THE CHURCH IN CRISIS -- And Scenarios for a Solution

Present at the Demolition: A Philosopher Remembers and Reminds: An interview with Dr. Alice von Hildebrand
The following conversation with Dr. Alice von Hildebrand opens our discussion of this issue's focus: The Crisis in the Church: Scenarios for a Solution. Dr. von Hildebrand, professor of philosophy emeritus of Hunter College (City University of New York) has just completed The Soul of a Lion, a biography of her husband, Dietrich.

TLM: Dr. von Hildebrand, at the time that Pope John XXIII summoned the Second Vatican Council, did you perceive a need for a reform within the Church?

AVH: Most of the insights about this come from my husband. He always said that the members of the Church, due to the effects of original sin and actual sin, are always in need of reform. The Church's teaching, however, is from God. Not one iota is to be changed or considered in need of reform.

TLM: In terms of the present crisis, when did you first perceive something was terribly wrong?

AVH: It was in February 1965. I was taking a sabbatical year in Florence. My husband was reading a theological journal, and suddenly I heard him burst into tears. I ran to him, fearful that his heart condition had suddenly caused him pain. I asked him if he was all right. He told me that the article that he had been reading had provided him with the certain insight that the devil had entered the Church. Remember, my husband was the first prominent German to speak out publicly against Hitler and the Nazis. His insights were always prescient.

TLM: Had your husband ever talked about his fear for the Church before this incident?

AVH: I relate in my biography of my husband, The Soul of a Lion, that a few years after his conversion to Catholicism in the 1920's, he began teaching at the University of Munich. Munich was a Catholic city. Most Catholics at the time went to mass, but he always said that it was there that he became aware of the loss of a sense of the supernatural among Catholics. One incident especially offered him sufficient proof, and it greatly saddened him.

When passing through a door, my husband would always give precedence to those of his students who were priests. One day, one of his colleagues (a Catholic) expressed his astonishment and disapproval: "Why do you let your students step ahead of you?" "Because they are priests," replied my husband. "But they do not have a Ph.D." my husband was grieved. To value a Ph.D. is a natural response; to feel awe for the sublimity of the priesthood is a supernatural response. The professor's attitude proved that his sense for the supernatural had been eroded. That was long before Vatican II. But until the Council, the beauty and the sacredness of the Tridentine liturgy masked this phenomenon.

TLM: Did your husband think that the decline in a sense of the supernatural began around that time, and if so, how did he explain it?

AVH: No, he believed that after Pius X's condemnation of the heresy of Modernism, its proponents merely went underground. He would say that they then took a much more subtle and practical approach. They spread doubt simply by raising questions about the great supernatural interventions throughout salvation history, such as the Virgin Birth and Our Lady's perpetual virginity, as well as the Resurrection, and the Holy Eucharist. They knew that once faith -- the foundation -- totters, the liturgy and the moral teachings of the Church would follow suit. My husband entitled one of his books The Devastated Vineyard. After Vatican II, a tornado seemed to have hit the Church.

Modernism itself was the fruit of the calamity of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt, and it took a long historical process to unfold. If you were to ask a typical Catholic in the Middle Ages to name a hero or heroine, he would answer with the name of a saint. The Renaissance began to chant that. Instead of a saint, people would think of geniuses as persons to emulate, and with the oncoming of the industrial age, they would answer with the name of a great scientist. Today, they would answer with a sports figure or cinema personality. In other words, the loss of the sense of the supernatural has brought an inversion of the hierarchy of values.

Even the pagan Plato was open to a sense of the supernatural. He spoke of the weakness, frailty and cowardice often evidenced in human nature. He was asked by a critic to explain why he had such a low opinion of humanity. He replied that he was not denigrating man, only comparing him to God.

With the loss of a sense of the supernatural, there is a loss of the sense of the need for sacrifice today. The closer one comes to God, the greater should be one's sense of sinfulness. The further one gets form God, as today, the more we hear the philosophy of the new age: "I'm OK, You're OK." This loss of the inclination to sacrifice has led to the obscuring of the Church's redemptive mission. Where the Cross is downplayed, our need for redemption is given hardly a thought.

The aversion to sacrifice and redemption has assisted the secularization of the Church from within. We have been hearing for many years form priests and bishops about the need for the Church to adapt herself to the world. Great popes like St. Pius X said just the opposite: the world must adapt itself to the Church.

TLM: From our conversation throughout this afternoon, I must conclude that you don't believe that the accelerating loss of the sense of the supernatural is an accident of history.

AVH: No I do not. There have been two books published in Italy in recent years that confirm what my husband had been suspecting for some time; namely, there has been a systematic infiltration of the Church by diabolical enemies for much of this century. My husband was a very sanguine man and optimistic by nature. During the last ten years of his life, however, I witnessed him many times in moments of great sorrow, and frequently repeating, "They have desecrated the Holy Bride of Christ." He was referring to the "abomination of desolation" of which the prophet Daniel speaks.

TLM: This is a critical admission, Dr. von Hildebrand. Your husband has been called a twentieth-century Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XII. If he felt so strongly, didn't he have access to the Vatican to tell pope Paul VI of his fears?

AVH: But he did! I shall never forget the private audience we had with Paul VI just before the end of the Council. It was on June 21, 1965. As soon as my husband started pleading with him to condemn the heresies that were rampant, the Pope interrupted him with the words, "Lo scriva, lo scriva." ("Write it down.") A few moments later, for the second time, my husband drew the gravity of the situation to the Pope's attention. Same answer. His Holiness received us standing. It was clear that the Pope was feeling very uncomfortable. The audience lasted only a few minutes. Paul VI immediately gave a sign to his secretary, Fr. Capovilla, to bring us rosaries and medals. We then went back to Florence where my husband wrote a long document (unpublished today) that was delivered to Paul VI just the day before the last session of the Council. It was September 1965. After reading my husband's document, he said to my husband's nephew, Dieter Sattler, who had become the German ambassador to the Holy See, that he had read the document carefully, but that "it was a bit harsh." The reason was obvious: my husband had humbly requested a clear condemnation of heretical statements.

TLM: You realize, of course, Doctor, that as soon as you mention this idea of infiltration, there will be those who roll their eyes in exasperation and remark, "Not another conspiracy theory!"

AVH: I can only tell you what I know. It is a matter of public record, for instance, that Bella Dodd, the ex-Communist who reconverted to the Church, openly spoke of the Communist Party's deliberate infiltration of agents into the seminaries. She told my husband and me that when she was an active party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican "who were working for us."

Many a time I have heard Americans say that Europeans "smell conspiracy wherever they go." But from the beginning, the Evil One has "conspired" against the Church -- and has always aimed in particular at destroying the mass and sapping belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. That some people are empted to blow this undeniable fact out of proportion is no reason for denying its reality. On the other hand, I, European born, am tempted to say that many Americans are naive; living in a country that has been blessed by peace, and knowing little about history, they are more likely than Europeans (whose history is a tumultuous one) to fall prey to illusion. Rousseau has had an enormous influence in the United States. When Christ said to His apostles at the Last Supper that "one of you will betray me," the apostles were stunned. Judas had played his hand so artfully that no one suspected him, for a cunning conspirator knows how to cover his tracks with a show of orthodoxy.

TLM: Do the books by the Italian priest you mentioned before the interview contain documentation that would provide evidence of this infiltration?

AVH: The two books I mentioned were published in 1998 and 2000 by an Italian priest, Don Luigi Villa of the diocese of Brescia, who at the request of Padre Pio has devoted many years of his life to the investigation of the possible infiltration of both Freemasons and Communists into the Church. My husband and I met Don Villa in the sixties. He claims that he does not make any statement that he cannot substantiate. When Paulo Sesto Beato? (1998) was published the book was sent to every single Italian bishop. None of them acknowledged receipt; none challenged any of Don Villa's claims.

In this book, he relates something that no ecclesiastical authority has refuted or asked to be retracted -- even though he names particular personalities in regard to the incident. It pertains to the rift between Pope Pius XII and then Bishop Montini (the future Paul VI) who was his Undersecretary of State. Pius XII, conscious of the threat of Communism, which in the aftermath of World War II was dominating nearly half of Europe, had prohibited the Vatican staff from dealing with Moscow. To his dismay, he was informed one day through the Bishop of Upsala (Sweden) that his strict order had been contravened. The Pope resisted giving credence to this rumor until he was given incontrovertible evidence that Montini had been corresponding with various Soviet agencies. Meanwhile, Pope Pius XII (as had Pius XI) had been sending priests clandestinely into Russia to give comfort to Catholics behind the Iron Curtain. Every one of them had been systematically arrested, tortured, and either executed or sent to the gulag. Eventually a Vatican mole was discovered: Alighiero Tondi, S.J., who was a close advisor to Montini. Tondi was an agent working for Stalin whose mission was to keep Moscow informed about initiatives such as the sending of priests into the Soviet Union.

Add to this Pope Paul's treatment of Cardinal Mindszenty. Against his will, Mindszenty was ordered by the Vatican to leave Budapest. As most everyone knows, he had escaped the Communists and sought refuge in the American embassy compound. The Pope had given him his solemn promise that he would remain primate of Hungary as long as he lived. When the Cardinal (who had been tortured by the Communists) arrived in Rome, Paul VI embraced him warmly, but then sent him to exile in Vienna. Shortly afterwards, this holy prelate was informed that he had been demoted, and had been replaced by someone more acceptable to the Hungarian Communist government. More puzzling, and tragically sad, is the fact that when Mindszenty died, no Church representative was present at his burial.

