TERRY EAGLETON 5

I continue to share thoughts here about Terry Eagleton’s 2009 book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution”.*

Eagleton (p.27) now starts to land some hard punches, to the reader as well as to the New Atheists and Ditchkins.

“The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Those who do not see this dreadful image of a tortured innocent as the truth of history are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress for which, as we shall see, Ditchkins is a full-blooded apologist.”

Eagleton is on to something here – something really big.

While the human psyche’s tendency to try to sugar-coat the terrors that confront it has always exercised a deforming gravitational pull on any world-class religion – trying to make its Vision less frightening and less demanding – yet the New Testament, and especially the Gospels, simply won’t let you do that in Christianity and the other religions of the Book.

The reality of what happens in this incomplete world, shot through with the energy and consequences of the less-evolved and basal and un-Genuine human energies, screams out from the Crucifixion and every little crucifix.

The urge to escape that sight and that Message, added to any less-religious or less-theological urge to throw aside the knapsack of consciousness in order to flee faster, has resulted in smarmy, sentimentalized goo-goo passivity, happy-faced burbling (and some god-awful churchy guitar music), or – on the other hand – robust and maniacal insistence that no matter how many ‘problems’ human existence poses, the human Mind and the human Will can either withstand or conquer them.

And as the West grew out of the threateningly dark forests of the Middle Ages into the ever-improving material world of the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, into the Modern age of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, it seemed possible that ‘religion’ was just a left-over nightmare, a residual depression and shock left over from days when human beings were terrified by rampant disease and burdened by the sheer physical challenge of existing and sustaining what little bits of life could be managed.

In the United States, especially as its almost story-book combination of natural resources and insulation from the ancient and dangerous national feuds of the Old World combined to create the appearance of a totally fresh new Start for humanity, the illusion could more easily find the space and fuel to burn as a large and powerful flame. (If, of course, you were willing to not-see what had to be done to the indigenous peoples and what had to be done to the imported enslaved peoples.)

But Truth and Justice – not simply as abstract empty concepts to be filled by whatever good intentions and thoughts an individual might have, but rather as aspects of a Multi-Planar, God-sourced Reality – have no easy time of it in this world, and those who dare to commit to Truth and Justice are going to find themselves in boiling in hot water or encased in frigid ice very quickly. The gravitational pull of Primitiveness and Sin (not the same thing) must always be taken into account; the ‘powers of this world’ are built into it because they inhere in human beings.

And the numbing, shocking Truth of Christ’s Crucifixion is that this is the way things are, and that God’s recommended response is to endure suffering while staying true to the Genuine and Echt still struggling to be born into actuality. Make your commitment and take your lumps, relying in faith on that relationship with God that is always available, even if your personal shopping list isn’t going to be filled right away.

You have to learn how to handle the ‘birth-pangs’ of a humanity that is only tenuously and inconsistently clawing its way up from its own violent, lumpish Primitiveness and selfish Sinfulness.

In other Posts I have used the image of the Resistance agent in Occupied Europe in WW2: you know London is ‘there’, you know that sooner or later the Liberation is going to come, you get assorted responses – often in code – to the radio messages you transmit with your dinky little set, and occasionally you actually get an airdrop out of the dark of the night sky. And that’s pretty much what you have to go on to keep on going. But you know London is there and that the Liberation is being planned and that someday the day will come.

And if you are a Resistance agent with a particularly clear-eyed grip on your situation and on the nature of things in an Occupied world, then you don’t try to turn London into a teddy-bear or give up on London and figure you and your posse can handle the full weight of the Nazis all on your own.  This is not kid-stuff.

And yet keeping on in an Occupation, and trying to help Liberation along according to your own poor power to add or detract … this is a discipline (askesis, in the Greek) that brings life even as it guarantees exertion and pain and lots of discouragement and irritation. Again, this is not kid-stuff.

And there’s a difference between carrying-on some semblance of acceptable daily life in order to mask your Liberation allegiances from the ever-observant Nazi demonry and simply caving to the pressure to conform to the (mis-)Shapes of the Occupied World and just go along to get along.

This is never an easy line to draw. But like an ‘event horizon’ line, it’s one of those dynamic realities that you always have to keep your eye on, even if you can never get a solid fix on it.

The Catholic approach, a curious blend of ancient Roman and Mediterranean, has always been to set up an ideal and then urge everybody to try for it, fully aware of the fact that nobody can ever fulfill the ideal perfectly in this life. The Church’s law is called ‘canon’ law from the Greek kanon (let’s not get into the letters of the Greek alphabet), which means ideal.

Considering her mandate to extend to all humanity the Church has always realized that you can’t stuff everybody into the same box when it comes to how individuals are equipped to face the various realities and consequences of Sin: different people have different skills and weaknesses, and the best you can do is help them stay committed to the ideal and make allowances for when they fail (as all human beings inevitably do fail, one way or another). You can’t expect everybody to become ‘maquis’, living out in the woods and blowing up supply trains; you can’t expect everybody to have the same strengths and skills. But you can keep alive their faithfulness to Liberation and help their commitment along as best you can.

This ‘abundance of life’ that Christ talked about – I think of it as owning a musical instrument and finally getting it tuned so that it consistently makes music at the height of its possibilities as an instrument. Or again: as an automobile whose gears you have learned to operate, so that when you take it out onto the highway you are in ‘drive’ gear and not one of the lower gears that hold the engine back when you’re trying to drive at speed – and so the car swishes along.

In other words, this ‘abundance’ is the equivalent of reaching in this dimension and within your own Self that narrow-band (as in Narrow-Gate of the Gospels) of consciousness where you are operating out of your most Genuine and Echt energies that comprise the Image of God within you while at the same time you are attuned to the powerful transmission beam of God’s abiding Energy flowing into you.

This ‘narrowness’ of the Echt path is precisely what the Boomers rejected: since all life was groovy and (young) people were basically reeeely groovy, then you could wade into life as if it were a combination of Sunday-buffet and picnic at a nudist beach. Wheeeeeee! The Church, like all of the Axial religions, has always been more cautious: navigating in the narrows between Scylla and Charybdis, where the dangerous dynamics under the surface could pull you into one or the other of the lethal rocks … the wise captain doesn’t drive the great vessel and her burthen of souls at high-speed and over-confident self-assurance. This is why kids can’t be in command of ships.

The soul at this level of operation is not simply a radio for transmitting and receiving messages; it is not simply an instrument tuned to its highest competence. It is also something of a lung: drawing in great amounts of fresh air from the Source and converting that into energy to continue. This is not for kids.

None of this is accessible to Ditchkins and atheism.

They limit themselves to the single base Plane of existence, which isolates human beings from any Beyond. And then they have to try to make a decent meal out of what’s left.

The consequences of this are clear, as Eagleton sees (p.32), in how they approach ‘love’. For the Mono-Planar types ‘love’ can be nothing more than personal ‘feelings’ and/or  physical coupling. That love can mean Love in the far more capacious and awe-some and awe-full sense of a relationship that is Grounded in and participates in the life-force of God … they have no room for that; they can’t allow for it.

There isn’t a God and therefore human beings aren’t made in any Image of God. In a single stroke they wind up uprooting this Plane of Existence from any other Higher Plane and they also denude the human being of any Larger or Higher relationship, Help, or Source of self-understanding. A human being trying to figure him/herself out without God is an isolated islander trying to figure out the automobile. They may well wind up taking a dump in it and thinking it’s a nifty out-house and nothing more. Happens all the time.

Eagleton quotes Aquinas (p.32) who figured that the fog of Sin (let alone the ignorance of not-realizing you are made in the Image of God) keeps human beings from using the power of sex well. If humans don’t have any knowledge of the Image, then sex has no Larger Framing context: it’s just some groovy fun-thing to do for a little momentary pleasure – it has no Larger context or Purpose (and no ill-consequences).

And without the context of that Framing Image then there’s no sense of a governing relationship as a framework into which sex-activity has to fit. It breaks loose within the self and just runs wild (and by ‘wild’ I don’t mean ‘free’).

And in the process sex may get mixed up with all sorts of primal emotions and urges and passions like anger, the quest for power, and the primitive lust for violence that so often consumes personalities that have no Larger motivations (or Help) to refine or boundary the primitive utterly self-oriented (I call it self-collapsed, where the self collapses in on itself like a black hole in space).

