{"id":113550,"date":"2019-10-03T00:56:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-03T07:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=113550"},"modified":"2019-10-12T13:16:12","modified_gmt":"2019-10-12T20:16:12","slug":"on-recovering-the-fearlessness-of-the-catholic-intellectual-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2019\/10\/on-recovering-the-fearlessness-of-the-catholic-intellectual-tradition.html","title":{"rendered":"On Recovering the Fearlessness of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Yesterday, I wrote of my appreciation for the Catholic intellectual tradition and what a relief it was for me to step into the wide sunlands of a Catholic Christianity that was not afraid to engage with the wide range of human culture and thought.\u00a0 From St. Paul on the Areopagus down through the Catholic invention of the university to the present, the Church\u2019s capacity for engagement with the breadth of the human experience is one of the most beautiful things about her and I have always loved her capaciousness and ability to, as Paul says, \u201ctest everything and hold fast to what is good\u201d (1 Thessalonians 5:21).<\/p>\n

I also noted that, like tofu, Catholic culture tends to take on the tint of the culture in which it finds itself. This can be both good and bad, depending on the culture. In the early English Church, for instance, when the martial virtues of the Anglo-Saxon warrior were prized by the culture, the author of The Dream of the Rood<\/em><\/a> saw and celebrated the courage of Jesus\u2019 embrace of the cross.<\/p>\n

In the high Middle Ages of Dante, the doctrine of courtly love helped Dante to see something the ancient Greeks missed: that the love of woman could be ennobling. His Beatrice (and far more, the Blessed Virgin) are encounters with divine grace. And, of course, just a little before him, Thomas\u2019 encounter with Aristotle vastly enriched our way of speaking about the Faith and about the world.<\/p>\n

This has happened again and again in the history of the Church and the Church has always had within it those who seek to capitulate to the culture, those who are cautious and judicious in \u201ctesting everything and holding fast to what is good\u201d and those who simply live in fear of the culture.<\/p>\n

In the past twenty years, especially under the influence of American white conservative Evangelicalism and an alliance with increasingly demagogic Right Wingery culminating in the Freak Show of Trumpian Republican Rite Christianism, conservative Catholics have embraced the habit of fear, panic, and conspiracy theory as their primary reaction to cultural phenomena they deem \u201cliberal\u201d. Rather than thinking with the Church and with the tools of her intellectual tradition, they have come to think with the often dubious opinions of certain Folk Heroes whose judgment is spectacularly bad. As a result, they give utterly unnecessary scandal to sensible people of good will.<\/p>\n

So, for instance, there is the absurd phenomenon of Catholic geocentrism, promoted by Robert Sungenis and endorsed by the reliably wrong Church Militant and Michael Voris. Employing a flat-footed Fundamentalism to reading certain Catholic texts as foolishly as a Flat Earther reads the Bible, they have taken the same hostility to \u201cliberal science\u201d that animates\u00a0 Climate Change denial and hatred of environmentalism and applied it to cosmology.\u00a0 In an infamous essay (now flushed down the memory hole), called the \u201cThe Fall of the Pink Einstein\u201d, Sungenis managed to glue together a great many of the fears and obsessions of Conservative Catholics with the ingenious thesis that the relativity of the Jew Einstein was one of the sources of liberal science\u2019s fiendish moral relativism contributing not only to godless heliocentrism but also to homosexuality and gay priests abusing kids.<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0 Really.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, there is also the Kolbe Center for Creation Research, a quack organization that is basically the Catholic-flavored version of Ken Hamm\u2019s Answers in Genesis.\u00a0 Of them, Augustine wrote long ago:<\/p>\n

\u201cUsually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.<\/p>\n

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.<\/p>\n

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although\u00a0they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Augustine grasped that baptism is grace, not magic, and that it did not confer competence in the sciences: study, brains, understanding and hard work do.\u00a0 And all these things are achievable by Christian and non-Christian alike.\u00a0 Because of this, non-Christians can tell when you are a crank and when you are competent and honest.<\/p>\n

Augustine, who also wrote a (now tragically neglected and opposed) treatise against lying<\/a> made the obvious point that Lying for Jesus is stupid. What lay at the back of his thought was a profoundly Catholic confidence that the Faith is really true and therefore does not need to be defended by tricks and lies.\u00a0 Like St. Thomas, he really internalized the conviction that \u201call truth is God\u2019s truth\u201d and that the Author of Creation is the same God as the Author of Redemption in Christ Jesus. He deeply and truly believed Jesus when he said, \u201cYou shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free\u201d (John 8:32). He did not, as so many conservative American Christians today do, live in the everlasting fear that the other shoe was going to drop, that the whole thing was a fraud, that something would turn up to show the Faith was a lie, and that he needed to be perpetually on guard against those who might discover that it was all a scam.\u00a0 So he was able to grasp that the temptation to tell pre-emptive lies was just that: a temptation from hell and not, as some absurdly claimed, \u201cbeing wise as serpents.\u201d\u00a0 In a word, his faith was not fragile<\/em>, but sturdy, and able to stand up to one of the most rigorous and searching minds and consciences God ever created.<\/p>\n

It precisely this jittery fragility that now characterizes conservative Christianity in the US, both Catholic and Protestant.\u00a0 From Evangelicals terrified of evolution to Catholics afraid of the Pope to conservatives afraid of the brown \u201cinvader\u201d and willing to endorse every single lie Trump tells in order to defend this most fragile of gods we see a demographic endlessly stampeded by<\/p>\n