha koum” – just like eating carrion, but it is a spiritual eating); Working through chaos and shadow (in particular the miracles, which are always somehow hidden, whether by the confusion of a crowd as in the multiplications of loaves, or by the weather, as in the walking on the water, or by a wall, such as in the raising of Lazarus, and so on – it is not like jumping off the parapet of the Temple and being protected by the angels, there is room left for both doubt and for a deeper encounter with the mystery being revealed on account of the need for faith to understand its proper meaning).
All of this symbolizes Christ’s space in our psychological weak spot – the uncanny valley, which is of course maxed out in the Resurrection, as exemplified by the fear which the Apostles experienced when they first saw Him in the Upper Room, thinking they were seeing a ghost. (Luke 24:37) He is the apex, the climax of the story, the way to the happy ending through an unsettling doorway called death. We are unsettled because we do not know what is there – we must ask, “What is it?” “Manna?” We learn in John 6 that Christ is in fact the true Manna, the true “what-is-it,” the real Mystery which provides the bridge between our deathward bios and the zoe of Heaven which shocks our psychology on account of the space whence He comes to us – but this fear is replaced by Paschal joy, when we see that He is not a ghost, or some kind of zombie, but Life itself come to us as a Friend Who will carry us safely across the divide, as our Viaticum.
But Christ is not a trickster, except in a material sense. By this I mean that it is how He works out His program among us, in particular among His contemporaries – our experience is quite different in that we have nice Chalcedonian definitions by which to understand Him. Not so for the Eleven gathered in the Upper Room, and yet in some way they understood Him much more. Christ uses these uncomfortable techniques to shake us out of the comfort of our present modus vivendi and drag us across the divide between bios and zoe – life here, and life in Heaven. He is the way there, and He is the life, zoe. But He is also the Truth, so that leaves us wondering about the significance of Him qua trickster. In fact, the hero archetype, the formal part, gives us an entirely different lens by which to understand His trickster part. The heroic element inverts the entirety of the meaning of the trickster in Christ: instead of lying to gain power over us out of petty and selfish motives at our expense, He makes Himself weak, giving us power over Him, even to harm Him unto death, and His motive is grave, namely, to help us, especially freeing us by taking on our sorry lot Himself and revealing to us the truth. That’s a complete inversion.
Yet Christ still has and always had power over us. This is because He is God, but, in the narrative sense, He is first and foremost a hero. Heroes are powerful. This is his formal part. Christ qua hero is a theme much more explored than the trickster element, so I will only briefly examine it before returning to a consideration of the question of power.
I pass over Raglan’s 22 points of the heroic “mythotype,” though this is worth its own investigation, and I go instead directly to the “hero’s journey.” This “monomythic” narrative structure has been described by several authors, including most famously Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, where it was pioneered, but also by other more recent authors. The hero’s journey essentially consists in a departure from the home, where one is born and raised, to go on a quest of some sort; next, there is some kind of initiation or trial; finally, there is a return home. The quest is always successful – the enemies are thwarted, the magic sword or golden fleece is obtained, or some object which is too powerful is destroyed, like a ring or a sorcerer’s stone. Then the hero returns home triumphant. The parallels with Christ are almost too obvious to point out: it is the entire story of the Incarnation, the Public Ministry, the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Ascension.
It is important for Campbell, at least, that the hero begins in the ordinary world, and is then called to adventure, in a world of mysterious forces and challenges, only to return home to normalcy. Odysseus is a great example. But Christ is very unlike Odysseus – and I speak here just of the “call to adventure” which the Lord receives. His real call to adventure is summed up by St. Paul: “Not deeming equality with God something to be grasped at, He emptied Himself, taking on the form of a slave.” The visible mission of the Son in the Incarnation is the call to adventure. The world of men, unlike the normal hero stories, is not full of mysterious forces, it is full of mundane forces which are perfectly comprehended by the hero and are completely under His control. Then the Lord ascends into Heaven – Nazareth is not really His home.
