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Scriptural Inerrancy

In 2005 the Bishops of England and Wales produced a teaching document titled The Gift of Scripture (CTS). If you search for it on the internet you will not find the text but instead you will find it denounced on countless Catholic blogs, in accord with the slanted theological perspective that is prevalent in cyberspace. The Bishops recall the teaching of Vatican II: “the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error teaches that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures” (Dei Verbum 11). Focusing on the phrase, “for the sake of our salvation,” they conclude: “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters. We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision” (The Gift of Scripture, no. 14).

Fundamentalism, they declare, “disregards the diversity of views and the development of understanding which is found in the Bible and does not allow for the presence of ‘imperfect and time-conditioned elements’ [imperfecta et temporaria] (Dei Verbum, 15) within Scripture.” It “actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide,” because it gives “insufficient consideration of the place of a given text within a developing tradition” and it “will often take a simplistic view of literary genre, as when narrative texts which are of a more complex nature are treated as historical” (The Gift of Scripture, no. 19).

Conservative Catholics, firmly entrenched in what the Bishops would see as a fundamentalist position, have a ready riposte to this. They point out that the footnotes of Dei Verbum cite Leo XIII’s encyclical of 1893, Providentissimus Deus, which has Vatican I behind it, and which upholds scriptural inerrancy in a most stringent form. Vatican II, they add, invoking some obiter dicta of Cardinal Ratzinger, was a merely pastoral council, forswearing infallibility, and the 1994 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church”, which the bishops refer to, has no magisterial authority, since the PBC has not been part of the Magisterium since the 1960s.

Leo XIII did speak out against extreme fundamentalism when he said that “the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately, the Holy Ghost ‘Who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation’ (Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. II, 9, 20). Hence they did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science” (#18).

However, with Vatican II, Leo tightly connects inspiration with divine inerrancy, giving less attention to the autonomy of the human authors and their literary genres than has become common in the Church since Divino afflante Spiritu (1943): “But it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture [as J. H. Newmand had proposed], or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it – this system cannot be tolerated… Inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true… Because the Holy Ghost employed men as His instruments, we cannot therefore say that it was these inspired instruments who, perchance, have fallen into error, and not the primary author. For, by supernatural power, He so moved and impelled them to writer… that the things which He ordered, and those only, they, first, rightly understood, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in apt words and with infallible truth. Otherwise, it could not be said that He was the Author of the entire Scripture” (#20).

Vatican II chose not to challenge this status quo position, since reflection on inspiration and inerrancy had no sufficiently ripened among theologians to provide the basis for any new doctrinal clarification. However, in setting Scripture in the light of new theologies of revelation and of the Word of God, in accepting more fully the autonomy of the human authors and their literary conventions, in calling for a more central position for Scripture in theology and in the life of the Church, and above all in facilitating the explosion of Catholic scriptural studies in the 1960s and the opening up of Scripture in the lectionary of the new liturgy, Vatican II did bring about a revolution in the Catholic relationship to Scripture. Here as so often it is not the rather drab text of Dei Verbum, less eloquent than Leo XIII, but the spirit behind the text, or the event, process or trajectory to which the text bears witness, that is the chief significance of the Council. It is to be hoped that the forthcoming Roman Synod on “The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church” will launch the Church further along this trajectory rather than attempt to curb and blunt the impact of Vatican II.

Like Vatican II, the English Bishops shy away from the possibility of admitting actual historical or scientific errors in Scripture, even though they clear the ground for seeing such errors as immaterial, since the truth Scripture is concerned with is of the order of salvation. To expect an ancient text or library of texts to be free of historical or scientific error is a very unrealistic expectation, indeed it savors of magical thinking. The prevalence of a broad, communal theory of biblical inspiration over the model of the Holy Spirit dictating every word entails a greater readiness to accept the imperfections and culture-conditioned blind spots of the biblical writers.

The Problem of Divinely Sanctioned Violence

A much more difficult question is whether it is possible to admit that the texts of Scripture contain moral and religious error. It is perhaps only today that the sanctification of violence in certain corners of Scripture has become truly scandalous to us, though it troubled individuals in the past and was used for polemical purposes by Enlightenment writers. For reasons that are obvious, including the extermination practices of the last century, the bloodthirsty aspect of certain scriptural texts, Jewish, Christian and Islamic, has become a neuralgic point in current religious reflection.

The herem or ban was a common institution of antiquity and is clearly blessed and commanded by God in Scripture. These texts reflect a real-life violent world. John J. Collins cites a ninth century parallel, the Moabite stone : “And Chemosh said to me, ‘Go, take Nebo from Israel. So I went by night and fought against it from break of dawn until noon, taking it and slaying all, seven thousand men, boys, women, girls, and maidservants, for I had devoted them to destruction for (the god) Ashtar-Chemosh’ (I, 13)”. Biblical texts as late as the seventh century BCE glorify the herem, and its spirit lives on in much later texts. Wars of extermination were as intrinsic to the religion, polity, law, culture and spirituality of ancient Israel as crusades and inquisitions were to those of the Catholic Church for centuries. The latter also are phenomena that we used to gloss over, despite the efforts of Protestant and Enlightenment critics to rub our nose in them; now we feel a duty to gaze on what John Kent calls ‘the unacceptable face’ of church history and draw what lessons we can from it. The “purification of memory” John Paul II eloquently called for must be based on facing the facts in all their ugliness, not in administering a coat of whitewash.

The Bible is interpreted by the Church today as a charter of respect for life, in the spirit of Albert Schweitzer, and this is indeed fundamentally true to the sense of Scripture. Today when we teach “the Bible as literature” we seek to bring out the brighter colors of the texts, ignoring such “twilight zones” as the closing chapters of the Book of Judges, for example. The basic thrust of Scripture respects life as holy. Yet though ancient Israel rejoiced in the gift of life, they often regarded rival tribes as encroachers to be eliminated and had little if any thought of celebrating a communion of life with them.

Even though the enlightened conscience of humanity today cannot be squared with a God who commands the slaughter of women and children, and the abduction of virgins as war booty (Numbers 31), these tales hold a morbid fascination for us. Their sublime, sacral style, the sanctification of violence they enact, comes from a primitive stratum of human history, like voices from an exotic other planet. This aura has led biblical inerrantists to glorify the genocidal activities, blaming their victims. Tackle them, say, on the bashing of innocent babies’ heads against the stones (Ps. 137), and they will reply: ‘First, who say they were innocent? Second, can you deny that God appoints humans as agents of his vengeance? Third, who are you, a corrupt sinner, to criticize the Word of God?’ That dogmatic rhetoric may be old-fashioned, but it is intoxicating, and can be reactivated at any time. The tortured efforts of fundamentalists to justify divinely ordained biblical violence shows how dangerous these ancient texts still remain, at least to the degree that they dull the intellectual and moral integrity of such apologists and the numerous believers they represent.

Such attitudes translate into deeds. Oliver Cromwell declared that “there are great occasions in which some men are called to great services in the doing of which they are excused from the common rule of morality”. This is an example of what Karen Armstrong calls antinomian fundamentalism. The genocide of Indians in America was based on similar biblical imagination. The obsession with inerrancy in America today goes hand in hand with a readiness to see even the most ill-thought-out and illegal military aggressions as somehow commanded by God. The inerrancy of Scripture translates into my inerrancy and my country’s inerrancy, and inspiration, as it reduces the word of God to a magic oracle, letting it lead them into one catastrophic misadventure after another.

Church Response

At present the most the Church seems prepared to concede is that there is a growth or development in moral and religious insight in the biblical books. In the 1994 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on “The Interpretation of Scripture in the Church”, we read:

The Bible reflects a considerable moral development, which finds its completion in the New Testament. It is not sufficient therefore that the Old Testament should indicate a certain moral position (e.g. the practice of slavery or of divorce, or that of extermination in the case of war) for this position to continue to have validity. One has to undertake a process of discernment. This will review the issue in the light of the progress in moral understanding and sensitivity that has occurred over the years. The writings of the Old Testament contain certain “imperfect and provisional” elements (Dei Verbum, 15), which the divine pedagogy could not eliminate right away.