Another of Don Villa's illustrations of infiltration is one related to him by Cardinal Gagnon. Paul VI had asked Gagnon to head an investigation concerning the infiltration of the Church by powerful enemies. Cardinal Gagnon (at that time Archbishop) accepted this unpleasant task, and compiled a long dossier, rich in worrisome facts. When the work was completed, he requested an audience with Pope Paul in order to deliver personally the manuscript to the Pontiff. This request for a meeting was denied. The Pope sent word that the document should be placed in the offices of the Congregation for the Clergy, specifically in a safe with a double lock. This was done, by the very next day the safe deposit box was broken and the manuscript mysteriously disappeared. The usual policy of the Vatican is to make sure the news of such incidents never sees the light of day. Nevertheless, this theft was reported even in L'Osservatore Romano (perhaps under pressure because it had been reported in the secular press). Cardinal Gagnon, of course, had a copy, and once again asked the Pope for a private audience. Once again his request was denied. He then decided to leave Rome and return to his homeland in Canada. Later, he was called back to Rome by Pope John Paul II and made a cardinal.

TLM: Why did Don Villa write these works singling out Paul VI for criticism?

AVH: Don Villa reluctantly decided to publish the books to which I have alluded. But when several bishops pushed for beatification of Paul VI, this priest perceived it as a clarion call to print the information he had gathered through the years. In so doing, he was following the guidelines of a Roman Congregation, informing the faithful that it was their duty as members of the Church to relay to the Congregation any information that might militate against the candidate's qualifications for beatification.

Considering the tumultuous pontificate of Paul VI, and the confusing signals he was giving, e.g.: speaking about the "smoke of Satan that had entered the Church," yet refusing to condemn heresies officially; his promulgation of Humanae Vitae (the glory of his pontificate), yet his careful avoidance of proclaiming it ex cathedra; delivering his Credo of the People of God in Piazza San Pietro in 1968, and once again failing to declare it binding on all Catholics; disobeying the strict orders of Pius XII to have no contact with Moscow, and appeasing the Hungarian Communist government by reneging on the solemn promise he had made to Cardinal Mindszenty; his treatment of holy Cardinal Slipyj, who had spent seventeen years in a Gulag, only to be made a virtual prisoner in the Vatican by Paul VI; and finally asking Archbishop Gagnon to investigate possible infiltration in the Vatican, only to refuse him and audience when his work was completed -- all these speak strongly against the beatification of Paolo VI, dubbed in Rome, "Paolo Sesto, Mesto" (Paul VI, the sad one).

That the duty to publish this depressing information was onerous and cost Don Villa great sorrow cannot be doubted. Any Catholic rejoices when he can look up to a Pope with boundless veneration. But Catholics also know that even though Christ never promised He would give us perfect leaders, He did promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail. Let us not forget that even thought the Church has had some very bad popes, and some mediocre ones, she ahs been blessed with many great popes. Eighty of them have been canonized and several have been beatified. This is a success story that does not bear parallel in the secular world.

God alone is the judge of Paul VI. But it cannot be denied that his pontificate was a very complex and tragic one. It was under him that, in the course of fifteen years, more changes were introduced in the Church than in all preceding centuries combined. What is worrisome is that we read the testimony of ex-Communists like Bella Dodd, and study Freemasonic documents (dating from the nineteenth century, and usually penned by fallen-away priests like Paul Roca), we can see that to a large extent, their agenda has been carried out: the exodus of priests and nuns after Vatican II, dissenting theologians not censured, feminism, the pressure put on Rome to abolish priestly celibacy, immorality in the clergy, blasphemous liturgies (see articles by David Hart in First Things, April 2001, "The Future of the Papacy"), the radical changes that have been introduced into the sacred liturgy (see Cardinal Ratzinger's book Milestones, pp. 126 and 148, Ignatius Press), and a misleading ecumenism. Only a blind person could deny that many of the Enemy's plan have been perfectly carried out.

One should not forget that the world was shocked at what Hitler did. People like my husband, however, actually read what he had said in Mein Kampf. The plan was there. The world simply chose not to believe it.

But grave as the situation is, no committed Catholic can forget that Christ has promised the He will remain with His Church to the very end of the world. We should meditate on the scene related in the Gospel when the apostles' boat was battered by a fierce storm. Christ was sleeping! His terrified followers woke Him up: He said one word, and there was a great calm. "O ye of little faith!"

TLM: I take it by your remarks about ecumenism that you don't agree with the current policy of "convergence" rather than "conversion"?

AVH: Let me relate an incident that caused my husband grief. It was 1946, just after the war. My husband was teaching at Fordham, and there appeared in one of his classes a Jewish student who had been a naval officer during the war. He would eventually tell my husband about a particularly stunning sunset in the Pacific and how it had led him to the quest for the truth about God. He first went to Columbia to study philosophy, and he knew that this was not what he was looking for. A friend suggested he try philosophy at Fordham and mentioned the name Dietrich von Hildebrand. After just one class with my husband, he knew he had found what he was looking for. One day after class my husband and this student went for a walk. He told my husband during this time that he was surprised at the fact that several professors, after discovering he was Jewish, assured him that they would not try to convert him to Catholicism. My husband, stunned, stopped, turned to him and said, "They said what?!" He repeated the story and my husband told him, "I would walk to the ends of the earth to make you a Catholic." To make a long story short, the young man became a Catholic, was ordained a Carthusian priest, and went on to enter the only Charter House in the United States ( in Vermont)!

TLM: You spent many years teaching at Hunter College.

AVH: Yes, and several of my students became Catholics. Oh, the beautiful conversion stories I could relate if I had time -- young people who were swept up by the truth!

I want to make one point very clear, however. I did not convert my students. The most we can do is pray to be God's instruments. To be an instrument we must strive to live the Gospel every day and in every circumstance. Only God's grace can give us the desire and ability to do that.

It is one of the fears I have about traditional Catholics. Some flirt with fanaticism. A fanatic is one who considers truth to be his personal possession instead of God's gift. We are the servants of the truth, and it is as servants that we seek to share it.

I am very concerned that there are "fanatical" Catholics who use the Faith and the truth it proclaims as an intellectual toy. An authentic appropriation of the truth always leads to a striving for holiness. The Faith, in this present crisis, is not an intellectual chess game. For anyone not striving for holiness, that's all it will ever be. Such people do more harm to the Faith, particularly if they are proponents of the traditional Mass.

TLM: So you see the only scenario for a solution to the present crisis as the renewal of a striving for sanctity?

AVH: We should not forget that we are fighting not only against flesh and blood, but against "powers and principalities." This should elicit sufficient dread in us to make us strive more than ever for holiness, and to pray fervently that the Holy Bride of Christ, who is right now at Calvary, comes out of this fearful crisis more radiant than ever.

The Catholic answer is always the same: absolute fidelity to the holy teaching of the Church, faithfulness to the Holy See, frequent reception of the sacraments, the Rosary, daily spiritual reading, and gratitude that we have been given the fullness of God's revelation: "Gaudete, iterum dico vobis, Gaudete."

TLM: I cannot end the interview without asking your reaction to a well-worn canard. There are those critics of the ancient Latin mass who point out that the crisis in the Church developed at a time when the Mass was offered throughout the world. Why should we then think a revival is intrinsic to the solution?

AVH: The devil hates the ancient Mass. He hates it because it is the most perfect reformulation of all the teachings of the Church. It was my husband who gave me this insight about the Mass. The problem that ushered in the present crisis was not the traditional mass. The problem was that the priests who offered it had already lost the sense of the supernatural and the transcendent. They rushed through the prayers, they mumbled and didn't enunciate them. That is a sign that they had brought to the Mass their growing secularism. The ancient Mass does not abide irreverence, and that was why so many priests were just as happy to see it go.

TLM: Thank you, Dr. von Hildebrand, for this time and opportunity to speak to you.

[Alice von Hildebrand, wife of famed philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, is an internationally known philosopher and author of numerous books, most recently The Soul of a Lion. The present article, "THE CHURCH IN CRISIS -- And Scenarios For a Solution," was originally published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition (Summer 2001), pp. 6-11, and is reprinted here by permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

The War on Symbolism

by Alice von Hildebrand
According to Plato, "Any change except to eliminate an evil, is an evil." It is easy to caricature this assertion and label Plato a hopeless conservative opposed to any kind of progress, a man stubbornly attached to a past he irrationally idealized.

I propose instead that Plato's claim is to be interpreted in the light of his Philosophy as a whole. My reading is that Plato warns us of the danger of irreverently rejecting the wisdom and experiences of our predecessors on the grounds that they are merely old or allegedly obsolete. Lamenting the spiritual, intellectual and artistic decline that he witnessed in his old age, Plato remarked that in Athens's heyday "reverence was our queen and mistress."

Certainly, Plato does not reject any improvement, e.g., a response to a legitimate need that arises because of changing circumstances. Nor does he reject the normal growth of things from one stage to another. What he is trying to impress upon us is that we should have respect for the wisdom acquired by our ancestors and refrain from discarding our spiritual, intellectual and social heritage, assuming arrogantly, in an Hegelian spirit, that to move forward guarantees improvement. Plato's works were written some 24 centuries ago, and yet much of their contents has a freshness and vitality that explains why pride of place is still given him among the very great thinkers of the world.

Our society, inebriated by its mind-boggling technological accomplishments, is constantly threatened by the arrogance inherent in material success. Thus: "Our ancestors were children; we are mature. Man has finally come of age. There is nothing that sooner or later cannot come under his control." The last fifty years have witnessed changes that affect our lives so radically -- landing on the moon, the atomic bomb (man's revenge that he cannot create: he can now destroy, with his fiat), television, computers, supersonic planes, and the Internet, to mention some of the most prominent ones -- that we are al tempted to believe ourselves superior to our ancestors. Many scientists are in a state of hubris that usually antagonizes wisdom and can lead to disaster.

