Reports from the Fringe

Well, I spent enjoyable days at home, and now I have returned to the Tiltenberg to study for my exams. My first exam is Ecclesiology, on the 11th.

While at home, I attended one Reformed church service to witness the baptism of my cousin’s son. There were good things about it, such as my cousin and her husband (especially), the faithful attendance, the psalm-singing, and even the traditional Reformed formula read in the baptismal liturgy, which speaks of Baptism as God’s pledge that He makes an eternal covenant of grace with us. (Although the words ‘of grace’ were tacitly omitted by the minister.) Apparently the older Reformed tradition had a more robust view on Baptism.

And the Baptism itself, of course, you say! I think so, but I will come back to that.

Mostly, however, the service was rather disappointing. The minister introduced the sacrament by saying that we should look carefully, for God had given as this sign as a ‘visible sermon’, and therefore he would scoop his hand full of water, not just a few droplets. This sermon would remind us of our own Baptism (so far so good), a sign that we all stand in need of washing because we are all filthy. (St. Paul writes: ‘Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.’)

The minister did scoop his hand full of water, but let it fall before it reached the baby’s head, then applying what moisture remained. Visible sermon indeed: God has much power to purify, but it is so cautiously applied that no impurity is taken away… But that is a low-blow polemic worthy of the sixteenth century. More fundamental are the implications for the validity of the sacrament: can we speak of a true Baptism when the water does not flow over the person, when he is neither immersed, nor partly immersed, nor sprinkled with water? According to the Encyclopedia, such a Baptism is at least doubtful.

The sermon (and I speak what I remember, with apology for inaccuracy) was about Zechariah and Elizabeth naming their child John. It was a kind of Reformed midrash, a colouring of the outlines of the Biblical story (with some details added), an exposition on the spiritual attitude of the characters. This is intended to reveal what the story leaves unspoken, but usually reveals something about the interpreter as well.

Zechariah, for one, was painted as a man who had laboured for nine months in the throes of conscience, after he had failed to believe the angel’s word. Deaf and mute, he had been locked in a small world of his own, to learn how to listen to God. The possibility that he might have been glad of the word’s fulfilment, of his fatherhood even in old age, was briefly mentioned, but called a bright spot against the dark background of his unbelief. When the time came for Zechariah to confirm the name that his wife had given to the child, he bent very low over his writing tablet and slowly spelled out the name John.

The minister spoke words in this vein: ‘Perhaps you will say: but how do you know that he bent very low over his writing tablet? Scripture does not say that, does it? But his spirit was moved!’

Then once the name has been written, the bonds of his spirit are loosed and he writes the name fast, looking up to God in joy because His word has come true. The name of the child is John, not Zechariah like his father’s, because ‘everything of Zechariah has to disappear’.

The people of Hebron – the neighbours – were present as well. They had been chatting amongst themselves and had already decided that the child’s name was to be Zechariah. When lonely Elizabeth lifted up her voice and declared the child to be John, she felt all their ‘piercing stares’ on her. Thus the world ever looks at the handmaid of the Lord, I suppose: with hostile incomprehension.

After the child had been named, the neighbours talked much about what had happened. Although they saw the strangeness and divine origin of these events, apparently their reflections did not reach their hearts, for ‘six months later, none of the people of Hebron were at the manger in Bethlehem’.

In the flow of his sermon, the minister also mentioned that no one was worth anything, and that there could not be grace without prior guilt. When I left the building, I felt that in the experiential-Reformed picture, God’s dealings with men are almost restricted to an endless cycle of forgiveness, the merely human dimension of life (like becoming a father!) is inconsequential, and true joy is incommunicable. This is seen as religious earnestness; a more positive valuation of the common activities of the nature God deigned to adopt is quickly discarded as spiritual immaturity.

