A wise man once said, “It’s either both/and or either/or or it’s both either/or and both/and.”
I was that wise man or, more precisely, wise guy.
Catholic orthodoxy, though certainly capable of either/or judgments when necessary (“Either God exists or he does not. Either Jesus is God or he is not. Either the universe is created or it is not.”) tends to be cautious and open to the reality of mystery and ambiguity in its judgments. So while it sometimes is driven by cold hard reality to places where either/or judgments must be made, its default habit of mind is to look for both/and ways of treating with the world since, well, things are seldom black and white and simple.
Most moderns have reversed the ancient notions of orthodoxy and heresy. Heresy is thought to be the open-minded thing while orthodoxy is assumed to be the rigid, unbending thing that refuses to open its eyes to new facts, discoveries, and ideas. But ironically, it is heresy (and its modern descendant, ideology) that craves the simple one-size-fits all All-Explaining Theory of Everything. So haereses, the Greek word for pulling one thread out of a whole weave and unraveling the garment thereby is the root of heresy. The defining mark of both heresy and ideology is that it hungers to eliminate complexity and paradox and mystery by seizing on one thing (Everything is about the glory of God the Father/salvation by faith alone/economics/racial purity/class struggle/electricity/evolution/ending abortion/insert obsession here) and pitting it against rather than relating it to other truths of equal or greater importance.
The devil, of course, loves this and, in particular, loves inflaming truths intended to be related into opposing monomanias. So, for instance, in the early Church, one of the earliest stupid controversies was whether Jewish or Gentile Christians were the real chosen ones, and the apostles had to struggle to scotch the idea of “second-class Christians”. That’s why Romans and Galatians had to be written. And their substance, particularly in Romans, is that Christians fighting about who is more favored by God is like patients in a cancer ward quarreling about who is the least terminal. It’s all about God’s grace, not our merit. Similarly, the first seven Councils of the early Church were all about quelling the rage for pitting one truth against one another. Is God the Father God or is Jesus God? Is God the Father God or is the Holy Spirit God? Is Jesus divine or human? etc. All false dichotomies.
The tendency for monomania has never left us. And when the devil can gin us into opposing camps that refuse to see truths as related instead of opposed, he loves it best, because it energizes us fools to only see the Rightness of Our Monomaniac Cause while viewing all appeals to the truths we dismiss as the camel’s nose under the tent that will destroy the Only Thing That Matters. So people refuse to “compromise” about perfectly true and good things because their monomania is the only thing that “really” matters. It’s a kind of intellectual cancer that metastasizes and kills healthy tissue (and eventually the whole body.
This is why C.S. Lewis rightly observes that, “Opposite evils, so far from balancing, aggravate one another.” To be a sure, human systems must sometimes, of necessity, deploy check and balances to keep our fractious species burning up its energy in stupid small quarrels rather than combining its energies in gigantic wars. But that remains what it has always been, a patch job on human sin and selfishness, not an ideal. The ideal is love: love of God and neighbor. And while often the best we can do is pit the blind and stupid against the blind and stupid and split the difference in systems and policies that allow prey to escape at least some of the predators, it’s never ideal. In the end, fighting monomania with an opposite monomania is how monomaniacs remain monomaniacs.
Which brings me to this:
No! Wrong! False! Bad heretic! No treat for you!
Yes, Jesus was killed by an imperial power. And it is important for Christians to remember that when they themselves are tempted by imperial desires. The temptation in the wilderness is not the last time Satan has led somebody to an exceeding high mountain, showed them all the kingdoms of the earth, and said “All this will I give you if you bow down and worship me.” And indeed, abuse of earthly power has been both the sin of Christians and the subject of their sermons, warnings, admonitions and prayers for two thousand years. Sometimes we have renounced it and gone into the desert like the Desert Fathers or made vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Sometimes we have whored after it.
But here’s the thing: It is not the case that the Christian tradition understands the death of Jesus simply in terms of rejection of imperial power, as though the political is the uttermost horizon of Reality. Ideology reduces the universe to the simple-minded idea “Everything is Politics..” Jesus does not. And so, he himself also plainly said that he was shedding his blood to atone for our sins: “Take this all of you and drink it. This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant which will be shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
One of the great (indeed, perhaps the greatest) heretical temptation of our time is the intense urge many Christians have to pit the mystical and theological aspects of the gospel–all the stuff about the deity of Jesus, his atoning work on the cross, his death and resurrection for our sins and our justification and so forth–against his clear and real social teaching about care for the least of these, the dangers of riches, generosity to the poor, renunciation of the lust for power, control of appetites, and so forth.
We wind up with opposing sects in which some are mad for mystical stuff but see no problem telling the poor they are lazy and refugees they are “invaders” on the one hand and another sect that says stuff like Dr. Lines, as though the gospel is only about manning the barricades and shouting “Fight the Power!”
Those who pit the moral and social teaching of Jesus against his theological teaching in reaction to those who do the opposite are just as soul-killing as those they oppose. I’ll take Dorothy Day any day; eager to adore Jesus in the Eucharist and listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit like a medieval mystic, and then of rolling up her sleeves and working in a soup kitchen for the poor–like medieval mystic.
Stop tearing apart the ancient unities of the Christian Tradition and start knitting them back together by the power of the Holy Spirit
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3 Responses
“Either God exists or He does not.”
Seems pretty simple and basic on the surface, and it is a discussion I have had with non-believing friends. But it isn’t quite that simple. I have found that what many non-believers mean by “God” is NOT what the Church teaches. They do indeed think we mean some sort of benevolent invisible all-knowing Santa Claus with an infinite number of hit points and 99+ ability scores in all stats. To make matters even more complicated, I have found sadly that this exactly what many Christians do in fact mean by “God,” because they never progressed past their 5th grade Sunday School lessons.
But that is not what the Church means by “God.” Once you start delving into that, you may not convince your non-believing friend. Many of them still want scientifically-testable evidence. But at the very least I have found that they are at least more open to the idea and possibility of what we mean by “God.”
Thanks for another “Amen!” column! I know I’m a greedy, unloving fool and try to work against it every day, but it’s hard…
When I see Televangelists on TV, extolling their electronic flock to send them money, because, Jesus wants them to do so, it occurs to me that God has a sense of humor.