I've been watching the Jeremy Paxman series Victorians on DVD, a series in which the "Axe-man" analyses that era principally through the lens of its art works. Art (I mean proper art) always makes good TV, and it doesn't take much creativity to draw out the social and historical context of paintings. Nor does Paxman evince a great deal of creativity, ticking off all the expected themes of the Victorian era, including the celebrated Crisis of Faith.
His exposition of John Martin's apocalyptic paintings leads to a discussion of Victorian fossil-hunters and the challenge they posed to Christian belief. Instead of being a few thousand years old, as orthodoxy held, the Earth (the Victorian discovered) had been around for unimaginable millions of years. Paxman quotes John Ruskin: "If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."
This sentence, along with certain lines from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach ("the sea of faith was once, too, at its full...but now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"), and some apocryphal exchanges from a debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley, is one of the classic texts of the Victorian Crisis of Faith.
The commonly received story is that a robustly Christian British public suddenly found themselves confronted with a set of data that could not be reconciled with the old myths; Darwin's theory of the origin of the species, the discovery of dinosaur fossils and other evidences of an ancient Earth, and the historical criticism of the Bible.
I am rather sceptical of this common account. It is too tidy, too self-conscious, too dramatic. I suspect that the Victorians were all too ready too cast off their Christian faith, and that the discoveries of science (which were really no more dramatic than the discovery of the New World, or the shock of the Islamic invasions centuries before) were simply an opportunity. I believe the agnosticism of Victorian Britian had more to do with intellectual fashion than science. Was the era of Alexander Pope, a century before, really a high watermark of British Christian fervour?
Chesterton, who grew up in the late Victorian era, describes its religious temper thus: "And what I wish to attest, merely as a witness to the fact, is that the background of all that world was not merely atheism, but atheist orthodoxy, and even atheist respectability. That was quite as common in Belgravia as in Bohemia."
But the question that really strikes me is: What about Ireland? At the same time that Victorian Britian was having its (supposed) spiritual crisis, Victorian Ireland was enjoying what has often been described as a "devotional revolution". Anyone who has read a handed-down Christian Brothers textbook from the nineteenth century can attest that this was an educated revolution. The Irish panted for knowledge as much as for rosary beads and pigrimages. The Irish cultural and intellectual Renaissance of the early twentieth century was germinating at this time; and even in the mid-twentieth century prominent Irish intellectuals such as Flann O'Brien, Eamon De Valera and Michael Tierney (president of UCD) seemed to be confident in their Catholicism.
I think also of the passage in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"--The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to be a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see, however, two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connexion with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room where MacCann, with one hand on The Origin of Species and the other hand on the New Testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours."
This doesn't seem to paint a picture of a defensive or anti-scientific Catholicism. And of course, Joyce was not studying at Protestant/agnostic Trinity College, but at the impeccably Catholic University College Dublin.
I think we are too prone to lazy stereotypes in the history of ideas.
Showing posts with label Irish Catholicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irish Catholicism. Show all posts
Monday, July 9, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
A Not-Very-Critical Review of The End of Irish Catholicism? by Vincent Twomey
The End of Irish Catholicism?
D. Vincent Twomey SVD
Veritas Publications, 2003
The first thing that occurs to me about The End of Irish Catholicism? is that the question in the title is never really answered. The book is more diagnostic than prophetic in nature.
Perhaps this is inevitable. I, for one, have no predictions to make about the future of Irish Catholicism. Of course, as long as there are any practicing Catholics on this island, there will still be an Irish Catholicism of some sort-- and, with such a huge majority having declared themselves Catholic on the recent census, it's hard to see the faith of our fathers going the way of the Irish Elk any time soon.
But will Catholicism survive as a social and cultural force on this island?
It only takes a look around most Sunday or weekday Mass congregations to feel very bleak about this. All too often there are empty pews, and the smattering of worshippers are mostly in their sixties or seventies or beyond. Our priests, too, are mostly well into their twilight years. A decade or two more, and what will become of those congregations? Will church after church have to be sold off? Will Catholics get used to making long treks to the nearest Mass? When journalists in that future Ireland talk about "the church"-- if they talk about any church, that is-- will it still be assumed that they mean the Catholic church?
But it's not all doom and gloom-- in fact, the state of the Church in Ireland seems quite contradictory in many ways. Though many congregations are scanty-- and it has to be remembered that I am writing from a Dublin perspective, and the situation in rural areas is very different-- at other times, churches are packed. St. Teresa's Church in Clarendon Street is often full for Mass, even on weekdays, and there is always a queue for confessions. The Archbishop of Dublin drew a crowd when he came to UCD to celebrate Ash Wednesday Mass this year. The Veritas Catholic shop in Abbey Street seems to do a booming trade. Younger Catholics tend to be more orthodox, and the decline in vocations seems to have levelled off.
The End of Irish Catholicism? attempts to describe how we got where we are now, and to suggest possible measures towards revival.