Think of newbie fireman-trainees: they don’t realize the terrific force of water under pressure that drives the nozzle of a large fire-hose. A standing joke used to be to let the kid loose on the training field all by himself holding the nozzle. Then the pump-engine is turned up, the water flows under pressure, and the nozzle starts bucking like a wild living thing – and assumes a life of its own, the nozzle writhing in his hands and spraying a dangerously powerful stream of water all over the place, and even begins walking him all over the field as it mindlessly gives off energy. (There’s a dark side to it: not only the stream of water but the metal nozzle itself can inflict lethal injury if they get loose from the handler’s control and simply start some crazy dance on their own; they will strike whatever can’t get out of their way.)

Sex can quickly become like that. And things don’t improve when the Boomers figure – as they did and have now allowed subsequent generations to figure – that it’s all ‘fun’ and there are no consequences, and that any attempt to control the stream and the nozzle are just signs of ‘conformity’ and lack of imagination.

Sex is a human energy like any other. If there is no Framing context of Purpose then it will run riot like an incompetently-handled fire-hose. And if on top of all that you wind up with a culture that will not or cannot insist on any Mastery, then the whole dangerous lunacy is erected into a Plan and people regress to their limbic and animal elements. This is not progress. This is not liberation. This is not maturity. This is not for kids.

Jesus, Eagleton notes (p.31), seems in the Gospels not to have much respect for the family. He is continually calling his disciples away.

Eagleton offers the thought that this is due to Jesus’ human awareness that the actual end of time would probably be coming very soon, so the work of sustaining a family and participating in one was – like all other human occupations – going to be ending soon anyway. Sort of as if Jesus expected the Allies to be landing in a couple of days so it’s time to put aside the ‘usual’ and ‘ordinary’ tasks and get ready for the Liberation.

Maybe.

But I think Jesus was using a sense of exaggeration as a rhetorical device: He was constantly trying to get His hearers to think Beyond (not outside-of) the Box of this-world and this Mono-Plane. And He was always aware that the human tendency is to seek a little comfort and predictability wherever it can be found, and then just pull of the trail and set up camp there. (Remember when Peter, having just watched the eye-popping vision of Jesus conferring with Moses and Elijah, came up with the idea that we should put up three tents and just stay here in this groovy place where great stuff happens.)

Jesus wanted to get people used to thinking Beyond the Box, thinking ‘on the Multi-Plane’, seeing and sensing things from the perspective of a Beyond that is not simply ‘coming along’ someday, but rather a Beyond that is continually and continuously here now, participating in this Plane’s activities and always inviting humans to participate in its energy right here and right now. (So ‘stop looking around’, stop searching ‘the sky’, and use your Image-of-God ability to tune into that Beyond right here and right now.)

The disciples were trying to play checkers on what was really a Vulcan chess-board. Jesus was always trying to get them Beyond checkers and even beyond the Single-Board idea, and to see and grasp the Reality of the Multi-Plane.

And the narrow-gate to all that was within them.

So I don’t ever sense that Jesus was anti-family. I think where He was going with it was that if you don’t have a genuine Multi-Planar Grounding then you aren’t really ever going to be able to develop the experience of the family to its full possibility. If you aren’t an Echt Self, sustained by that Beyond while working toward the Image of God within you, then whatever family activity you engage in is never going to get off the ground; your family relationships and your kids are never going to get the full benefit of what ‘family’ can be when it is lived among humans committed to the Image of God within them and living within an active relationship with the God in Whose Image they are each and all made.

This concept of family is not kid-stuff.

The Church always had to try to keep this complex Vision alive, and you can see where it would be hard to keep alive among Nobel prize-winners or the student-bodies (or faculties) of the world’s most prestigious universities, let alone among the hugely-varying competences of human beings generally. (Which is not to say you need Mensa-level intelligence or a degree from an Ivy to embody and embrace the Christian message … not hardly.)

In this sense then, all genuine Christian theology is ‘liberating’; it seeks to help humans ‘live Beyond the constraints of the Mono-Plane’, to live closer to that Beyond and that Multi-Planar Reality in Whose Image they are made to begin with. You learn to live beyond the basal and primal within yourself and you learn to live in participation with the great Graced energies of God coursing through this PoE from Beyond and seeking to draw humans into the life of the Beyond which is the Image in which they are made in the first place .

There’s a marvelous, dynamic symmetry to it.

But this is not simply a matter of having some ‘faith’ or any ‘faith’. Faith, like loyalty, is only as good as that in which it is invested. Many humans have given their faith, their loyalty, their integrity, to evil causes (the success of the Third Reich and the ‘master race’ or the success of the Communist vision of human life, for example) and yet it has led them horribly off the Echt human path into monstrousness.

This much Eagleton sees (p.37). And he takes it further: the New Atheists will claim that they too seek ‘faith’, although it will be in ‘human progress’ or in this or that this-dimensional ‘cause’ (he uses the two specific examples of “feminism and anti-colonialism”).

But these objects of faith are insufficient as primary Grounds toward which and upon which to anchor a human self (let alone a collective movement of many humans). They are all Mono-Planar and are themselves ‘creatures’ or constructs; human constructs are incapable of serving as Ultimate Grounds for humans.

Such constructs may legitimately serve as expressions of a Genuinely Grounded human activity (although that constitutes an analysis all its own, separate from my general discussion here).

But this is precisely where atheism fails. Because by definition no ‘cause’ can be Grounded in anything Beyond, nor can any human being be grounded in any Beyond. In the atheist vision, there is no Beyond and no Multi-Plane.

Which means that there is no Boundary and no Shape imposed by any Beyond. The this-dimensional construct and the this-dimensional human being are ‘liberated’ from Shape and Boundary.

This is not liberation; this is Shapelessness. And Shapelessness is not a good thing for human beings; and lack of Boundary is not a good thing for human energies.

So, Eagleton says (p.37), the Ditckins-types are wayyyy off course when they say that the world is sort of nice, and would be a whole lot nicer, except for the dark derangements of ‘religious believers’.

A world Flattened and squashed into its most basic levels, and human beings equally Flattened and un-Shaped … this is not a happy picture. And the atheists – even if on the surface ‘optimistic’ or ‘progressive’ – have to adopt a looney sort of happy-face vision of things in order to keep on going.

There’s a reason why Larry McMurtry (if memory serves) described this earth as “a boneyard mostly, but pretty in the sun”. The atheists have to concentrate on the ‘pretty in the sun’ and ignore the ‘boneyard’. And worse, they have to ignore how the Mono-Plane creates a boneyard within the individual human being.

You can see, perhaps, why they don’t want to go into these matters.

But that hardly makes them ‘radical’ or particularly insightful. As Eagleton notes (p.39) one of the Ditchkins triad, Daniel Dennett, actually thinks the invasion was a good idea except that it wasn’t carried out properly. There’s nothing radical there; in fact it’s conventional in a frighteningly in-the-Box and conformist sort of way.

If there are no boundaries, if there is no Boundary and no Shape, then what’s wrong with murder, for example?

Current and recent generations of young have a problem with that (if you press them enough to think beyond simply parroting the ‘sensitive’ or Correct answer).

Is it wrong simply because there’s a law against it? Then if the government passes a law that makes murder legal it’s OK to do it.

Is it wrong because it serves no useful purpose? But what if by murdering a parent can get money to support his/her children? That’s a useful and good purpose.

Is it wrong because it ‘feels wrong’? But feelings change. And on top of that, at any given time different human beings can have different feelings.

What makes murder wrong such that a general moral and legal ban upon it can be enacted and enforced?

And what justifies such a ban being valid even for other cultures and other times? To kids raised with the idea of ‘total autonomy’ and a non-judgmental ‘respect’ for any thoughts that anybody ‘has’ or ‘likes’, what justifies you intruding upon others’ preferences?

It’s frightening how many today would be caught like a deer in the headlights if the questions were put to them.

They have been trained that there is no Beyond and that you can’t go around interfering with people’s ‘total autonomy’ (unless you’re a government that ‘gets it’ and then you can impose anything on anybody who ‘just doesn’t get it’).

So they reach a certain point – and it doesn’t take long to reach it – and simply disconnect: who knows? It’s just the way things are.

This is no type of Citizenry upon whom to ground the governance of a government, nor upon whom to rely for the sustainment of democracy against a government increasingly seeking to engorge its writ.

The question of ‘liberation theology’ comes up (p.39). This is an approach that arose among Western missionaries especially in Latin and South America in the difficult and contorted period when US interests supported repressive (and thus reliable) governments and established elites whereas the peasantry might have been susceptible to Communist agitation. (Whackulently, the US support for the repressive governments drove the peasants even closer to the Communists who promised ‘liberation’ where the US was clearly bringing nothing but more repression.)