This remains evasive, for it suggests that extermination of civilian populations is not intrinsically evil but had validity under the circumstances of pentateuchal times. Concern to safeguard scriptural inerrancy seems here to be opening the doors wide to moral relativism. Looking benignly on the development of humanity, one might argue that ancient wars were actually ennobled by being fought as holy wars. One might claim that Numbers 31 or 1 Samuel 15 are not genocidal texts, since they are not motivated by race-hatred but by the attitude of radical obedience that devotes the enemy as a sacrifice unto the Lord. Yet it seems impossible to iron out all moral and religious error from these texts. The question of moral judgement is forced on us again and again, and there is a sense that to fudge it out of respect for the archaic but inerrant texts is to have lost the legitimate freedom of Christians in their handling of Scripture. We must renounce exaggerated claims of inerrancy not only for reasons of honesty, but because they are themselves forms of violence. They make Scripture an intrinsically violent document.

Pious hermeneutical principles, such as Luke Johnson’s claim that “God’s wisdom is somehow seeking to be communicated even through the impossibilities of the literal sense” and that we must wrestle with apparently difficult texts instead of condemning them “until they yielded a meaning ‘worthy of God’” prevent one from reading the texts with full sensitivity to their literary texture. They prescribe in advance that the texts must have an edifying sense. In contrast, John J. Collins writes: “The power of the Bible is largely that it gives an unvarnished picture of human nature and of the dynamics of history, and also of religion and the things that people do in its name”.

One could say that the power of the Bible is primarily that it corrects these evils, offering a medicine-chest for the religious pathologies of humanity (as Gregory Baum once remarked). But the evils do show themselves clearly, and are not entirely controlled, analyzed and overcome by Scripture itself, even at the last redactional level, though perhaps they are if we take into account at every step the total vision of the entire canon. If the Bible tells us something about the divine it tells us much about the human, and in the end the divine is best revealed in the process of humanization that the Bible attests. The Bible corrects itself but it is also corrected by the wider revelation of the divine that is coterminous with the spiritual history of humankind. If it is cut off from that background even the New Testament becomes a sectarian and violent text.

Scripture is always correcting itself. An obvious way it does this is when later redactors take some old text and modify it or join it with other texts in such a way as to make it more acceptable as an expression of Israel’s faith. These redactional efforts to impose an edifying reading offer a clue on which exegetes may build. The old allegorical method of finding an edifying spiritual sense – taking Samson as a type of Christ, for example – has lost authority. But attention to the theological vision of the Book of Judges as a whole may discover an initial theological reaction against the Samson lore in its primitive original form, and reference to the wider canon may discern here a pointer to values worked out more fully further along the Bible’s trajectory of moral reflection.

That is the general direction of the biblical trajectory, but in practice elements of the older projections persist unchanged even in such summit documents as the Gospel of John, with its insidious polemic against “the Jews”. Human nature shows its violent side even as it confides itself to the mercy of Christ, and the God it projects remains a barbaric killer or torturer. In defusing the notion of Christ’s sacrifice of the idea than an angry God is calling for blood we might draw on the softer soteriology of Luke, for whom the death of Christ has a saving impact due to the remorse and conversion it inspires rather than as a blood-price. Even if we find the best corrections of Scripture within Scripture itself, we can learn much from our modern experience as well. Psychoanalysis, for example, will have much to teach us about the human dynamics of scriptural violence, and about how to draw on the resources of Scripture in a discerning, critical fashion.

Taking the Enlightenment on board

This more nuanced attitude to inerrancy – which distances the Church from fundamentalist literalism – allows us to take on board the genuine insights of the Enlightenment critique of religious scriptures, while allowing the scriptural texts to speak to us anew with power. The trajectory of Scripture encourages us not to put our faith in authorities but to trust the instinctive reaction of reason and conscience.　There is nothing to apologize for if we find biblical language barbaric and intolerable. We need to discover this freedom of discernment, within a general respect for the overall message of Scripture.

Scholarly hermeneutics without a faith-investment will seek to grasp the historical and literary texture of the scriptural writings in all its richness. It will reap the anthropological insights these texts contain just as it draws out the anthropological vision of Greek classics. When it comes to ethical judgment, the secular scholar will argue freely with the scriptural text, assessing its codes without respect for their hallowed status in still living traditions. Differentiation between what is viable and what is unacceptable in scriptural ethics will emerge in this process, and the Bible will become a repertoire both of classical ethical mistakes, or primitive bypaths in the genealogy of morals, on the one hand, and of seminal ethical breakthroughs of the Axial Age on the other. This critical reappropriation of sacred scriptures as part of the heritage of secular humanity provides a broad basis to which the specifically religious retrieval of this heritage would do well to attend. This naturalistic outlook on Scripture has entered theology through the critical-historical study of biblical texts, which recovers their human, historical texture, reconstructing the real motivations of the authors in their contexts.

For the religious reader, and particularly for the community of faith that accepts the Scriptures as authoritative, the secular critique of Scripture can be taken up as a moment within the immanent critique of Scripture itself. The Christian Church has always enjoyed freedom over against Scripture, seeing it as a book to be used. Revelation is not handed to one on a plate; it is an event that occurs when one reads Scripture in community and in dialogue with the “signs of the times.” The fullest form of critical overcoming and reappropriation occurs when an engaged faith-community uses the text as an occasion of potential revelation, or enlightenment for present action. The sacredness of Scripture lies then primarily in its inexhausted capacity to produce effects of liberation and enlightenment in the present. Christians judge the Bible not only from the standpoint of the modern conscience, but also under the impulsion of the Holy Spirit. The real, spiritual authority of Scripture – its capacity to elicit faith and inspire hope – emerges when they wrestle with it in prayer and loving debate. They are moved to correct, in charity, Paul’s occasional sexist, homophobic or anti-Semitic remarks, but they do so in order to free the core teachings of the Apostle and make them audible today. They work on biblical traditions, cleansing them of their toxins, in order to retrieve them as living traditions for today.

Inerrancy as an Ideal

We could re-interpret inerrancy as a regulative ideal. It means that “the Bible cannot be wrong”, that is, it urges us to use the Bible in an “inspired” way, so that we draw from it only healing truth.

Israel was a people who opened themselves to God, came before the Holy One and experienced their own wretchedness and sin under his gaze. But as they persisted in their quest for, and orientation, to the divine they found also a God who was attested in respect for the life and rights of one’s neighbor, a God of justice. Biblical holiness is more a matter of justice than of spirituality or mysticism. The phrase “I, the Lord, am holy” is appended to commandments concerning social justice (Lev. 19). Fundamentally, biblical justice is of the humane, restorative sort that reconciles the offended party. “An eye for an eye” is an effort to compensate the injured party, not to vindictively and vengefully punish the culprit. Further acquaintance with the God of justice revealed that he was also a God of mercy and forgiveness. A culture of justice could not come to fruition without becoming a culture of mercy and forgiveness as well, something we still need to learn. In the Christian dispensation we bring our sin to Christ and receive in exchange his righteousness, and in this more intimate exchange of human and divine all the rougher earlier projections of a fearful God of vengeance are allegorized or integrated as lower stages or, with Luther, as an “alien work” of God, preparing his “proper work” of forgiveness and redemption.

Inerrancy as a regulative ideal means that “the Bible cannot be wrong”, that is, it urges us to use the Bible in an “inspired” way, so that we draw from it only healing truth, while leaving in obscurity, or quarantining, texts that could create attitudes incompatible with the Bible as the Church now interprets it. The Bible stands over against the Church and judges it, to be sure, but only insofar as it can be actualized as a living word. Scripture founds the Church and embraces it; yet it is the Church that established the Canon of Scripture and it is the present community of faithful who embrace Scripture with their understanding and bring forth its sense for today. To take dusty passages from little-known corners of Scripture, which have never lived and breathed in the Church’s worship, and to jump them on people as the Word of God is be a bizarre parody of effective scriptural authority, which depends on the Bible being voiced in a church context of spiritual discernment. Today we can see Scripture in historical and interreligious perspective with a clarity of vision that has no precedent. As we open ourselves to the challenge of Scripture we need not be afraid to challenge it in return. “Wrestling with difficult texts” is not a matter of apologetical acrobatics, but of frank pitting of our misgivings against what seems brutal in the old texts. The process of this ongoing learning from the Holy Spirit, through wise use of the hallowed texts as a skillful means, is an indefectible one, in which we are held in the truth, despite the many errant and fallible sidetracks of history.