At the beginning of the book, Dr. Twomey addresses a topic of particular interest to me-- the link between patriotism and religion, nation and faith. He says, "growing up in the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s, I was certainly aware that part of our self-identity as Irish Catholics was to see ourselves as Christian Jews, God's chosen people, materially weak but spiritually strong, spread diaspora-like throughout the world, ever loyal to the faith of our fathers." He then describes this notion of chosen-ness as being "of dubious theological value", and points out that "the New Israel is not any particular race but is made up of Jews and gentiles, that is, people from all races and nations now united in one faith..."
However, a Christian is not obliged to renounce national feeling, and Dr. Twomey quotes Solzhenitsyn: "Nations are [part of] the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special aspect of divine intention." And the author is himself rather critical of the modern Irish attitude to nationhood: "The very concept of nation, not to mention nationality, seems to have vanished from public discourse, not least due to the 'Troubles' in the North-- we now refer rather disparagingly to 'this island'. In addition, national identity is difficult to reconcile with the vague cosmopolitanism of our new mid-Atlantic identity."
One thing I really like about this book is that Dr. Twomey resists the temptation to caricature the Irish Catholicism of the twentieth century. It has become rather fashionable to do this-- to find the seeds of our current spiritual "recession" in the devotional "Celtic Tiger" of previous generations. I think this is too simple. It is true that the faith of our fathers (and mothers)-- or, more accurately, of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers-- was often quite naive and ritualistic, focused on popular devotions such as First Fridays and sacramentals like the Miraculous Medal. We often hear that the faith of the Irish had become so complacent and unthinking that it crumbed at the first tides of secularism.
I don't really go along with these criticisms. I think every generation has to answer for itself. Perhaps lots of people went to Mass in the forties, fifties and sixties because it was the done thing. But I am sure that thousands, tens of thousands, went out of genuine religious fervour. Nor is a devotion to sacramentals, pilgrimage and popular devotions a bad thing.
A more plausible explanation for Ireland's crisis of faith comes with Dr. Twomey's description of the post-Vatican II atmosphere. Suddenly, everything seemed to be up in the air. "Things were permitted, like attending services in a Protestant church, which up to then had been strictly forbidden under all kinds of dire penalties...few have pondered the effect it must have had on the majority of priests, many of whom, up to relatively recently, controlled all the strings. The ground had been taken from under them."
An intriguing theory that Dr. Twomey puts forward is that Irish Catholicism had rather more in common with English puritanism than we like to think. Ireland, in comparison with Catholic countries on the continent, had little concept of sacral time and space, of religious festivity, of the cult of saints and martyrs. Dr.Twomey instead posits that traditional Irish Catholicism focused on an intensely moralistic, anti-sensual, anti-sexual piety that he describes as "angelism". This is also a familiar argument from John Waters.
I'm not sure what to make of this, either. Irish Christianity has always had an ascetic, rather sombre flavour to it. In this it is much like Russian Christianity. This seems to me a matter more of tone than of doctrine. Ireland never seemed to fit into the spirit of Belloc's couplet:
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine
There's always laughter and good red wine.
Edward Feser, the Thomistic philosopher, has pointed out that attempting to distill a spirit of Catholic culture is contrary to the very catholicity and universality of our Church-- that Catholicism embraces and consecrates all that is good in every culture. Ireland has its unique gifts and temptations, just as continental forms of Catholicism have their own.
Dr. Twomey calls for a rediscovery of Catholic festivity and community celebration. I wonder about this. My own guess is that religious joy overflows into festivity, and not the other way around. I don't think people come for the parties and stay for the prayer, but vice versa. Of course, Dr. Twomey is not making such a claim himself, but I suspect that this mentality exists elsewhere.
One powerful argument that Dr. Twomey makes is for the recovery of contemplative life: "In Ireland over the past two centuries, most religious orders were engaged in some form of apostolic work, or, as they are called today, active ministeries, such as teaching, nursing, or missionary activites abroad. There was always a core of strict contemplatives, men and women, and indeed most active orders (especially of women) had, before the Council, evolved into semi-contemplative orders with strict enclosure. The initial implementation of the decrees of the Council by the active congregations resulted in the gradual removal of the contemplative dimension almost entirely....good and necessary though these social concerns are, one may well ask: should they be the main focus of our attention for those consecrated by vows to the religious life? Or should men and women religious perhaps be more concerned with testifying to 'mankind's yearning for its heavenly home', as the Council put it?"
I think this is right on the money. As Tennyson wrote, "more things are wrought in prayer than this world dreams of", and the story of Mary and Martha should be a permanent reminder to Christians that we are forever tempted to value bustle and activity over the "direct line" to our Creator. It seems to me that nothing is more radically counter-cultural and (in the best sense) subversive than prayer. Making it a priority is, in itself, an act of renewal, an affirmation of Christian identity.
Besides this, I believe that our culture thirsts for prayer more than for social workers. We can see this in the endless flood of prayer requests that the Poor Clares receive. I see it, also, whenever I visit the UCD church, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. This small (but handsome) church rarely seems to attract more than a handful of worshippers outside Mass times, and is often to be found empty. But the book of prayer intentions by the door seems to be written in almost every day, and usually several times a day. Turning these poignant pages, I always feel I am seeing a different Ireland to the one we see on television and in the media-- an Ireland of sleepless nights and silent rooms and unquenchable spiritual yearning.