It is one thing to achieve an ever-greater control over the material world, but another to have wisdom to put these discoveries at the service of the good. One could raise the troublesome question of whether scientific conquests do not often militate against true wisdom. What the contemporary world, rich in technological feats, lacks is wisdom. Science aims at achieving through knowledge an ever-greater dominion over the material world; the love of wisdom (philosophia) is to shed light on the key questions of human existence, such as the existence of God or immortal souls, the meaning of human life, the meaning of moral good and evil, and the like. These are questions that science cannot answer because it cannot even raise them. Its perimeter is limited to the material universe. Our society offers a depressing discrepancy between our scientific conquests and -- to quote Gabriel Marcel -- our steady devaluation of human life, which is less and less appreciated as a gift. This state of moral disarray finds its expression in the demoralizing literature, which has flowered in the 20th century. Kafka, Camus, Hemingway and Fitzgerald come to mind here. We are suffering from a "sickness unto death" -- namely despair, to refer to Kierkegaard's great work.

The danger that characterizes our society is the tacit assumption that change b its very nature guarantees betterment. New means better. Lack of respect for old age, and adulation of youth -- so typical of our society -- are expressions of this same ethos. Traditionally white hair was respectable: today, people seem to be ashamed of their closeness to eternal youth. We try to hide it much as we try to hide physical defects and blemishes. After the age of 35, most women (and many men now follow suit) owe it to themselves to dye their hair. The "world" would brand them as "badly groomed" if they showed streaks of gray in their hair.

By contrast, in ancient Rome one had to be a senex to be member of the Senate. According to Indian customs, the chief was always a man whose age inspired respect: he was the one whose wisdom, based on experience, was respected and heeded. He was the one consulted in times of crisis. In Greek tragedies, white hair is treated with respect. The same sentiment is expressed in the Old Testament.

Our present philosophy of life, which glorifies youth and novelty, creates a state of instability that is one of the diseases afflicting our society; we have no roots. What Plato calls the golden cord of tradition has been ruptured.

This ethos assumes much weight when it affects a sacred tradition. It is here that the words of Plato reveal their wisdom. I am referring to changes that have been introduced in Catholic life since Vatican II. Those of us who are now elderly remember vividly that priests were identifiable not only because of their Roman collars and dark suits, but also because of their tonsure. The latter had a clear symbolic meaning: the fact that part of the priest's hair was shaved indicated his total donation to God. After Vatican II, this longstanding tradition was abolished. I do not recall that a convincing reason was given for this change, but somehow the special dignity of the priesthood was no longer honored by a visible sign.

Before ascending to the altar for the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, priests had to don 7 pieces of clothing, each one of which symbolized a step in a particular scene of Christ's ascent to Golgotha, where the ultimate sacrifice of the God-man for our redemption took place. These symbols have been powerfully highlighted in [Martin] von Cochem's book, The Amazing Catholic Mass [i.e., The Incredible Catholic Mass] (TAN). Today many of them have been eliminated. It is most unlikely that young priests know either their names or their symbolic meanings. What is particularly regrettable is that priests are likely to be much less conscious of the fact that Holy Mass is essentially a non bloody re-enactment of the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, a fact of which the priestly vestments they were wearing physically and forcefully reminded them.

Whereas in the so-called Tridentine liturgy the priest stood first at the foot of the altar -- once again symbolizing the way of the Cross toward the hill of Calvary -- in the Novus Ordo he immediately faces the congregation. The steps have been eliminated. And yet, how deeply meaningful and symbolic were these "steps" -- powerful expressions of the virtue of discretio, which teaches us that before reaching a noble goal, we should beware of rushing to it without proper preparation.

Another significant change is the abolition of minor orders: up to Vatican II, there were seven steps leading to the priesthood: porter, lector, exorcist, and acolyte, and then subdeacon, deacon, and finally the holy sacrament of the priesthood, in which a human creature is granted the unfathomable privilege of representing Christ, and of changing bread and wind into the holy Body and Blood of the Savior of the world. These seven steps had a deep meaning: inspired by a sentiment of sacred discretio, the Church in her wisdom reminded the candidate to the priesthood of the awesomeness of the step he was about to take. Whether in universities or in the military, we note grades of dignity. It was thus highly appropriate that the ascension to the highest dignity ever given to man should be marked by several degrees, each one of them granting the seminarian a more intimate participation in the mystery of Holy Mass. Once again, this tradition rich in symbolic meaning has been eliminated.

It is also regrettable that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is now celebrated on a table, the piece of furniture used for meals. An altar, on the contrary, was exclusively used for sacrifices, as clearly stated in the Old Testament.

Another important change is that priests now face their congregations, whereas for centuries they were facing east, and Christ is called the sol justitiae. He is the light -- the lumen Christi. Once again, a profound symbol was discarded.

Still another break with tradition is the elimination of the altar rails in catholic churches. For centuries, people knelt while receiving Holy Communion, and kneeling in our culture is the most perfect expression of an adoring posture -- that is, a bodily duplication of the proper posture of the soul. Why this change was introduced (at great financial cost) is difficult to understand, by unfortunately it is not the only case in which symbolism has been eliminated.

Symbolism plays a central role in religious life. A symbol is a material object that represents, or stands for, a spiritual reality. The symbol partakes of the dignity of this invisible reality and makes it physically present. Its purpose is to establish a harmony between the soul and the body of the faithful, the spiritual, and the material. For the posture of the body is bound to have an influence on the soul, just as the inner attitude of the soul calls for an adequate bodily expression. All of us know that if we were privileged to have a supernatural vision, we would immediately kneel and even prostrate ourselves. We only need read the New Testament; when Christ performed a miracle, its beneficiary prostrated himself and adored Him.

The kneeling posture when the faithful recite the words et incarnates est in the Creed and the beating of one's breast in the Confiteor are powerful expressions of one's adoration or one's sinfulness. Today, the number of times that a priest bows or genuflects in front of the altar has been substantially reduced. And yet repetition is of great significance in religious life. The mea culpa used to be repeated three times. The Donminus vobiscum is like a sweet refrain that keeps reminding us of the living participation of the faithful in the holy sacrifice taking place on what should be an altar. The value of repetition becomes obvious when we compare a sentence communication information (today is Saturday), and one which conveys an affective content. In the first case, repetition is inane once the message has been perceived. In the second case, repetition is never "repetitious"; it is old and always new, to quote St. Augustine. What would we think of a husband who never told his wife that he loved her, on the ground that she had already received this "information" when he asked her to marry him? The sweet words "I love you" are never old: each one of them is a new blossom on the tree of love. The Bible and the liturgy illustrate this powerfully: holy, holy, holy, sanctus, sanctus, sanctus. In heaven, the whole choir of blessed ones will eternally sing God's praise, without ever exhausting its plentitude. How deeply meaningful it was that the celebrant first prayed the Confiteor, followed by the faithful acknowledging their guilt to him -- who, while performing the sacred mystery, is in persona Christi -- and not to their brothers and sisters as is the practice today.

Another change that has had an upsetting effect on many faithful is that Catholics are now permitted to eat meat on Fridays. Until Vatican II, Friday was a day of abstinence, reminding the faithful that Christ died for us on that fateful day. It was therefore deeply symbolic that Friday should be a day of penance, and that his should be expressed by our abstaining form meat. Paul VI, who introduced this change, did remind the faithful that they should make some sacrifice of their own choice, by alas, how many young people (victims of a deplorable education in so-called Catholic schools) even know the meaning of the word sacrifice? The awareness of one's sinfulness and joyful willingness to make sacrifices are so essential to Catholic life that its total elimination was bound to have negative consequences on the religious lives of the faithful. That is true of the clergy as well: penance, abstinence, fast, hair shirts and the discipline have been eliminated or reduced to a minimum in most seminaries.

The abolition of the index is also relevant in this regard. For centuries, the Church as a vigilant mother warned her children that certain books contained poisonous doctrine, either in faith or morals. When a bottle contains toxic material, the law orders that that fact be indicated on the label: do not drink, do not inhale, do not eat. The obvious reason is protection of the non-initiated. The same thing applies in the intellectual and religious sphere. Most men are likely to be misled by brilliance, novelty, dynamism, and by what Dietrich von Hildebrand called "false depth." Kant's works are not easy reading. Many are those who assume that the very obscurity of his formulations constitutes proof that he is communicating a message of great importance that we do not understand because of its "depth," Whereas in fact his abstruse formulations often hide confusions and ambiguities. How many of us, if not protected by special graces and having a legitimate reason for doing so, can read scandalous books without being affected by their contents? Priests -- because of their role as confessors -- must be acquainted with the ugly traps into which men fall; for this reason the Church, in her motherly concern, reminds us that our intellects have been weakened by original sin. Our intellects are not "perverted," as Calvin claimed, and can still distinguish between true and false, good and evil, but this clarity of vision presupposes a fundamental attitude of humility. Just as we should remember that we are sinners, we should also remember that our intellectual faculties are limited. An attitude of humility never hurts. This was one of the precious messages of the great sage Socrates: "I know that I know not." This, of course, should not be interpreted as skepticism or intellectual despair, but rather as a reminder that the safest way of avoiding errors is to remember that we are prone to fall into them if we are not humbly vigilant.

Why this safeguard was abolished by Paul VI is not very clear. The pope told us that he trusted the intellectual maturity of Catholics, but to assume that one is mature is one of the typical marks of immaturity. In his holy rule, St. Benedict writes that when a monastery is facing important or even secondary decisions the abbot should ask the advice of the whole community and make up his mind only after having listened carefully to the various opinions offered for his consideration.

One of the great temptations of modern man is that, inebriated by the technological achievements of the 20th century, he is constantly exposed to the danger of believing that, given time, he can become God. Once again, the Greeks proved their wisdom; they considered hubris as a classical temptation likely to bring man to a tragic downfall. This is a subtle repetition of the temptation that the Evil One presented to Eve: thou shalt be like God (without God's help). Eritis sicut Deus.