A talk given at Durham University, April 20. 2008

3. Amorce d'une nosographie

Je voudrais réfléchir sur les pathologies du jugement théologique, en particulier celles qui se montrent les plus virulentes à l'heure présente.

A. En premier lieu, le fondamentalisme rend impossible le sain exercice du jugement théologique car il s’attache aux certitudes dérivées d’une lecture étroite des sources, dans la méconnaissance des contextes et de l’historicité, et dans l’incapacité de participer au processus dynamique du développement de la compréhension. Arrêt inopportun du mouvement de la pensée, il fétichise le texte ou le dogme qu’il choisit comme son « fondement », comme son fundamentum inconcussum. Le fondamentalisme est une attitude moderne – le type de certitude qu’il cherche et post-chrétien, et sa manière de braquer les textes qu’il adopte comme autorités est très moderne aussi. On devrait historiciser les conceptions fondamentalistes de l’autorité, en notant par exemple que « l’expression ‘le magistère’ en son acception actuelle a été introduite par la théologie du XVIIIe siècle mais surtout par les canonistes allemands du sébut du XIXe siècle » (Y. CONGAR, Église et papauté, Cerf, 1994, p. 294). Opposé au fondamentalisme, l’herméneutique prend conscience du caractère imparfait et provisoire de toute structuration historique de la vision religieuse. Elle se trouve ainsi libérée pour des relectures qui discernent le sens vivant que les traditions peuvent retenir aujourd’hui. Elle procède dans l’ouverture de la situation actuelle de l’humanité devant Dieu. Mais cette maladie requiert une thérapie plus profonde, pour surmonter l’accrochement idolâtrique à des faux absolus et pour guérir ou apprendre à vivre avec le manque radical qui pousse à pareil accrochement.

Le fondamentalisme produit le fanatisme. J’en trouve un exemple dans les discours de Jean-Paul II écrits par son « nègre » (hélas, c’est ainsi qu’on dit « ghost writer » en français) Msgr Carlo Caffarra, sur le mal innommable de la contraception. À un congrès de théologiens moraux en 1988 le pape insista que même pour des personnes infectées du sida or qui cherchent à l’empêcher la doctrine morale de l’Église n’admet aucune exception. Msgr Carraffa, son porte-parole pour les affaires du mariage et de la famille insista que si un mari infecté ne pouvait pas maintenir l’abstinence totale il était préférable d’infecter son épouse que d’utiliser un préservatif, « car la préservation des biens spirituels, tel le sacrament du mariage, est à préférer au bien de la vie . (http://www.counterpunch.org/dickinson04042005.html) Autre illustration de fanatisme vatican : le discours délirant sur le Troisième Secret de Fatima. L’Église doit guider la piété mariale dans les sentiers d’une saine vision biblique et ecclésiale ; on a bien réussi cela dans le cas de Lourdes, mais dans le cas de Fatima on trop cédé à la fantaisie et aux obsessions idéologiques.

B. Le sectarisme nuit au jugement théologique en se repliant sur des positions dénominationnelles aux dépens d’une vision qui mettrait l’accent sur ce que toutes les Églises ont en commun et sur l’avenir eschatologique les dépassant toutes vers lequel elles s’acheminent. Opposé au sectarisme, le dialogue accueille l’autre religieux ou non-religieux comme partenaire dont on attend un élargissement de la vision, et sans lequel on est conscient d’un manque, d’un appauvrissement pénible. Toujours prêt à apprendre humblement de l’autre religieux, le dialogue constitue l’élément même d’une saine pensée théologique, fondée sur la reconnaissance d’une révélation du divin à l’échelle de l’histoire humaine dans sa totalité, quelles que soient les prérogatives du judaïsme et du christianisme.

Tous les problèmes théologiques doivent être traités de manière transdénominationnelle. Si on se rend compte que ses références sont toutes aux autorités de sa propre dénomination, on doit admettre que ce n’est pas de la théologie qu’on fait – que la réflexion ne s’est pas encore élevée au niveau de la théologie.

Une réflexion transdénominationnelle a lieu d’habitude quand des chefs religieux se réunissent à l’occasion d’un grave événement, tel les bombes à Londres en 2005. À cette occasion l’Archévêque de Cantorbéry, le Cardinal de Westminster, le Modérateur des Églises Libres, le Grand Rabbin, et le Président du Concile des Mosques & Imams s’unissaient pour dire : « Nous voulons signaler le terrain commun que nous occupons comme chefs dans la foi, et réaffirmer les valeurs que nous soutenons en ce temps de douleur et de peine... Au centre de ce que nous partageons comme gens de foi est la croyance dans l’amour et la compassion de Dieu pour nous. C’est un amour qui nous oblige à chérir notre humanité commune et ne pas la défigurer. Nous trouvons espoir et consolation dans la certitude qu’en cherchant à guérir notre propre condition brisée nous coopérerons avec le dessein de Dieu pour tous ses enfants et pour la famille humaine entière ».

Quelle que soit la valeur de cette déclaration, elle indique l’urgence d’une pratique constante de consultations interreligieuses, afin d’être prêts à coordonner une réponse dans le sens de la paix et de la réconciliation dans des situations tendues. Une théologie transdénominationnelle identifierait les croyances partagées par tous les chrétiens et que l’on pourrait présenter comme l’apport principal des chrétiens au dialogue interreligieux. On objectera que pareille théologie ne serait que le dénominateur commun minimal, de l’unitarisme, ou une théologie protestante libérale très diluée. Mais comme dans le cas de l’éthique mondiale de Hans Küng, n’est-il pas plus important d’établir des universels qui unissent que de défendre les points de doctrine des différentes dénominations ? Enfin, toute théologie valable doit être en tension palpable avec les revendications de la dénomination du théologien, car elle doit travailler à dépasser le sectarisme et laisser naître une sagesse évangélique universelle parmi chrétiens et persuasive pour le monde. Ne nous moquons pas des libéraux qui réduisent la foi à des slogans – « la fraternité de l’homme et la paternité de Dieu » (Harnack) – car un idéal sur lequel toutes les personnes de bonne volonté peuvent se réunir vaut mieux qu’une virtuosité de l’orthodoxie. On peut estime celle-ci, mais il faut travaille à élargir le champ de l’influence de celui-là.

C. Le scolasticisme se préoccupe des questions théoriques en passant à côté de la pensée et de l’expérience du monde contemporain et en n’offrant aucun point d’attache pour l’articulation de la théorie avec la praxis. La plupart des apologistes zélés pour un catholicisme conservateur se contente de répéter et de défendre les dogmes, mais quelques-uns s’ensevelissent dans des châteaux doctrinales, prêts à reprendre toutes les grandes controverses de l’histoire de la théologie. Dans le monde de la philosophie analytique, cette tendance se voit chez certains philosophes de la religion, qui « justifient » Dieu par des raisonnements et en réponse à des problèmes qui n’ont eu de circulation depuis le 14^ème siècle. Opposé au scolasticisme, la recherche du réel remonte en deçà des constructions spéculatives vers le coeur de l’Évangile, tel que les sources en témoignent et tel qu’il se manifeste dans le témoignage chrétien contemporain. Cette remontée pourrait utiliser les méthode de la bonne scolastique, qui engage avec les problèmes actuels sans rechercher des énigmes archaïques ou artificielles. Mais la raison elle-même, dira-t-on, nous impose ces énigmes – telle celle de concilier l’omniscience divine et la liberté humaine. Se laisser prendre ainsi dans une logique archaïque, au lieu de chercher par la logique de désamorcer les termes mêmes du problème, en ouvrant des perspectives historiques et religieuses plus larges, est au fond irrationnel.

Se contenter de discuter des questions théologiques comme si nous vivions encore à l’époque de saint Thomas ou même de Hegel n’est pas non plus un geste prophétique, une courageuse résistance au relativisme postmoderne. C’est au contraire un arrêt de la pensée, et donc aussi de la conscience prophétique; c’est révéler une incapacité pour la réflexion intégrale. Une théologie qui se construit sur la seule base des catégories anciennes, celles de la patristique grecque, du thomisme ou de l’idéalisme allemand, n’est pas une théologie réelle mais tout au plus un essai de reconstruction historique, aussi déconnectée du réel que le serait un ouvrage littéraire composé dans le style de ces époques. Même une théologie qui dépend étroitement du langage biblique risque de n’être qu’un pastiche. On peut se construire une forteresse d’où toute contamination moderne est bannie – comme l’Église ancienne aussi peut-être s’est bâti un monde de représentations chrétiennes, en refusant de prendre trop au sérieux les questions et les valeurs de l’environnement païen. Pareille stratégie peut être efficace, mais elle repose sur une forclusion violente. Sa part d’ombre, même dans sa version ancienne chez les Pères, mérite une interrogation vigilante.