The journey continues after the call to adventure, with its various stages, which Christ fulfills par excellence, and which for the sake of time I will pass over. The point is that the “hero” is His formal part – He is the one who can rescue us and bring us home with Him safely.
I wish to return to a consideration of power, specifically the power of Christ over our minds as a narrative figure. I note that Christ as a narrative figure has three modes – a mode which is inaccessible to us, another which is partially accessible to us, and another which is totally accessible to us. The first mode is as a flesh-and-blood historical figure during His earthly life and ministry. The second is as a figure who is spoken of by those who had encounters in the first mode, and of course for us this comes especially in the form of the Gospels and Acts. The third is as one with whom we live out our own lives now, and to whom we pray and make sacrifice. In each of these three modes, Christ exercises a unique kind of psychological power.
The first kind of power over humanity is as an uncategorizable figure. In the Public Ministry He was somehow “not this and not that” – again, “manna,” “What is it?” This ambiguity gave Him a power over His interlocutors, both the friendly ones and the unfriendly ones. We are threatened by what is ambiguous, what is “impure,” because we do not know how to treat it… We don’t know what to expect; everything is surprising. This is the trickster element coming to the fore.
The second kind of power is as the Hero which emerges as intellectual and spiritual keystone of human history. The story itself of the Gospels is compelling because it is the story our minds were built to receive and recognize as the “right narrative.” Here we see the hero most on display.
The third kind of power is as the Lord, our God, Who has ascended into Heaven, body and soul, and Who wants now to save us if we let Him. By encountering through prayer and the sacraments the One described in our creeds and in our liturgy, prescinding from the reading of the Scriptures, we get the doctrine of His salvific power. We are utterly helpless before the gaping maw of the abyss which stands beyond death. Only He can help us. To do this, those who are capable of human acts must in fact make the choice to invite Him into their lives. They must walk with Him, in a strange and sometimes very confusing way. He is here, there, everywhere, hiding… He plays a kind of game with us, a game which is ultimately ordered to our salvation if we “play along” and follow the rules. The hero and the trickster reveal themselves here together as a unity most forcefully. He is in hiding, changing shape, touching the impurities of our souls – but he is mighty to save, using that very hiddenness and ambiguity to our advantage and the ultimate advantage of all Creation and God’s own glory.
More research is called for into the Jungian psychological paradigm as a tool to sift through the Scriptures, taking the revealed data as “the story which God wants told,” the narrative which heals, elevates, and perfects pagan narratives – including, of course, the actual historical fulfillment of those stories and their figures. This kind of approach to Scripture is becoming more popular, but this seems to be primarily the case among non-Catholics, and non-theologians; we ought to take our cue from the popularity and power of these kinds of analyses as an opportunity for evangelization, in addition to an opportunity for deepening our own speculative understanding of Christ and our relationship with Him.
Eamonn Clark, STL
In the past year, I’ve become immersed in the world of Catholic doctrine and discussion on marriage and sexuality. This adventure has undoubtedly just begun, but I have already reached a few conclusions. Let me share some of them.
It’s the 6th one I’m talking about here. The marital debt has a long juridical-moral tradition, reaching a kind of crescendo in Gratian, then being filtered through Peter Lombard into St. Thomas, then expounded on by the manualists (like Sanchez – it’s Book 9 in the 1st volume, which is linked to) and synthesizers up until quite recently. There are many points we could talk about, but in this post we’ll go through the basics and discuss why this topic so often gets butchered by both those eager to present the classical (and correct) doctrine on the matter and those who balk at it.
A lot of people want to appeal to St. Thomas on this, and they are right to do so. However, there is an issue with that – St. Thomas, in line with St. Augustine, presumes that requesting the debt, absent at least a habitual intention to have children, is always at least a venial sin. That’s not the doctrine of St. Alphonsus, modern popes, and other authorities – but we’ll just leave that question aside for right now.
