Statement in “Inside the Vatican:” Evangelii Gaudium (“The
Joy of the Gospel”) is an apostolic
exhortation, one of the most authoritative categories of papal document.
[And interestingly,] “The pope wrote the new document in response to the October
2012 Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization, but declined to work from a
draft provided by Synod officials.”[1]
The point made is that “The Joy of the Gospel” did
not emerge from the “instrumentum laboris”
that was the pre-synod draft for the synod. Francis was writing from within
himself as Bergoglio, son of the Church, and Pope. It is a document that is not
“doctrinal” but a personal challenge. It is not only the word that comes out,
but the person speaking the word that has to be coming out of self. It is “kerygmatic.”
Kerygma means preaching Christ in the manner of the early Church. Francis says “kerygma…
needs to be the center of all evangelizing activity and all efforts at Church
renewal. The kerygma is Trinitarian. The fire of the Spirit is given in the
form of tongues and leads us to believe in Jesus Christ who, by his death and
resurrection, reveals and communicates to us the Father’s infinite mercy”
(“Joy… 164). Notice that the kerygma is not to become doctrine in the sense of
conceptual abstraction. Rather it is has to be an enthusiastic (“en –
theou” - in God, and God within) challenge to coming forth from out of
self and go to serve the other. And it “must ring out over and over: Jesus Christ
loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side
every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.” This is “the principal proclamation, the one which we
must hear again and again in different ways, the one which we must announce one
way or another throughout the process of catechesis, at every level and moment”
(164). And most interesting (in that it clearly is working within a different
epistemological horizon [the subject]), “We must not think that in catechesis the
kerygma gives way to a supposedly more ‘solid’ formation. Nothing is more
solid, profound, secure, meaningful and wisdom-filled than that initial
proclamation. All Christian formation consists of entering more deeply into the
kerygma” (165). And notice that the kerygma is not imposed on anyone in
violation of his freedom. Rather , it is the answer to the deepest longing that
each person has as image of the divine Persons. Ratzinger wrote: “The
anamnesis instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without
so that it can become aware of itself, But this ‘from without’ is not something
set in opposition to anamnesis but is ordered to it. It has maieutic function,
imposes nothing foreign but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis,
namely, its interior openness to truth.”[2]
“The pope does not impose from without. Rather, he elucidates the Christian
memory [anamnesis where we “remember” as imaging God that “this” is
good, and “this” is bad] and defends it,”[3]
And so the kerygma does not become doctrine and deduction, “a conceptually articulated
knowing, a store of retrievable contents.” Rather, the proclaimer of
the Word is re-cognized by “an
inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is
not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: that’s it! That
is what my nature points to and seeks.”[4]
The question can be asked: What are the categories of authority in
papal documents? And the problem, to
begin with, is the notion of “categories.” In the beginning, there were no categories, and more important than words, there was an experience and a consciousness that was
passed on.
There had to be words, of course,
but they could not be written down. DeLubac writes, “As far back as the second century,
mention was made of a ‘rule of faith,’ and their conviction grew up, not
entirely without justification, that this rule went back to the twelve
apostles. This is what is deduced from the declarations of St. Irenaeus, who
says that ‘if the Apostles had not left any writing behind, we would still need
to follow the rule of faith which they passed on to the leader s of the Church.”[5]
And these words, probably from St. Ambrose, from A.D.380-390: “I want you to be
well aware of this: the Creed must not be written down…. Why not? Because we
have received it in a way that was not meant to be written. Wheat then must you
do? Remember it. But, you will say, how can we remember it if we do not write
it down, you will remember it all the better… When you write something down, in
fact, certain that you can reread it, you do not take the trouble to go over it
every day, meditating on it. But, when you do not write something down, on the
contrary, fearing to forget it, you do take the trouble to go over it every day….