Dr. Twomey's book was written in 2003, and I wonder if the author himself would now consider the proposals in his chapter "Beyond Church vs. State" to be at all plausible. "Perhaps, also, the time has come...to consider working towards a concordat between the Catholic Church and the Republic of Ireland that would define more clearly, and anchor in international law, the relationship (and so the authentic separation) between Church and State". The tide now seems to be running in the opposite direction. Dr. Twomey deplores a comment by a recent Minister for Justice "that he would accord the Church's canon law the same status as the rules governing a golf club". Even that seems benign now.
Rather than seeking greater institutional relations between Church and State-- even relations that emphasise Church/State separation-- it seems wiser, at this point in time, for the Church to regard the hand of Caesar with suspicion. The Church authorities in Ireland surely made the right decision in not seeking any public funding for the International Eucharistic Congress this year-- as evinced when one texter to a recent radio show, in the wake of the latest anti-Church frenzy in the media, wondered whether the taxpayer was paying for this event and suggested that, if so, such funding should be removed.
Dr. Twomey complains of a fatalistic attitude amongst Catholic and, especially, religious orders in Ireland, as though secularisation was some inevitable law of history. This is certainly a strong tempation. We live in a culture in which deterministic thinking has almost become a second nature to us (even while we are encouraged, by the fashion and entertaintment and advertising industries, to assert our individual freedom ever more aggressively-- and ever more superficially).
When it comes to the future of Catholicism in Ireland, and our attitude towards it, the two great temptations remain-- as always-- presumption and despair. We hear the note of despair when Catholics of the liberal stamp suggest that the Church has to reformulate its doctrine according to the spirit of the age. But perhaps we hear it also in the most stubbornly traditionalist Catholics, who seem to see the Church as nothing but a sign of contradiction, and a bulwark against every manifestation of modernism.
As for the note of presumption, I think we hear that whenever any sign of "green shoots" are hailed as a new Spring-time of the Church. Not only is this presumptious, it is foolish. We can only cry "revival" so often before we lose all credibility, like the ageing Marxist who always believes the Revolution is just around the corner. We should give thanks for every welcome development, while firmly resisting the temptation to make too much of it.
Our Lord has told us not to be afraid, that he will be with us even to the end of the age, that he who perseveres to the end shall be saved, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against his Church. That is all we can know, and it's enough. What the future holds for our own era and nation, we cannot know.
In a final appendix, Dr. Twomey welcomes the phenomenon of a greater lay interest in theology, and calls for greater academic study of the subject in Ireland. Here I must simply defer to his authority, while admitting a personal scepticism. I once lodged, very briefly, with a gay philosophy PhD student who taught (I can't remember if it was theology or philosophy) in a well-known institute of Irish theology. His living room walls were bedecked with rather erotic drawings of nude men. The philosophers he tended to cite were Heidegger and Nietzsche and other figures who are hardly within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. When I think of lay theological studies in Ireland today, I think of him. Perhaps that is unfair.
My own guess is that, if all Irish Catholics knew their Catechism, that would be an extraordinary advance in faith formation. It seems to me-- especially flicking through the pages of The Irish Catholic-- that Irish Catholicism will certainly not perish for the want of seminars, courses, book launches and magazines.
But doubtless I am wrong to be so cynical. As Dr. Twomey says, "Once people begin to think about their faith, they will in time search for, and find, the truth." Or as Chesterton put it, if every human being lived to be a thousand years old, everybody would end up either a Roman Catholic or a stark nihilist. The problem with dissidents who call for a "debate" in the Church is that they don't realise the debate has been going on for centuries, and has in fact already reached conclusions on most of the topics they consider to be unaddressed.
The End of Irish Catholicism? gives suggestions rather than answers, and it's hard to see how it could give easy answers to such vexing questions. I wonder how Dr. Twomey would have written the book today, and if he would have substantially altered any of the arguments and proposals he makes.
When it comes to Irish Catholicism today, I think even the most bullish secularist would have to admit-- to quote the title of a perennial favourite on Donncha O'Dulaing's radio show Failte Isteach-- "There's Life in the Old Dog Yet".
D. Vincent Twomey SVD
Veritas Publications, 2003
The first thing that occurs to me about The End of Irish Catholicism? is that the question in the title is never really answered. The book is more diagnostic than prophetic in nature.
Perhaps this is inevitable. I, for one, have no predictions to make about the future of Irish Catholicism. Of course, as long as there are any practicing Catholics on this island, there will still be an Irish Catholicism of some sort-- and, with such a huge majority having declared themselves Catholic on the recent census, it's hard to see the faith of our fathers going the way of the Irish Elk any time soon.
But will Catholicism survive as a social and cultural force on this island?