First, let’s present the foundational text: 1 Corinthians 7:1-9.
“Now for the matters you wrote about: ‘It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.’ But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”
So, St. Paul is saying that, if you are getting married, you are giving over your body to your spouse for his/her access at his/her will, and vice-versa. Otherwise, why would you get married? If you don’t need to have relations, stay celibate! And that’s precisely what he talks about later in the chapter.
“Are you saying marriage exists just to use and be used by someone to prevent sin?” No. But this is an understandable reaction given two points. First, most who present the doctrine of the marital debt do not give it the nuance required and/or are generally pastorally insensitive. Second, the world does not see marriage rightly anymore, which subconsciously warps our attitudes towards it even when we make the attempt to be pious and right-thinking. Marriage is primarily about multiplying the glorification of God by having children who will worship Him in spirit and truth – in other words, marriage is primarily about making saints, especially of your children, while working on yourself and your spouse as well. The spouse’s vocation is to be a domestic missionary. Marriage is not primarily about satisfying one’s personal hopes and dreams, even though that’s important. It’s also not primarily about slaking lust, but this is an important function of marriage. One has a more direct path to union with God as a celibate, and celibacy also enables one to make saints more easily on account of availability for ministry in addition to the interior spiritual goods it offers, so it is preferrable – unless one will struggle with concupiscence too much without relations, or unless there is some other special reason, as Paul indicates later in the chapter.
While Paul’s precept is in one place framed as a negative statement (“do not deny each other”) it is really better seen as a positive precept – “do this” – as he gives first (“should fulfill his marital duty” etc.). Positive moral precepts of the “do this” variety (i.e., “give alms to the poor”) admit of exceptions, unlike negative moral precepts (“do not blaspheme”). This is for two reasons. First, because positive obligations can interfere with each other. Suppose a church is on fire and one’s child is trapped inside. One has the duty to reverence Christ in the Eucharist by bodily signs, especially by genuflection – but one has a higher duty in this moment to save one’s child from being killed in the fire. God wants “mercy, not sacrifice” in this case – run to the place where your child is, don’t bother to genuflect, and get him out of the fire! Second, because positive obligations are sometimes impossible. A man who witnessed a murder has the obligation to testify in court to act as a key witness, but if he is in a coma he is excused.
Given this, there are several cases when the marital debt need not be fulfilled. While authors will disagree about some particular points, we’ll take an obvious case. A woman has a heart condition which is aggravated by sexual intimacy such that a single conjugal act could be fatal. She would not only be not obliged to acquiesce to a request for the debt from her husband, she is obliged to refuse.
St. Thomas discusses another kind of case, where the woman requests the debt after having just received it. There is no obligation to pay it, because biologically it cannot be paid by the man, and the woman in this case is acting like a harlot, not a spouse – which she shouldn’t do.
So there we have two kinds of obvious cases of being able to say, “No.” These are not controversial. But what about… “I have a headache.” “I’m tired.” “I’m not in the mood.”
Here we have to pause and clarify something, as this is the space where the zealous go awry, and the anti-zealous rightly pounce. Simply proposing the idea of relations, or even asking for them, does not constitute a strict appeal to one’s marital right. Consider the following exchange between husband and wife at 10:30 P.M.
Husband: “Can we go to bed? You know…”
Wife: “Oh… I’m sorry, I’m trying to get the checkbook to balance before calling it a night and have a bad headache. Can we wait until tomorrow night?”
Husband: “I know, and I can appreciate that and I’m sorry about the circumstances. It’s just that I’ve been having such a hard time at work, it’s been so stressful and we haven’t slept together in a month because I’ve been coming home so late, and you’ve been up so early with the baby. Are you sure you can’t?”
Wife: “I just don’t the energy right now. I’m totally exhausted and feel a cold coming on.”
Husband: “Please, I really, really need this tonight.”
Wife: “No, not tonight, sorry.”
Husband: “I’m telling you I need you to sleep with me tonight. Please.”