The New Testament is truly -- to quote Roy Schoeman -- post-Messianic Judaism, for the Incarnation not only fulfills Judaism, but also opens up new vistas that were either only in a seminal stage in the Old Testament, or could not be realized without the divine miracle of the Incarnation. That the Second Person of the Holy Trinity should become man is something -- to quote Kierkegaard -- that never entered man's head. It is and can only be a divine "invention." For man's craving is always to go higher, so to speak. God, on the contrary, chose to assume the form of a slave, teaching us thereby that the message of the Gospel is incomprehensible to him who refuses to acknowledge that it should be read on one's knees, in an attitude of total receptivity and humility. Intellectual arrogance inevitably makes one blind, for many "brilliant" intellectuals have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear. A high I.Q. is not necessarily an advantage from a religious point of view, for the divine message is best understood by the little ones who become like children and acknowledge that without God's help, they can do nothing.

No doubt the numerous changes that have been introduced in the Church over the course of the past forty years have confused many of the faithful. One judges a tree by its fruits. Maybe we should rediscover the beauty and religious import of past customs that have been discarded in the turmoil that characterized the post-Vatican II years.

What attitude should a true son of the Church adopt? As St. Paul instructs us, "test all things, keep what is good." May contemporary man understand that message.

[Alice von Hildebrand, wife of famed philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, is an internationally known philosopher and author of numerous books, most recently The Privilege of Being a Woman. The present article, "The War on Symbolism," was originally published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition (Winter 2006), and is reprinted here by permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

Musings on the October Synod

by Peter A. Kwasniewski
There is no question that the 11th Ordinance Synod of Bishops that took place in Oct. 2005, dedicated to the theme of "The Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church" -- a synod already announced by John Paul II but carried into effect by his successor, a theologian noted especially for his liturgical and Eucharistic focus -- was in many ways a fruitful ecclesial event, making allowances for the limitations of any such enormous gatherings of prelates.[1] Pope Benedict XVI was unusually present and accessible in the sense that he came to all the plenary sessions, listened with great care to the discussions, and participated from time to time spontaneously, as a brother bishop. He is clearly at home in discussions of this sort, the give-and-take of theological debate and pastoral deliberations. For their part, the bishops spoke freely, at times movingly, but without saying anything that could be described as a real surprise. The 700 or so media agents approved for the event had to leave somewhat disappointed that no items of a liberal agenda (such as married clergy in the Latin rite, or communion for divorced and remarried Catholics) were taken seriously, much less proclaimed to a world waiting for more validation of its habitual permissiveness.

What surprised me the most, however, was the astonishing lack of discussion or even the awareness of the most fundamental point of all in any attempt to come to grips with the Church of today and her Eucharistic life -- namely, the extent to which the so-called reform of the liturgy has been a disastrous failure. Here was a golden opportunity for some honest soul-searching, for the admission of collective guilt in allowing the riches of the Western liturgical heritage to be pitilessly scattered and buried, for the proposal of radical cures to confront a disease already far advanced. Here was a chance, dare we say it, for humble acknowledgement that what the majority of the Fathers of Vatican II had expected and desired in a liturgical reform was far, far different from what actually transpired at the hands of Bugnini's band, that the de facto abolition of the unbroken custom of ad orientem worship[2] and the associated destruction of sanctuaries and tabernacles across the world was a wretched mistake.[3] Indeed, though one cannot expect the pope of today to declare that the helmsman of the barque of Peter in the 1970s was asleep on the job and did not wake up until he sent Bugnini off to a foretaste of purgatory in Tehran, one could have expected the pope, or at any rate some of the bishops, to confront directly the key question: What has happened to the Roman liturgy of the Mass? Could it be that there was some connection between unprecedented liturgical experimentation and church redesign on the one hand, and the massive drop in devotional life on the other? In short, did something go drastically wrong, and can we take steps to undo the damage?

But my hopes that this would happen were repeatedly dashed. The first indication that the synod would be dealing with worthy but, in a way, second-level questions (as compared with the burning heart of the matter, the Mass) was when the ZENIT news service reported on some comments made by the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Cardinal Francis Arinze, at a press conference on October 13.[4] According to Cardinal Arinze, up until that point no bishop had mentioned the "Tridentine rite" at the synod -- which means no one had directly raised the painful question of the faulty reform and the inheritance it so grievously distorted, not only by wretched translations into the vernacular but also by the rationalist presuppositions and execution of the reform as such, which constitute nothing less than a break with Tradition, as Cardinal Ratzinger himself had observed in more than one publication.[5] Cardinal Arinze went on to say: "If there are groups that desire the Tridentine Mass, this is already provided for. Bishops may allow it for groups. It is not a priority for the synod, as no one has spoken about it." If you imagine a group of hundreds of bishops and even more assistants, and not one of them brings up a matter that is, for many reasons, at the heart of all that the synod is supposed to be about, does this not sound a bit like a conspiracy of silence?

As I contended above, the burning heart of the matter is the Mass in concreto, not he Eucharist in abstracto. One of the most common mistakes today is when people think that since the Eucharist is the greatest mystery of the faith, we should focus our attention only on it, and not bother so much about he liturgy, which is a secondary affair, (rather like the shell of a hard-boiled egg: when it comes time for eating, you break the shell and eat the egg). But it is not like that. The only way in which our Lord gives himself to us is through the liturgy that His Spirit has lovingly created inside the heart of His Bride, who is our Mother. The Eucharist is not a free-floating entity but a distinctively sacramental, liturgical reality. We cannot be transformed eucharistically apart from being habituated to a life of meditation and contemplation by the sacred rites of the Church. The attempt to cut off the sacraments and view them as independent wholes, almost like Platonic Ideas, forgets altogether the way in which sacramental life is always and essentially a liturgical life, inculturated in forms of a given age and place.

We have been through many phases in the history of Western liturgy, and there have been peaks and valleys. Yet never have we been through a collective desacralization and ideological rewriting of the rites such as the past forty years have witnessed. This is the true crisis that stands behind the more attention-getting crises in the Church; this is the deepest reason for the Church's amnesia of identity, her loss of political nerve, slackened missionary impulse, abandonment of pure contemplation, and whatever other evils we are suffering from (and there are truly very many evils, as Amerio, Ferrara, and Woods, among others have documented all too well).[6] When she -- when we -- knew that we had, at our heart, the ultimate and supreme mystery of the universe to which all glory, laud, and honor was to be given, from sunrise to sunset, the mystery in which man would find his strength and comfort, the healing of his wounds and the salvation of his entire being, in which the very meaning of life begins to be disclosed and the secrets of divine intimacy are make ours to taste, as we yearn in hope for eternal consummation -- when this was our daily bread we knew we had to celebrate it with all reverence and beauty, we had to preach it and teach it to the ends of the earth, we had to fight against every power that would dare to stand in the way of Christ the King of glory, Redeemer of the world. This summarizes the message of Leo XIII in one of his last encyclicals, Mirae Caritatis (1902), on the Eucharist as the life of the world and the only hope for modern civilization.

Far be it from me to suggest that the Fathers of the recent synod do not, in fact, believe that the Eucharist is mankind's only hope. The very title of their final document shows the contrary: "The Eucharist: Living Bread for the Peace of the World." Many things they say are perfect echoes of what Leo XIII said. Similarly the lineamenta prepared before the synod as well as the 50 Propositions that the Pope unexpectedly released afterwards contain much that is beautiful and valuable. But what is fundamentally lacking is an acknowledgement of the properly liturgical causes of the Church-wide post-conciliar crisis, and the corresponding acknowledgement of the liturgical remedy to the same. Until this is done, no matter how numerous or "pastoral" the documents, we will not be liberated from the prison of our own design. We will continue to be like captives who spend their time longing with sighs and groans for better days (or more terribly, who are hallucinating that better days are already her to enjoy), when all along the door of their cell remains unlocked if only they would try to get out. The one solution that is ours to begin implementing even now is the one thing that none of the bishops, according to Cardinal Arinze, ever mentioned. One wonders: are they afraid of mentioning it? Or are they really unaware that the Catholic investment house called Tradition is open seven days a week, especially on Sundays, ready to pay out massive dividends to its customers?

But the best is what Cardinal Arinze said last, surely unaware of the irony of his words: "The problem we have discussed [so far in our synod] is that many people don't go to Mass, and those that come don't understand -- they go to Communion but not to confession, as if they were immaculate." Could one hope for a better confirmation of the point we are making? "Many people don't go to Mass." Does the reformed liturgy not speak to them after all? Why did their parents go to a Mass they could not understand? And those who do go -- exquisite irony here, given that the main point of the reform was maximal intelligibility -- "don't understand" what it's really about or what's required of them in return for the Lord's precious gift of Himself. (The bishops in general worried about the loss of a sense of the sacred, the loss of knowledge that the Mass is a true sacrifice, the loss of belief in the Real Presence. A person who cannot see the connection between these problems and the botched reform -- which intentionally emphasized a common brotherly meal, downplayed the sacrificial and took away dozens of poignant ritual testimonies to the Real Presence -- has a lot of waking up to do.) Finally, "they go to Communion but not to confession, as if they were immaculate."[7] Is there a form of the Roman rite that duly accentuates man's unworthiness and sinfulness, his need of divine help and healing, pardon and peace? And is there a form that does not? Experientia locuta, causa finita may not be a catchy phrase, but it is the truth.

There was once a "liturgical culture" in which the sacrament of penance, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the ritual of divine worship were all of a piece, proclaiming a consistent message, calling to conversion of heart and promising eternal life to the faithful -- a life that one could almost taste in the "tranquility of order," the sublime adoration, manifested in the very manner in which the mysteries were handled. No one here was tempted to think himself immaculate; the only immaculate one was the Virgin Mother of God, and it was precisely her omnipresent cultus that helped us to see how far we had fallen and yet how high we could rise again by imitating her faith and humility, taking hold of the Lord's strong right arm. There can be such a liturgical culture once more. But it takes time, patience, and prayer, and most of all it takes priests and bishops who are awake enough and courageous enough to size up the problem form its roots.