It only takes a look around most Sunday or weekday Mass congregations to feel very bleak about this. All too often there are empty pews, and the smattering of worshippers are mostly in their sixties or seventies or beyond. Our priests, too, are mostly well into their twilight years. A decade or two more, and what will become of those congregations? Will church after church have to be sold off? Will Catholics get used to making long treks to the nearest Mass? When journalists in that future Ireland talk about "the church"-- if they talk about any church, that is-- will it still be assumed that they mean the Catholic church?
But it's not all doom and gloom-- in fact, the state of the Church in Ireland seems quite contradictory in many ways. Though many congregations are scanty-- and it has to be remembered that I am writing from a Dublin perspective, and the situation in rural areas is very different-- at other times, churches are packed. St. Teresa's Church in Clarendon Street is often full for Mass, even on weekdays, and there is always a queue for confessions. The Archbishop of Dublin drew a crowd when he came to UCD to celebrate Ash Wednesday Mass this year. The Veritas Catholic shop in Abbey Street seems to do a booming trade. Younger Catholics tend to be more orthodox, and the decline in vocations seems to have levelled off.
The End of Irish Catholicism? attempts to describe how we got where we are now, and to suggest possible measures towards revival.
At the beginning of the book, Dr. Twomey addresses a topic of particular interest to me-- the link between patriotism and religion, nation and faith. He says, "growing up in the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s, I was certainly aware that part of our self-identity as Irish Catholics was to see ourselves as Christian Jews, God's chosen people, materially weak but spiritually strong, spread diaspora-like throughout the world, ever loyal to the faith of our fathers." He then describes this notion of chosen-ness as being "of dubious theological value", and points out that "the New Israel is not any particular race but is made up of Jews and gentiles, that is, people from all races and nations now united in one faith..."
However, a Christian is not obliged to renounce national feeling, and Dr. Twomey quotes Solzhenitsyn: "Nations are [part of] the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special aspect of divine intention." And the author is himself rather critical of the modern Irish attitude to nationhood: "The very concept of nation, not to mention nationality, seems to have vanished from public discourse, not least due to the 'Troubles' in the North-- we now refer rather disparagingly to 'this island'. In addition, national identity is difficult to reconcile with the vague cosmopolitanism of our new mid-Atlantic identity."
One thing I really like about this book is that Dr. Twomey resists the temptation to caricature the Irish Catholicism of the twentieth century. It has become rather fashionable to do this-- to find the seeds of our current spiritual "recession" in the devotional "Celtic Tiger" of previous generations. I think this is too simple. It is true that the faith of our fathers (and mothers)-- or, more accurately, of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers-- was often quite naive and ritualistic, focused on popular devotions such as First Fridays and sacramentals like the Miraculous Medal. We often hear that the faith of the Irish had become so complacent and unthinking that it crumbed at the first tides of secularism.
I don't really go along with these criticisms. I think every generation has to answer for itself. Perhaps lots of people went to Mass in the forties, fifties and sixties because it was the done thing. But I am sure that thousands, tens of thousands, went out of genuine religious fervour. Nor is a devotion to sacramentals, pilgrimage and popular devotions a bad thing.
A more plausible explanation for Ireland's crisis of faith comes with Dr. Twomey's description of the post-Vatican II atmosphere. Suddenly, everything seemed to be up in the air. "Things were permitted, like attending services in a Protestant church, which up to then had been strictly forbidden under all kinds of dire penalties...few have pondered the effect it must have had on the majority of priests, many of whom, up to relatively recently, controlled all the strings. The ground had been taken from under them."
An intriguing theory that Dr. Twomey puts forward is that Irish Catholicism had rather more in common with English puritanism than we like to think. Ireland, in comparison with Catholic countries on the continent, had little concept of sacral time and space, of religious festivity, of the cult of saints and martyrs. Dr.Twomey instead posits that traditional Irish Catholicism focused on an intensely moralistic, anti-sensual, anti-sexual piety that he describes as "angelism". This is also a familiar argument from John Waters.
I'm not sure what to make of this, either. Irish Christianity has always had an ascetic, rather sombre flavour to it. In this it is much like Russian Christianity. This seems to me a matter more of tone than of doctrine. Ireland never seemed to fit into the spirit of Belloc's couplet:
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine
There's always laughter and good red wine.
Edward Feser, the Thomistic philosopher, has pointed out that attempting to distill a spirit of Catholic culture is contrary to the very catholicity and universality of our Church-- that Catholicism embraces and consecrates all that is good in every culture. Ireland has its unique gifts and temptations, just as continental forms of Catholicism have their own.
Dr. Twomey calls for a rediscovery of Catholic festivity and community celebration. I wonder about this. My own guess is that religious joy overflows into festivity, and not the other way around. I don't think people come for the parties and stay for the prayer, but vice versa. Of course, Dr. Twomey is not making such a claim himself, but I suspect that this mentality exists elsewhere.