Wife: “No. Goodnight.”
So… at what point in the conversation was the debt refused? Certainly not in the first response of the wife. If the husband had taken that and gone off, she could reasonably assume that his request was not really that serious, at least not as serious as her reason for declining. With the second exchange we are getting a little closer, but it’s still reasonable to see the request not as a strict appeal to his right as a husband, especially given that in her response she is still leaving things open for him to make a decision of whether to continue to ask or to decide to let it go. With the third exchange, we are now toeing the line, if not crossing it. With the fourth and final exchange, the line has clearly been crossed – at this point, there can be no lack of clarity about the appeal to his right, which would indeed overcome the appeal to the mild physical discomfort of the wife. On St. Thomas’ view, if the husband tomorrow takes an impure glance at that pretty secretary at work he’s been trying to avoid getting close with, while it is his sin, his wife is partially to blame due to having illegitimately increased the occasion of sin, as it’s her responsibility to help her husband with this precise kind of thing… Remember, nobody else can. But the refusal itself is grave matter – one signs away one’s body when getting married. Actually, all things being equal, strictly refusing a perfectly legitimate request for the debt for a completely frivolous reason is worse than adultery. In the exchange of marriage vows, one implicitly makes a negative promise (“I will not sleep with others”) and a positive promise (“I will sleep with you”). To violate the positive promise is in itself a worse offense than to violate the negative one – one isn’t simply giving too much to someone else, one is denying what one promised to give to one’s spouse. “This is mine, and it is only mine.” It’s the “is mine” part that is the most important, our psychological and social dispositions to think otherwise notwithstanding. That’s not to say that adultery isn’t a terrible sin – it is – it’s to say that the completely unjustified refusal of a reasonable request for the debt is even worse. (As an aside, today we might struggle to explain why adultery is really all that immoral – I won’t descend into that discussion here, I just want to note in passing that the mistaken appeal to Gaudium et Spes about the equality of marriage goods which I noted in the introduction is perhaps more significant than it might at first seem.)
There are some competing principles here, and it is important to appreciate them to have a not-totally-crazy understanding of the marital debt. Spouses should in fact be eager to serve each other. That of course includes the desire to have relations when requested. It also includes the desire to be considerate of one’s spouse’s condition. Because of this, a healthy sexual dynamic between spouses includes communicating about oneself – like being sick, having work to do, etc. The appeal to one’s right should only come as a last resort – and can itself be excessive and thus sinful. Suppose, for example, that the husband in the conversation above is simply an intemperate man, and it’s not stress from work or lack of intimacy that is occasioning the request but just his out-of-control libido which he makes no effort to reform. If mixed with a lack of care for the welfare of his wife, the situation becomes very bad very quickly. And yet, except in the limited cases where it is acceptable to refuse the debt flatly, or in cases where the holistic reality of the marriage is abusive (a more complex topic), she will have to give in to the requests.
This goes both ways. Oddly, St. Thomas primarily talks about the woman having excessive requests for the debt, and we usually only talk about the man having such a problem. Anyway, husbands too must respect legitimate requests from their wives, even when inconvenient or uncomfortable.
Initiating a conversation about a request for relations does not amount to refusing the debt, which is the sense one gets from some presentations of the issue. However, at the “bottom” of such conversations there is the possibility of appealing to the debt, and in such a case it must be accepted, unless a very serious reason exists. And there is often sin in such requests for the debt.
To know whether refusing a request is sin or not can sometimes be difficult. (For the nerds, what we are talking about is the quasi-potential part of prudence called “gnome.”) But the larger point is this: don’t be selfish, and don’t marry someone selfish.
In the end, navigating the marital debt is actually not that hard to figure out in general. It’s only the very special cases of when flat refusal is justified which can get complicated (and which we won’t explore here). As a good husband or wife, you want to help your spouse – either by giving over your body to your spouse at his or her request, or by holding your body back so you can respect the reality of the presently unsuitable condition of your spouse, even when you could legitimately insist on your right. Good spouses are eager to help each other. St. Paul gives this principle, albeit in a different context but which nevertheless applies here: “Outdo one another in showing honor.” (Romans 12:10) And when in doubt about the legitimacy of a reason to refuse the debt strictly speaking, lean towards paying it. That’s pretty much the whole rule summed up.