Alas, it seems the time for this sizing-up is still in the future. Among the bishops' own propositions, the second proposition, deliberately in a place of prominence, refers to the "beneficial influence that the liturgical reform implemented since the second Vatican Council has had for the life of the Church." As readers of these pages are aware, this is a stock phrase that is repeated in all official documents (e.g. John Paul II's commemorative documents on Sacrosanctum Concilium: Vicesimus Quintus Annus of 1988 and Spiritus et Sponsa of 2003), apparently without regard to mountains of evidence to the contrary; Michael Davies has often spoken of the "obligatory optimism" of the Vatican. There is, of course, no room for an obligatory pessimism. It would seem that realism ought to be the default position.

Cardinal Arinze was not the only one who bore witness to this profound lack of analysis, this baffling disconnect between cause and effect. Cardinal Marc Ouellet, archbishop of Quebec, admitted frankly in an interview with Inside the Vatican that testimony of the Greek Catholic bishops at the synod was immensely important because they had a much deeper sense of the sacred.[8] "Something very enriching was the experience of the Eastern Churches. They have different liturgies and they have a different sense of the liturgy and so to hear them speak about the holy Eucharist was very defining for us.... They have a deep sense of the sacredness, and so to hear them speak about the holy Eucharist was very edifying for me. In the West, we need to recover the sacredness of the liturgy." Again these true but vague wards point to the much more precise analysis that many traditional Catholics have already given, though it seems to fall on deaf ears: we in the West had that sense of the sacred, we had (and still have) the liturgy that preserves the original undivided sensus liturgicus of the whole of Christendom before the Great Schism. In terms of ethos, atmosphere, density of prayer and symbolism, High Mass in the ancient Roman rite has for more in common with the Byzantine rite than it has with the Novus Ordo.[9] The lesson Cardinal Ouellet and the other bishops should have taken away is that we in the West need to recover the birthright that Catholics in the East have never been foolish enough to sell away for the pottage of modernity. The Eastern churches give us a model, an inspiration, and a warning: the model of traditional worship in spirit and in truth; the inspiration to return to our glorious and much-maligned heritage; the warning that we shall never reform our church life until we make the worthy glorification of God our absolute priority.

Cardinal Ouellet rightly pointed out that "adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is awakening and developing all over the world and this will help to restore the sacredness of the liturgical celebration of the Mass." Nevertheless, as I said above, this is simply not enough. Even in a Western world where everyone venerated the Body and Blood of Jesus, as they ought to do -- a tall order for any century, not just for the present one -- such uniform behavior would not, in and of itself, automatically produce a liturgy worthy of the sacra mysteria. We would still be eating the divine banquet with plastic knives and forks. While in a state of emergency there is no reason to complain if the cutlery is substandard, in "ordinary time" the service, when God and His gifts are in question, should be extraordinarily good.

There is still a glimmer of hope, as always. The Fathers of the October Synod did not, as it were, carry off an October Liturgical Revolution. It may well be too soon, humanly speaking, for the radical response that is required. We may need a hierarchy of bishops impregnated with traditional liturgical piety who, at a Synod in (say) 2055, by an unforeseen and overwhelming inspiration of the Holy Spirit, arrive together at the realization that it is time to dig up that treasure buried in a field, the full liturgical treasure of the Roman Church, and to spread its riches far and wide. Perhaps someday the cry will go up and resound in the heavens: "Burn the polyester jazzubles![10] Re-consecrate the high alters! Bring back the tabernacle, the relics, the fiddlebacks, the schola contorum!"

Meanwhile, in these duller times of ours, we are only at the beginning of a long, long journey, and we cannot assume that things will get better and better; that is the obligatory optimism machine, not faith in a divine Providence that embraces both the bitter Passion and the glorious Resurrection. It is up to us to pray and to work -- ora et labora, as the pope's patron saint instructs his monks to do in the Rule -- so as to make ourselves the intelligent instruments of that same provident God, who with his Son is ever at work,[11] in open and hidden ways, for the authentic renewal of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

Te rogamus, audi nos!

Notes:

1. The important documents surrounding this synod are available at the Vatican website (http:www.vatican.va/roman_curia/synod/index.htm); these include the instrumentum laboris of July 7, 2005 and the Message of the General Assembly at the Conclusion of the Synod, October 22, 2005. A number of Pope Benedict's homilies and messages in connection with the event are certainly worth reading.
   
   
2. See the definitive study by U. M. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004). It is no longer possible to call into question that the ad orientem stance goes back to the apostolic age and is, with great probability, fro the Apostles themselves, as St. Basil the Great (329-379 AD) placidly states in his treatise On the Holy Spirit, as if saying something obvious to all at that time.
   
   
3. Michael Davies, no great friend of the Bugnini reform, nevertheless saw the need to demonstrate that there was nothing in the Council documents and even in the postconciliar legislation that mandated or even recommended reordering the sanctuaries and decentering the tabernacles (see his The Catholic Sanctuary and the Second Vatican Council [Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books and Publishers, 1997]). It is never required that the "president's" chair be in front and center stage; it is never required that Mass be celebrated "towards the people"; and, for a time at least, it was taken for granted that the ordinary of the Mass would remain in Latin, as it had always been. Yes the ambiguities and loopholes of Sacrosanctum Conciluim have been pointed out, but the fact remains that most of what is most distinctive in people's minds about the "reform" has nothing to do with the Council per se, and everything to do with the Consilium, Bugnini, Paul VI, slumbering and scheming bishops, parish councils, etc. In other words, let the blame be placed where the blame is due.
   
   
4. See ZE05101305.
   
   
5. A few good sources may be mentioned here. On translated texts, see Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, "The Catechetical Role of the Liturgy and the Quality of Liturgical Texts: The Current ICEL Translation," Comminio 20.1 (1993): 63-83; Eamon Duffy, "Rewriting the Liturgy: The Theological Implications of Translation," in S. Caldecott, Beyond the Prosaic: Renewing the Liturgical Movement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 97-126. For well-researched critiques of the reform by orthodox Catholic theologians, see Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background, trans. Klaus D. Grimm (San Juan Capistrano, CA: Una Voce Press, 1993); Aiden Nichols, OP, Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of Its Contemporary Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996); Alcuin Reid, OSB, The Organic Development Of The Liturgy (Farnborough: Saint Michael's Abbey Press, 2004). For Ratzinger's views, see, among other works, The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986); The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000); God is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003).
   
   
6. See Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the 20th Century, trans. Fr. John Parsons (Kansas City, MO: Sarto House); Christopher A Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Great Facade: Vatican II and the Regime of Novelty in the Roman Catholic Church (Wyoming, Minn.: The Remnant Press, 2002).
   
   
7. Why is it that people now do not think themselves sinners? Why does Communion seem such a simple, lighthearted affair, almost like taking a potato chip? Could ever-multiplying lay "ministers of communion" or the giggling girls at the altar have something to do with this?
   
   
8. See ZE05102107.
   
   
9. Except when the Oratorians in England do it, but then they are the exception that proves the rule: the Novus Ordo has never been implemented in a way that makes it continuous with what came before, and the Holy See has not really lifted a finger to ensure that this should happen. The repeated warnings or regulations are no more than the feeble protest of a weak-willed parent against the tantrums of an unruly child. True liturgical reform would require the realistic measures of a St. Pius X who, to stamp out modernism, sent Vatican representatives throughout the world to make sure the heretics were identified and snuffed out.
   
   
10. [Note from the Editor of the forthcoming Archaeological Dictionary of Catholic Worship: " 'Jazzubles' is a late 20th-century corruption of the original term 'chasubles,' which were the dignified, ornately decorated sacred vestments that priests used to wear in order to offer the holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is possible that the proper name Jezebel had some influence on the corruption into 'jazzuble,' but etymological specialists are divided in their opinion on this matter."]
    
    
11. Gospel of St. John, 5:17.

[Dr. Peter A Kwasniewski teaches philosophy at the International Theological Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, in Gaming, Austria. His article, "Musings on the October Synod," was first published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition (Winter 2006), pp. 16-20, and is reprinted here by permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.]

New bumper sticker

This lovely little bumper sticker with its merry little message of good cheer is back in print by popular demand for any of you who drink your coffee black and take your religion straight. Slap in on your bumper, rejoice, and drive with pride. Available for a donation of $4.00 each (including shipping). Trust me: nobody's getting rich from this little marketing venture. At the very worst, you might be buying ol' Pertinacious Papist a pint of Guinness in the local Irish pub.

Fr. Joseph O'Leary's unorthodox ("Hot Tub") Christology

Part I

Fr. Joseph O'Leary, a liberal Catholic priest teaching English Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, has written an essay entitled "Demystifying the Incarnation" (posted June 20, 2005 to his website, apparently first published in Archivio di Filosofia, vol. 67, 1999). His purpose is to offer a constructive critique of the Fourth Ecumenical Council -- the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) -- which is traditionally seen as having definitively defined the full humanity and divinity of Christ. Chalcedon affirmed the "hypostatic union" of Christ's two natures, meaning that His divine and human natures, though distinct, act together as a unit subsisting in one person, Jesus Christ.

Ecumenical Councils typically yield carefully-worded dogmatic formulations employing precise metaphysical conceptualizations borrowed from Greek philosophy. O'Leary grudgingly grants such formulations have a legitimate role, but is quick to observe how narrow and limited and negative he thinks this role is. At best such dogmatic formulations provide a check against obvious heretical tendencies like monophysitism (a favorite scapegoat of his, as we shall see). But even then, words like "dogma" and "metaphysics" seem to leave a sour taste in his mouth. Thus, he tends to describe formulations like those of Chalcedon derisively as "cold," "logical," and "bloodless." By contrast, he is fond of describing his own theological alternatives in language laced with warm expressions like "personal encounter" and "personal experience." It seems only proper, then, that we do him the favor of referring to his own Christological proposals in the thermal vocabulary he favors, and envision him vested as Gandalf, but in warm Pink, shepherding us out of the frozen wastes of Chalcedonian tundra into the warm, welcoming waters of his own existentialist hot-tub Christology.