One powerful argument that Dr. Twomey makes is for the recovery of contemplative life: "In Ireland over the past two centuries, most religious orders were engaged in some form of apostolic work, or, as they are called today, active ministeries, such as teaching, nursing, or missionary activites abroad. There was always a core of strict contemplatives, men and women, and indeed most active orders (especially of women) had, before the Council, evolved into semi-contemplative orders with strict enclosure. The initial implementation of the decrees of the Council by the active congregations resulted in the gradual removal of the contemplative dimension almost entirely....good and necessary though these social concerns are, one may well ask: should they be the main focus of our attention for those consecrated by vows to the religious life? Or should men and women religious perhaps be more concerned with testifying to 'mankind's yearning for its heavenly home', as the Council put it?"
I think this is right on the money. As Tennyson wrote, "more things are wrought in prayer than this world dreams of", and the story of Mary and Martha should be a permanent reminder to Christians that we are forever tempted to value bustle and activity over the "direct line" to our Creator. It seems to me that nothing is more radically counter-cultural and (in the best sense) subversive than prayer. Making it a priority is, in itself, an act of renewal, an affirmation of Christian identity.
Besides this, I believe that our culture thirsts for prayer more than for social workers. We can see this in the endless flood of prayer requests that the Poor Clares receive. I see it, also, whenever I visit the UCD church, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. This small (but handsome) church rarely seems to attract more than a handful of worshippers outside Mass times, and is often to be found empty. But the book of prayer intentions by the door seems to be written in almost every day, and usually several times a day. Turning these poignant pages, I always feel I am seeing a different Ireland to the one we see on television and in the media-- an Ireland of sleepless nights and silent rooms and unquenchable spiritual yearning.
Dr. Twomey's book was written in 2003, and I wonder if the author himself would now consider the proposals in his chapter "Beyond Church vs. State" to be at all plausible. "Perhaps, also, the time has come...to consider working towards a concordat between the Catholic Church and the Republic of Ireland that would define more clearly, and anchor in international law, the relationship (and so the authentic separation) between Church and State". The tide now seems to be running in the opposite direction. Dr. Twomey deplores a comment by a recent Minister for Justice "that he would accord the Church's canon law the same status as the rules governing a golf club". Even that seems benign now.
Rather than seeking greater institutional relations between Church and State-- even relations that emphasise Church/State separation-- it seems wiser, at this point in time, for the Church to regard the hand of Caesar with suspicion. The Church authorities in Ireland surely made the right decision in not seeking any public funding for the International Eucharistic Congress this year-- as evinced when one texter to a recent radio show, in the wake of the latest anti-Church frenzy in the media, wondered whether the taxpayer was paying for this event and suggested that, if so, such funding should be removed.
Dr. Twomey complains of a fatalistic attitude amongst Catholic and, especially, religious orders in Ireland, as though secularisation was some inevitable law of history. This is certainly a strong tempation. We live in a culture in which deterministic thinking has almost become a second nature to us (even while we are encouraged, by the fashion and entertaintment and advertising industries, to assert our individual freedom ever more aggressively-- and ever more superficially).
When it comes to the future of Catholicism in Ireland, and our attitude towards it, the two great temptations remain-- as always-- presumption and despair. We hear the note of despair when Catholics of the liberal stamp suggest that the Church has to reformulate its doctrine according to the spirit of the age. But perhaps we hear it also in the most stubbornly traditionalist Catholics, who seem to see the Church as nothing but a sign of contradiction, and a bulwark against every manifestation of modernism.
As for the note of presumption, I think we hear that whenever any sign of "green shoots" are hailed as a new Spring-time of the Church. Not only is this presumptious, it is foolish. We can only cry "revival" so often before we lose all credibility, like the ageing Marxist who always believes the Revolution is just around the corner. We should give thanks for every welcome development, while firmly resisting the temptation to make too much of it.
Our Lord has told us not to be afraid, that he will be with us even to the end of the age, that he who perseveres to the end shall be saved, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against his Church. That is all we can know, and it's enough. What the future holds for our own era and nation, we cannot know.
In a final appendix, Dr. Twomey welcomes the phenomenon of a greater lay interest in theology, and calls for greater academic study of the subject in Ireland. Here I must simply defer to his authority, while admitting a personal scepticism. I once lodged, very briefly, with a gay philosophy PhD student who taught (I can't remember if it was theology or philosophy) in a well-known institute of Irish theology. His living room walls were bedecked with rather erotic drawings of nude men. The philosophers he tended to cite were Heidegger and Nietzsche and other figures who are hardly within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. When I think of lay theological studies in Ireland today, I think of him. Perhaps that is unfair.
My own guess is that, if all Irish Catholics knew their Catechism, that would be an extraordinary advance in faith formation. It seems to me-- especially flicking through the pages of The Irish Catholic-- that Irish Catholicism will certainly not perish for the want of seminars, courses, book launches and magazines.
But doubtless I am wrong to be so cynical. As Dr. Twomey says, "Once people begin to think about their faith, they will in time search for, and find, the truth." Or as Chesterton put it, if every human being lived to be a thousand years old, everybody would end up either a Roman Catholic or a stark nihilist. The problem with dissidents who call for a "debate" in the Church is that they don't realise the debate has been going on for centuries, and has in fact already reached conclusions on most of the topics they consider to be unaddressed.