Much more can (and ought to be) said. But this will suffice for now. I leave you with two recent sources which give decent formulations of the principle:
Fr. McHugh and Fr. Callan (#2614-#2616)
Fr. Dominic Prümmer (#860-#861)
For the nerds, there are many older manuals on this website in the Research tab which will go through this kind of stuff and more in all the deliciously casuistic nauseating detail which you and I so crave.
St. Joseph, pray for us.
Eamonn Clark, STL
I appreciate the reply to my latest post on Sola Scriptura from Nemo. This long-delayed post will be my last public response – and I will do so via the method called “fisking,” my comments in bold, with a little outro to close. Go here to see the whole post (some introduction and endnotes). See my previous posts here, here, and here.
START
Clark made an objection to sola scriptura, which is commonly raised by Roman Catholics, as I found out just recently. It goes like this, if I understand correctly: a) the Scripture started out as individual books written by different authors centuries apart, b) there is no way of knowing which books belong in the Scripture c) unless there is an authority outside the Scripture that can infallibly determine what constitutes Scripture, d) ergo the infallible authority of the Catholic Church.
Yes, that is more or less the way the argument goes, as what else would determine the canon? In my last post, I showed that the only alternatives are that we are left with our own judgment, that some totally arbitrary measure exists (sola Luther?), or the even worse and much weirder hypothesis of a “fallible collection of infallible texts.” Another option would be that history didn’t happen – as we will see, the historical reality of the formation of the canon is relevant here.
For starters, regarding (d), even if we grant that an authority outside the Scripture is necessary to determine what constitutes Scripture, it doesn’t follow that the magisterium of the Catholic Church is such an authority. I get the impression, rightly or wrongly, that Roman Catholics are attacking sola scriptura as if it were a zero-sum game, and they would establish the authority of the Church simply by knocking down the authority of the Scripture.
Not quite – one needs to recognize the Voice of the Shepherd behind all of it. One is simply bound, by the operation of the kind of sufficient grace which touches all rationally active minds, to know that the Christ’s truth and authority subsists in the Catholic Church. One way to see this is through the history of the Scriptural canon – it did not fall from the sky. If I think that the old woman at the supermarket infallibly determines the canon, then I have a problem. Why would it be any different for, say, some disgruntled Augustinian friar named Martin Luther? (Then there are other claims too, such as with the Ethiopian tradition, but we leave that aside.) So history is the key here. There are PLENTY of ways to see that the Catholic Church has the authority which She claims – the plethora of miracles, the favors of the many major Marian apparitions (especially Fatima, given its enormous audience and recent occurrence), the coherence and stability of doctrine, the proliferation of that doctrine across the Earth… But the canon is its own argument, based in the facts of history (but not thereby exhausted, as one must still see with the eyes of faith).
But that is far, far from the case. From the epistemic perspective, the same questions would remain: How do we know that (the magisterium of) the Church is infallible? What constitutes the magisterium and who decides that infallibly? Does it speak with one voice or many? How do we know that the teachings of the magisterium are interpreted correctly? The list goes on.
These are presented as very challenging questions, but they are relatively straightforward to answer. We know the Church is infallible by faith, evidence of which is contained in all the things I just mentioned. One ought to be inclined toward trusting the Church as God’s infallible mouthpiece just as one is inclined toward Christ – flesh and blood does not reveal, and yet it also does prepare one to make the jump. St. John Henry Newman called this sense of the convergence of evidence which doesn’t quite demonstrate the truth of the Catholic Faith the “illative sense.”