This is not to suggest that O'Leary, as liberal as he may be, is simply a flake. He is clearly a deeply-sensitive, broadly educated man, familiar with the outlines of patristic and medieval tradition, appreciative of St. Thomas Aquinas, fluent in Latin, intimately conversant with the richly speculative currents of contemporary biblical theology, and deeply wedded to the Heideggerian vision of "overcoming" the onto-theological tradition of Western metaphysics. His concern here, quite simply, is with "overcoming" (there, that word again!) what he regards as certain historical and metaphysical "limitations" of the Chalcedonian formulation in order to more effectively call Catholic theology back to the Bible. (Who could possibly object to that!) Ultimately, he says he wants to reestablish the primacy of divine revelation over dogma and "reroot Chalcedon" in a living "encounter with Christ." (Who could possibly object to that!)

Nor is this to suggest that O'Leary is unappreciative of Chalcedon's dogmatic formulation as it stands. Indeed, he readily affirms the importance of doing justice to "the necessity and truth of Chalcedon on its own terms," as well as appreciating "how well this rule of faith ... served classical theology, holding in check the monophysite [note that scapegoat again] tendencies recurring throughout the tradition." (p. 2) Further, he asserts: "Even today, Chalcedon can be effective in correcting speculative distortions in Christology, such as the popular theories of a 'suffering God' which undermine not only divine transcendence but also the integrity of Christ's human nature." (p. 3) Moreover, he insists that "Chalcedon can be applied still more radically than its defenders have done." (p. 3) Hence, there is no question of O'Leary brushing aside Chalcedon as having no relevance.

Yet there is a profoundly disturbing unorthodox undercurrent running through O'Leary's essay that verges at times towards open apostasy. He would deny this charge, portraying his own proposals as faciliating the ongoing "development" of Christian doctrine and merely fleshing out implications embedded in Christian theology from its inception. He would also respond with countercharges of Catholic "fundamentalism," "rigid literalism" and "ossified traditionalism" against any "rigid" adherence to the dogmatic decrees of the Church. Yet by any traditional canon of orthodoxy, O'Leary cleary goes over the edge in this essay. He makes some attempt at concealing the bald implications of his own proposals by conceding a provisional value in the formulations of Chalcedon (as noted above) so as to cover his flank. But his clear intention is to push well beyond Chalcedon, and as one progresses through his essay, it quickly becomes apparent that he is heading towards conclusions that bear little conceivable affinity to traditional Catholic orthodoxy.

The first hint of this occurs in his opening paragraph in which he describes what he calls the "two realities" at issue in the Chalcedonian formulation as follows: "One is fleshly: the life and death of a historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth. The other is spiritual: an encounter with the living God ...." The first, he says, is a "matter of fact"; the second, a "self-authenticating" matter of "Christian experience." Notice that the matter of fact here includes the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Not His resurrection. The resurrection, of course, is consigned to the "self-authenticating" realm of "Christian experience," which, please note, is beyond the realm of fact.

The distinction O'Leary is assuming here comes from that tired, old dichotomy of the biblical historical-critics, which severs the "Christ of Faith" (the resurrected Christ) from the "Jesus of History" (the historical man who lived and died). This dichotomy is simply a transposed, religious version of the "value/fact" dichotomy that runs back through Kant's "noumenal/phenomenal" dualism to still earlier versions of that bifurcation. It is that dichotomy that now pervades our culture's dictatorship of relativism and has gone to seed in such blithe sophomorisms as "Your opinions about religion are true for you, and mine are true for me," based on the uncritical assumption that opinions about religion, because they pertain to the realm of personal "values" and not to the realm of empirically varifiable "facts," cannot be objectively right or wrong.

All of which is silly nonsense. This dichotomy, long defended by logical empiricists and other positivists of yesteryear, has been soundly exposed for the piffle it is. The problem is that the dichotomy is utterly contrived and collapses the moment it meets with reality. For values are facts too; and facts are permeated with values. The positivist notion of a value-free fact is no more tenable than the postmodernist notion of a fact-free interpretive construct. What is positive in positivism is the healthy and robust insight that a real world of objective facts exists beyond our subjective efforts to interpret it and that it can be known. What is negative is the assumption that this reality can be known and described without the intrusion of any value-laden bias. What is positive in postmodernism is the fact it dispels the positivist illusion that reality can be known and described without the bias of value-laden presuppositions. What is negative is its denial that there is any reality beyond interpretative constructs to be known or described.

Part II

Chalcedon famously defined Christ's human and divine natures as united in the singular person of Christ. Its technical term was "hypostatic union," or the union of the two natures in an underlying hypostatis, meaning "substrate" or "substance." Remarking on this Chalcedonian clarification of the Church's understanding of who Christ is, Fr. O'Leary says: "Today this clarification is likely to be seen as an estrangement. Our search to articulate the relation of the human and divine dimensions of the Christ-event has to overcome the Chalcedonian perspective through a lucid critique of its limitations." (p. 2) O'Leary hastens to reassure his readers that he's not simply opposing the Council's Christological dogma, but, rather, preparing for "a hermeneutical retrieval of the truth of Chalcedon." (p. 2, emphasis added)

Throughout these statements, one hears the echoes of Martin Heidegger's existentialism, as one does in the demythologizing theology of Rudolf Bultmann. Expressions such as "Christ-event," "overcoming" (usually "overcoming of metaphysics"), and "retrieval" (usually retrieval of something long hidden, like Heidegger's "Being," or Paul Tillich's "Ground of Being") are nuts-and-bolts trade jargon in the industry of theological existentialism.

In order to get at how the divine and human are really related in the "Christ-event," then, O'Leary wants to "overcome" the limitations of Chalcedon in order to hermeneutically "retrieve" what he sees as the underlying "truth of Chalcedon." But before this "truth" (presumably heretofore hidden and overlooked) can be "retrieved," it would be helpful to know why this presumably hidden truth of Chalcedon has been overlooked for so many centuries. Why weren't earlier attempts at uncovering this truth more effective? One reason, O'Leary says, is that "[earlier] critics have been unable to bring into view the nature of the Greek metaphysical horizon within which the classical doctrine developed; here Heidegger offers resources for a critical genealogy which theology has yet to exploit." (p. 2)

Indeed! Just as fish don't know what it means to be wet, earlier theologians didn't know what it was to be immersed in a "Greek metaphysical horizon," because they lacked sufficient critical distance. And it is none other than Heidegger, according to O'Leary, who provides this critical distance through his genealogical deconstruction (or "destruction," as Heidegger sometimes calls it) of the western metaphysical and "onto-theological" tradition. In order to appreciate something of the significance of Heidegger's existential philosophy for such theological undertakings as O'Leary's, it may be helpful to know something about both Heidegger's and existentialism's relationship to Christianity.

Martin Heidegger (pictured right) was at one time a seminarian in formation to become a Catholic priest, but dropped out after losing his faith and went on to become a leading existentialist philosopher -- an existential phenomenologist, to be specific. From the research of John D. Caputo and others, we know that Heidegger translated the categories of his erstwhile Christian faith into secular, existential equivalents, so that his philosophy is in many ways a secularized substitute for his erstwhile faith. "Care," "anxiety," "averageness," "thrownness," "inauthenticity," "authenticity," etc., are all examples of Heideggerian shorthand for denatured Christian notions. Similar patterns in secularized existential theology can be found, for example, in John Macquarrie's Principles of Christian Theology and Paul Tillich's three-volume Systematic Theology. Further, in order to see how loosely tethered the concepts of such existential theology are to the historical claims of the Christian tradition, one may note that for the Nazi theologians -- Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch -- "Christ" was reinterpreted to mean the "spirit of National Socialism." In fact, dring the Nazi regime in Germany, Hedegger himself affiliated his vision, which John D. Caputo, following Emmanuel Levinas, describes as a "totalizing ontology," with the totalitarian vision of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. (See Martin Heidegger's German Existentialism, trans. by Dagobert D. Runes [NY: Philosophical Library, 1965] for Heidegger's speeches as the Nazi Rektor of the University of Freiburg) This in no way should be seen as a backhanded attempt at tarring O'Leary with an opprobrious association with Naziism. Rather, it is simply an illustration of how disconnected any such secularized existential theology can become from the historical realities of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

So what is existentialism, exactly? What animates it? Can this question be answered without distinguishing atheistic from Christian existentialism? Perhaps so. Albert Camus (pictured below left), an example of the atheistic variety, once wrote: "A literature of despair is a contradiction in terms .... In the darkest depths of our nihilism I have sought only for the means to transcend nihilism" (quoted in John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt [NY: Oxford UP, 1960], p. 3). Atheistic existentialism accepts the nihilistic account of the objective world that emerged historically from the worldview of naturalism, which, hard on the heels of deism, rejected the supernatural. With a mechanistically understood, deterministic closed-box universe, objective reality yields no hope of meaning. In the face of this hopelessness, the essence of existentialism may be described as the attempt to transcend nihilism. But how? The answer: through subjectivity. What can that mean? Camus declared that he was utterly certain of two propositions: (1) that he could not live without meaning, and (2) that life has no objective meaning. But rather than commit suicide, which would seem to have a prima facie logical compulsion, Camus embraced what he called an "absurd logic," by which he affirmed life (as in the myth of Sisyphus) despite its absurdity. Even if there is no objective meaning to be discovered, meaning can be subjectively generated, even if it is only through metaphysical rebellion.