Thus far the first report. Second report: Rev. Kort from the Old Reformed Congregations in the Netherlands, formerly from the Dutch Reformed Church (before it merged into the Protestant Church in the Netherlands), has stridden to a theological border, seeking a skirmish. His beef is with what he calls the ‘embryo theology’, according to which sinners can be regenerate without conscious faith in Christ (i.e. the belief that Christ has forgiven their sins), merely yearning after God, mourning over sin and hungering for salvation. Against this he argues that a personal knowledge of Christ as Mediator is indispensable.

The ‘embryo theology’, popularised by the 18th-century minister Alexander Comrie, makes unscriptural, Aristotelian-Scholastic distinctions between the ‘act’ of faith and the ‘habit’ of faith, which could be given by God before the act of conscious faith is exercised. According to Rev. Kort and his supporters, this leaves people satisfied with an apparent, probable, untrue and presumed rebirth, rather than a true conversion and union with Christ.

As I was checking my sources, I came across a rather acerbic publication in support of Rev. Kort, which exclaims:

...many professors [of faith] and leaders engage in hostile outbursts against the separating, liberating doctrine of the Gospel of the Cross, because they, through the teaching of Christ and the experience of faith that necessarily goes with it, see their imagined conversion go up in smoke! Christian persecution within the Refo-ranks has thus been in full swing for many years and I would like to say to Rev. Kort: welcome to the battle!

Meanwhile I, in my hammock (so to speak), have been reading Verbum Caro by the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. It contains interesting ideas, like the following (p. 66, translation mine):

And so, the fruitfulness of [Mary’s] faith unites itself with the fruitfulness of her womb and her entire human nature. At this place, Luther’s interpretation of the act of faith has undergone a certain narrowing in respect to the old Germanic-Christian interpretation, in which the moment of surrender, of the faithfulness of the follower, thus of the human, was much more prominent than in the Reformed sin-grace dialectic. Where that human dimension does not appear to be implied in the Church’s holiness, the chargedness of a ‘naked’ soteriological dialectic all too easily changes into professorial abstractions.

Reflection in Ongoing Time

I wish you all a happy end of 2012 and a blessed 2013!

Ten days ago the world was supposed to have ended. On the assumption that today is not the end of the world, either (though the Jews tell us that we get a ten days’ reprieve to mend our ways before the ultimate Day of the Lord), here is a reflection on how to evaluate the past…while time goes on.

On reading Church history

I.

This ragtag band of men, this feuding breed

that claims to be united by a name

but differs on its sound; that boasts a creed

but tones it down for wealth, or peace, or fame,

survived its persecutors’ deadly purge

one moment, then sought shelter in their power;

what blind and desperate survival urge

has brought them to, will bring them past this hour?

Lax discipline, grand dreams, unbending laws,

critics that judge and copycats that rob;

God! cannot history set wide its jaws

and swallow this exasperating mob?

Who can explain – for I am at a loss –

how these adore one Man upon one Cross?

II.

This remnant people that has crossed the firth

beyond our nature’s furthest borderland,

linked by the secret bond of second birth

to God’s paternal and creative hand,

yet moves to all delights of eyes and touch

and blinks in mortal weariness of soul.

All christenable oddities and much

absurd attachment go to shape the whole;

to God’s last sentence history’s deferred,

rejoiced in, judged, confessed, reweighed for glory

under the mercy of the final word

who will discern the plots of every story.

One God inspires our way in desert’s dust,

us, pastored, pastured in one common trust.

Ecce Virgo Concipiet

Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.

Twice this Advent, this well-known text from the prophet Isaiah has been the Scripture reading during Lauds. Together with the immediately following verse which no one has ever heard: He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. But that is only a triviality, to be casually dropped during a Christmas dinner or something of that sort; in any case, beside the point.

I am enamoured of Isaiah 7:14 because it challenges our insidious evolutionism, the reigning assumption (whose tyranny even rebels feel) that everything in this world is a product of natural forces, and every positive development a slow-paced unfolding of what one possesses within, flourishing under prosperous natural conditions. The way pregnancies usually develop. And there is nothing wrong with that.