The End of Irish Catholicism? gives suggestions rather than answers, and it's hard to see how it could give easy answers to such vexing questions. I wonder how Dr. Twomey would have written the book today, and if he would have substantially altered any of the arguments and proposals he makes.
When it comes to Irish Catholicism today, I think even the most bullish secularist would have to admit-- to quote the title of a perennial favourite on Donncha O'Dulaing's radio show Failte Isteach-- "There's Life in the Old Dog Yet".
Monday, April 16, 2012
Review of Beyond Consolation by John Waters
Beyond Consolation by John Waters
Continuum, 2010
I like John Waters. There is something very endearing about a commentator who is willing to think out loud in public, in newspaper columns and the pages of his books. And I always admire somebody who can openly admit to having been wrong, as Waters did upon his metamorphosis from a rock journalist (with all the anti-religious, anti-traditionalist ideological baggage that usually entails) to a kind of spiritual gadfly who stings Irish culture for its materialist and liberal assumptions.
Besides, he gets away with landing the most abstruse kind of prose onto the unsuspecting shelves of newsagents. Can you imagine another Irish journalist writing the following, in the columns of a widely circulated newspaper?
True love is an infinite quantity corresponding to the love of God that has stretched itself over our nothingness. Conversion, then, allows the true love to enter into this weariness and possess it.
Waters doesn’t just turn on that philosophical strain now and then, for show. He writes like that all the time. And that’s actually why a whole book of his ruminations can be very tough going—as compared to his page-long articles in the Irish Catholic, where his style comes as a welcome tonic.
Beyond Consolation, which was published in 2010, is a kind of sequel to his fine 2007 volume, Lapsed Agnostic, in which he described his journey towards Catholicism.
Or maybe not Catholicism, but Christianity.
Or maybe not Christianity, but theism.
Or...well, the problem is it’s very difficult to work out what John Waters actually believes. In fact, at one point in Beyond Consolation, he treats us to this confession:
I don’t “believe”. I can’t. If believing is just gritting my teeth and adhering to some proffered concept of what is and might be, I cannot do it. If a “faith” is merely a collection of people, a club, in which everybody affirms everybody else, and together they affirm a set of dogmas that have been agreed long before by others, then count me out.
Full marks for honesty and introspection, but two out of ten for clarity. Waters steps forward onto the soapbox to tell us stuff like this. Presumably he expects that it will help others in their journeys, but how exactly? There is very little to affirm, deny, debate, or get your teeth into in this kind of thing.
The spur to the musings in Beyond Consolation is Nuala O’Faolain’s famous radio interview with Marian Finucane in 2008, in which she described her feelings and thoughts as she faced terminal cancer, a disease that she knew would kill her within weeks. What is interesting to Waters is that O’Faolain received much popular acclaim for her bravery and honesty, but few people seemed willing to discuss the most striking fact about the interview—that this woman, who seemed in many ways emblematic of the social liberation Ireland achieved in recent decades, found nothing to give her comfort and meaning in her last days. And she emphatically rejected the hopes of religion and an afterlife, even seeming to do so with a certain amount of grim resolve.
Waters asks the question; how has our country become so hostile to the idea of God, that we are prepared to embrace despair rather than so much as open up a chink to the transcendental?
Waters touches on many interesting subjects in his ramble through the spiritual (or anti-spiritual) state of the nation: the cult of youth, the extent to which our thoughts are conditioned by our culture, modern man’s enslavement to the machine and subsequent belief that he himself is a machine, the possibility that opinion polls only work because we have been so effectively chicken-cooped into conformity.
He makes great play in this book, and in his newspaper articles, of the fact that reality can’t be reduced to the quantifiable and measurable, as in this quotation from the philosopher Mike Cooley:
“We are at a stage now where we can only accept something as rational and scientific if it displays three predominant characteristics: predictability, repeatability, and mathematical quantifiability. And, by definition, this precludes intuition, subjective knowledge, passive knowledge, dreams, imagination, and purpose.”
Yes. Absolutely. This is a vital insight, one all too often overlooked by our science-bedazzled generation.
But it only takes you far, and Waters seems relucant to say any more, merely reiterating this theme over and over again. He even seems to regard anything more as a kind of fossilization into dogma, a lapse into inauthenticity, as in this passage:
This is the kind of paradox that the Mystery throws at us. Reality is reality. God is just another word, a tool for getting to grip with this. But it is a word that, used in a certain way, can be made to open up things rather than close them down.
And later:
I am waiting for whatever it is that my humanity asks for, and I see no particular reason not to call this Christ.
But why Christ? Why not Krishna or Buddha or the Reverend Moon or the Meher Baba?
Later, he explains his choice this way:
If you have a path, why waste time looking for one? I see no point in fighting the Catholic Church any more than I might think it a good idea to fight the air of kick a tree. Neither do I see the church as a refuge, or a club, or a political party, still less a source of moral guidance. The church is a place I look to in order to maintain a structured engagement with the Mystery and also in my need for a source of reflective experience of the human condition.