Go over the Creed in your mind; I insist, in your mind. Why? So that you may not
fall into the habit, by repeating it aloud to yourself, of starting to repeat
it among the catechumens or the heretics.”[6]
And the great fear
there was to get into debates that are determined by only by the rational of
logic. Newman writes: “these are the secrets which the Church
unfolds to him who passes on from the catechumens, and not to the heathen. For
we do not unfold to a heathen the truths concerning Father, Son and Holy
Spirit; nay, not even in the case of catechumens, do we clearly explain the
mysteries, but we frequently say many things indirectly, so that believers who
have been taught may understand, the others may not be injured.” He speaks of “the peculiar caution then adopted
by Christians in teaching the truth, - their desire to rouse the moral powers
to internal voluntary action, and their dread of loading or formalizing the
mind.”[7]
The
History of the West:
And so,
Francis is retrieving for us the aboriginal way that the God-man was
encountered and “known” from the beginning. Charles Taylor offers the
epistemological sea-change that he found “inspirational” in Ivan Illich as the
key to understanding the emergence of Modernity as rationalistic, objectifying,
controlling, rule based individualism which pervades the Western culture in
which we all live and experience our being.
Taylor writes in his foreword to
an interview with Ivan Illich:[8]
“In
Latin Christendom, the attempt was made to impose on everyone a more
individually committed and Christocentric religion of devotion and action, and
to suppress or even abolish older, supposedly ‘magical’ or ‘superstitious’
forms of collective ritual practice.
“Allied with a
neo-Stoic outlook, this became the charter for a series of attempts to
establish new forms of social order. These helped to reduce violence and
disorder and to create populations of relatively pacific and productive
artisans and peasants who were more and more induced/forced into the new forms
of devotional practice and moral behavior, be this in Protestant England,
Holland, or later the American colonies, or in Counter-Reformation France, or
in the Germany of the Polizeistaat.
“This creation of
a new, civilized, ‘polite’ order succeeded beyond what its first originators
could have hoped for, and this in turn led to a new reading of what a Christian
order might be, one which was seen more and more in ‘immanent’ terms. (The
polite, civilized order is the Christian order.) This version of Christianity
was shorn of much of its ‘transcendent’ content, and was thus open to a new
departure, in which the understanding of good order – could be embraced outside
of the original theological, Providential framework, and in certain cases even
against it (as by Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, and in another way David Hume).
“The
secularization of Western culture and, indeed, widespread disbelief in God have
arisen in close symbiosis with this belief in a moral order of rights’ bearing
individuals who are destined (by God or Nature ) to act for mutual benefit.
Such an order thus rejects the earlier honor ethic which exalted the warrior,
just as the new order also tends to occlude any transcendent horizon. (We see
one good formulation of this notion of order in John Locke’s Second Treatise of
Government, in which he argued for a human origin of the authority to rule.)
This understanding or order has profoundly shaped the modern West’s dominant
forms of social imaginary: the market economy, the public sphere, the sovereign
‘people.’
“This, in bare
outline, is my account of secularization, one in which I think Illich basically
concurs. But he describes it as the corrupting of Christianity. To illustrate
he draws, again and again, on the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan,
Jesus’ story about an outsider who helps a wounded Jew. For Illich this story
represents the possibility of mutual belonging between two strangers. Jesus
points to a new kind of fittingness, belonging together, between the Samaritan
and the wounded man. They are fitted together in a proportionality which comes
from God, which is that of agape, and which became possible because God became flesh.
The enfleshment of God extends outward, through such new links as the Samaritan
makes with the Jew, into a network which we call the Church. But this is a
network , not a categorical grouping; that is, it is a skein of relations which
link particular, unique, enfleshed people to each other, rather than a grouping
of people together on the grounds of their sharing some important property. Corruption occurs when the Church
begins to respond to the failure and inadequacy of a motivation grounded in a
sense of mutual belonging by erecting a system. This system incorporates a code
or set of rules, a set of disciplines to make us internalize these rules, and a
system of rationally constructed organizations – private and public
bureaucracies, universities, schools – to make sure we carry out what the rules
demand. All these become second nature to us. We grow accustomed to decentering
ourselves from our lived, embodied experience in order to become disciplined,
rational, disengaged subjects. From within this perspective, the significance
of the Good Samaritan story appears obvious; it is a stage on the road to a
universal morality of rules.
“Modern ethics illustrates this fetishism of rules and norms… Not just law but ethics is seen in terms of
rules - as by Immanuel Kant, for
example. The spirit of the law is important, where it is so, because it too
expresses some general principle. For Kant the principle is that we should put
regulation by reason, or humanity as rational agency, first. In contrast, we
have seen, the network of agape puts first the gut-driven response to a
particular person. This response cannot be reduced to a general rule. Because
we cannot live up to this – ‘Because of the hardness of your hearts’ – we need
rules. It is not that we could just abolish them, but modern liberal
civilization fetishizes them. We think we have to find the right system of
rules, of norms, and then follow them through unfailingly. We cannot see any
more the awkward way these rules fit enfleshed human beings, we fail to notice
the dilemmas they have to sweep under the carpet: for instance, justice versus
mercy; or justice versus a renewed relation, as we saw in South Africa with its
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a shining attempt to get beyond the existing
codes of retribution.
With this perspective, something
crucial in the Good Samaritan story gets lost. A world ordered by this system
of rules, disciplines, and organizations can only see contingency as an
obstacle, even en enemy and a threat. The ideal is to master it, to extend the
web of control so that contingency is reduced to a minimum. By contrast, contingency
is an essential feature of the story of the Good Samaritan as an answer to the
question that prompted it. Who is my neighbor? The one you happen across, stumble
across, who is wounded there in the road. Sheer accident also has a hand in
shaping the proportionate, the appropriate response. It is telling us something,
answering our deepest questions: this is your neighbor. But in order to hear
this, we have to escape from the monomaniacal perspective in which contingency
can only be an adversary requiring control. Illich develops this theme
profoundly…
“This is why Illich’s work is so
important to us today. I have found it more than useful, even inspiring,
because I have been working over many years to find a nuanced understanding of
Western modernity. This would be one which would both give a convincing account of how
modernity arose and allow for a balanced account of what is good, even great I,
in it, and of what is less good, even dangerous and destructive. Illich’s
understanding of our modern condition as a spinoff from a ‘corrupted’
Christianity captures one of the important historical vectors that brought
about the modern age and allows us to see how good and bad are closely interwoven
in it. Ours is a civilization concerned to relieve suffering and enhance human
well-being, on a universal scale unprecedented in history, and which at the
same time threatens to imprison us in forms that can turn alien and
dehumanizing. This should take us beyond the facile and noisy debate between
the boosters and knockers of modernity for the ‘Enlightenment project.’
Illich, in his overall
vision and in the penetrating historical
detail of his arguments, offers a new road map, a way of coming to understand
what has been jeopardized in our decentered, objectifying, discarnate way of
remaking ourselves, and he does so without simply falling into the clichés of anti-modernism.
Codes, even the best codes, can
become idolatrous traps that tempt us to complicity in violence. [I immediately think of the “code”
of capitalism that (with all its good emphasis on the person, freedom,
industriousness, etc.]. Illich reminds us not to become totally invested in the
code – even the best code of peace-loving, egalitarian variety – of liberalism.
We should find the center of our spiritual lives beyond the code deeper than
the code, in networks of living concern, which are not to be sacrificed to the
code, which must even from to time subvert it. This message comes out of a
certain theology, but it should be heard by everybody. This rich book assembles
countless reminders of our humanity, which w can all hear and gain from,
regardless of our ultimate metaphysical perspective. Charles Taylor[9]
[1] Inside the Vatican January 2014, p. 60.
[2] J.
Ratzinger, Conscience and Truth, On
Conscience, Ignatius (2007) 34.
[3] Ibid
36.
[4] Ibid
32.
[5] Adversus haereses, bk. 3, chap. 4. nos. 1-2;
cf. bk. 1, chap. 10, no. 1.
[6]
DeLubac, “The Christian Faith,” Ignatius (1986) 23.
[7]
John Henry Newman, The Arians of the
Fourth Century, UNDP (1833, 2001) 47-51.
[8]
“The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich As Told to David
Cayley,” House of Anansi Press (2005) x-xiv.
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