But Mary shows us a higher alternative, the alternative of the People of God. For as Kierkegaard said, God is that all things are possible. A woman who becomes a mother without a man (proximate or remote – the latter possibility technology allows) is a miracle indeed. But if the natural conditions do not obtain, will the fruit survive? Will it be healthy? It stands in need of careful scrutiny, this Child; it might be born half-human, half-void (for God is nothing to nature): stunted, crippled. But no! Not only is the Child as healthy as any other, but He is already the Health-bringer of the world.

Similarly, God gives the Church a hundredfold of what She gives to Him in prayer, sacrifice and love. It sometimes seems that all these things are vain. But at other times it does not seem so, as at Christmas. We are Christ-bearers; that is enough. We are really and truly filled because – I speak as a fool – because the void overshadows us.

Division and All Saints

            …division stretched between
the queen’s identity and the queen.

So writes Charles Williams in his Arthurian poem The Coming of Palomides. Palomides, mathematician and minstrel, at court as a foreigner (in all possible ways) – this Palomides sings before the Queen Iseult, ‘defining’ the beauty of her body. As Iseult’s beauty shows something more than physical, so Palomides’ song is something more than words. It is called forth by his pierced heart, his exultant reason, and the reality of the Queen for which his heart and reason were made –

blessed the unity of all

authorities of blood and brain,
triply obedient, each to twain,
obedience in the mind, subdued
to fire of fact and fire of blood;
obedience in the blood, exact
to fire of mind and fire of fact;
to mind and blood the fact’s intense
incredible obedience,
in the true equilateral ease.

But alas, the vision does not last; while the Queen’s body remains as beautiful as ever, something disappears. Palomides’ eyes lose sight of the Queen’s true glory. He falls, because he keeps gazing nonetheless. That is the division, the dis-visio, seeing things apart from each other. How well we understand this division: it is not easy to see, in a single perception, both what the Queen is and what the Queen is. Especially when the Queen is adulterous Iseult. And who of us isn’t?

Those who remember the old interior of this blog-spot might recall my reaction at finding out some biographical details about the actress who gave flesh and face to the young heroine of Inception, Ariadne. Suffice it to say, I preferred Ariadne.

So when I recently saw the beautiful movie Joan of Arc, starring Leelee Sobieski, I knew better than to look up the actress. Through unfortunate circumstances, however, I caught glimpses of her on Google, from which it was immediately clear that she was not the devout, charismatic, young, feminine peasant general whose demeanour she had borrowed for a spell, and whose life in the movie began and ended with a great Eucharistic ‘Thank You’. Too bad; Leelee would have been truer to her name and herself if she had been consistently truer to Joan. (Sobieski, after all, was the ‘Lion of Lehistan’ who beat the Turks away from Vienna.)

That is why I cannot agree with the Reformed fringe that opposes acting because it is allegedly a lie. Acting is not a lie. Man is an actor, an imitator, and he finds his highest identity in imitation (just ask Thomas a Kempis). Acting shows that humans are not fixed in their habits, but that they have a potential to become better or worse than they are. It invites us to say ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ or ‘There for the grace of God could I go’. When division stretches between our visible lives and the true Image in the sepulchre of our soul, the parts we act can show more of the truth to others than the part we play through habit. (No doubt the Reformed fringe thinks that comparing life to a ‘play’ betrays an irreligious lack of gravity. Or calling mature piety a ‘habit’: such an external view of things belongs to the Romish monk and his shameful garments of false humility! I exaggerate.)

Incidentally, when I watched Joan of Arc, it struck me that St Joan’s ‘voices’ identified themselves as St Catherine (of Alexandria) and St Margaret. These virgin-martyrs from the late dawn of Christianity belonged to the Fourteen Holy Helpers popular in the Middle Ages. There is a certain fittingness to these two: St Margaret was put on trial and was miraculously saved from death by fire, whereas St Catherine was called to dispute with fifty learned pagans, who could not outwit her. Or so the legends go. For the lives and indeed the very existence of these saints is obstinately doubted in these soul-corroding times.