D. Le bureaucratisme – à distinguer d’une bureaucratie efficace et honorable – cherche à gérer les choses de la foi et veille sur elles en se laissant obséder par un besoin de contrôle et d’ordre au point de se couper de la foi vivante et donc de toute possibilité d’adresser une bonne nouvelle positive à l’humanité. Opposé au bureaucratisme, l’engagement dialectique rapporte chaque donnée de foi aux questions du monde qui obligent à la repenser. Il renonce à l’illusion que la capacité de réciter les propositions orthodoxes suffit pour assurer la possession du vrai. Ce qu’on appelle une parole vraie est un événement plus riche que la formulation d’une proposition vraie ; celle-ci n’est d’ailleurs pas pleinement vraie, pleinement articulée avec le réel, si elle ne sait pas s’incarner comme parole vraie. Le contrôle propositionnel de la parole a sa légitimité, mais en revanche la parole vivante est le juge de derniêre instance de la pertinence des propositions. Le culte de la seule vérité propositionelle, qui ne la mesure pas à chaque moment à la vérité plus grande de la parole, conduit à étouffer la voix de l’Évangile.

E. L’obsession de l’orthodoxie, enfin, contient en soi les quatre déformations antérieures et leur donne leur forme maximale et exquise, en restaurant la culture inquisitoriale. La grande époque de l’orthodoxie, son siècle d’or, est la période entre Nicée (325) et Chalcédoine (451). Dans ce temps il arrivait régulièrement que la choix entre la vérité et l’erreur, entre la vie et la mort ecclésiales, dépendait d’une formule. Tout en célèbrant les soucis et les accomplissements de cette époque, nous ne pouvons plus souscrire à la glorification des quatre premiers Conciles comme piliers de la vérité à mettre à côté des quatres Évangiles. D’abord la convergence de la pensée chrétienne dans cette époque sur des formules dogmatiques réflète la théorétisation hellénistique du christianisme; cette manière de poser et de traiter les questions appartient à un temps et une culture bien précis. Puis le fruits amers de l’insistance dogmatique dans l’histoire ultérieure nous obligent de revenir avec une conscience plus critique sur la site prestigieux de la formation des dogmes conciliaires. Si l’époque glorieuse de la pensée dogmatique inspire de tels soupçons, les époques moins glorieuses doivent en inspirer des plus profonds.

Si le mot « orthodoxie » retient un sens salutaire, c’est quand on l’entend comme plénitude de la sagesse biblique, comme vision compréhensive et sagement différenciée des diverses dimensions de la vérité chrétienne. Faute de disposer d’une telle vision intégrale et créatrice on a lourdement mis l’accent sur la défense de la saine doctrine contre des dangers de toutes sorte. Aujourd’hui c’est « relativisme » auquel auraient cédé des théologiens suspects, relativisme surtout au sujet du statut de Jésus et de son Église; voir ce que raconte Hans Waldenfels dans Stimmen der Zeit, avril 2008 ( http://www.stimmen-der-zeit.de/StdZ_04_08_Waldenfels_219_231_HA.pdf ). Waldenfels note que dans les cas des Jésuites Dupuis, Haight et Sobrino "il s'agit avant tout de deux développements modernes: l'éveil de la conscience historique et l'expérience existentielle du pluralisme moderne". Les trois théologiens ont répondu mieux que le Vatican à la double tâche de retrouver un rapport dynamique avec les origines de la tradition chrétienne -- rapport façonné non selon une orthodoxie statique mais en reliant orthodoxie et orthopraxie -- et de mettre l'Évangile en dialogue avec les signes du temps, en faisant appel aussi au "troisième magistère" (A. Pieris), celui du Peuple de Dieu.

Loin de contribuer à la vitalité de l’Église, l'obsession de l’ « orthodoxie », privée de contexte vital, a plongé l'Église dans le silence et la paralysie. Dans les rites pénitentiels de 2000 on s’est repenti des excès de certains chrétiens dans leur zèle pour la vérité, en omettant de mettre l’Inquisition elle-même en cause. Il aurait fallu porter un jugement courageux sur cette institution, tellement essentiel à la constitution de l’Église pendant sept siècles. Faute de l’avoir fait, on continue à marcher dans les ces ornières, en encourageant une attitude de méfiance chez les jeunes catholiques, une confusion entre foi et fanatisme, une identification de toute ouverture d’esprit et toute prise de parole avec l’esprit d’hérésie. Pareilles habitudes de pensée ne sortent pas d’un discours circulaire se nourrissant de lui-même, et condamné à se débattre avec des ombres en frustrant l’élan de la foi de toute réalisation émancipatrice.

Opposé à cette obsession, la confiance de la foi évangélique fait redécouvrir les grands horizons bibliques qui font appel à une imagination généreuse avant de se cristalliser en théologoumènes. L’orthodoxie n’est pas en premier lieu une affaire du passé. Elle devient même un poison si elle ne traduit pas la vision d’une Église ouverte à l’avenir et au dialogue avec les diverses voix qui l’interpellent. D’ailleurs, l’orthodoxie est une vertu secondaire, qui reste au service de la vitalité d’une vision de foi. Insister trop sur elle, aux dépens de cette vitalité, c’est tuer une langue vivante par un souci de contrôler à tout moment l’exactitude des règles grammaticales. Si, comme le prétend Schleiermacher, « l’erreur n’existe nulle part en et pour soi, mais toujours seulement en rapport au vrai, et n’est pleinement comprise que quand on a trouvé sa connexion avec la vérité, avec le vrai auquel elle s’attache » (Der christliche Glaube, Berlin, 1999, I, p. 50-1), en la réprimant sans discussion on se ferme un chemin du vrai. Aucune orthodoxie, d’ailleurs, n’est elle-même à l’abri de l’erreur ni en pleine possession du vrai. La santé de nos idées religieuses n’est que relative, et ne se garde que dans la mobilité du dialogue.

Puisque j’écris un journal et non pas un traité, que l’on me permette de faire un application concrète et polémique de ce diagnostic. Si on veut savoir qui souffre des cinq vice théologiques qui paralysent notre jugement, on trouvera une illustration suffisante dans les schémata présentés aux Pères du Concile Vatican II, dont la plupart ont été rejetés (rejet qui selon certains marquent la déviation initiale qui a scellé l’hétérodoxie du Concile!). Il est clair que les bureaucrates romains étaient incapables de s’élever à la hauteur et à la largeur des vues de Jean XXIII. Or n’est-il pas clair aussi que le Saint-Office, aujourd’hui la Congrégation pour la Doctrine de la Foi, n’a que très partiellement accepté les desseins de réforme annoncés par Paul VI à la fin du Concile et que des documents récents comme la Notification contre Jon Sobrino et la déclaration sur la non-ecclésialité des Églises protestantes manquent encore les grandes perspectives conciliaires et témoignent d’un rétrécissement déplorable. Sur le premier de ces documents l’éminent théologien de Tubingue, Peter Hünermann, a émis un jugement sévère et juste, et avec une centaine de théologiens européens a demandé une réforme de la CDF; quant au deuxième document, il a suscité des réactions très vives des Cardinaux Kasper et Lehmann ainsi que de l’Archévêque Zollitsch. 

