A Living Text

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says of G.K. Chesterton:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you’re new to mail.

Rod Dreher (Orthodox via the Catholic Church) comments on this:

Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer’s apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church). Again, I can’t discern the justice of Gopnik’s judgment re: Chesterton’s writing, because I’ve never read enough of his apologetics to know. But this feels right to me. It also gives me insight into why I don’t have and never had that convert’s glow about Orthodoxy. I didn’t believe when I left it that Catholicism was a jury-rigged makeshift system, nor did I believe that Orthodoxy was a uniquely fabulous thing. I’m glad not to have those illusions about either faith, but it does take some of the romance out of the thing.

Forbes has an article discussing how relics are still sold today in a way that sound Medieval. This is a pagan practice, pure and simple, that was imported into the church. It is sad that it still persists.

LDS professor Richard Sherlock offers a provocative thesis regarding the nature of the LDS Church. He writes:

These remarks are a prelude to a far-reaching claim I wish to make about Mormonism. Mormonism represents a hierarchical ecclesiastical order that holds special powers of priesthood and leadership combined with an emphasis on personal obedience and righteous works as having merit before God, which is at least Annabaptist in its flavor and background. In more traditional terms theological terms, Mormonism combines an authoritative magisterium with an emphasis on righteous works characteristic in Christian theology and history with its exact opposite.

In other words, the LDS Church has a Catholic hierarchy, with an Annabaptist, radically Pelagian theology and practice. In fact, Sherlock offers great honesty when he says:

These [Book of Mormon] passages and others do not articulate a strong theology of grace as clearly as Luther or Calvin may have wished. There is a Pelagian (or semi-Pelagian) ring to a number of the passages, and individuals who have claimed that Mormonism is essentially a modern Pelagianism are not entirely mistaken in such an assessment.

I am being made increasingly aware of the existence of the Catholic counterparts to Robert Tilton, Benny Hinn, and their ilk. I subscribed to the New Oxford Review this past year, it’s a really hard core Catholic magazine that delights in calling out heretics and advocating for the Latin Mass and strict obedience. I respect folks who are straight-up about their beliefs and not afraid to call a spade a spade. At least I know that we disagree and what it is that divides us. 

But subscribing to this magazine has put me on the mailing list of all kinds of Catholic groups seeking money, many of which are eerily reminiscent of Protestant hucksters. Today I got a letter from “America Needs Fatima” which included a picture of a gaudy statue of Mary. The letter says in part:

Here is your beautiful and deeply spiritual picture of Our Lady of Fatima.

And I’m forwarding it to you with a sense of urgency because you are a very dear child of Mary, and you have proven your love for Our Lady because of your deep faith and devotion.

And as you confirm that you did actually receive your picture, I pray that you send your gift to help me enthrone Our Lady’s picture in 2,000,000 homes in 2008.

In gratitude, I’ll send you a free miraculous medal and novena brochure just as soon as I receive your gift in the mail.

It seems that these particular Catholics have learned some unfortunate lessons from the TBN wing of the Osteen-Joyce Meyers-heretical church.

Writing about Richard Hooker and his conception of the Church of England, C.S. Lewis says:

The prince as ‘Supreme Head’ of the Church is, in fact, the bottle-neck through which the decisions of the local Church-Nation pass in order to become law. And that Nation-Church owes an allegiance to the universal Church: yet the universal Church might swerve from scripture and we should then have to disobey her. (That is, all parts of her, except ourselves, might conceivably become ‘unsound’.) Where then does ultimate sovereignty lie? I think Hooker would answer, ‘Nowhere except in Heaven’. He allows no unambiguous sovereignty on earth either civil or ecclesiastical. Judged by the standards of Austin and of modern Catholicism, the church and state which Hooker welds together are both headless. And I do not think this is an oversight. Hooker felt no need either for omnicompetent prince or for infallible Pope. He was much more afraid of tyrannies and idolatries than of ambiguities and deadlocks.

About six months ago, I wrote that the local APA parish would probably not last for six months. Indeed, St. Michael’s APA folded three months later, in December, 2007. It is hard to see what the attraction of Anglo-Catholicism is in this age. If you are ok with praying to Mary and the Saints, bowing to objects, and believing in seven sacraments, then why not become Roman Catholic? Add to that the reality that these kind of parishes are seldom if ever evangelistic, and Anglo-Catholicism looks like a club of Anglophiles, not a real church that gets in the trenches. St. Michael’s specifically had other problems including vestry members who were Masons, which I guess didn’t phase the APA Bishop over the church. The crying need in this neck of the woods is for an updated version of the Anglicanism that was generated by Ridley, Cranmer, Donne, et al.