It is likely that the hagiographers have sought to illumine the true identity of these virgins by painting a halo of miracles around them. Sorting out truth from, let us say, embellishment is a hopeless task. Can one say, then, that St Catherine or St Margaret (or St Christopher, for that matter) existed, if their entire ‘lives’ (in the biographical sense) are doubtful? What do we remember, then – a lifeless name? But she whom the West calls Margaret is known in the East as Marina.

I expect a report from the CDF (any day now, surely!) on whether the infallibility of the ordinary Magisterium extends to unofficial canonisations. For now, I remain sturdily convinced that all the dubious saints existed and had a true identity, known to God alone (and who of us hasn’t?). Certainly St Catherine and St Margaret; the argumentum ad Ioannam proves that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Happy All Saints’ Day!

The Father's Rod

Written on reading The Beginning and the End by G.M. Hopkins, particularly the last lines:

Of a bygone age

Ah! well more than a hundred years past might
that poet Gerard Manley Hopkins write
about a boy who, poring over verse,
finds his enjoyment soured, his pleasure worse;
his was an age in which good discipline
showed children’s minds a world to wonder in:
the gentle drawing of the shepherd’s crook
led hungry souls to pasture in the book.
Now in this age of trickery of lights,
endless pursuits, deaths, loves, powers, turns, and flights,
the Father’s rod unblossoming lies between
the dead twigs of our youth before the screen.
The words that stood as beacons, stirred our blood,
drift now like useless flotsam in a flood;
writs of the passions of an ordered age
have come untexted. Even on this page
I made my own irrelevance still worse
using an eighteenth-century mode of verse.
Where is the able poet who will write
in present words a hundred years’ past might?

Fantasy

By the time I turned 16, I was suffering from a perplexed conscience in regard to Harry Potter. My literary palate was quite accommodated to this phantastic brew, and my heart was mixed in it, but the arguments of certain cautious Christians strongly urged discarding the potion and sifting my soul out of it.

They made some plausible arguments and appealed to some credible authorities. They also wrenched biblical prooftexts from their chapters to support their ascetic version of Christian aesthetic education, such as ‘The LORD saw … that every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil continually’. This was my first practical lesson in Hermeneutics 101 (the theological equivalent of Defence Against the Dark Arts).

The years accomplished what my youthful self shuddered to consider. My taste has been modified, my passions less ready to drown themselves in fictional cauldrons. The question whether Harry corrupts the youth has therefore lost much of its urgency, yet it retains a passing interest.

Recently I came across a Dutch blogger, Anton de Wit, who argued that Rowling should be classed with Tolkien and Lewis, in a different category from the boring Gnostic fantasies that more frequently inundate our television screens. By contrast, the accomplished novelist Michael O’Brien sees Harry Potter as Gnostic, an agent in the ongoing paganisation of culture. Since they are both Catholic, adduce reasonable arguments, and have a healthy appreciation for the potential of imaginative literature, it may be worthwhile to summarize their arguments. Weigh, and weigh in if you please, carissime lector.

Anton de Wit offers three criteria for distinguishing between good and ‘Gnostic’ fantasy – Gnosticism being ‘something that looks like a healthy spiritual attitude but isn’t’.

Firstly, Gnostic fantasy is characterized by a strict separation of good and evil; good is the intrinsic and exclusive property of the ‘good guys’, while evil is what the ‘bad guys’ do. Good and evil are thus determined more by the group to which one belongs than by the choices one makes. In good fantasy, evil does not simply exist as an opposing force; it has a history, and its root is in the good which it rejected.

Secondly, Gnostic fantasy is characterized by a spiritual elite of the initiate, those ‘in the know’. The doctrines of the Christian faith, though not accepted by all, are still publicly preached and universally accessible. Gnosticism, on the other hand, works with conspiracies, ‘closed meetings and secret codes’, and believes that higher knowledge is reserved for those few who have been favoured by fate.