What constitutes the magisterium, in the relevant sense here, is: the Pope, or the whole college of bishops teaching together with the Pope. Who decides that infallibly is and could not be other than God. We can see here that Nemo is struggling with the relationship between evidence, faith, and authority. In the end, it is up to one’s own mind to see, and that’s that, and yet we also are not entirely alone in our responsibility for knowing – we have help through others. What is really of faith cannot be demonstrated by “flesh and blood,” it must be revealed from above, but often using “flesh and blood,” as with the Incarnation itself, but also through the visible hierarchical structure of the Church. The Pope is, in a sense, the Church’s babysitter – like Aaron was for the Hebrews while Moses was up on Sinai. Regardless of how well he does, he has the authority (cf. Saul’s reign over Israel, the Pharisees and Jerusalem, etc.).
The magisterium, in this sense, speaks with one voice, and could not speak otherwise. (I have written more about the different senses/uses of the word “magisterium” elsewhere on these pages.)
Nemo’s final objection once again shows that he is trying to grapple with the reality that, at the end of the day, one cannot actually have another take the place of one’s own mind in the relationship between evidence, faith, and authority, but one also isn’t responsible for everything by himself – we have a visible, exterior structure which disposes us to the operation of interior invisible grace. We can have intelligent people help us to understand the teaching of the Church, and we have the exterior authority of the Church itself as expressed in Her definitive doctrines, but one must still see with the eyes of faith for themselves after encountering the reality of dispositive visible effects of God’s grace with the senses. To drive this home, I could take many of these same objections and apply them to Christ. How do we know He speaks infallibly? Who decided that? How do we know we are understanding what He is saying? Actually, this last one is the whole theme here – He evidently wanted us to have a very serious kind of help. He did not leave us orphans. Nor do we need to be able to read in order to have faith – something which Sola Scriptura indirectly implies. The peasant girl in 9th century Gaul simply knows, “The old man in the funny hat has learned the true Faith and is responsible for instructing me so that I can save my soul,” and that’s about all she needs.
Second, regarding (c) the canon. If we define canon as a definitive collection of books that are recognized by believers as Scripture, then what constitutes the canon changes over time, at least from a historical perspective. For example, in the Gospels, Jesus constantly refers to (what we now call) Old Testament books, namely, the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms (Luke 24:44-45), which the Gospel authors designate collectively as “the Scriptures”, or simply “the Scripture”, emphasizing its unity. The canon then did not include the New Testament books which were written later. By the fourth century, the majority of the 27 books of the New Testament have been recognized as Scripture, as evidenced by extant New Testament manuscripts and the writings of the Church Fathers. There is no evidence that such recognition resulted from a Church Council. It is likely that the canon emerged organically through a grass-roots networking process, independent of any central authority.
I’m a little shocked that Nemo would make the objection that the existence of Scriptures before Christ and the apostolic age would somehow undermine the possibility of more Scripture. Since the fullness of God’s revelation is the Incarnation of His Son, there will be a clear division among the texts wherein God foretells the coming of Christ and the texts wherein God teaches about what happened during Christ’s earthly life and ministry. Turns out that the 430 year gap between Malachi (the last prophet of the Old Testament) and Christ’s public ministry maps onto the 430 years of Israel’s enslavement in Egypt. It was time for God to speak again.