What about Christian existentialism? There are always hazards in generalizing, but I think we can safely say this: Existential theologians tend to view the world in terms of two levels -- the objective and the subjective. On the objective level, like their atheistic counterparts, they tend to accept the account offered by a naturalistic world view, which excludes the supernatural, shutting the lid on the universe, as it were. Hence, the meaningful dimensions of the Christian Faith are nowhere to be found on that level. On that level, the Bible is viewed as an entirely human book, full of errors and subject to ineluctable skepticism. If the essence of existentialism lies in the attempt to transcend nihilism, then how do Christian existentialists propose this be done? The answer, again, is through subjectivity. In other words, the only meaning available is going to be that encountered on the level of subjective experience. Hence, while denying that the miracles mentioned in the Bible ever objectively happened, existential theologians affirm that miracles may happen as part of the "phenomena" of our personal experience. The "Jesus of History" may be a rotted corpse somewhere in Palestine. But the "Christ of Faith" is alive in our hearts and in the life-changing experiences within the believing "kairos" community. Existentialist theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth (if we read him carefully) are replete with such suggestions. Even Soren Kierkegaard (pictured right), the Lutheran father of the existentialist movement, though he may not have succumbed to the worst of these tendentious errors, defined truth as "subjectivity," and faith as "the objective uncertainty along with the repulsion of the absurd held fast in the passion of inwardness" (Training in Christianity, trans. by Walter Lowrie [Princeton UP, 1944], quoted in Robert C. Solomon, ed., Existentialism [NY: Random House, 1974], p. 27). The pattern is clear, and it will be helpful to bear in mind as we return to O'Leary's essay.

So what does O'Leary envision when he suggests that "Chalcedon can be applied still more radically than its defenders have done"? (p. 3) What does he mean when he says "still more radically"? As will eventually become clear, I think, what he wants is a Christ of Faith who is freed from the constraints of the Jesus of History -- a Christ who lives in our subjective personal experience in a rich and meaningfully-felt way in the collective experience of the community of believers -- not a Christ who is dogmatically linked to the Jesus of history by "fundamentalist literalism" about such things as the Incarnation ("Jesus is God") or the Resurrection ("Jesus was bodily raised in space and time") or His claims about everlasting punishment and about nobody being able to come to the Father "but by me" (Jn 14:6).

His immediate strategy is to exploit the Chalcedonian opposition to docetic and monophysite heresies (which denied the full humanity of Jesus) in order to assert that our obligation to embrace the full humanity of Jesus requires us to think of Him as something less than fully God, or, more precisely, of His human nature as not fully informed by His divine nature. First of all, he sets the stage by criticizing the limitations of the Chalcedonian perspective in the work of one of its foremost exponents, St. Thomas Aquinas. O'Leary writes:

Within scholastic perspectives, reinforced by Aristotelean conceptuality, it is hard to do justice to the link with biblical vision which Chalcedon had retained. Thus Aquinas takes the Gospel accounts of Jesus' preternatural insight and miraculous powers to warrant ascription to him of the greatest knowledge and power possible in a creature, including the capacity to see in the Word all that the Word sees. Only historical scholarship has allowed us to recover Jesus as a human being sharing the cognitive limitations of his culture. (pp. 3-4)

Several things are being asserted here. First, "scholastic perspectives" are clearly considered inadequate. Second, they are considered inadequate because they don't do justice to the full humanity of Jesus. O'Leary cites Aquinas as an example of a scholastic who, he thinks, fails to do justice to the full humanity of Jesus. This can be seen, according to O'Leary, in Aquinas ascribing to Jesus the "the capacity to see in the Word all that the Word sees." It's intersting that O'Leary refers to "Jesus" (= Historical Jesus) here, and not "Christ" (= "Christ of Faith"), although I suspect that, if pressed, he would accommodate some flexibility in language here, if not of conceptualization. It's also interesting that he describes Aquinas as ascribing to Jesus "the greatest knowledge and power possible in a creature" (emphasis added). I suppose this is only carelessness, as I would hope O'Leary would not go so far as to suggest that the Jesus of History was a "creature," in Arian fashion; but the slip, if it is a slip, is an interesting one. Third, O'Leary says that "historical scholarship," by which he means the secularized protestant historical-critical tradition of biblical studies, "has allowed us to recover Jesus as a human being sharing the cognitive limitations of his culture." Just what sort of a "recovery" does he have in mind?

O'Leary quickly assures his readers that his "recovery" is "not in conflict with the Chalcedonian tradition," that, in fact, Chalcedon "kept the stage clear for it" and allowed the Church "to take aboard the findings of scholarship as a welcome confirmation" of the humanity of Christ. Then he tells us what his "recovery" entails:

It helps us take in our stride the possibility that the human Jesus may have erred, due to the limitations of the framework of his eschatological thinking; such errors could include not only the Naherwartung [the expectation of an imminent return of Christ] (Mk 9:1; Mt 10:23), but the elements in his teaching that gave rise to anti-Jewish supersessionist doctrine (Mk 12:9) and notions of eternal punishment. (p. 4)

So whatever may be said of the pre-incarnate Word, the Jesus of History is a fallible human being, whose possible errors may have included not only errors in judgment about the timing of His second coming, but theological errors in his teachings concerning the relation of His Gospel to Judaism and the doctrine of hell. I have dealt with this notion of a fallible Jesus in some detail in an earlier discussion entitled "To Err is Divine???" so I will not belabor the question here. Suffice it to sum up by noting that O'Leary sees this fallible Jesus as a logical consequence of Chalcedon's affirmation of the full humanity of Christ and it's opposition to docetic and monophysitic heresies. Yet Catholic tradition, in addition to affirming the full humanity of Christ, affirms the hypostatic union of Christ's human and divine natures in the single person of Jesus Christ, with full communicatio idiomata, meaning that the properties of the Divine Word can be ascribed to the human Christ, and vice versa. Catholic tradition therefore affirms that Christ's human knowledge was free from positive ignorance and from error, a view with which O'Leary's proposals cannot be squared.

How, then, does O'Leary understand the Incarnation? "Chalcedon," he writes, "has often been taken to teach a massive ontological amalgamation of divine and human substances," which can be best expressed in such forthright statements as "Jesus is God," "the God-man," "God became man," and so forth. But an "authentic" Chalcedonian understanding of the communicatio idiomata, he says, can help to "smooth away some of the unease" of statements such as these. Statements like "Jesus is a man" and "The Logos is God" are direct predications, he says, but "Jesus is God" is misleading shorthand that needs to be spelled out carefully. He writes:

Because the man Jesus is hypostatically one with the eternal Logos, we can attribute to this one person all the attributes of the humanity and of the divinity; thus we can say 'Jesus is God', 'Jesus created the world' or 'The Logos was born of Mary', 'The Logos suffered and died', as long as we ward off any suggestion that the human nature as such acquires divine qualities or that the divine nature as such is subject to human limitations. (p. 4)

This statement is perfectly orthodox as far as it goes. What remains in question is how the properties of these divine and human natures are understood to be united in a common hypostasis, or substrate. O'Leary says: "The ultimate hypostasis of Jesus Christ is God's eternal Word," but then adds that God the Son, as a trinitarian mode of being, cannot be called a "person" in the ordinary human sense, suggesting that the innate limitations of the Chalcedonian formulation cannot be easily overcome:

Yet however subtly one expounds Chalcedon -- at the risk, indeed, of making it a wax nose --, people will object: Is it not enough to say that in Jesus we encounter the living God? The pursuit of the ontological grounds of this encounter seems epistemologically dubious and has divisive and alienating effects. Moreover, others may experience God's self-disclosure just as definitively elsewhere. 'Jesus was and is divine for those who experience in him the manifestation of God ...' writes J.D. Crossan, in Who Killed Jesus (San Francisco, 1996), p. 216.

Note what is being asserted here -- (1) the limitations of Chalcedon; (2) the supplanting of those limitations via the objection raised in preference for a personal "encounter" with the living God (here the existential primacy of subjective experience surfaces); (3) the negative judgment on the Chalcedonian-inspired pursuit of the (objective metaphysical) "ontological grounds" of this (subjective) "encounter" as "epistemologically dubious" and having "divisive and alienating effects." What O'Leary has in mind here is the "divisive and alienating effects" of asserting that the living God is encountered in His fullness solely in the unique person of Jesus of Nazareth. (4) this is confirmed by his assertion that God's self-disclosure is "experienced" by others (non-Christians) "just as definitevely elsewhere," and by the quotation from Crossan, which asserts the subjectivistic sophomorism that "Jesus was and is divine for those who experience in him the manifestation of God." Thus, the classic existential patter of disconnection between subjectivity and objectivity becomes apparent -- the disconnection between (a) the experienced subjective Christ encountered in non-rational, personal faith and (b) the objective Christ defined by dogmatic tradition so as to link Him ineluctably to the empirical Jesus of history, who is open to rational investigation. No wonder O'Leary could state, in another context, that it was "an open question" among the students in his seminary days whether the archiological discovery of Jesus' body in Palestine would refute the reality of the Resurrection! (See "Fr. O'Leary on the Resurrection") The "Christ" encountered in the warm, fuzzy "hot tub" categories of existentialist theologians has little more to do with the Jesus Christ of historic Christianity and the Gospel accounts than the "Buddy Christ" (pictured right) of Bishop George Carlin in the Kevin Smith film, Dogma.

Part III

Part II of O'Leary's article, "Demystifying the Incarnation," is entitled: "Rerooting Chalcedon in the Encounter with Christ." A vast number of post-Vatican II Catholics have been conditioned over the past four decades of exposure to low grade Protestant Liberalism to respond like pavlovian Fundamentalists to experiential expressions such as "encounter with Christ." Most of them seem to find affective responses, such as a strangely warmed heart or tears welling up in the eyes, more authentic tokens of spiritual veracity than any doctrinal tests of truth such as the Apostle John imposes in his First Epistle, or the Church imposes in her creeds and dogmas. Of course, the mistake is to think the one should be unhinged from the other at all. When O'Leary speaks of rerooting Chalcedon in the "encounter with Christ," then, it is pertinent to ask what he means. Perhaps it is even pertinent to ask why he uses such an emotionally charged expression as "encounter with Christ," with all of its predictable nuances and pavlovian responses. The answer is not hard to guess. His readers will be principally of two types, those who are ignorant of his existentialist theological presuppositions and those who are not. He knows that the former may very well be unwittingly swayed by their conditioned responses to think that they are here being guided by a good shepherd out of the wasteland of frigid and barren dogma back to a warm and living relationship with J-e-s-u-s! Thus he may hope that they will be won over to the view that his revisionist Christology is simply a more biblically faithful Christology, one that will yield a racheted-up "for real" relationship with Christ such as Kierkegaard described under the rubric of existential "contemporaneity." As to those who know where O'Leary is coming from, either they will find themselves in agreement with his pretheoretical commitments, or they will not. In the former case, such expressions as "encounter" are simply code for a revisionist reinterpretation of Christianity at work here, which O'Leary knows will be readily embraced. In the latter case, as in our own, where the reader knows where O'Leary is coming from but is unsympathetic, O'Leary realizes he has no hope of making his case, and he has little recourse but to respond, if he so chooses, with ad hominem attacks on his opponent's character, or bias, or the like. But let us see for ourselves how O'Leary endeavors to execute his proposed task of "rerooting" Chalcedon in an existential "encounter with Christ."