Thirdly, Gnostic fantasy is characterized by strict individualism: all knowledge and power is already present within the chosen one, and his friends can only lead him to a place where he can realise and actualise it; they constantly emphasise how helpless they are to contribute anything.

According to De Wit, Harry Potter is different from Gnostic fantasy on all three counts. Firstly, Harry and his friends sometimes make bad choices, but remain good by choosing virtue in decisive and difficult moments; evil characters can repent (Malfoy and perhaps Wormtail spring to mind) and even the greatest villain was once a gifted and agreeable student. (I would like to add that Voldemort ends up murdering the only part of him that still adheres to goodness: the part that inheres in Harry.)

Secondly, while Harry is indeed a member of a select group favoured by fate, wizards are ultimately not significantly different from Muggles; they have few spectacular powers. In many modern fantasy tales, ordinary people are entirely impotent, ‘passive observers of a cosmic game they can neither grasp nor control’. Muggles, on the other hand, have a role to play and are feared.

(While I agree that the power of magic mostly seems to be equivalent to human technology, I think the role of Muggles is overestimated here. Though Sirius Black is apprehended by Muggle police, no Death Eater is harmed by Muggles and they play no important part in the story, unless you count Harry’s bullying family. Guns do not seem to be a match for spells, and the Muggle Prime Minister is even more clueless than the Minister for Magic.)

Thirdly, Harry does not run the race on his own; Ron and Hermione ‘complement him in essential points’, and Dumbledore is an important counsellor to him. Their role is certainly not limited to telling Harry that he needs to find all the answers himself.

Thus far Anton de Wit. Michael O’Brien, as I said, is much more critical of the Harry Potter series (of which Part Four was the latest when the article was written). His article is not only a discussion of the ‘Potter phenomenon’, but also a more general reflection on the loss of discernment in our culture due to the constant stimuli with which we are bombarded. He points out (rightly, I think) the passive state in which television has left both our rational and our imaginative faculties: we find it increasingly difficult to attend to anything, whether it be an argument or an artwork. This makes us vulnerable to manipulation.

He then discusses the argument that Harry Potter promotes reading. He concedes the fact, but finds it inadequate, because a book is not always better than a movie. Much fantasy, he says, reads like a movie: overwhelming (‘fast-paced’ is an oft-used term of praise in reviews) and shallow. ‘In a word, thrills have swept aside wonder.’

Is this the case in Harry Potter? O’Brien does not say so explicitly. In fact he almost defends the opposite, by detailing the truly imaginative charms of the wizarding world. What he does find objectionable is the mixture of these delights with repulsive things: vomiting slugs, ghosts in toilets, habitual rudeness between students, and so on. These are arguably more prevalent in Rowling’s work than in Lewis’s or Tolkien’s. But let us stick to the points we’ve used so far and try to reconstruct O’Brien’s answers to De Wit.

Firstly, good is indeed presented as stronger than evil, and repentance is possible; nonetheless, there is no clear standard of good and evil. The Harry Potter series is marked by the philosophy that the end justifies the means. Harry blackmails his uncle, lies, takes revenge on enemies, and is disobedient, for which disobedience he is rewarded by the authorities. (I could add Dumbledore’s willing Snape to murder him: an intrinsically evil act, even in his illness.) Moreover, Rowling herself sneers at the physical ugliness of the ‘bad guys’ who torment Harry.

We might argue that these things happen in real life, after all. But the point is precisely that they shouldn’t happen in real life, and that literature should make this clear. A book in which injustice is rewarded with the sympathy of the author – in other words: a book in which some of Harry’s bad choices are presented as good – does not teach the difference between good and evil. It seems, after all, that the ‘good guys’ are ‘those who agree with what Harry does’, which would invalidate De Wit’s first point.

Secondly, Harry is indeed part of a ‘gnostic cabal’, which may not be as extreme in its powers as some groups portrayed in other fantasy works, but nevertheless separates itself from society in the pursuit of power and esoteric knowledge. (They erase the memories of ordinary people who happen to stumble upon the magical world – hardly respectful of their integrity! I would say that one of the most terrible scenes in the seventh movie shows Hermione taking the decision to erase herself entirely from her parents’ lives.)