In these countries, so often of a dense Catholic heritage through the work of earlier centuries of missionaries, the hierarchy – caught as so often between governments with the power to kill and the Gospel – tried to thread their way and make accommodations. (Matters not made any easier by the class-origins of many of the members of the hierarchy.)

Some missionaries and theological thinkers came to believe that the Gospel demands not simply prayer for the poor, but immediate action. Which, in terms of ‘giving alms to the poor’ has a long and respectable Christian heritage.

But then further, they came to believe that no Christian can be Echt unless s/he works to change the material conditions which oppress and make the poor dependent on alms to begin with. Which moved things further along a difficult road.

Culture is never easily messed with, nor should it be. Human beings are culture-making beings and rely on culture to Shape them and in some ways mediate their relation to the Beyond.

But government is not the same as culture. And the American Revolution was certainly clear on that point, precisely seeking to limit the incursions of Leviathan in the large and more vital culture and society of the Citizens.

So how far can – or must – a committed Christian go toward changing the governmental policies or structures that oppress the poor, and often violently so?

What happens in a theological approach where the individual Christian is not morally justified in not working to change conditions, no matter if it leads to overt – perhaps deliberately intended - violence in the service of the poor?

This is a hugely fraught matrix of issues and questions.

But surely atheism can offer little beyond adopting either a happy-face approach or an acquiescent passivity or simply engaging in political revolution.

It can only offer some form of political illusion or political action, on the basal PoE, because there is no Larger Framework that atheism admits and there is no Help from any Beyond. Atheism plays on no Larger Board or Boards.

The line between intensified spiritual commitment and intensified political action is as close as you come to a tectonic plate-boundary in religious matters. There is no clear and easy way through it and the Church’s vision is to thread its way carefully; ‘damn the torpedoes’ works in war (sometimes) but it’s no basis for a system of government or cultural guidance. Had they not been so turned-off by things-military, the Boomers probably would have found Admiral Farragut’s brassy words at Mobile Bay to be a perfect capture of their sense of things.

So once you take Shape and Boundaries out of the equation – and the Beyond that gives them their capital-importance – then human beings become Shapeless and invertebrate. Yet they remain still possessed of all of their vitalities and energies. Especially if those human beings are not aware of the Challenge to increasingly operate out of their Higher, pre-frontal brainparts and are simply allowed to mistake the Shapeless vitality of the Lower, limbic brainparts as ‘life’ and ‘freedom’.

And if this is a bad way to raise kids, it is even more frakkulous to skew an entire society’s culture such that this sort of dreck is passed on as cultural wisdom and required of any member of the culture.

The Axial religions are each in their way aware of the ‘narrowness’ of the Genuine Path.

The Catholic Church – going back to the days when the Roman emperors and their empire collapsed, leaving the Church more or less in charge of culture and civilization in the West – is painfully aware of how much care must go into the construction and navigation of a Culture.

Like a great ship, a Culture must be handled with deliberation and care and prudence and caution. You don’t just play with them like you would with your personal motorboat out in the harbor or out on the lake on a summer Sunday afternoon.

There’s a reason why your 747 or 777 pilot doesn’t play games up in the air; no fancy loop-the-loops or flying real low to scare the chickens in the barnyard.

In a way, you have to handle a Great Culture the way you would fly a WW2 bomber, and not a WW2 fighter plane. The fighter pilot, so often alone in his highly-maneuverable aircraft, precisely has to operate on quick, instinctual responses in order to win his dogfight; thus he does his job. Whereas the bomber pilot has to hold his big, lumbering craft steady – no matter how much flak and threat from enemy fire and fighters, no matter what the weather and wind conditions are – in order to provide a steady and accurate run into the target; thus he does his job.

Trying to handle a Great Culture as if it were a personal pleasure boat or a fighter-plane isn’t going to work well at all. In fact it’s going to wreck lives and ruin the craft itself.

All of that has been going on for the past few decades around here. Yes, it was going on earlier than that – think of kids raised in the Jazz Age of the pre-Depression 1920s. But the Boomers were much more numerous.

And then when certain advocacies began to put forth various philosophical ideas as ‘justifications’ for creating more ‘social space’ for themselves, then the impatience and inexperienced callowness of the Boomer youth was erected into a Plan. And into national cultural policy.

The New Atheists are just the most recent ‘public intellectuals’ who are surfing the need of various influential ‘elites’ to get rid of any obstructions to this whakkulent Plan.

And one of the biggest of those obstructions is God-Religion-Beyond. And especially in the US, the Catholic version of Christianity, which stubbornly stands as a reminder that there is a Beyond; that there is a certain Shape and certain Boundaries which are built-into human beings and must govern their actions; that this is not a matter of ‘preference’ but rather a sober and accurate assessment of Reality at its most profound and Genuine level; and that conducting a human life is not something to be left to kids and the whimsy of ‘feelings’ and passing preferences.

So long as there is enough pressure to deny all of those elements, the New Atheists will always sound like they are making useful sense.

But they aren’t. Not hardly.

NOTES

*New London: Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0-300-15179-4

ANDREW BACEVICH, THE  CATHOLIC CHURCH, AND MODERN TIMES

Andrew Bacevich, retired Army colonel and now on the faculty of Boston University, author of numerous meaty books and articles on the current state of Our political and military affairs, turns his formidable competence to the role of the Catholic Church (of which he is a member) in the present era of Our discontent (and probably derangement).

As he sees it, “confronting the 20^th century, Catholicism stood fast”. He’s right. Going into the 20^th, the Church had bound itself robustly to the perennial realities of human nature and the eternal Reality of God.

The 19^th had been a difficult time, as European Modernism simultaneously struggled toward a political freedom of mass-democracy (so often, alas, on the model of the French rather than the American Revolution) and a philosophical ‘freedom’ that consisted in abandoning the Beyond – that ancient and solid anchoring-Ground of belief, principles, character, virtue and values – in the excited assumption that this Dimension, presided over by human beings in either their Rational or Romantic glory, could under human management fend perfectly well for itself.*

The 19^th century Catholic Church had had a bellyful of the French Revolution and its ‘democracy’ that so quickly turned into the Terror and then the Napoleonic imperial wars. It wasn’t really impressed; indeed, it feared for itself (the French Revolution made Reason the only god and equated the Church with the Monarchy, as well as being an oppressor of the human mind and spirit in its own right). But also for the peace and welfare of Europe’s peoples if both unbelief and revolutionary bloodshed in the name of the ‘the people’ were to run riot. European culture, the Church feared, would be simultaneously attacked in its soul (through some form of Modernist unbelief) and in its body (through the wars to spread such ‘enlightenment’ to everyone within gunshot range).

So by the dawn of the 20^th century the Church was wary as hell – as it were – of Modern Times.

Yet there was a strong dissenting opinion that, if it did not go gaga over Modernism, at least sought to somehow address it constructively. The best of the more conservative ecclesiastical opinion (and there was a lower end to that spectrum as well) figured that the whole thing was just too potentially, if not probably, dangerous to ever be tamed: the core this-worldly bent of Modernism was in and of itself utterly incompatible with a sense of the Beyond as the Ground and Guide of this-dimensional human affairs.

But thanks to the huge influx of immigration into the United States in the second half of the 19^th century, there was also a large and robust Catholic community within the Universal Church that saw democracy (and Modernity) through the lens of the American, rather than the French, Revolution. And the United States, throughout the century, was growing ever stronger and more robust in all respects.

These ‘Americanist’ prelates, thinkers, and pastors were convinced that (the American model of) Modernity could be engaged constructively and usefully. Rome – with fresh and living memories of a Pope being taken off by Napoleon’s troops to do his imperial bidding and of frenzied crowds of ‘the people’ stringing up priests and nuns along with all the aristocrats – wasn’t inclined to agree.

But in the United States, the Americanist prelates soldiered on as best they could, although hampered by the growing rapidity of communications (steamships, undersea transatlantic cables) that robbed them of the beneficial ‘fog of time and distance’ that had enabled prior generations of ‘missionary’ types to address matters ‘on the ground’ without too much abstract-ifying interference from the head office back in Rome.

They wanted to demonstrate to the Waspy American governing elites and to the ‘progressive’ American Modernist elites that their Catholic flocks could be good Americans and good Catholics. But they were also anchored in the rock-ribbed view of the cosmos that placed this-dimension in ongoing and living relationship with a Higher Dimension, a Beyond, presided over – in best Catholic form – by a benevolent but decidedly adult God, ably assisted by angels and the spirits of the ‘faithful departed’ in the arranging of human affairs so as to draw all humans simultaneously to Himself and to their own genuine selves (humans were, after all, made in His image, according to the Catholic vision).

Solidly grounded but eager to engage, the American Church made its way into the 20^th century, not often in a position to influence national affairs (until the 1920s and 1930s) but more than busy enough with the building-up of the Catholic parish and school system, and ministering to the needs of Catholics newly-arrived and those somewhat established, looking to improve their own and their children’s lot in this speeding but shaking (in ship terms ‘rocking and rolling’, perhaps) culture as it raced ever forward in terms of material success.

Muted for the moment was that the American race forward into material success seemed to raise a gritty but relatively golden dust-cloud that blotted out the Upward dimension. Engagement would sooner or later require some hard questions as to just how far Catholicism could go to ‘fit in’ before it began weakening its own vital connections to the Beyond. If you were going to ‘go in the American door in order to bring America out your own door’ (to use a favorite image of St. Ignatius of Loyola) you were going to have to make sure that once inside the American door you didn’t forget what you came for and lose your way in the American ‘building’ such that you couldn’t find the Catholic ‘door’ or else forget that there was some essential difference between the two.

World War 2 gave the American Church a huge opportunity to show just how patriotic and useful Catholicism and Catholics could be. By 1960, 15 years after that War ended, a Catholic was running for President. But even before that, in 1958, the Roman Curia had elected as Pope (for lack of the ability to settle on any more organizationally-connected candidate) a rotund, elderly, peasant-born former Army chaplain (the Italian Army in World War 1), pastor, and diplomat – John XXIII. He was almost the mirror-opposite of his predecessor, the aloof, scholarly, born-to-be-a-prelate Pius XII.

Having had more than enough of both ecclesiastical pomp and caution, and also of the terrors of two intensely lethal wars in less than 30 years that shattered the confidence and competence of Europe, John decided that he needed to open the ecclesial windows and let in the ‘fresh air’ of the world. Optimistically and with profound benevolence, he hoped that like a great ship too long at sea, the Church could put herself in drydock, scrape off the barnacles and unhelpful accretions, and restore the great ship’s hull to its pristine efficacy, ready to slice through troubled waters cleanly and bring her cargo of faith, hope, and charity.

It turned out to be something different; more like a great orchestra when the conductor decides to step down from the master’s podium, put down the baton and take off the white-tie-and-tails, and ask the various players and instrument-groups what they think. An excellent approach in itself, it works only so long as all the players remember that the conductor is still the conductor and – as well – is the designated interpreter of the Composer.

So you can see where things got out of hand in myriad ways.

Thus by the time it entered the 21^st century, as Bacevich accurately observes, the Church “stands dishonored and discredited” and worse “that it has misconstrued the problem … the ramparts it persists in defending – a moral order based on a received, permanent truth – have long since been scaled, breached, and bypassed, and have fallen into ruin”.

The dishonor and discredit stem from its own organizational failures and also from its successes. Its failure was in trying to treat as eccentricity (ironically, with the best, modern  Rogerian therapeutic indulgence and supportiveness) patterns of behavior among its priests that actually required far sterner intervention. Its successes – a series of powerful public statements in the 1980s against nuclear war, the economic maltreatment of the poor, and in favor of the Family – aroused the ire of both Right and Left, who proceeded in the 1990s and early 00’s to prevent any such further such obstructions to their various Agendas by focusing unrelentingly on the failures in order to undermine whatever public status the American Church might deploy against them.

Bacevich’s second observation – that the Church is now trying to defend a position that has already been outflanked and overrun and rendered useless – reflects, I think, not only a military vision of events (nothing necessarily wrong with that) but an insufficiently accurate vision of the actual Field of Action.

The Church operates in a Battlespace – as it were – that is multiplanar: that Battlespace comprises not only this Plane of Existence but the Beyond as well; and between those two Planes of Existence there is much dynamic communication (“angels ascending and descending” the ladder Jacob saw in his dream) and God and His workings – whether believed in or not – have a reality all their own, independent of whether humans believe in Him and His works or not.

I have used a historical reference in a prior Post and I use it again here now: at the beginning of World War 2 the Japanese Navy had a torpedo (the ‘Long Lance’, colloquially known) that could travel further than any known torpedo, and without leaving a telltale wake of whitish bubbles on the surface to give itself away. For quite some time – alas – Japanese submarines were sinking US naval vessels, especially in the dark, from distances beyond anti-submarine detection capabilities and, since the things didn’t even leave that telltale white line on the surface to mark their approach, not even the best lookouts could see them. The response of the Navy was to presume that the ship commanders were simply negligent or incompetent – thus effectively denying the reality of the Long Lance. Which, of course, made utterly no difference to the torpedo’s effectiveness; indeed, quite the opposite. In other words, as Scrooge was to learn from Marley’s ghost and the spirits of Christmas, just because you exercise your human ‘freedom’ and ‘choose’ not to believe in something (or some One), that doesn’t of itself deprive that something (or some One) of its own independent and very real existence.

So it is granted that the this-dimensional ‘footprint’ of the Divine – His earthly ‘establishment’- has been weakened: culturally and socially and not without the heavy thumb of assorted ‘elites’ and even their Beltway enablers, leaning grotesquely on the scales. At this point American society (now in its post-Modern or hyper-Modern phase**) and far too many Americans are much weaker: less adult and more infantile and childish, more government-dependent, less robust and more fragile.

Meanwhile the original Vision of the American Framing has been – in the past 40 years – replaced by the late-18^th century French Vision and – worse – thickly spackled with the lethal goo of Leninist and Maoist agitprop which has unleashed – even worse – the ancient evils of Leviathan and concentrated economic-political power. Such that at this point We have a two-party system with a single policy.

And – worse – that at this point now that policy is the policy of the Soviet nomenklatura in the 1970s: can I just get out of here with my pension and boodle before the people realize what’s happened?

But the position has only been overrun on one Plane of the Battlespace; and it exists in two – the second, that Beyond, being by far the more vital and ultimately robust. For all We know, as happened with the Roman Empire, the American culture and society may go (especially if the economy or the currency go much further south) and the Church, based on and supported from and Guided by that Beyond Plane of Existence, will take root and in time grow in some new this-dimensional establishment. And if hyper-Modernism’s  ongoing attacks by government-enabled secularizing elites on Western culture as a whole finally succeed and that historic vessel breaks up in the mid-ocean of this life, then the Church will – in naval parlance – shift its flag to another more capable vessel.

Mysterious are Thy workings … and so on.

Bacevich applies the analysis of Henry Adams to the Church’s problem: Adams saw Christianity as an organizing principle (what I would call a monoplanar mis-evaluation of its genuine and actual reality). Being rather monoplanar himself, Adams thus saw matters only as sort of a this-dimensional and static struggle between this and that human understanding of Christianity and Modernity (Christianity was the Medieval Virgin; Modernity was the Dynamo). What bummed Henry out was that the Dynamo had clearly eclipsed the Virgin as an organizing principle of culture.

Adams was onto something there. But as Bacevich notes, he was looking at Christianity merely as a sociological and this-dimensional belief-system. And thus, I would say, not as a) a living community that is b) anchored in a reality Beyond this dimension that is yet active and engaged with humans and their affairs. What Adams sensed was not the decline of Christianity, perhaps, so much as the decline of the West’s ability to ‘platform’ or serve as the carrying-vessel for Christianity. And perhaps, part of his unconscious foreboding – so obvious in his authorial mood and tenor – was a fear for what would happen to the West when it cut itself off from genuine Christianity.

Christianity is not simply a this-worldly, monodimensional belief-system or a project; the Church is not simply an organization like any other human organization. There is a multiplanar element to both of them that is also primarily a relationship – an active, personal relationship (both individual and communal). Like a radio-signal from London to Resistance agents in Occupied Europe, the Beyond’s influence can be attenuated temporarily by the ‘atmospherics’ and the weather, or by the incompetence or insufficient attention of the agents, or the disrepair of the receiving equipment … but the signal and the London that sends it exist independently of all the head-scratching and frustration of nonplussed or distracted agents on the ground up to their ears in hostile Occupiers.

And this metaphor doesn’t even begin to touch the myriads of folk simply trying to keep life together in difficult times and who can at best try to keep in their mind and heart a vision of a London and a civilization that will yet come to their aid and get themselves and their loved ones through the Occupation without too much collaboration. They are all very real.

(Yes, you can argue – and with some legitimacy – the wisdom and competence of London when desired and needed air-drops fail to materialize or good people suffer because somehow the great fleets and armies of rescue have not yet appeared off the landing beaches to liberate Fortress Occupation. But in the long run, as residents of an Occupied and tortured world, humans are neither ‘totally autonomous’ nor are they calling-the-shots in this cosmic Effort. To accept that boundary and limitation is neither delusion nor surrender to serfdom and despair, but is actually a liberation itself: freeing the Occupied from delusions of a grandeur and omnipotence which are themselves an enslaving delusion.)

Bacevich notes that Adams began to see the Dynamo as symbolic of an increasing human mastery of machines that could harness elemental (but, I add, still this-worldly) forces such as electricity and the powers of fueled industry. And thus Adams came to sense it as the symbol of a “moral force” itself.  I think at this point it won’t seem too outré to suggest that what Adams saw as a ‘moral’ force was actually a demoralizing and de-moralizing force.

I mean ‘moral’ in the sense that it was used back then as a ‘vital principle’ or ‘life force’ as well as in the more obvious meaning of a force for doing the Good and the Right.

Inherent in that Dynamo force, then, is a potential that will, if not carefully handled, actually work as a dark-magnet, drawing the human spirit so deeply down into this single monoplane dimension that – almost like a black hole – it blots out the light and energy of the Beyond, of that Higher Plane.

Living in the Industrial Age as American abundance and its culture of work-and-freedom began to produce stupendous amounts of material goods (although not yet the widespread and amazing material luxuries of the later 20^th century and its consumerist ethos), Adams could sense the queasy dizziness that was beginning to affect American life even in the 1890s and early 1900s. A kid left in Disneyworld with unlimited credit and no adult supervision and no closing-time might well feel such dizziness, especially in the company of a lot of other kids equally dizzy with such enjoyable and pleasurable ‘freedom’.  You can see where something like that might go.

And there would develop a lethal dynamic: the “Trusts and Corporations” (indicative of the combination of economic and political power) would come to be seen as the providers, enabled by a Congress and Executive that gave them unbridled sway over society and culture and the economy; and which would exert powerful pressure for the military to be sent out to ensure ever-wider markets around the world. The "Trusts and Corporations" would come to be seen as the ‘real’ providers and before long as – for all practical purposes – the Ultimate Provider.

The kids, if apprised of the source of their magically unlimited credit, and of the authority to keep the park open and all the rides running and all the food shops cooking and baking away … well, the kids might just come to mistake such an authority as the Ultimate Provider. Church, Sunday-school, darkling and weighty matters such as character and virtue and sin and human limitations and consequences and responsibility and such have no place in such an apparently eternal Saturday at the amusement park. After all, the kiddies would whine, the whole idea of an amusement park is to get away from the labors and chores of quotidian life; the whole idea of an amusement park is precisely that it is not a Vale of Tears. Ronald Reagan could hardly disagree. And why bother yourself with the fact that behind the Trusts and Corporations, it is the mighty Dynamo that drives the electric lights and the machines that make the rides?

And – not to simply blame it all on ‘the Republicans’ – the assorted equivalents of those Trusts and Corporations on the Left, the advanced-level professional advocacies seeking to justify their own sugar-spun dampdream Agendas for total-autonomy and the choice-filled life actually worked to undermine any human days except the Weekend Day At The Ever-Fun Amusement Park; any other ‘day’ was merely oppression and limitation and a discourse-of-power that served only to ruin your day with worries you didn’t need to have.

From both Right and Left wayyyy too many Americans became kiddies – infantilized, as the professionals would say.

In his fears about the Dynamo – though he was not yet in an era of enveloping amusement parks that beggared any such simple joys as a country-fair – I think Adams has been proven correct.

Acutely, Bacevich homes in on Adams’s fear that “Christianity as a formula for ordering human affairs” has been supplanted.

Yes and more than Yes. Because this matter cannot be construed simply as a case of one ‘approach’ replacing another in the endless human cycle of invention and re-invention. Christianity is not simply a fashion – like the length of skirts or the width of ties – that come in and go out like the unending tides. What is at stake – and what demands an answer – is the Question: does genuine Christianity accurately represent the actual (multiplanar) reality and Reality? Because if it does, then whether or not it is the ‘in’ fashion or the ‘out’ fashion among humans is – not to put too fine a point on it – irrelevant.

If genuine Christianity is accurate, then there is a Reality ‘Up There’ that will continue to exist (and operate) regardless of whether some humans care to realize it.

Nor do I here worry that that Reality will punish humans for such an act of lese majeste. Rather, human ignorance will itself punish humans, much as an untrained driver who doesn’t realize that the car has several forward gears spends years driving around in 1^st gear (or Drive Low), subjecting the driving experience to far more delay and expense and frustration, and cutting off far more of the positive benefits of driving, then ever needed to have been the case. Disregard of the Real punishes itself; the Real doesn’t have to come down and do much of that at all.

Thus the consequences and Consequences (those nasty and oppressive things) of “the frantic pursuit of self-liberation” in Bacevich’s phrase.

No vessel – no matter how small or how large – exists as an island unto itself (to mix a metaphor, but you get the idea). It exists in an infinitely larger surround of huge natural forces and their potential to wreak lethal havoc, relies on ports along its path, other ships (especially if things go south), and it must constantly monitor itself for the operational integrity of its own vital inner dynamics and its inner systems and their workings. There is no such thing as total-autonomy and not even the most competent or tyrannical or megalomaniac captain is ‘totally free’ (ocean-going ships cannot be driven along on land, for example) and for that matter, even in their own element and in pursuit of their own purpose they can be wrecked, as you saw with Ahab monomaniacally chasing his Great White Whale and none of his crew able to muster the political will to put a stop to it before he took himself, the ship and all of them (except Ishmael floating on that coffin) to ultimate wrack and ruin.

A realistic awareness of Shape – which itself imposes limitations – liberates one from the insidious and queasy and death-making seduction of the boundary-less (and thus Shape-less) self and life.

This has not been a wisdom ever easy for Americans to accept. This was a land of abundance and in terms of world-historical affairs an almost story-book insulation from the consequences of having to live cheek-by-jowl with potential rivals, invaders, and that darkling host of historical entities and actors who have served other nations and peoples as helpful reminders that the world doesn’t revolve around you and your own affairs. (Recall J. G. Ballard’s book – and the film made from it – “Empire of the Sun”, where the coddled little English kid growing up in Singapore in 1942 suddenly finds out, through a resounding whack in the chops from his heretofore submissive and attentive native nanny, that the Brits have blown it, the forces of a surging Asia are in the ascendant, the Japanese Army is coming down the street, and the world – who knew? – didn’t exist merely as a playground for his personal desires and whimsies).

But the current cohort of Americans, in their several generations and age-groups, has now an opportunity presented to no other Americans before them: not only is the country in a very tight spot indeed, but it is in most certain decline. Indeed, the whole thing has happened so fast that many who had attained the age of reason in that magical quarter-century of 1945-1970 have seen everything go south under their very noses. We are rapidly becoming Great Britain in 1946, except that for Us there will be no New World giant on whose coat-tails at least a decent simulacrum of international status and economic viability might be maintained.  

This is a challenge greater even than that which confronted the generations who had to face that rendezvous with destiny imposed by World War 2.

We are on Destiny’s home turf now, and not as conquerors or hegemons.

It would help – perhaps hugely – if We as a nation understood Ourselves to be on Providence’s home turf (as if any humans ever weren’t), but the Correct Stance of anti-Beyond imposed by secularizing elements and pandering pols has robbed many of even that (marvelous and robust) Consolation and Strength.

So, as one Civil War general once put it, we are going into battle with “one boot on”, and only one … if even one.

As scripture might put it, We have not been wise-virgins at all (the image works on sooooo many levels).

Now comes a crucible of fire. But for those who understand the ways of the Beyond, the challenge is an invitation to a maturity and solid real-ness that this velveteen-rabbit political and societal culture of latter days has willfully thrown aside, even as an ideal to which one might aspire and around which one might Trellis one’s personal and collective hopes and energies and purposes and goals.  Thus is decline (or worse) a “muse of fire” for those willing to enter into its searing aura.

It was Roland Barthes (if I recall correctly) who rejected ideals because where you have an ideal you will sooner or later have “coercion”: you will have to try to forcefully master your lower urges in order to get your Self in hand, and perhaps oppress others by making them conform as well, or even ‘oppress’ them just by the vivid force of your own example.

Thus genuine Christianity’s potential as an alternative to the flattening monoplanar and ultimately megalomaniac cockiness of the totally-autonomous ‘secular liberation’ exists as an affront and a rival to the New Correct Order.

It has always struck me as odd: if you could travel on an airline whose pilots demonstrated the Correct ideals of the choice-filled, totally-autonomous self, would you? If they started out across the field from the terminal with no regard to the lines painted on the tarmac or the myriad flashing lights and arrows and with no regard for the tower’s instructions; if they decided once airborne that they didn’t feel like flying at the prescribed altitude for (say) West-bound flights and were exercising their ‘choice’ to fly at the altitude they felt like tonight; if they decided they really didn’t feel like flying to the Coast at all but preferred to go look at Canada today; if they really considered themselves oppressed by the Prime Directive never to try to fly in reverse … who would fly such an airline?

You see where this sort of thing can go.

And has.

NOTES

*Yes, there were also more mundane reasons: the maintenance of the Papal States as a secure base of the Church’s and Papacy’s influence occupied the Popes of the 19^th century. So did the divisions between those – even in the upper ranks of the hierarchy – who sought to somehow engage Modernity in order to somehow co-exist with it and those who feared that – as one doughty Cardinal put it, and not without some acuity – “freedom of religion is freedom for irreligion”; his assumption being that if you have a ship loaded with passengers (‘souls’ as they were known then) that is floating tolerably well on the ever-dangerous sea, then the ‘freedom’ to tinker with its core dynamics or overhaul them or dispense with them altogether is madness; how – he wondered – could you consider the license to deform, destroy, or dispense with the genuine grasp of humanity to be any sort of actual and genuine ‘freedom’ at all?

**Some authors suggest that since Modernism was the movement toward a monoplanar human reality (only this Plane of Existence exists; rather than the multiplanar human reality of this-world and also a Beyond), then technically post-Modernism would indicate a swing back to the state of affairs before Modernism took hold (the Age of Faith, as it might be called, which flourished some centuries ago but retained its efficacy until relatively recently). In their view what many call today ‘post-modernism’ is actually not that at all; rather it is a form of hyper-Modernism where all the most lethal potentials of Modernism (the denial not only of a Beyond but of the possibility of any human ability to ‘know’ anything – which thus utterly undermines any workable and sufficiently strong Grounding or Shaping of human life individually or collectively). In this Post, just to let your mind get used to it, I will use ‘hyper-Modern’ to describe Our current wracked state of culture, and post-Modern will refer to that heark-back to a time when humans had some workable Grounding in the Beyond and were Shaped by it (resulting in the genuine freedom that stems from knowing their own purpose and role in the cosmos, in Creation).

JAMES CARROL ON CELIBACY

More on this Catholic priest thing. Why? It’s amazing to watch this thing keep going, with so many commentators tossing whatever they happen to have handy in the hopes that something will stick. And yet it is presented by ‘The New York Times’ and its corporate subsidiaries with all the breathless solemnity of ‘serious’ stuff.

Carroll has a full-page piece. He’s basically running the plan of claiming that all the priestly abuse and all the ‘cover up’ is due to priestly celibacy (and an old-boy network that also comes back to ‘men’, not to put too fine a point on it).

In this approach he dovetails nicely with Garry Wills, about whom I recently Posted. Although, Wills goes after the Papacy and the entire concept of a hierarchy and a clergy (at least a male clergy) as being late add-ons to a fancied original layperson’s church nicely called “the people of God”.

But they both join the ‘liberal’ siege that is seeking to neutralize the Church’s credibility and stature as a moral force, either through sex-abuse (cases now either very old or diminishing in number), hierarchical cover-up reaching up to the Papacy itself (opening the path to a ‘democratic’ – and thus more ‘liberal’? – Church), maleness (opening the way for women to be ordained and become bishops and even Pope), or – not quite coherently – abolishing the Papacy and the hierarchical priesthood itself (what will that do to all the ordainment opportunities for women?).

I sort of get a sense of déjà-vu: the old Tailhook game-plan now run against the Church, presumably with as much success as – alas – it had with the Navy and the Pentagon. The Church, though, appears to have a bit more backbone than the Admirals and assorted pols, and perhaps enough intellectual chops to see that the proposed utopia of Postmodern Ascendancy has more than a coupla downsides.

Which resistance is not having a good effect on the ‘liberals’’ blood-pressure at all.

Carroll is going for the idea that if the Church got rid of clerical celibacy then there wouldn’t have been all the sex-abuse.

Of course, you first have to remind yourself that the ‘abuse’ has been defined to include anything from a touch to outright rape, with an awful lot of the claims at the lower end of that spectrum, and with almost all of the allegations never subjected to the inquiry of a trial (even as the trial process has been skewed in favor of allegators in the Age of Sex Mania).

But beyond that, I’d need to know if the existence of sexual abuse is less among married clergy.

That’s an utterly necessary bit of information to have before you can start assessing the dump-celibacy (or dump-men) plan. But it’s a tough one, since – by amazing coincidence – the marquis media investigative resources have never done any sustained and effective looking into the question.

Anglican clergy? Protestant clergy? Fundamentalist clergy? Mormon clergy? Jewish clergy? Where either the male or the female is the ordained member?

Surely the sex-offense movement’s rather shrewdly underplayed information is that when you actually look at the numbers, more than 90 percent of the sexual abuse of children takes place in the family setting. And that the stranger-man so favored in media reports constitutes less than 5 percent of the instances. Marriage doesn’t seem to have the effect that Carroll presumes it to have.

Nor do I say here that the clergyman is a ‘stranger’; but then I would want to know if Catholic priests are relatively more frequent or less frequent offenders (when they actually do offend) than clergy of other faith-groups. And that too is a rather vital piece of the puzzle that the marquis reporting media haven’t really discussed.

This is not an attempt to ‘minimize’ by trying the ‘everybody does it’ gambit; but if Carroll is going to pin everything on ‘celibacy’ (and ‘men’ to a lesser extent) then answers to these questions are essential.

He stakes a lot on his own experiences as a seminarian and priest for some years.

He himself left, he says, because he wanted to be a writer and he felt he couldn’t exercise the freedom to do that while a priest. He’s probably onto something there: large organizations don’t usually allow their official representatives or employees an unlimited latitude for freedom of expression. It’s sort of built into the organizational – even the ‘team’ – dynamic, and is clear in corporate and military settings as well as in political and even academic settings.

But he also reports on the substantial amount of immaturity – emotional, psychological, as well as sexual – among the Catholic clergy as he experienced them.

And I think he’s on to something there.

The Church made a choice for an unmarried clergy in the 12th century. There were organizational and strategic reasons for that. Organizationally, married priests died, for example, leaving wives or concubines and even children to be supported and there arose questions of what belonged to the priest’s ‘estate’ and what belonged to the Church (did the widow or relicts have a legal claim upon the parish property?).

Strategically, the Church in the various nascent monarchies of a Europe recovering from the Dark Ages, was looking to protect not only its spiritual integrity and authority (fearing what ultimately took place in Henry VIII’s England) but also the physical infrastructure of parishes and bishoprics and so forth.

And in suppressing the pre-Reformation agitations of dissenting sects (the Cathari and Albigensians, most notably) as well as in looking at the diplomatic and military professionalization going on in the developing monarchies, the Church leadership saw the possibility of having a corps of professional dedicated agents in the form of a celibate priesthood.

It was that or allow a slide toward priests becoming employees of the nascent monarchies (as happened in Henry VIII’s England, most notably) or simply popular local tribunes, chained to local popular whims theological, social, political and otherwise.

And, of course, if you were married – and marriage being such a significant and profound sacrament – then your first responsibility in life had to be to your family and not to God and the folks assigned to your care. (Which is why the military for so long preferred unmarried folks and was not ‘family-oriented’. I clearly recall an episode in the first season of the ‘Star Trek’ TV show (the one with Kirk and Spock and the gang) where two officers on the ship (a male and a female; the show wasn’t TOO far ahead of the times) are going to get married; suddenly the Battle-Stations alarm goes off as an enemy vessel is sighted; the betrothed immediately rush … to find each other for re-assuring hugs. Thank God this is science fiction, I said to myself.)

But there was a spiritual dimension to it as well. Carroll rightly looks to the original deformation – to remain in the spirit of his analysis – that took place in the early centuries of Christianity when certain North African Christians took to the deserts to live a life of almost complete withdrawal from the life of this world, the better to conduct a vital relationship with the Divine, unhindered and undistracted in their pursuit of the soul’s excellence by the needs of societal living and even of the body itself.

Their idea was something akin to naval life: you stripped down the vessel so that it carried only those things essential to the mission of the warship. You lived your life as focused on the Mission of conforming yourself to a relationship with the Divine as a naval officer at sea lived his life conformed utterly to the needs of the Mission (you see a robust echo of this in “Master and Commander” Jack Aubrey’s overriding dedication to ‘the needs of the Service’, which so exasperated his friend, the scientist (and, in the books, government intelligence agent), Dr. Stephen Maturin).

This strand resembles the insight underlying Noh plays: you strip down the inessentials, thus acutely refining and intensifying the spirit to fit into the most core essentials in the script-action and in the performance. (Alhough there then developed Kabuki for those who weren't up to the challenges of performing or watching Noh - but I'm not going to draw the analogy out that far: because in the Church, and certianly as reaffirmed in the Second Vatican Council, 'lay life' wasn't seen as merely a 'watered-down' version of genuine Christianity suitable for 'lesser' minds, souls and lives - rather, the lay life was in itself a mode of the Divine life expressing Itself in life and history and human affairs.)

There was a significant weakness in this desert hermit approach: not everyone baptized into the Church community was going to be living as a desert hermit. And the Church saw her mission as not only to provide a matrix for desert hermitry, but also for all of those human beings who still wished to carry on a life of more conventional (not to say less-spiritual or less morally valuable) societal participation, marrying, raising families, and earning a living through which sustenance could be provided for same.

The hermits, let’s face it, took a dim view of ‘the body’ and of Matter (as opposed to Spirit) generally. To them, all of that was ‘the world’ and it was the playground of the Devil. And especially sex, which the hermits rather vividly – and perhaps acutely – perceived as capable of raising one hell of a mess with one’s concentration and one’s life. Few adolescent boys of any era (girls too, in their way) could disagree with that concern.

The trouble with sex was that it is not only a human capability, but is one of the most primal evolutionary* fundaments of the human being, and in each individual self, it was a remarkably powerful element of ‘motivation’. This, we now know, wasn’t surprising: the first thing Nature seeks to ensure in a species it that it will be able to reproduce itself and raise its young to continue the cycle of birth, life, and death.

But in the Church’s (and hence the West’s) view, the human being also possessed a ‘soul’, something that kept going after death, something that (as we now know) maintained personal identity even as all the cells in the body replaced themselves in the space of multi-year cycles throughout life.**

And the problem arose of how to integrate the human’s primal evolutionary sexual urge into the advanced life of being possessed not only of Material (physical, bodily) existence but some form of non-Material, spiritual (metaphysical) existence as well.

Scripture was not definitive. There are two Creation accounts, one which emphasizes procreation and one which seems to indicate that God created Eve so that Adam wouldn’t be all alone and lonely. Nor does Scripture apologize for the bald duality in its text.

Is sex for ‘having kids’ or for ‘relationship’? Or for both? (Or, as in today’s hook-up culture, the gift of the past 40 years, is it for ‘personal fulfillment’ or for ‘stress relief’ or for ‘health’ or for laffs?)

And in any case, then, how integrate it into a general balance among one’s human powers and potentials? Or do you just call Sex your personal equivalent of the Prime Directive and let it run your life?

You may already sense that these issues are hardly ‘quaint’ or of merely historical interest. For much of the past 40 Biblical years this country has been wrestling with the question. And taken it to new heights or depths of conceptual creativity. And political activity - or political theater, anyway.

Especially in a consumerist culture that emphasizes the immediate gratification or ‘fulfillment’ of the individual and every desire, not to be postponed or ‘repressed’ for any reason – including, some would say, responsibility to ‘children’ and succeeding generations (once quaintly known as ‘posterity’).

The Church has evolved a concept of human ‘fulfillment’ that involves a responsible use of sex (by males and females) that is tied into a complex and dynamic human reality that involves other human beings in the Present building on the experiences of humans in the Past and holding itself responsible for those humans in the Future, that posterity yet to be born. And the whole three-ring circus to be overseen by a Beyond that cared enough to guide, nurture, support and – in the widest and most constructive sense of the word – ‘judge’.

And it is a concept that requires more than a little ‘postponement of gratification’, a hallmark of maturity in psychological circles that yet affronted (and affrighted) the cocky adolescent Boomers (who, if you ask me, were given far too much too soon, not only by their doting parents but also by their government when the Democrats gave them the vote in 1972 and told them they were the cutting edge of Everything).

If materialist and consumerist America has always existed a little uneasily with the Church’s teachings, the Boomers – and especially some of the utopian paradise excitements that have riled Us during their tenure – have really got their issues with the Church. But nobody ever really said No to them; and after the domestic political experience of Vietnam they got the idea that nobody really had the authority or integrity to say No to them.

Nor have they learned to say No to themselves. To the contrary, they have erected Yes into a general philosophy of life. But one that has somehow morphed in the following generations into an instinctual (no philosophy about it) knee-jerk of Whateverrrrr.

But Carroll’s own experiences do hold some valid observations.

The downside of the Church’s 12th century plan was that if you were going to have a complex set of sacraments that would mark all of the important watershed moments in every believer’s life, dispensable only by your ordained agents, and yet you were a very large and widely dispersed organization, you were going to need a whole lot of agents.

And that would have quality-control ramifications. Where find consistently so many spiritually as well as personally mature adults, trained to ecclesiastical and sacramental competence?

In American history, especially as the pioneering immigrant Catholic flocks of the 19th century got themselves adjusted to America’s culture, the pool of candidates – raised in a misch of Catholic and ethnic tradition that then combined with American attitudes – to administer the extensive Catholic ‘establishment’ of parishes, schools, and dioceses faced a life not so far different from what is known in the military as ‘garrison life’.

It was not the life of the legions, enduring great physical hardship and danger yet experiencing the thrill of deploying self and commitment to duty squarely in the teeth of the remarkably concentrating and enlivening threat of death. Rather, life in garrison was prone to become a round of duties and formalities.

Garrison life attracts a certain type of recruit who might not have signed up for the legions. It’s just the way things are and for what it’s worth I don’t think that the simple addition of ‘women’ to the mix is going to make that much difference.

Unless, deducing from the work of the many ‘nuns’ who vitally sustained the work of the Church over decades, the female is naturally better equipped to ‘nurture’ and ‘nurse’ – which, in a way, is what the parish ministry is all about. But that – who can be surprised? – is not something that Correct thought will entertain in the present matter. Nor can I resolve it in a simple Post here.

And the garrison mentality – as opposed to the life of the legions – also brings its own insidious spiritual drawback: you get the idea that if you just get all the daily, weekly, monthly checklists checked-off, and keep the flag flying and fire the sunrise and sunset guns, then you’ve pretty much done your job and the rest of your energy is … ‘free’ (as in free-time or – in Latin – ad libitum).

So you either have to train the troops to define ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ in a way commensurate with their overall professional responsibilities, or else you’ll wind up with a 9-to-5 soldiery that, once the uniform is off, acts like just any other civilian.***

The postwar years – when the Boomers were just getting started - saw not just a loosening of cultural restraints (that had started at least as early as the 1920s, though tempered by the Depression and then World War Two) and a culture-wide settling down to a long-deserved (it was presumed) binge of peace and quiet and personal satisfaction.

It is the strength as well as the risk of the Church’s deep engagement with culture that anytime the culture ‘catches a cold’ the Church’s own human agents are going to start sneezing a little too.

And the confusing trumpet of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965)didn’t help matters, sounding in this country in the midst of the confusing mid-Sixties civil rights experience (the Voting Rights Act followed in days by the Watts riots), the Vietnam experience, Liberation Theology’s concern for ‘oppression’ and ‘social justice’, an increasingly anti-male early feminism, on top of the general confusion of both elements of the Boomers’ excitements: the groovy, druggy Summer of Love ethos and the in-your-face ‘revolution’ ethos (so vividly-modeled by Mao’s Red Guard youth cadres).

The upshot was a general loosening of the traditional strictures, evident not only in the increasing number of priests who more frequently appeared in public without their traditional black-suit garb, but also weren’t so clearly held to the old strictures that governed deportment.

But then, the idea was to get ‘beyond the garrison’, so to speak, and get out among the people. (The French had tried that with the ‘worker priest’ movement of the immediate postwar era.)

And not to be underplayed (but also not to be overplayed) were the number of priests who were either clearly unbalanced (but accepted because they seemed able to keep up appearances and go through the daily round) or were accepted into seminary far too early in their lives. And there was also a residual dynamic among some ethnic groups where you either wanted your ‘best son’ to be a priest or you gratefully sent along your ‘different’ one.

A genuine kaleidoscope of pressures, influences, dynamics, and – as ever – complex human realities.

All things considered, I’m not about to say that the Church did a worse job navigating that era in America than did the national political establishment.

But to conclude on the basis of his own experience of organizational inertia and emotional confusion that there has been a) a huge and extraordinary amount of genuine and profound sexual abuse and b) an old-boy network cover-up that clearly indicts the Church’s entire concept of i) ordaining only males and ii) requiring them to be celibate … I don’t see it.

And, frankly, I can’t see how Carroll sees it.

Nor can I imagine from certain tensions I noticed as a kid among the tremendously impressive and dedicated ‘nuns’ who taught grammar school, that there wasn’t and would not be an awful lot of old-girl dynamics in a Popess or Goddess Church.

Carroll blames Paul VI, the Pope who followed John XXIII (he who decided in 1959 to call a Council in the first place). John was a marvelous peasant (I mean that in the very best sense) who had been an Army chaplain with the Italian forces during their profoundly horrific experiences, under truly awful senior leadership, against the Austro-Hungarians in the mountains of northern Italy; he had been in the Vatican diplomatic service during the interwar years, ranging Europe as it was wracked by all the tumults of aspiring social democracy, departing monarchy, vigorous Red agitation, and nascent Fascist reaction.

And Catholics were involved on all sides of everything, or were endangered by same.

John, a large man in all senses of the world, maintained his heart and mind, possessing his soul and ministering to the soul of Europe and of humanity.

Paul was a bird-like man, physically, but no dope. He gasped, as probably any more conventional person – or responsible official – would gasp, when his boss decided to shake things up with a world-wide corporate re-evaluation. Imagine the head of GM or IBM in 1959 ordering a general world-wide re-assessment of Everything.

John died before he could guide the complex forces that he had convened. Paul found himself elected to the hot-seat; the previous Ringmaster – a true master of the life forces – had put them all in the center ring and had no doubt expected to manage what he had set in motion. Paul was a far less confident and secure Ringmaster – and the whole zoo figured that out pretty quickly.

In a way, the Church experienced what this country experienced when Lincoln, who had formulated a vision for the future and had achieved the political and personal maturity to shepherd it through, was taken away just as the War ended, but long before its objectives and achievements were solidly anchored in a national consensus.****

Paul VI's solution – decently enough – was to slow down; since navigation and even command philosophy were now uncertain for the moment, the prudent thing to do was to slow down from Warp 6, make a respectable Warp 3, and get things a little clearer.

The American idea – sharing more than a little utopian impatience with the French Jacobin and 19th-century ‘revolutionary’ mind and heart – is to kick it up to Warp 9, see what happens, and que sera sera. Wheeeee! It worked so well in the movies, and up to that point (1965) had made and kept the country an actual (if not comprehensive) Number One in the world and in history.

Carroll speaks for the Warp-9 club that considered any prudent handling of the helm to be rank incompetence, cowardice, back-lashing, foot-dragging, and probably some things a whole lot darker.

It’s not sufficient to suggest that the Warp-9 bunch have been emboldened by the past quarter-century of American Sex Offense Mania to take a swipe at the Vatican, the Papacy, the hierarchy, the celibate priesthood, and men generally.

Their own ‘liberal’ credentials and their friendliness to all things Boomer and Correct enabled them to render encouragement and credibility to all the forces within American culture and civilization, on the Left and on the Right, that would rather not live in the presence of a Beyond that might Judge.

It also occurs that there is an extra benny MIRV-ed into this whole priest sex-abuse thing: you will wind up scaring off whatever decent potential priesthood candidates there are. In either of two ways: a) they simply lose hope in the possibility of a fulfilling and worthwhile life answering the call to ministry or b) they realize that no matter how blameless a life one might lead, the sex-offense laws and the mainstream media are so skewed now that just about anybody can lodge an allegation secure in the knowledge that you can't defend yourself and they will never be held to account in law for any mischief they deliberately wreak with a false claim.

This of course will yield the tactical and strategic result of weakening the Church's ministry as numbers of available priests shrink, and perhaps even render the Church more amenable to ordaining women or simply turning over more and more 'ministry' and 'governance' to laypersons. Neat.

And here We are today.

On top of which, the forces for ‘liberalization’ have convinced themselves that ‘religion’ as in the forces that pulled off 9-11 and ‘religion’ as in the people who shoot abortion doctors are pretty much the essence of ‘religion’, and that therefore the ‘liberal’ attack upon the Church is justified and Good because it will rid the country and the world of fanaticism. Thus the ‘New Atheist’ movement, which has been inspired to ‘get active’ and join the Cause against religion-terrorism.

Although if anything is true of the garrison-mentality it’s that it isn’t dedicated (not to say ‘fanatic’) enough.*****

It's a mug's game - taking the mis-application of something and claiming that the mis-application is its essence. The Church has spent long centuries trying to tame the wildness in the most profound needs and potentials of the human reality, seeking to Shape and channel the deepest human energies rather than choking them out.

But as I've said here, that requires a certain amount of saying No, and to both the Boomer and the revolutionary cadre, being-said-No-to is the most outrageous of oppressions.

And as I’ve said in a previous Post, it’s long past the time that the Church faced up to itself and yet also to its – I’ll indulge myself here – tormentors.

There’s more than enough work and space cargoed in that comment to keep ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, hierarchs and laypersons, quite usefully, constructively, and (one hopes and prays) fruitfully engaged for quite some time.

As has always been the case with the Church and with humanity and with History.

NOTES

*’Evolution’ was not formulated widely as a concept until the 19th century, but while they didn’t have the word for it, or a large conceptual understanding of its dynamics, earlier generations and eras intuitively grasped the power and complexity of the sexual urge.

**This is a problem not unknown to the ancients. The 'Ship of Theseus’ problem dealt with it: if you have a ship, and you replace its original planks one by one, at what point have you replaced so many of the original planks that you no longer have the original vessel at all? Nicely, the oldest commissioned warship in the US Navy – the frigate Constitution, now berthed in Boston – has at this point in Time had just about every single piece of her replaced several times over with the possible exception of the deep keel wood; so to say that you are taking a tour of the ship that did all that great stuff in the space of a few months in the War of 1812 is to deploy a bit of imagination. (It’s still a tour well worth taking if you’re up that way.)

So too with humans then: if you replace all the cells in your body every 7 or 10 years, say, then how is there still a ‘you’? (Assuming that 6 year-olds aren’t reading this Post.) What is it that keeps you You even though all the physical infrastructure present at birth has been replaced several times over at the cellular level?

Current science suggests, among other things, that a) there is a ‘mind’ or b) there isn’t anything and you’re not.

But (a) simply kicks the can down the road since you now have either a ‘something’ at your core that is not actually materially dependent on your cells or you do have something immaterial at your core – and why not call it a ‘soul’ and how can you be so sure that said ‘soul’ isn’t configured as the Church has always taught?

And (b) simply erases you as an individual extended in Time. And, by the by, raises all hell with the Constitutional vision of the individual person as Citizen. That is to say: if You today aren’t the same entity carrying your name and wearing your clothes that existed yesterday, and that You today aren’t the same entity that will be carrying your name and wearing your clothes tomorrow, then ‘You’ as a Constitutionally protected (and responsible) entity are merely a momentary flicker and could hardly have any ‘rights’; You are not sustained and are not sustainable as an individual being. Whatcha think about that?

I sit back sometimes and wonder if this is the type of stuff that they assure each other is ‘knowledge’ at elite Beltway and academic dinner parties, as the Chardonnay and Kool-Aid rain down like a tasteful and tasty flood.

***Let’s not even get into the fact that this, indeed, is precisely what the national approach to military life is sliding into.

****Contrary to current Advocacy thinking, I don’t think it’s first and foremost a matter of getting your ‘vision’ enacted into law, so as to force everybody to go along with you. Rather, the hard path of consensus-building, at which Lincoln was a patient and sober master, is the only way to profoundly change a democracy without ripping it off its foundations. Alas, in 1965 and subsequently, the vote-addled pols chose the low-road, the easier way, and We are hugely the worse for it as a national Community with a national Idea … meaning that We The People at this point have neither.

*****I don’t want to limit my vision of things to the somewhat military garrison-legion image, helpful as it is. If you imagine the parish priest as a ‘farmer’ in the best sense of that vocation, then surely that is a powerful image through which to imagine a disciplined dedication to assisting Life (including Spirit) that requires focus, concentration, competence, and unremitting effort in order to remain an efficacious servant of the Great Process of God’s life-giving work in the world and in history.