Nemo then jumps to the 4th century. He’s right to point out that the canon had basically been settled by then. He neglects to say HOW. It was, of course, the project of Pope St. Damasus I, whose old house I coincidentally have been doing some of my research in (it is here) as there are some curial offices there in the palazzo surrounding the church. This was partially in response to confusion over what belonged in the canon which occurred at the end of the 2nd century, because of the heresiarch Marcion. But without going into details, there was still some slight lack of clarity over the so-called “Deuterocanon” throughout the medieval period and into the 15th century. However, there was no problem significant enough to warrant any action more forceful than the council which Damasus held in Rome in 382, where he published his list. This mild anxiety (but no “crisis”) was evidently on account of the prologue to the the Liber Regus (the “Kingdom Books” – 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2Kings), written by Damasus’ private secretary, St. Jerome. (Jerome evidently held reservations about Damasus’ list and let people know it. Maybe Damasus was fine with it – who knows… It was 9-10 years after the Council of Rome in 382 under Damasus I.) It was the Council of Trent (an ecumenical council, the highest kind of teaching authority on account of the sort of papal sanctioning involved) which “canonized” the list which we have today – although the same list had been put forward by Damasus some 1,200 years earlier, and also just the century before at the Council of Florence (another ecumenical council), but only using the word “inspired” and not “canon”/”canonical.” This was in response to the activity of Luther, who threw out some books which were especially inconvenient for his ”theology.” This, together with the invention of the printing press, heightened the urgency for a stronger position on the canon than did the shift from baskets and scrolls to the codex in the 1st century. The Jews and first Christians didn’t have books at all, they had scrolls which could be put into one basket and then another. The codex forced the question of what would be included and what excluded. The printing press meant that not just the clergy and scholars but everyone in the world could soon have a “Bible” – so it became absolutely imperative to know what that meant. In fact, we see here a stroke of God’s Providence. Had Luther not tampered with the list given by Florence, then we may still be left without the list of inspired texts which Trent gave us, and the problem would perhaps have grown deeper and thornier than it already is.
Third, a few more words regarding the self-authentication of the Scripture (b). Jesus says, “It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me” (John 6:45). And “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27) It is interesting that, with the advance of technology, voice recognition software can uniquely identify the speaker from a voice recording, as the voice of each person has a unique digital signature. If I may use another analogy, the Scriptures bear the seal of the Lord, just as signet rings are used by ancient kings to authenticate their royal decrees. All believers, without exception, have been and will continue to be taught by the Lord, and have the right and obligation to hear His voice and follow Him.
Once again, we see Nemo wrestling with the evidence-faith-authority paradigm. Yes, we do need to recognize the Voice of the Shepherd, but to what degree? As I said in an earlier post, St. Mary of Egypt was taught by God without study. Are we held to that standard? Are we all bound to know what is Scripture simply by being sufficiently holy, or intelligent, or both? No – rather, we ought to see the all the other things which point towards the Divine origin and thus the veracity of the Catholic Faith and go from there. God wants us to see the greatest effect of His Incarnation – the Church, His Bride – and then read about Him in the light of what the Church offers to us for our instruction. He does not want us arguing whether 1 Clement or The Shepherd of Hermas or the various silly Gnostic “gospels” are inspired documents, OR THE DEUTEROCANON.
Lastly, if we define the Canon as a complete collection of books inspired by God for the salvation of His people, then the Canon is fixed from the foundation of the world. But, one might ask, is what we have today the whole Canon? It is possible that some inspired books have become extinct, e.g., Paul’s letter to Laodicea (Colossians 4:16), just as some species God created has become extinct through the long lapse of time, and just as His prophets died after they had served the purpose of God in their own generations. We can only answer (in faith) that God has preserved the canon through history to accomplish His purpose, so that the canon we have is sufficient and necessary for salvation, and the lost books, if any, do not subtract from the integrity of the canon, nor their inclusion make the canon redundant in any part.
Here we have to say that God knows what He wants included and certainly made sure that it was in fact included. That’s it. Those, and those alone, would then carry the character of “inspiration,” as inspiration is only really a useful term in theology when it refers to “those books contained in Scripture.” Other kinds of authority and prophecy surely exist, but the special thing about being inspired is precisely that it is part of Scripture.
END
Well, thus endeth the discourse. From here, we would no doubt continue to explore what “the Church” is, how the virtue of faith works, what the process of inspiration involves, or drill into what exactly the status of the Deuterocanon was in the middle ages, and so on, but this takes us quite far afield of the question. I do other posts on some of that stuff. But for any curious Protestants reading, you might start with this good article on apostolic succession and go from there.
Christian Renaissance Movement 