Allant dans le même sens de la panique au sujet des dogmes et d’un sectarisme sans aucune sensibilité oecuménique, le père Inos Biffi, que chiesa.com salue comme « le savant le plus illustre dans le monde de la théologie médiévale » et « sans l’ombre d’un doute le plus grand théologien italien vivant », a écrit un essai immature sur la transsubstantiation dans l’Osservatore Romano dans lequel il fustige, de façon très inopportune et très contraire à l’esprit de Vatican II, les « hérésies » du protestantisme. On se demande à quoi pense Giovanni Maria Vian, le nouvel éditeur de l’Osservatore. S’il partage pareil manque de vision, je ne vois pas comment il pourra donner à cet organe une meilleure réputation. Biffi ne pense pas au-delà des catégories médiévales (Trente est cité ; aucune référence à Vatican II). La Présence Réelle se pense exclusivement en termes du pain comme chose isolée et non pas dans le contexte dynamique d’un repas qui est tout entier transformé dans communion au Christ, reéllement présent dans le mouvement eschatologique de son Mystère Pascal. Biffi déplore certains « comportements qu’on note pendant la célébration eucharistique, par exemple, quand on reçoit la communion, ou aprés la Messe, dans la manière dont sont traitées les particules consacrées qui restent » et en conclut que l’on manque toute foi dans le Corps et le Sang du Seigneur. Quant aux protestants, ils n’ont ni la Présence Réelle ni le Sacrifice. L’idée que le Christ puisse suppléer chez ses fidèles à tout ce qui pourrait éventuellement manquer dans leur théologie ou dans la forme de leurs rites ne lui vient pas à l’esprit. « Ceci, en tout cas, est la foi catholique, définie à Trente mais toujours crue par l’Église, et dont les Réformateurs se sont séparées, avec le résultat de ne plus posséder ni le sacrement du sacrifice de la Croix, ni la présence ‘vraie, réelle et substantielle’, ni le culte de l’Eucharistie ». Sans doute faut-il réaffirmer des doctrines menacées. Mais si elles le sont, c’est qu’on a perdu la perspective dans laquelle elles ont leur sens originaire et biblique. Si on ne fournit aux affirmations doctrinales que la perspective d’une polémique confessionnelle on ne fait rien pour leur rendre leur crédibilité.

Mais au lieu de nous attarder sur le bruit irritant des polémiques contemporaines, nous devons réfléchir au fait que le danger d’une clôture paralysante menace toute théologie. Même l’herméneutique la plus sophistiquée et la mieux renseignée pourrait n’être qu’un leurre, nous faisons croire que nous pénétrons dans le réel tandis qu’en réalité nous ne faisons que rajuster des idées et des formes verbales. Comment sortir du cocon? Comment remettre le discours théologique en rapport avec les signes du temps, dans l'esprit de Vatican II?

A Comment from Archbishop Weakland

Robert Mickens has dug up a piece that Archbishop Rembert Weakland OSB wrote in 1997 (http://www.americancatholicpress.org/articles6.html). (He warns that the concessions to traditionalists made by John Paul II have set off a kind of civil war in the liturgical sphere. As the recent demonization of Bishop Trautman shows, any bishop who makes sensible criticisms of the Tridentine restoration or of the proposed new bad translations of the liturgy, is instantly branded by the traditionalist hotheads as a "dissident" or a "heretic". Roman authorities such as Archbishop Ranjith seem happy to play the traditionalists’ destructive game. Weakland’s closing quote from John Paul II reminds us what the voice of the papal magisterium might have sounded like if it had cleaved strongly and consistently to the spirit of the Council.)

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“Many of us bishops, acceding to that pastoral judgment of Pope John Paul, have granted permission for Masses, even on a regular basis, following the Tridentine usage. The faithful who attend are grateful. But the liturgical climate in the nation has changed totally. An encouraging signal was sent out to those groups who wanted to reject all or most of the liturgical reforms of Vatican Council II. They have increased their efforts to undermine and reverse the liturgical reforms of that council and especially the implementation approved by Pope Paul VI immediately following the council.

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“Just at the moment when the situation was beginning to settle down and the deeper and more spiritual aspects of the renewal were becoming possible, a whole new battle began, one in which the renewal itself was brought into question or where everyone seemed free to project his or her personal views on how the renewal of the council should have taken place. As well-meaning as that decision to broaden the Tridentine usage was, one cannot emphasize enough how devasting the results have been. Not only was the liturgical renewal of the council called into question; the impression was created that, with sufficient protest, the whole of Vatican Council II could be reversed.

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“Moreover, since the conferences of bishops around the world were involved in the post-Vatican II liturgical implementation, they are now under suspicion; their wisdom and authority are placed under a cloud of mistrust. We have entered a truly “cafeteria” period in Catholicism, in which one can pick and choose from Vatican Council II what one likes and what one dislikes. The disunity that Pope Paul VI sought to avoid has come to pass

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“Seen from this vantage point in the trenches, the decision that caused confusion and harm in the Church was not that made by Pope Paul VI to permit only one Latin rite, but the decision to permit the Tridentine usage to enjoy equal footing with the reformed rite.

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In addition to that decision are all the semiofficial statements that call into question the entire liturgical reform of Vatican II. These statements come from Roman officials and are uttered without contradiction from higher authority. As a result, confusion in the trenches is inevitable.

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“Till hearing otherwise, I make my own the words of Pope John Paul II in the letter sent to all bishops and priests of the world in December 1988, which marked the 25th anniversary of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council:

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“The time has come to renew the spirit which inspired the Church at the moment when the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium was prepared, discussed, voted upon and promulgated and when the first steps were taken to apply it. The seed was sown: it has known the rigors of winter, but the seed has sprouted and become a tree. It is a matter of the organic growth of a tree becoming ever stronger the deeper it sinks its roots into the soil of tradition.”

2. Contre l' "orthodoxie"

Mon essai sur L’art du jugement en théologie doit paraître avant la fin de l’année dans la collection « Cogitatio Fidei » aux Éditions du Cerf – il paraît que cette collection reprenne son souffle, avec plusieurs titres de haute qualité dans le pipeline. Or si là je m’astreins à la sobriété réflexive je voudais ici parler des mêmes choses de manière plus déboutonnée. Le jugement s’exerce dans la conversation et en particulier dans la conversation que nous poursuivons avec nous-mêmes dans notre for intérieur. Une note intime, quelque écho du chuchotement de Montaigne, s’entend chez Descartes et même chez Kant malgré l’austerité de leurs démonstrations, et si un écrivain exclut cette note rigoureusement on le soupçonnera de perdre aussi la liberté et la souveraineté du jugement.

Comment exercer notre jugement au milieu des controverses ou face aux confusions qui troublent l’Église, ou celles qui assaillent la foi en ce moment ? Vous direz : « En affirmant avec force, avec une certitude sans failles, ces grands dogmes qui seront le clou de notre identité – la naissance virginale, qui assure la nature divine du Christ; le tombeau vide, qui assure sa véritable résurrection; l’infaillibilité de l’Église qui assure l’indubitabilité de tout ce qu’elle a enseigné comme pertinant à l’essence de la foi; la transsubstantiation qui ancre notre pratique liturgique dans l’être de la façon la plus solide ». Mais j’observe que cette position est une choix, que la certitude qu’elle revendique est volontaire, qu’elle dépend « du concours de deux causes, à savoir, de la puissance de connaître qui est en moi, et de la puissance d’élire, ou bien de mon libre arbitre : c’est-à-dire, de mon entendement, et ensemble de ma volonté » (Descartes, Méditation Quatrième). Or n’y a-t-il pas la possibilité d’une choix plus compréhensive, qui respecte mieux les données que notre entendement nous présente ? On pourrait choisir de dire : « J’accorde aux dogmes le respect qui leur est dû, j’ai confiance dans leur vérité de fond, mais il se peut aussi qu’il y a quelque chose de partiel dans les perspectives qu’ils ouvrent, quelque opacité dans leur formulation et dans les représentations qu’ils évoquent. Jurer par ces dogmes n’est pas la position ultime; les accueillir avec respect et avancer dans une réflexion et un questionnement ultérieurs, sans insistance inutile, est une stratégie plus modeste et plus habile ».

D’ailleurs, la primauté du dogme comme forme suprême de la vérité chrétienne est quelque chose qui appartient au passé. Vatican II a identifié la Bible et non le dogme comme l’âme de la théologie. Le progrès de la pensée chrétienne ne prend pas nécessairement la forme d’un « développement des dogmes ». Pour Harnack l’histoire des dogmes est close depuis longtemps et ne continue que de manière fantomatique dans l’Église tridentine. La pensée croyante la plus vitale aujourd’hui ne fait pas un travail dogmatique mais cherche plutôt à retrouver les larges perspectives bibliques dans les horizons de notre monde. Karl Barth a organisé sa pensée dans le genre d’une Dogmatique, mais cela même a limité le va-et-vient fructueux entre le biblique et le moderne qui doit nourrir une réflexion théologique contemporaine.

On affirme une saisie objective de l’être, en opposition aux courants sceptiques ou inconclusives de la pensée moderne – mais il n’est pas clair que les formules dogmatiques assurent cette saisie. Il me semble que nous sommes entrés dans une période du « retrait de l’origine » ou de l’ « origine barrée » ou, pour parler comme Daniel Sibony, d’un « manque à l’origine ». L’être objectif dans lequel nous voudrions nous enraciner échappe à nos prises. « Ah, oui, vous voulez parler de la théologie négative – mais tout cela est déjà pris en compte, et n’affecte en rien l’objectivité du langage dogmatique! » Mais, justement, peut-on si facilement apprivoiser l’indicibilité divine ?

Ce que j’appelle le « retrait des origines » affecte non pas seulement les affirmations métaphysiques mais aussi les convictions plus existentielles ou phénoménologiques qu’on a voulu leur opposer. Par exemple, le grand dogme du protestantisme, la « justification par la foi » a été une libératione pour beaucoup de chrétiens – mais cette vérité aussi échappe aux prises de qui cherche à lui donner une stabilité et une immédiaté rassurantes. La pure donation du phénomène, dont parle Jean-Luc Marion, nous élude également et refuse de combler le manque originaire. Vivons donc le manque, vivons les incertitudes, comme exercice spirituel à la manière de Rilke, comme ouverture vers ce qui nous dépasse. Et ne cherchons pas à caractériser ce dépassement de façon stable, comme « distance » divine, transcendance bien rangée. Une foi dogmatique qui surveille ses définitions comme si elle gardait une forteresse ne peut que se mettre dans un rapport d’hostilité et de surdité à l’égard de son temps. Une foi ouverte et questionnante, par contre, se trouve en solidarité fraternelle avec les questions du temps. « Gaudium et spes, luctus et angor hominum huius temporis... » Mais une foi défensive n’a pas un rapport très heureux avec son objet non plus. Les dogmes ont une fonction, qui se comprend quand on les réinsère dans le processus de leur genèse et de leur réception historiques. Mais ce n’est pas principalement par le truchement du langage dogmatique que le divin se fait connaître. En investissant notre confiance dans ce langage nous devons garder la conscience de sa valeur et de sa fonction relatives, en refusant de lui accorder un statut absolu. Prendre le moyen pour la fin, le relatif pour l’absolu, le conventionel pour l’ultime, c’est le défaut de jugement le plus commun dans le monde religieux; c’est une forme d’idolâtrie.

L’ « orthodoxie » est un mot qui signale souvent une pathologie du jugement théologique, une manie même. Si par orthodoxie on entendait une saine et large sagesse biblique, ce serait bien. Mais quand elle devient l’obsession de ceux qui s’accrochent à des schibboleths, à des propositions-fétiches, la vision biblique s’éclipse, et la prophétie de Rahner se réalise : que l’hérésie à venir se présentera sous le nom de l’orthodoxie. Ce culte d'une orthodoxie privée de contexte vitale est une forme du vice que le Bouddhisme nomme l'attachement aux vues. Pour approfondir et guérir ce malaise de l’esprit, né des siècles inquisitoriaux, il faudra développer toute une nosographie des déviations du jugement théologique, sur la base de la riche documentation pathologique que l’histoire nous a léguée.

Eliot Lives On

THE INTERNATIONAL RECEPTION OF T. S. ELIOT. Edited by Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagchee. London and New York: Continuum, 2007.

 

Sometimes a great reputation is suddenly eclipsed; a star vanishes from the firmament and is heard of no more. Sometimes the reputation slumps, loses its magnetic power, and its bearer survives only in encyclopedia entries, embalmed in academia, venerated in small fan clubs that hope for the day when the world will once again recognize his or her greatness. I experienced this “twilight of the idols” in greater or lesser degree in the cases of G. K. Chesterton, Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karl Marx and all his clan, even Sigmund Freud and his.. I expect the same phenomenon to overtake Samuel Beckett. Literature has many once great luminaries who can never expect to thrill people as they once did: Byron, Hugo, Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, whereas others glow with undiminished brilliance: Austen, James, Proust, Rilke, Yeats, Woolf, and some rather minor luminaries show a resilience, an ability to pop up brightly, that one would not have expected of them: Trollope, Forster – but no doubt the present constellation, too, is a temporary phenomenon, reflecting only the taste of our particular cultural moment.

The longest and most painful of these deflations has been suffered by T. S. Eliot, whose fame stood at the zenith fifty years ago, when he was seen as a poet of the first order, a critic whose every pronouncement was to be treasured, a sublime dramatist, and one whose career both as a poet and as a man represented an exemplary pilgrimage of Christian faith. Now he is likely to be seen as a poet of the second order, very much of his “period”, an erratic and often prejudiced critic, a fake dramatist, and in his personal life a rightist, a misogynist, an anti-Semite and Heaven knows what else. Building on his famous thesis that the new ‘individual talent’ reorganizes the previous landscape of literary history and establishes new hierarchies, Eliot was no respecter of reputations: he knocked the Romantics from their pedestals and did much damage to the standing of Milton, while raising the Metaphysical poets and the Jacobean dramatists to a lofty status they had not known before. In the days of Eliot’s austere domination, people breathed a sigh of relief on finding that he had deigned to confer his approval where they had feared he could only frown – on Tennyson for example, or on Kipling – and read with gratitude his second essay on Milton, in which he was pleased to recognize that Milton was a great poet after all, well worth reading. Now the toppler of reputations is himself tottering. Marjorie Perloff has tried to prop him up recently, but only as the avant-garde innovator of his early verse. Genuine enthusiasm for The Waste Land or Four Quartets, despite their anthology status, is regarded as the mark of an old-fashioned critic, just as was enthusiasm for Shelley in the heyday of the Eliot-influenced lit. crit.

But salvation for Eliot may come from an unexpected quarter. If he is a spectral presence in the English and American literary world, even in academic departments of English Literature, he is a spectral presence in another sense beyond the limits of this world, in the sense that the multiple trajectories of his influence in many countries open up a spectrum of fascinating images of Eliot, alter egos who have an exciting impact similar to the first impact of his verse in England long ago. It seems that to read The Waste Land as a living poem today one must resort to the translation of Eva Hesse, just as jaded Shakespearians resort to the classic German translation of Shakespeare. Elisabeth Däumer reveals that it brilliantly captures the variety of voices in the poem and its underlying passionate intensity, whereas the earlier translation E. R. Curtius had tamed the poem to smooth its reception, imposing a leveling literary style that was also quite unidiomatic. Ironically, Grass’s translation evoked in Germany the same unease and hostility that had greeted the original in England. The professors rounded on Grass and continued to teach Eliot in the same conventional, deadening way, perhaps thwarting a new reception of Eliot as a living poet in Germany. (A precious detail: the line ‘In the mountains, there you feel free’ derives from the opening line of a Bavarian folksong composed in response to the death of Ludwig II: ‘Auf den Bergen wohnt die Freiheit’. Eliot would have learnt this from Marie Larisch – ‘Marie,/ Marie, hold on tight’ – who was intimate with Ludwig’s childhood friend the Empress Elizabeth.)

E. R. Curtius, as J. H. Copley shows, was no stalwart ambassador of Eliot’s fame in Germany. After World War II, when Eliot was admired as a playwright in Germany, his poetry having been lost to view during the years of Nazism, Curtius had the temerity to declare that Eliot was a great minor poet, whose plays lacked ‘the indefinable aura of life’ (p. 248) and whose standing as a critic was largely due to his ‘superior and reserved way of speaking’ and the ‘studied modesty’ of his style which masked dogmatism and deep-seated arrogance (p. 250). I don’t see why this should be considered as ‘ad hominem attacks motivated by personal bias rather than critical and literary judgement’ (p. 248). Curtius was irritated at Eliot’s condescending attitude to Goethe – a touchy subject with Germans who made Goethe a refuge from Nazism and after the presented him as the true glory of their nation. Eliot blandly declared in Harvard in 1932 that Goethe ‘dabbled in both philosophy and poetry and made no great success of either’ (p. 250). Curtius saw that Eliot himself had only dabbled in Goethe and was speaking beyond his competence. Since Eliot did not detect the faults in Curtius’s translation of The Waste Land and did not suggest improvements, his knowledge of German cannot have been very deep. In fact, an ‘illuminating sample of Eliot’s German, shrewdly omitted from the first volume of his correspondence,… shows that there were serious deficiencies in his knowledge of basic grammar’ (p. 256). Rather hurtfully, Curtius did not reciprocate Eliot’s admiring friendship, or was prepared to sacrifice it ‘for the sake of national pride’ (p. 252), believing that Eliot was advocating ‘the formal exclusion of Goethe from Europe; but also the exclusion of Germany, her language and her culture… His judgment shows that literature can also be the expression of politics’ (p. 253). He refused countless appeals from Eliot to contribute to The Criterion. J. H. Copley attempts to convict Eliot of ‘Germanophobia’ with arguments reminiscent of those used by Anthony Julius in alleging anti-Semitism (p. 254). After the war, Eliot struck up a warmer relationship with Germany. He Eliot daringly advocated ‘the unity of European culture’ to a German radio audience in 1946; his talks became a school textbook; and ‘he took various steps to invite German scholars to Britain to build cultural bridges between the two countries’ (p. 256); his lecture, ‘Goethe as the Sage’, on reception of the Goethe Prize in 1954, ‘was probably addressed to Curtius more than anyone else’ (p. 257) – but none of this sufficed to restore the warmth of their friendship. Copley draws the melodramatic conclusion that Curtius was guilty of betrayal ‘like Judas’s’ (p. 259); ‘instead of showing gratitude, Curtius stabbed a good friend in the back’ , and may be imagined now to languish in ‘the worst place in hell, reserved for those who betrayed their masters and benefactors’ (p. 258). If Eliot held that ‘even the harshest criticism could never bring an end to a long-standing friendship’ , it was because ‘he never fully understood the extent of, or the reasons for, his friend’s betrayal’ (p. 259). It is surely unnecessary to be so paranoid and vindictive on behalf of Eliot, who, as a sharp-tongued critic himself, and a good self-critic, no doubt respected the freedom and appreciated the astuteness of his friend’s critical views.

The bulk of the essays are business-like surveys of the reception of Eliot in individual countries. In Italy there are striking similarities, as Stefano Maria Casella notes, with Eugenio Montale, though ‘no direct influence can be demonstrated’ (p. 131). The most striking conjunction is between ‘Eliot’s famous short poem “Silence” (1910)’ and ‘a no less famous lyric’ of Montale. I must confess I had not heard of Eliot’s a ‘famous’ poem (in Inventions of the March Hare) of which Casella manages to quote fourteen words ; all contributors seem heavily inhibited from quoting Eliot, no doubt because of the expensive fees charged by the Eliot estate, and this limits the intelligibility of the book for those who do not know Eliot by heart. Another poet, Mario Luzi, wrote ‘countermelodies’ to Eliot’s poems, which at first glance look like pastiche: ‘Here I am, a person in a room./ a man at the bottom of a house, I listen/ to the sputtering of the flame’  (compare ‘Gerontion’). In Spain before the Civil War, Eliot was seen as a Romantic, the successor of Wordsworth and Coleridge; during the Franco dictatorship he was prized as a conservative religious voice; more recently the radical innovativeness of ‘Prufrock’ has taken the ascendant. Juan Ramon Jiménez was his foremost admirer and translator, though critical of his poetic ‘tricks’ and contemptuous of his conservative politics. Two leftist homosexual poets, Luis Cernuda and Jaime Gil de Biedma, drew on the urban, demotic, decadent side of Eliot. Cernuda, displeased at Eliot’s unfavourable review of Edmund Wilson’s translations of his verse, panned Eliot’s provincial attitude to Goethe and put it down to religious prejudice. In Iceland, K. E. Andrésson’s pioneering 1949 essay on Eliot identifies as the basic element of his verse the ‘centrepiece of the bourgeois world view nowadays, fear of life’ (p. 110).

Among modernist Israeli poets of the 1950s and 1960s T. Carmi drew on the ‘mythical method’ of Ulysses and The Waste Land, to reveal ‘the Bible’s early Near Eastern, idol-worshipping and magically oriented cultural origins’ (Leonore Gerstein, p. 75) in The Brass Serpent (the title refers to Numbers 21). Critic Ruth Nevo explored the presence of the Hebrew Bible in The Waste Land, yet Israeli poets had no interest in the biblical resonances in Eliot. Gerstein sees ‘the lacunae in the Israeli construction of Elio not as an insufficiency, but rather as a system of interesting, culturally-specific filters’ (p. 85). In China we find pastiches of the following type: ‘Man bears too much reality/ And sometimes cannot find its meaning./ The cold wind withers our hopes,/ withering them like flowers’ (p. 165). In Japan, where as Shunichi Takayanagi reports, a key role was played by the meteoric passage of the Scottish poet G. S. Fraser in 1950, an academic Eliot industry flourished in the 1970s, but there has been a slump since. Eliot pastiche is found here too: ‘This Ash-Wednesday afternoon, I saw off/ A march of so many corpses, / And asked you to go with me to eat peachers, /And we walked an endless monotonous street’ (Tachihara Masaaki, quoted, p. 191). Oe Kenzaburo’s 2005 novel,　さようなら、私の本よ is steeped in quotations from Eliot as it ruminates on old age and human destructiveness – which does not sound like a promising basis for novelistic inspiration.

Others contributors study Eliot’s influence on individual authors such as Czeslaw Milosz, the Bengali poet Bishnu Dey and the Canadian poet A. J. M Smith. The last two, rather weak, essays in the volume are subjective memoirs on how it felt to read Eliot in Bengal and in Australia respectively. The latter, by Sean Pryor, contains a fine observation: ‘Eliot’s poetry anticipates its own alienation in time, place and language. It courts the fate of old stones that cannot be deciphered’ (p. 288).

This book takes us on a giddying tour of the planet, and reveals how the voice or voices of Eliot continue to percolate throughout world literature. While over-exposure of his not very voluminous poetic work has made Eliot an influence to flee from in the English-speaking world, its resurfacing in the dialects of other tribes is a great triumph for this half-forgotten ‘dead master’ , ‘both intimate and unfamiliar’, who has now indeed become a ‘compound ghost’ (‘Little Gidding’).

Sebastian Moore on the Liturgy

Sebastian Moore was one of our gurus back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book  “The Crucified Jesus is no Stranger” had a considerable impact. Now I find that his voice can be heard loud and clear on his website (http://sebastianmoore.blogspot.com) -- and he has wonderful things to say.

“The church is the home of eternal truth, crucified and risen. It is also the home of long-enduring errors. For most of its two millennia, it tolerated abstention from the bread of life for most people, and a liturgy that disguised rather than revealed. Karl Rahner, a theologian of undoubted orthodoxy, spoke of the dark intellectual history of the church, in which people have been crucified on absolutes that have turned out not to be absolutes. When Father Bernard Lonergan, my teacher whose orthodoxy was never in doubt, was sent to teach theology at the Gregorian　University, he said the science was seven hundred years out of date. I have seen in my time a massive revision in teaching and attitudes, not least of the worship of the church, and I now see with some distress the attempts of authority to discredit this.

“To be a Catholic is to find none of this surprising. It is to know that there is the Holy Spirit of Jesus, who creates saints and martyrs known and unknown, many of whom may have known only an impoverished liturgy and theology. It is to be in touch with what I am learning to call a live nerve of truth that always surprises, being the nerve that connects the agony of Gethsemani with the Sacrum Convivium celebrated by Thomas Aquinas. It is in short to know the signs of eternal life in this world of time and change, and to be undisturbed at the encroachments of man’s enormities. It is to be rooted in truth at a level that makes the mind astonishingly resilient and tolerant of idiocies and distortions, a serenity deeper than words. The barque of Peter is not promised average seas and good stabilizers. He said, ‘in the world you will have trouble. But take courage, I have overcome the world.’”

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  On the liturgy, he has some penetrating criticisms of the eerie world into which the Motu Proprio beckons us, a world in which the Eucharist ceases to be a meal:

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“Trent tackled the sacrifice of the Mass and the real presence in the Eucharist in two separate sessions, some time apart. Why? Surely because they were thought of as two different topics. Understandably, because, in the long established usage of the church, the people didn’t go to communion at Mass; they didn’t normally go to communion at all; it had to be ‘at least once a year’. Thus the Sacrifice of the Mass stood alone as a mysterious event which somehow re-enacted the sacrifice of Calvary. How? A whole string of words had to be come up with, to ‘get it right’. It didn’t repeat Calvary, but on the other hand it didn’t merely recall it. My years as a student saw a plethora of attempts, in a number of books, to ‘get it right’, and an old professor I knew in Rome counted forty-eight of these theories.

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“Is it not now—at very long last!—clear that the whole problem arose from the practice of the church that separated the doing of the Mass from the distribution of the sacrament. And the doing was highly mysterious for this reason; because it wasn’t what Jesus did, saying ‘take, eat, my body for you.’ So you have two separate things, the doing (one session of the Council) and the distributing (another) How the Mass did Calvary　was one thing. And the resultant, bread-transformed, was another. And both were mysterious in a very non-sacramental way: the doing a ‘blessed mutter’ that no one heard or understood, the resultant presence demanding a philosophical neologism, transubstantiation, that even Herbert McCabe, an ardent Thomist, described as ‘dangerously misleading.’

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“But how the Mass is Calvary, and how the bread and wine really are the body and the blood, are one and the same question, and the answer is in the words of the him we believe to be the Word Incarnate.

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“What makes this matter rather piquant is that the last pope wrote ‘the mass is essentially a meal’ with the italics his (Mane nobiscum), while his successor has said repeatedly that the notion of the mass as a meal is the fundamental mistake of the people behind the liturgical reforms, of which he openly disapproves.

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“The Mass is His ritual, into which he put all His meaning for us, which is God incarnate slain by us and for us and risen for us to be his Body. Let us stop dividing him up between blessed mutter and bad Aristotle, and come before him again, in sorrow for so much, and praying to be brought again to our senses, and into a true sensus fidelium.”

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  And in another posting:

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“Bread broken and shared, wine blessed and shared, is a meal. Period. But we learn from Jungmann, who is the chief authority, that very soon the emphasis shifted from the rite as meal to the rite as defined by the solemn prayer of thanksgiving, and it is on this early shift that the pope’s strong disagreement with a meal-centred theology is based.

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“But surely it is clear that the finding in the Eucharistic Prayer, of what Ratzinger brilliantly calls a transformation of existence - even of death - into thanksgiving, is simply the discovery of what in this meal is wholly special and indeed unique. It is not a de-emphasizing of the fact that it is a meal. This de-emphasizing is a further stage, and it has been reached when the Eucharistic Prayer is being described as a quasi-holy-place and named as the Holy of Holies, to be entered by the priest alone, with the people as outsiders or spectators. This development does not follow from, is not pre-contained in, the experienced transformativeness of the Eucharistic Prayer. On the contrary, it would naturally resonate in the hearts of the people in whose name the priest is giving thanks. For its failure to do this, we have to look to another source, and the most likely one is the amazing phenomenon whereby the faith that created martyrs became the state religion. For with this, to be a Christian is no longer necessarily to be a disciple, but to be a decent citizen.

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“In an important article, Benedict XVI and the Eucharist (New Blackfriars, March 2007), Eamon Duffy writes. ‘It seemed therefore that the Eucharist’s basic structure was unequivocally that of a meal, and this was the position adopted by Guardini and most other theorists of liturgical reform from the 1930s onwards. Immediately however, the dogmatic theologians detected a problem. Was not this precisely the position Luther had adopted in renaming the Mass the Lord’s Supper, and hence, was not this the view condemned at Trent? Did not an account of the Mass as in essence a meal reduce or obliterate its sacrificial character?’

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“Ratzinger’s answer is unequivocally yes. He argues that ‘the Eucharistic thesis [that it is thanksgiving and not meal that defines the Mass] is able to put the dogmatic and liturgical levels in touch with each other. For the Eucharistic thanksgiving is the form (this, and not the meal, he means) in which Jesus at his Last Supper attached sacrificial meaning to his death, and identified the elements of bread and wine with his flesh and blood given for the forgiveness of sins…the Eucharistic words of Jesus are the transformation of existence - even of death - into thanksgiving.’(1) This is beautiful. Ratzinger is saying that that which identifies the bread and wine with Jesus’ body and blood - which of course is the crucial step - and makes a feeling-sense of this identification, makes doxological sense if you like, is the prayer that is celebrating the victory over death, a paean of life beyond life as we know it. This is Ratzinger, and I’m with it all the way. But why does this transformation of existence, even of death, into thanksgiving, into Eucharist, in a uniquely appropriate doxology, which gives us at last, yes, the sacrifice convincingly in bread and wine, have to reduce to secondary status the fact that what we have here is food and drink shared, the new convivium, indeed the Supper of the Lamb, the sacred meal that is the cult of Christians? It doesn’t follow, surely.

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“And so much is at stake here. The language in which, indeed, liturgy and doctrine are in touch with each other so that we have take-of, does take off - and leave the wondering people behind! It is indeed an endlessly fascinating problem - it has exercised me most of my thinking life - as to how we get, in a way of feeling, from the bread and wine to the awesome reality of Calvary made luminous by Easter, and the alchemy that Ratzinger finds in the thanksgiving prayer really pulls this off I think, it gets me thinking-together these chosen foodstuffs of his ritual and a new earth, but saying how this makes sense, how this conjoins bread-and-wine and a new world born on the cross, does not swallow up the bread and wine as food and drink, as meal, about which all these wonderful things are being said, the doxologically sacred meal.

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“Ratzinger has said that the notion of the Eucharist is a meal is the fundamental mistake of the new reformers such as Guardini (who did much to save the soul of German Catholic youth from the ravages of the Third Reich). Duffy describes his solution, which is to jettison the idea of the meal as what the Mass is, as draconian. Is not this draconian solution based on a confusion between the natural coming-to-the-fore of the rite in the solemn thanksgiving with the subsequent interpretation of this development as making of the great prayer a quasi-Holy-of-Holies to be entered by the priest alone, the people outside?

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“Once this confusion is overcome, it makes perfect sense to see the Mass as a ritual meal in which the participants, with understanding faith, hear the celebrant utter the great prayer that ‘transforms existence - even-death into thanksgiving.’ The fact that this is not often a description of what happens with the reformed rite leads me to a radical question: is Jesus too human for us? Choosing as the ritual of his passage our oldest and the only universal symbol, the meal shared, he exposes that most human thing to our banality.

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“And it is just here that there occurs to me what Alexander Schmemann, the great Orthodox theologian, names as the ‘Eucharistic Crisis, eastern and western’, ‘the loss of the Assembly.’ The Assembly is lost in the beautiful words that are lost on the Assembly.

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“Over a century ago, Gregory Dix, in The Shape of the Liturgy, pointed out that with the Christianising of the Empire, being a Christian changed from being a disciple, with one’s life at risk, to being a respectable citizen. One effect of this, he said, would surely have been that full participation in the rite fell to the celebrant, the professional as it were. As the bishops changed from martyrs to people with competence and power, so the people changed from communicants to ‘the people at Mass’, their Easter Duties’ being to communicate once a year. I remember as a pious child being surprised at this Commandment of the Church. Only once a year? Another surprise, that came much later as I was ‘doing my theology’, was that one of the demands voiced by the Pilgrimage of Grace under Henry VIII was a return to the old Mass at which only the priest communicated, this latter detail being specified.

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“Now let us take a big leap, to the innovative advocacy of frequent communion by Pius X, the full significance of which has only just dawned on me. It is not only saying ‘the more the better’, a good prescription for spiritual health. It also means the normality of the congregation communicating at the Mass, which makes the Mass more evidently a ritual meal, though one of unique moment.

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“And now another connection begins to appear, between ‘the Mass not evidently a ritual meal’ and ‘the Mass clericalised.’ If the old rite does mark the beginning of the clericalising of the liturgy, then to advocate its restoration is to advocate a re-clericalising; and after all, in the old rite the celebrant does play all the roles.

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“This leads me to invoke, in conclusion, a ground-breaking book on the Mass that appeared in 1993, On Breaking of Bread by P.F.Fitzpatrick (Cambridge University Press), a priest I came to know well. This was, far and away, the best book on the Mass that I had ever read - and I read the lot in those days! - and this goes for everyone to whom I have recommended it. The book is ground-breaking in that it discloses the role of ritual in our lives at a depth that we are not normally conscious of. The Mass is, most radically, a ritual. It is His ritual. A ritual what? A ritual meal. Let the author