Gradualism and the Aesthetics of Communication

I’ve stayed away from the Synod news. I’ll read the documents in due time, but I have no journalistic interests to hasten me. Two small impressions have occurred to me, which I offer below in limited relation to the actual Synod event. These are speculative remarks, made in response to the always unreliable informant that is my Twitter feed and Facebook wall. Feel free to ignore them or to apply them where they might fit in that discussion, but do keep in mind that this is not really about the business of the Synod or even the Church more generally. These are just loosely and personally related thoughts and feelings.

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Gradualism is a neologism to me. I had never heard the word before a few days ago, which may betray more of my ignorance than I care to share, but, after reading Calah Alexander’s description of it, the only thing that jumped into my mind was Augustine’s slow and repetitious story of conversion in his Confessions. If “give me chastity, but not yet” doesn’t have a gradualist ring to it, then I am not sure what the term is meant to imply. Nonetheless, it doesn’t take a close or sophisticated reading of the Confessions to understand the gradual progression of Augustine’s entry into the Church, and there is also the theme of restlessness that brings a deeper dimension of this notion of gradualism that is so hot and bothered in the Catholic news today.

In a more intimate way, I can say that Late to Love (my debut studio album) is in many ways a confessional ode to what is being called gradualism. The song “Show Me” is the most graphic evidence of this, but the whole album is a testimony of a conversion that is still unfinished —not Augustine’s, mind you, it is my own need for redemption and grace.

All of this may be entirely off the technical mark, since I find the term so new and unfamiliar and may misunderstand its proper usage, but this is the Augustinian image it conjures at the moment. Sure, this may seem too convenient an impression for someone who has just released an Augustinian soul album, but I’ll leave it to your conscience to make that judgement.

The lyric in “Show Me” that I might try to analogize to gradualism is this one: “redemption on delay.” You can listen to the whole song here:

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There seems to be a strong reaction to some of the language in first document produced by the Synod. While I cannot comment on that document, seeing as I haven’t read it, I do think that the reactions I’ve seen are missing one important, more general, aspect of communication.

I’ve remarked in the past that yelling a true statement — “One plus one equals two!” — over and over at someone will never be wholly guilty of not telling the truth, but whatever truth there may be to tell, the way the truth is told will discredit it in most cases, and for good reason. This idea that the way we speak matters as much as (or even more than) what we say may seem like nonsense, and it surely can be taken too far, but it is confirmed by ordinary language and experience.

There is an aesthetic dimension to communication that will always win the day. Sure, this is more sentimental than rational, but these moral sentiments and feelings that bind themselves to our impressions and intuitions do more work on our ability to reason than we may realize, and certainly have significantly more impact on the culture of our day than any detailed analysis or carefully detailed truth.

When we read the words of Christ, we find four accounts of the same message, told in slightly different ways, with selective omissions, repetitions, intentions, and styles. What this may lack in clarity and simplicity has proven overabundant in possibility and imagination. The teachings of Jesus Christ may be questioned in many ways but in this regard they are indisputable: they communicate.

The tone and style of Pope Francis and this Synod may in fact be more important than its content (the latter which I do not know much about), because, in the mysteries of communication, the performance belies the content. The aesthetics of communication require a slow, plodding, and even gradualist approach in which it matters little what the truth is in its literal and bare reality, if its presentation goes unaccounted for.

This doesn’t mean that the true and the real are inconsequential, but it does mean that there is more to what is important and worthwhile than we may initially think if we think that “getting it right” is what matters most. We are all going to die; of this there can be no doubt. But it is how we live and die that matters most.