Christianity did not grow because of miracle working in the marketplaces (although there may have been much of that going on), or because Constantine said it should, or even because the martyrs gave it such credibility. It grew because Christians constituted an intense community, able to generate the “invincible obstinacy” that so offended the younger Pliny but yielded immense religious rewards. And the primary means of its growth was through the united and motivated efforts of the growing numbers of Christian believers, who invited their friends, relatives, and neighbors to share the “good news.”

From Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity pp.196-215 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) 1996

The Church Father Lactantius wrote:

What madness is it, then, either to form those objects which they themselves may afterwards fear, or to fear the things which they have formed? But, they say, we do not fear the images themselves, but those beings after whose likeness they were formed, and to whose names they are dedicated. You fear them doubtless on this account, because you think that they are in heaven; for if they are gods, the case cannot be otherwise. Why, then, do you not raise your eyes to heaven, and, invoking their names, offer sacrifices in the open air? Why do you look to walls, and wood, and stone, rather than to the place where you believe them to be? What is the meaning of temples and altars? what, in short, of the images themselves, which are memorials either of the dead or absent? For the plan of making likenesses was invented by men for this reason, that it might be possible to retain the memory of those who had either been removed by death or separated by absence. In which of these classes, then, shall we reckon the gods? If among the dead, who is so foolish as to worship them? If among the absent, then they are not to be worshipped, if they neither see our actions nor hear our prayers. But if the gods cannot be absent,—for, since they are divine, they see and hear all things, in whatever part of the universe they are,—it follows that images are superfluous, since the gods are present everywhere, and it is sufficient to invoke with prayer the names of those who hear us. But if they are present, they cannot fail to be at hand at their own images. It is entirely so, as the people imagine, that the spirits of the dead wander about the tombs and relics of their bodies. But after that the deity has begun to be near, there is no longer need of his statue.

(source)

Besancon continues:

With peace within the church and the conversion of Constantine, Christian art in the strict sense began; its fundaments determined the centuries that followed. The powerful called for an art as lofty as their own “connoisseurship,” and artists now worked without constraint for the glory of the new faith.

There was already an imperial pagan art: only a slight shift was needed to make it a Christian art. The philosopher became Christ, the apostle, or the prophet. The theme of imperial apotheosis was transformed into the Ascension of Christ. The offerings of presents corresponded to the Adoration of the Magi, the adventus (the triumphal entrance of the sovereign) to Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem. In fact, court ritual provided a framework for Christian art. Just as artists represented the emperor and empress on their thrones, sorrounded by their entourage, they depicted Christ and the Virgin among the saints and angels. In Santa Maria Maggiore, the Virgin is represented as the empress. One of the first Christian paintings (from the first half of the sixth century), housed in Santa Maria Antiqua, shows the Virgin as the emperor’s wife, wearing the imperial diadem and the robes and jewels of her office.

There were constant exchanges between the Christian image and the imperial image. The latter transmitted its force to the former. In the imperial world, it was understood that the emperor’s image could be a legal substitute for the emperor’s actual presence. It took the place of his person. In legal proceedings, if the emperor’s portrait was present, the judge rendered his judgment without appeal, like Caesar in person. The legal and religious efficacity of the image was naturally transferred to Christian images. The icon was later heir to it (Besancon 109-110).

On the origins of Christian art and icons Besancon writes:
The development of a specifically Christian art was modest and extremely slow in the early centuries. The walls of the catacombs were marked with graffiti, sketches, signs, and symbols for initiates. Pagan symbols were often charged with a new meaning. The garden, the palm tree, and the peacock symbolized earthly paradise. The ship, a symbol of prosperity and of a fortunate journey through life, became the church. The erotic theme of Eros and Psyche came to signify the soul’s thirst and the love of God in Jesus Christ. Hermes, a symbol of humanity, began to represent the Good Shepherd. The sleeping Endymion became Jonah under the booth. There were many other scenes from the Old Testament as well: Daniel in the lion’s den, the three children in the fiery furnace, Adam and Eve. Only in the late second century did specifically Christian symbols appear: the miracle of the bread and fishes (a prefiguration of the Last Supper), the Adoration of the Magi (the gentile entering into the Covenant), Lazarus raised from the dead. Finally, arcane symbols arose, comprehensible only for the few: the vineyard, and above all, the fish, the ichthus, an acronym for Christ. These signs were found from Spain to Asia Minor and from Africa to the Rhine River, with no change in style or subject matter. The paintings were rudimentary: a few strokes in a limited spectrum of colors. They were not images of worship. The church was imposing no program. They were reminders, mementos of Christ or the Virgin, not portraits of them.