The Church seems little better than a pis-aller, then, the spiritual franchise you happened to find closest to you. But this logic couldn’t have applied to the missionaries and martyrs and suffering millions who have handed the faith on to us, who quite deliberately and heroically chose Christ and the Catholic Church over paganism and Protestantism and communism and every other creed that fought for their bodies and souls.
It seems disrespectful to those people, great and obscure, who laboured so heroically in the vineyard, to enjoy the fruit of their labours in such a noncommital way.
It would be unfair to Waters to leave it at that, though. Christ himself does not seem like a mere cipher to him, to tell from this book, but an overwhelming personality. This is one of the most interesting passages in the book:
We cannot look at Him, but still we do not condemn him or castigate Him. None but the most insistent, and often the most demonstrably damaging secularising voices in our cultures do not, as a rule, attack the person of Christ, or suggest that He was not who He claimed to be…Despite everything, the icon that is Christ remains intact in our culture—venerated by some, but quietly respected even by those who deny belief in or adherence to the Christian proposal. This is strange and interesting.
It most certainly is.
Perhaps the thing that bothers me the most about John Waters is the way he wrinkles his nose at institutional Irish Catholicism—actually existing Irish Catholicism, so to speak. He is at great pains, over and over again, to assure the reader that though he is no longer one of Us (meaning the liberal commentariat), he has certainly not become one of Them, either:
I am turned off by a strain in almost all organised religions, and strikingly in the more traditionalist strains of Irish Catholicism, which seem to glory in the vindication of seeing people brought to their knees. I have no sense of being a prodigal son come home to be feasted. I shudder a little when someone congratulates me for returning to the “faith”. I have returned noplace, except closer to an understanding of myself.
Waters misses the point if he abhors the fellowship of Catholic believers as a mere club, a faction. It is neither. It is the mystical body of Christ, composed of living stones. The Church is not a road-sign, but a reality—a thing to be loved in itself.
The gag reflex that Waters describes so well, when it comes to the modern Irish horror of tradition and religion, seems to survive within himself. I even get the impression, reading his books and articles, that he thinks that only somebody lacking in imagination or sensitivity or joie-de-vivre could wholeheartedly embrace a traditional Irish Catholic identity.
But that’s exactly what I do, Mr Waters. I don’t have to shudder or bite my fist or grimace when I pass the portal of an Irish Catholic church. I don’t feel burdened by any exaggerated shame in the history of Irish Catholicism, despite the abuse scandals. What I feel for the history and traditions of Irish Catholicism is, overwhelmingly, gratitude and affection—not to mention a keen (if belated) sense of belonging.
Thank God for John Waters. Amongst the legions of sneering liberals in the ranks of Irish journalism, he is a brave and unique figure. But I hope he comes to realise that being a maverick isn’t always braver, or better, than being a disciple.
Continuum, 2010
I like John Waters. There is something very endearing about a commentator who is willing to think out loud in public, in newspaper columns and the pages of his books. And I always admire somebody who can openly admit to having been wrong, as Waters did upon his metamorphosis from a rock journalist (with all the anti-religious, anti-traditionalist ideological baggage that usually entails) to a kind of spiritual gadfly who stings Irish culture for its materialist and liberal assumptions.
Besides, he gets away with landing the most abstruse kind of prose onto the unsuspecting shelves of newsagents. Can you imagine another Irish journalist writing the following, in the columns of a widely circulated newspaper?
True love is an infinite quantity corresponding to the love of God that has stretched itself over our nothingness. Conversion, then, allows the true love to enter into this weariness and possess it.
Waters doesn’t just turn on that philosophical strain now and then, for show. He writes like that all the time. And that’s actually why a whole book of his ruminations can be very tough going—as compared to his page-long articles in the Irish Catholic, where his style comes as a welcome tonic.
Beyond Consolation, which was published in 2010, is a kind of sequel to his fine 2007 volume, Lapsed Agnostic, in which he described his journey towards Catholicism.
Or maybe not Catholicism, but Christianity.
Or maybe not Christianity, but theism.
Or...well, the problem is it’s very difficult to work out what John Waters actually believes. In fact, at one point in Beyond Consolation, he treats us to this confession:
I don’t “believe”. I can’t. If believing is just gritting my teeth and adhering to some proffered concept of what is and might be, I cannot do it. If a “faith” is merely a collection of people, a club, in which everybody affirms everybody else, and together they affirm a set of dogmas that have been agreed long before by others, then count me out.
Full marks for honesty and introspection, but two out of ten for clarity. Waters steps forward onto the soapbox to tell us stuff like this. Presumably he expects that it will help others in their journeys, but how exactly? There is very little to affirm, deny, debate, or get your teeth into in this kind of thing.