Yes, it is power, not wisdom, that is sought for in Rowling’s magic: power over oneself, over the environment, sometimes even over other people. It is upsetting that ‘supernatural powers are redefined as human faculties’; magic, which in the real world always involves contact with unclean spirits, is portrayed as a harmless gift which it is good to train. The Catechism says that magic or sorcery, the attempt ‘to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others’, is diametrically opposed to the virtue of religion.

Of course, as mentioned, magic has been redefined as ‘natural power’, like electricity or other forces we use without full understanding. The question remains whether the books are not likely to excite a desire for esoteric power in children. Magic is portrayed otherwise in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s works, where it is either sparingly wielded by divine or angelic beings (Aslan, Gandalf) to protect others’ freedom, or it is manipulative and destructive. (Lucy’s magic on the Dufflepuds is not mentioned; still that chapter also chastens our desire for magical power and knowledge.)

In the last analysis, Rowling’s story is Gnostic where Tolkien’s isn’t. ‘Harry is the reverse image of Frodo. Rowling portrays his victory over evil as the fruit of esoteric knowledge and power. This is Gnosticism. Tolkien portrays Frodo’s victory over evil as the fruit of humility, obedience and courage in a state of radical suffering. This is Christianity.’ (To which I would like to add that Tolkien really does not portray Frodo’s victory, only his defeat and salvation through mercy!)

Thirdly, while Harry is not a lone ranger, he does not consider himself bound by any external law. All rules may be broken, as long as one’s own values do not suffer; this means that obedience is not one of Harry’s values. (St. Augustine called obedience ‘the mother of all the virtues’.) Dumbledore seems to approve of Harry’s trespassing tendencies; rule-enforcers are usually dubious characters. The young reader can only conclude that he himself is most capable of distinguishing between good and evil in any concrete situation, ‘guided only by the occasional intervention of a Dumbledore or some similar guru figure’, and that the law needs to be treated with a certain degree of contempt.

(In Rowling’s defence, traditional moral theology does allow law-breaking in exceptional circumstances for which the lawgiver did not intend the law. Also, some laws are not binding in conscience and may be broken, as long as one is willing to accept the punishment when caught. Yet it seems irresponsible to acquaint children too soon with these niceties of casuistry; besides, they are bound by the commandment to honour their parents, which also extends to those in loco parentis, such as teachers.)

In short, O’Brien would be in general agreement with De Wit on what constitutes a Gnostic and unhealthy fantasy, but disagree about the application to Harry Potter. I think that his arguments at least merit consideration, that there is a real danger of youths being confirmed in an anti-authoritarian attitude (at best) or sliding into occult activity and demonic oppression (at worst), and that O’Brien has a point when he says that our cultural discernment is damaged by our frequent exposure to violence, sexual promiscuity and inverted symbolism.

(If someone would have told me five years ago that I would write this article, I would have laughed in his face!)

Year of Faith

Today the Year of Faith has started, as announced in His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei. I went to the Basilica of St. Lidwina in Schiedam, where the Bishop of Rotterdam celebrated Mass with many of his priests. Afterwards they rang the bells for quite some time. It was a beautiful experience.
 
May this Year be a source of grace to the Church and all the world. Faith is a gift from God, and we cannot increase it by our own efforts, although we can and should do everything in our power to dispose ourselves to receive the gift. This Year offers a wonderful opportunity. The hymn chosen as its theme implores the Lord: Adauge nobis fidem, ‘Increase our faith’. I found one version here; I haven’t been able to find a Latin or English version yet.
 
As Porta Fidei says:
 
The “door of faith”  is always open for us, ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering entry into his Church. It is possible to cross that threshold when the word of God is proclaimed and the heart allows itself to be shaped by transforming grace. To enter through that door is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime.