The Guardian on Calvin

Why won't John Calvin die? | Cif belief: The question | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

This Friday is the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth, and the tradition he founded is still in pretty good shape. There are something like 80 million Calvinists around the world, grouped in slightly fewer denominations. This is extraordinary to an English mindset...What is it that accounts for the success of the ideas of John Calvin, when so many of his contemporaries among the reformers are forgotten?

FYI--a response by the Guardian, and its readers, to the Calvin's 500th birthday.

Aestheticism and Authenticity

This is the Anglican shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, a repository of artistic and conceptual kitch constructed on the site of a real shrine that went out of business at the Reformation. Built during the grand finale of Anglo-Catholicism Triumphant in the UK, the aim was to recapture the pre-Reformation piety of the English Church before The Stripping of the Altars, to show everyone that Anglicans really were Catholic dammit, and to prove that Anglo-Catholics weren't just a bunch of aesthetes and fakers.

But why, one asks, did the builders of the shrine and many other educated, sophisticated people with good taste--including perhaps Eleanor Stump in her commendation of St. Louis Music--feel they had to do kitch to prove that they were really religious? It may be an Anglican thing you wouldn't understand but here is the story.

I grew up in Paterson, NJ, the shooting site (in more ways than one) of several Sopranos episodes. In Paterson there were just two ethnic groups: Italian and Not Italian. The People of the Land were Italian and the state religion was Mediteranean Folk Catholicism, which ran to lawn statuary and shocking representations of the Sacred Heart.

Growing up as we did, I and other Patersonians saw Catholicism as real religion, the industry standard, in the way that most Americans now view conservative, evangelical Protestantism as paradigmatic Christianity. And the Catholicism we saw was the Catholicism of Sicilian peasants--tacky, trashy and frankly superstitious though, on the bright side, not in the least guilt-inducing: supernatural beings operated as a transcendental Mafia who could be wheedled and bribed.

Given this picture of what real religion was like we developed two rather strange ideas about religious authenticity:

(1) If it's tasteful, beautiful or aesthetically interesting it's not real religion. Catholics were the only people who put themselves out for religion, who went to church every Sunday (or sent their womenfolk to go proxy) whether they felt like it or not, who stuck with bad marriages because divorce was against the rules. And their stuff was kitch--they weren't just in it for the aesthetics. In fact they weren't into it for aesthetics at all.

(2) If it's reflective, sophisticated, or involves a seriously considered intellectual commitment it's not real religion. Indeed, if it was something in which one was interested it wasn't real religion. The Catholicism we saw was culture religion. It was inherited, reinforced by classical conditioning and never questioned. It was part of the world-taken-for-granted, more of the boring stuff you had to do but never really thought about. We believed that this stimulus-response, taken-for-granted religion was a deep part of the self in a way that religion which was taken on as a matter of conviction was not.

So this was the model of authentic religion for us and, I suspect, for the movement in the Church of England that produced such self-conscious monstrosities as Walsingham in the interests of religious authenticity. Now one asks: why did Anglicans, who possessed any number of pre-Reformation churches, lovingly restored and maintained by the National Trust, want Walsingham?

The story is similar to the Paterson story. During the 19th century--a century which I believe should never have happened--Anglican Romantics became convinced that the 18th century killed real religion: the religion of the Middle Ages and the Irish immigrant working class. So in the interests of religious authenticity this was the religious sensibility they tried to emulate.

The irony, perhaps paradox, of these attempts was that striving for authenticity precludes any possibility of attaining it. Call it the Walsingham Paradox. It isn't even the sheer ugliness of the place--I've seen much, much worse--but the overwhelming, embarrassing inauthenticity.

One thought about Rik's paper

I wanted to comment on Rik's great paper. I think I disagree, but I really like his project. I'll put my challenge this way. Consider two cases. The first is the case of the paralyzed person who nonetheless can commemorate in a way that is what we were calling "parasitic" upon the more dominant examples. (Say a paralyzed person prays the Rosary without actually fingering the beads). Here we have a person who commemorates the mysteries simply through the acquiring of certain mental and brain states. Now take the case of a Carthaginian Christian who was not discovered in the Decian persecution. After the fallout, the person claims that she would have succumbed to persecution had she only been found out (though in fact she was not found out). This seems to be a claim of being in the state of conditionally willing the commemoration of the Roman gods (and some of their actions, whatever those might have been taken to be). Are the states of the paralyzed person and the Carthaginian all that different? Clearly there's a kind of conditional state for the paralyzed person, too. ("I would be saying the 'Glory Be' between the first and second decades right now if only I were able to move my fingers"). The most obvious difference between the paralyzed person and the Carthaginian is that the paralyzed person wants to commemorate in the full physical sense, but the Carthaginian does not want to commemorate in the full physical sense. Nonetheless, they both are in a kind of counterfactual state like the following: "If circumstances c were actual, I would will to commmemorate in the full physical sense." So why does the first case count as commemoration (even if it is parasitic on more full-blooded examples) while the second case (of the Carthaginian) does not? Rik may have an answer to this, I'm just interested to hear what it might be.

Remembering the Future

Not much was said about it during the discussion of Rik's paper this morning, but I thought it worth underlining the fact that most Christians commemorate a future event, namely the parousia. In the anaphora or eucharistic prayer of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, the priest prays, "Remembering, therefore, this saving commandment, and all that was done for us: the cross, the tomb, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the sitting at the right hand, and the second and glorious coming."

This eschatological feature of Orthodox theology that we saw in Schmemann is the subject of a forthcoming book by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, Remembering the Future: An Eschatological Ontology. I thought you might find the following quote on ecclesiology suggestive, taken from Metropolitan John's Lectures in Christian Dogmatics.

"Saint Maximus the Confessor .... [integrates] the cosmological approach, which refers creation to its origins, into the eschatological approach, which looks forward to the future kingdom of God. Maximus took the cosmology of Origen and made it eschatological, transferring its reference from the beginning to the end, so dethroning Plato. He turns us around from the past to the future so that the eschatological community became the centre of ecclesiology again. When cosmology is reconciled with eschatology, we get the eschatological community in the divine Eucharist and the body of the Church. This single eschatological community incorporates the logos of beings, the world, as realities that come to us from the future. The events of he end which the Church portrays are not about this people only, but about creation as a whole. Just as each Christian represents in his own body the gathering and redemption of material creation, so the whole Church is the assembling of all creation in Christ, who is himself the final truth of all things. This ecclesiology gives us an account of mankind in which the new Adam recapitualtes all things, and so it overcomes the dichotomy of individual and eucharistic ecclesiologies" [p. 131].

Eucharist

Real Presence - Google Docs

Here is my paper which I'll be alluding to in my presentation this coming week. I've now changed my mind about some things. Comments greatly appreciated!

Note: you can easily upload papers to Google Docs as I've done with the paper linked here for discussion and comment.

Three Cheers for Mrs. Murphy!

Since Liturgy is not frozen, I think that Kavanagh's Mrs. Murphy has an important role. There are stories about how much of Rahner's theological work (I would gather especially in the Investigations) came from his encounters with the concerns of ordinary parishioners in the confessional. Of course, there is the need to pull out the theology from the liturgy, but there is also the need to infuse the liturgy with the evolving piety of the people and their own Christian understandings. Why isn't this process of give and take (taking from the liturgy, but giving to it from our experience as well) just the process of liturgical theology? Although I think Von Allmen's concern for God's freedom is misplaced, the point he's trying to make is one that draws a conclusion from his theology to the way that he thinks liturgy makes more sense. Here I agree with Patrick in thinking that primitivity is not the only good to be sought. Clearly there are some ways in which a connection to the ancient Christian past can and must be prized, but liturgy and theology develop, and there is much good in that.

Liturgy gone didactic

Regarding Kavanaugh's speculation that the availability of the Bible and other religious material in print encouraged the understanding of church services as instructional it seems that the opposite should have been the case. With widespread literacy and the ready availability of Bibles and other religious books one would think that there was less motivation to use church services for instruction--people could read the stuff at home.

Along these lines here's a heretical thought: maybe sermons should be abolished. Given virtually universal literacy (in developed countries) and ready access to information through printed media and the internet, do we need sermons? If so, for what?