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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31037 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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A poster here recommended a book to us all called “Introduction to Christianity”, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI) a few weeks ago. I recently got a copy of it.

I wanted to share with you all the first few paragraphs from the book, because I found them very interesting:

Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought (whether by vocation or by convention) soon comes to sense the alien -and alienating- nature of such an enterprise. He will probably soon have the feeling that his position is only too well summed up in Kierkegaard's famous story of the clown and the burning village, an allegory taken up again recently by Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City. According to this story, a traveling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighboring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help to put the fire out. But the villagers took the clown's shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried.

The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there really was a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly--until finally the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground.

I’m sure we’ve all felt like that clown at some point or another. Especially with regards to ideas like “just kids on college campuses”.

Here’s a quote, this one from Saint Anthony The Great, one of The Desert Fathers (Early Christian precursors to Christian monks who lived in Egypt in about 300AD).

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

Anyway I think the relevance to the culture war is obvious here, and could be taken any of many directions. I just read this today and wanted to share. To pull on one culture war thread (perhaps one of the oldest culture war) it is profoundly depressing to me that these parts of our history, especially the history of The Catholic Church, seem to be suppressed or at the very least ignore in modern western society.

Those quotes say nothing more than “I’m right but people won’t listen to me.” Just because something is dressed up as “The Parable of the X and the Y” or is quoting someone from 2000 years ago doesn’t really make it fundamentally different from just leaving it at “I’m right you’re wrong”

You are right about the second quote but wrong about the first one. Back then (Introduction to Christianity was published in 68) Ratzinger was a reformer: he associated with the nouvelle theologie and was one of the reformist peritus of Vatican II.

What he's saying here is that the catholic church should abandon neo-scholastic theology and all the other weird medieval trappings it accumulated throughout the century and both go back to the basics as well as reconstruct on modern philosophical foundations, because if it didn't do that it would never be appealing to modern intellectuals. This stuff was borderline heretical (probably still is, who can say) and allegedly he was even investigated by the holy office in the 50s (although I've never been able to locate a reputable source for this claim, nor any details about the investigation).

Eventually he became far more conservative, his former associate Kung went off the reservation (arianist, denied papal infallibility, promoted euthanasia) and started hating him. Later on he also became cardinal prefect of doctrina fidei (formerly holy office, formerly inqusition) where, thanks to his conservative positions, he was (informally) known as the german shepherd. Fun fact, he held this post for longer than almost anyone else, you have to go back to the 1700s to find someone that was prefect for longer.

His general ideas about theology and intellectuals didn't fundamentally change, even after he became pope (although they became more moderate): he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think. If anything Bergoglio's approach, to appeal to... "common people" has worked better, even in europe.

Take this with a grain of salt, I'm an atheist and I think it's all nonsense.

he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think.

Well, I don't think it was a kind of...business strategic decision optimizing for growth. I'm sure he hoped he would influence people to come back to the pews, but I think he thought and wrote this way because he believed that man is meant to search for the truth and must attempt to articulate to himself real, satisfying answers to his deepest questions. This is probably part of why he struggled with the job, because he was always more inclined toward theology than administration.

I'd also say that the crafting of an intellectual edifice is a lifetime of work that can only be judged from a generational, rather than immediate, perspective. When Socrates died it probably looked like he was a failure (from an external perspective - of course he succeeded in living how he thought was right), but his way of thinking about man and the soul (via its modulation in Plato and Aristotle and combination with Christian ideas) ended up ruling the Western world for a long time.

As a Catholic I hope that the slow decline of the west we are witnessing will lead to curiosity and interest in the questions that Ratzinger considered central to man's life and destiny but that modern society tends to obscure or deny. I hope it will also lead to fruitful engagement with the lifetime of work that he produced in attempting to answer those questions for himself. But even if it doesn't have any outsized downstream impact, it was worth doing anyway.

Francis’s approach isn’t working better, though. He hasn’t brought the masses back to church.

I mean to be fair that’s a hard problem to solve. But it does appear that Benedict XVI did notably better at appealing to people who are already practicing catholics, based purely on seminary enrollments(which are a reasonable proxy for engagement among young practicing Catholics). That was Benedict’s entire goal; the main thrust was to revitalize practicing catholics that were seen as lukewarm.

It’s not 100% clear what the main thrust of pope Francis’s pontificate is. But measured by what Benedict XVI was attempting to do, it’s been a dismal failure. He also hasn’t brought lots of people into practicing Catholicism that weren’t previously, which was the other obvious goal.

Thanks, I am also an atheist, but I found this a really useful bit of information.

My inclination is to think that he is right that the Catholic Church could win over some intellectuals if it wasn't so neo-scholastic. For example, I know one prominent philosopher who converted to Catholicism, and neo-scholasticism was the biggest single stumbling block. And they're Aristotelian about many things! If it's a problem for an Aristotelian, it's going to be even more of a problem for philosophers who are receptive to some sort of religious belief but who generally have deflationary or otherwise non-scholastic views on many metaphysical issues.

A neo-scholastic might argue that being a neo-scholastic makes it easier to e.g. be convinced by Aquinas's arguments and that these are the quickest way to Christianity for a smart person, but that's making the Perfect into the enemy of the Good. As I recall, my friend was mostly convinced by (a) a best explanation argument for God as the Creator, (b) a best explanation argument for Jesus as divine, and (c) a benevolent God as the best explanation of why there are moral truths. Then he reasoned to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as the best unifying theory of (a) to (c), and converted, having been an atheist and before that a Protestant.

I think the problem with abandoning neo-scholasticism is that aquinas is a doctor of the church and moving away from it was condemned as heretical by aeterni patris. Also scholastic concepts are used to explain both the trinity as well as transubstantiation. They might be stuck with it.

My inclination is to think that he is right that the Catholic Church could win over some intellectuals if it wasn't so neo-scholastic. For example, I know one prominent philosopher who converted to Catholicism, and neo-scholasticism was the biggest single stumbling block.

Meanwhile, for comparison, 35,000 people convert to Pentecostal Christianity every day.

Yes, this branch of Christianity with zero intellectual appeal is "the fastest growing movement in the history of religion", it grew, in little more than one century, from one small decrepit warehouse to about 1/4 of all Christians worldwide.

Maybe less intellectualizing and more speaking in tongues is the way to success?

There are lots of better ways to succeed if by succeed you just mean grow. But if by succeed you mean really satisfy man’s need to understand the world, his place in it, and his purpose and destiny, putting a primacy on the search for the truth is the only way to do it. If that means getting fewer converts than you could by being a less substantive philosophy, so be it.

(I mean, that’s the enterprise we are trying to be in. You (the reader) may or may not think we do that particularly well, but that’s the point of all of this, not just converting people to…something or other.)

I didn't mean to suggest that that should be the Catholic Church's focus!

In answer to your question, unironically "yes". If the CC had gone down the Malachi Martin route when the Exorcist was still in theatres and played up exorcisms, who knows how many they would have won over?

As it happens, I know a very Social Gospel-style Protestant minister. The one time they ever were invited into the nastiest ghetto in their local area by a family was to perform an exorcism in a "haunted" apartment. The minister didn't explicitly admit "We don't do exorcisms in my denomination," but instead provided a blessing for the apartment, which made the family extremely happy and apparently was enough to banish the ghosts.

The minister also told me that this was the first (but not last) time that they entered an apartment with no furniture - the family was penniless due to drug abuse, and they'd sold (or never bought) all the furniture. They just had sleeping bags, old matresses, and dirty pillows. It genuinely had a "haunted" feel...

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