The spur to the musings in Beyond Consolation is Nuala O’Faolain’s famous radio interview with Marian Finucane in 2008, in which she described her feelings and thoughts as she faced terminal cancer, a disease that she knew would kill her within weeks. What is interesting to Waters is that O’Faolain received much popular acclaim for her bravery and honesty, but few people seemed willing to discuss the most striking fact about the interview—that this woman, who seemed in many ways emblematic of the social liberation Ireland achieved in recent decades, found nothing to give her comfort and meaning in her last days. And she emphatically rejected the hopes of religion and an afterlife, even seeming to do so with a certain amount of grim resolve.
Waters asks the question; how has our country become so hostile to the idea of God, that we are prepared to embrace despair rather than so much as open up a chink to the transcendental?
Waters touches on many interesting subjects in his ramble through the spiritual (or anti-spiritual) state of the nation: the cult of youth, the extent to which our thoughts are conditioned by our culture, modern man’s enslavement to the machine and subsequent belief that he himself is a machine, the possibility that opinion polls only work because we have been so effectively chicken-cooped into conformity.
He makes great play in this book, and in his newspaper articles, of the fact that reality can’t be reduced to the quantifiable and measurable, as in this quotation from the philosopher Mike Cooley:
“We are at a stage now where we can only accept something as rational and scientific if it displays three predominant characteristics: predictability, repeatability, and mathematical quantifiability. And, by definition, this precludes intuition, subjective knowledge, passive knowledge, dreams, imagination, and purpose.”
Yes. Absolutely. This is a vital insight, one all too often overlooked by our science-bedazzled generation.
But it only takes you far, and Waters seems relucant to say any more, merely reiterating this theme over and over again. He even seems to regard anything more as a kind of fossilization into dogma, a lapse into inauthenticity, as in this passage:
This is the kind of paradox that the Mystery throws at us. Reality is reality. God is just another word, a tool for getting to grip with this. But it is a word that, used in a certain way, can be made to open up things rather than close them down.
And later:
I am waiting for whatever it is that my humanity asks for, and I see no particular reason not to call this Christ.
But why Christ? Why not Krishna or Buddha or the Reverend Moon or the Meher Baba?
Later, he explains his choice this way:
If you have a path, why waste time looking for one? I see no point in fighting the Catholic Church any more than I might think it a good idea to fight the air of kick a tree. Neither do I see the church as a refuge, or a club, or a political party, still less a source of moral guidance. The church is a place I look to in order to maintain a structured engagement with the Mystery and also in my need for a source of reflective experience of the human condition.
The Church seems little better than a pis-aller, then, the spiritual franchise you happened to find closest to you. But this logic couldn’t have applied to the missionaries and martyrs and suffering millions who have handed the faith on to us, who quite deliberately and heroically chose Christ and the Catholic Church over paganism and Protestantism and communism and every other creed that fought for their bodies and souls.
It seems disrespectful to those people, great and obscure, who laboured so heroically in the vineyard, to enjoy the fruit of their labours in such a noncommital way.
It would be unfair to Waters to leave it at that, though. Christ himself does not seem like a mere cipher to him, to tell from this book, but an overwhelming personality. This is one of the most interesting passages in the book:
We cannot look at Him, but still we do not condemn him or castigate Him. None but the most insistent, and often the most demonstrably damaging secularising voices in our cultures do not, as a rule, attack the person of Christ, or suggest that He was not who He claimed to be…Despite everything, the icon that is Christ remains intact in our culture—venerated by some, but quietly respected even by those who deny belief in or adherence to the Christian proposal. This is strange and interesting.
It most certainly is.
Perhaps the thing that bothers me the most about John Waters is the way he wrinkles his nose at institutional Irish Catholicism—actually existing Irish Catholicism, so to speak. He is at great pains, over and over again, to assure the reader that though he is no longer one of Us (meaning the liberal commentariat), he has certainly not become one of Them, either:
I am turned off by a strain in almost all organised religions, and strikingly in the more traditionalist strains of Irish Catholicism, which seem to glory in the vindication of seeing people brought to their knees. I have no sense of being a prodigal son come home to be feasted. I shudder a little when someone congratulates me for returning to the “faith”. I have returned noplace, except closer to an understanding of myself.
Waters misses the point if he abhors the fellowship of Catholic believers as a mere club, a faction. It is neither. It is the mystical body of Christ, composed of living stones. The Church is not a road-sign, but a reality—a thing to be loved in itself.
The gag reflex that Waters describes so well, when it comes to the modern Irish horror of tradition and religion, seems to survive within himself. I even get the impression, reading his books and articles, that he thinks that only somebody lacking in imagination or sensitivity or joie-de-vivre could wholeheartedly embrace a traditional Irish Catholic identity.
But that’s exactly what I do, Mr Waters. I don’t have to shudder or bite my fist or grimace when I pass the portal of an Irish Catholic church. I don’t feel burdened by any exaggerated shame in the history of Irish Catholicism, despite the abuse scandals. What I feel for the history and traditions of Irish Catholicism is, overwhelmingly, gratitude and affection—not to mention a keen (if belated) sense of belonging.
Thank God for John Waters. Amongst the legions of sneering liberals in the ranks of Irish journalism, he is a brave and unique figure. But I hope he comes to realise that being a maverick isn’t always braver, or better, than being a disciple.
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