Chalcedon has often been spoken of as the foundation of the christological edifice (Seeberg), and as a beginning rather than an end (Rahner), observes O'Leary, "but today we need to register the sense in which Chalcedon is an end," its "possibilities of speculation ... exhausted," the confines of its discourse a "rut." It is no longer a matter of trying to overcome bad metaphysics with good, of trying to correct the speculations of process theology or kenoticism or tritheistic accounts of the the intradivine social life with good metaphysical theology in either its classical or modernized form. Rather, O'Leary seems to think that the problem is metaphysical thought itself, as a spent paradigm that must be "overcome" [Note that existential-Heideggerian term again]. Metaphysics must be "overcome," he says [and get this] "as the thinking of faith finds its proper path." (p. 6) [Ever the master of subterfuge, O'Leary will find every possible opportunity to couch his denaturing revisionism in the pious language of an ever more authentic recovery of faith.] He distinguishes four trends of "hermeneutical awareness that converge to impose this overcoming" -- (1) phenomenality, (2) pluralism, (3) historicity, and (4) epistemological limits. Translated into what they actually mean, as I will show, these become: (a) subjectivism, (B) relativism, (c) historicism, and (d) skepticism.

1. Phenomenality (i.e., subjectivism): "Modern theology," says O'Leary, "insists that faith is grounded in an encounter with God in Christ and only secondarily in dogmatic formulae." Notice the subjectivism implied in this statement. The existential "encounter" (something by definition subjective) is what grounds faith. And what it then means to say that dogmatic formulae are "secondary," if anything at all, is thrown into radical question by the decided subjectivity of the existential encounter. Let this caveat put the reader on guard against the sleight of hand that follows.

"Dogmas mark certain logical constraints which must be respected in order to guard the integrity of the encounter [Careful here! It looks like the subjectivism of the encounter is being protected by the logical constraints of dogma here, but watch!], but they do not provide a foundation or synthesis superior to or equal to the biblical events themselves. [Caution! Dogma is said to guard the subjective encounter, but isn't more fundamental than the biblical events themselves. Well, of course. Vatican II states that the Magisterium is a servant rather than a master of the Word of God, but take care to note what is meant here by O'Leary, who is no friend of the Magisterium and considers his own interpretation of the Word of God a viable, if not preferable, alternative to Rome's.] Metaphysical theology is built on a reversal of this priority of revelation over dogma. [OK, so does O'Leary mean metaphysics sees itself as sitting in judgment on Revelation in contradiction to the declaration of the Fathers of Vatican II? Keep an eye on the expression "metaphysical theology" in his essay, because this is what O'Leary hates, and it's thoroughly Roman Catholic!] In the space of thought it projects, the truths of faith are no longer grounded in encounter but in stable definitions and substances. [N.B. -- What emerges here is that O'Leary is contrasting (1) logic and dogma to (2) Revelation and encounter. This means that the concept of "Revelation" operative here is a distinctively existential concept of non-propositional, and therefore non-logical and non-rational, just as Revelation is subjective, personal, non-rational, non-logical, occurring as an event in an existential encounter. He does not explicitly point this out, but he does not need to. The contrast is clear: dogma, in his view, is logical and rigid, ossified, cold, and frigid, just as Revelation is warm, personal, and emotional -- the kind of thing that evokes hot tub imagery.] In seeking to clarify the biblical events by asking first and foremost for reasons and grounds and by setting them within a doctrinal system, it overleaps both the pneumatic and the fleshly phenomenality of these events, which are no longer free to deploy their significance in the space opened up by scripture and its ongoing interpretation. (emphasis added) [And here we have it, folks -- the dream of dissident Catholic Bible scholars since Vatican II has been that the open horizon of endless possible new ways of interpreting and requisitioning Scripture could provide them with an authority alongside and independent -- if not superior -- to that of the official Magisterium, by virtue of the fact that the latter is bound to a single irreformable apostolic tradition. Regardless of how this apostolic tradition may be deepend by the growing understanding of the Church through time, by what Cardinal Newman called the organic "development" of doctrine, to be distinguished from heretical deformations of innovations by seven "notes" (or tests) that he specified, this tradition of understanding is not amenable to the radical revisibility of the kind O'Leary would like to see. As Peter Kreeft says, "The Catholic Church claims less authority than any other Christian church in the world; that is why she is so conservative. Protestant churches feel free to change 'the deposit of faith' (e.g., by denying Mary's assumption, which was believed from the beginning) or of morals (e.g., by allowing divorce, even though Christ forbade it), or worship (e.g., by denying the Real Presence and the centrality of the Eucharist, which was constant throughout the Church's first 1,500 years)." (Source.)]Questions framed within a Greek metaphysical horizon, oriented to substantial identity, would not need to, and could not, be formulated in a thinking of revelation oriented to events and processes. (emphasis added) [Note the contrast here between "substantial identity" -- the former negative, the latter positive, in O'Leary's world of paternalistic revisionism.] Speculative construction would be stymied at the question stage by the impossibility of casting off the narrative vesture of biblical revelation in order to define the event in abstraction from its inexhaustibly pluralistic historical texture. [In this florid declamation, whose postmodern fluidity is surpassed only by its textured impenetrability of Derridada, O'Leary suggests the non sequitor that the "event" revealed in Scripture, because of its "inexhaustibly pluralistic historical texture," is incapable of yielding a "speculative construction" that can do justice to the "narative vasture of biblical revelation." But this is nonsense. While it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words and that reality is always inexhaustably more complex than any propositional account of it, it is nonsense to suggest that a proposition or a "speculative construction" cannot render an intelligible account of it or that metaphysical or dogmatic theology cannot render an intelligible and faithful account of the event disclosed in biblical Revelation. That has been the task of dogmatic theology since St. Paul exemplified it in I Corinthians 15.]

In summary, notice here the dualizations between Revelation/dogma, Scripture/metaphysics, Event/logic, Process/ substantial identity. Each of these is enlisted in the service of garnering theological autonomy from Rome, yet each is couched in the language of seeming piety, such as that of restoring the priority of Revelation over dogma, and so forth. The packaging is impressive. The content is predictably dull and disappointing.

2. Pluralism (i.e., relativism): "The biblical events come to us in a plurality of experiences, languages, literary genres, conceptual frameworks, and cultural contexts," notes O'Leary. However, "Metaphysical theolgy proceeds from a falsifying unification of these data under a homogeneous framework. Taking a view from above on the variety of biblical languages ... [its] ambition is to be the definitive, objective language which integrates all others. But it turns out to be but one more language, equally subject to historical and cultural plurality which cannot be ironed out." Therefore: "Even when the Church agreed on one dogmatic formula and maintained it through the centuries, the specific explanations of the formula … have never admitted of reduction to a single framework. Full recognition of this pluralism greatly limits the role that metaphysical speculation can play in the clarification of Christian truth." (emphasis added, pp. 6-7)

This reminds me of the sophomoric student who in his introductory philosophy class raised his hand eagerly in the midst of a class debate about moral relativism and declared with all the satisfaction of having offered a sublimely conclusive rebuttal, "But professor, that's just your opinion!" Whether we're talking about languages or doctrinal formulations, such a view takes no account of any differences between opinions that may be wise or stupid, or between views proclaimed by lawfully ordained successors of Peter or by mere ideologues.

The substance of this second point of hermeneutical awareness (pluralism), even if it is couched in the language of scholarship, amounts to an apologia for relativism of the most sophomoric type. The ad hominem implicit in it, after all, could be turned against O'Leary himself, whose own Heideggerian existential theology turns out to be but "one more language," which severely limits any instructive role it could possibly play alongside the opinions of any gutter snipe televangelist, in the clarification of Christian truth. This, at least would be the consequence of applying his own logic to his own theology.

3. Historicity (i.e., historicism): "All of the cultural frameworks within which Christian truth is articulated belong to limited historical epistemological contexts. They become to a large degree obsolescent and inaccessible when new contexts supervene. The metaphysics which attempts to isolate essential structures and foundations is itself a historically contextualized formation.... Full recognition of the historicity of theological thought makes us conscious that such notions as 'nature' and 'hypostasis' or any modern equivalent thereof are culture-bound constructs and provisional conventions. They may be aids to insight in certain contexts, but since they cannot be purged of historical relativity they refer us back to an ongoing activity of understanding that never halts in a definitive systematization." (emphasis added) (p. 7)

This is both true and false, depending on what one means. Everything O'Leary says here is true in the sense that anything said or written in any language is a historical-cultural artifact relative to a time and place in history. It is also true that our human efforts at understanding are always provisional and piecemeal and never exhaustive or comprehensive. But it is not true that nothing said or written in human language cannot be absolutely true and known to be so. The Chalcedonean formulation may never allow us with any certainty to specify the positive content of what is affirmed in the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity of Christ. Yet,, as with any dogmatic formula, it offers us absolute certainty as to what orthodoxy denies: without a shred of doubt, it allows us to know that a categorial denial of Christ's humanity or divinity is unconditionally false. Is there any part of this that is obsolescent or inaccessible, any part of this that we cannot clearly understand?

4. Epistemological limits (i.e., skepticism): O'Leary accepts the canard that metaphysics has become untenable since the critiques of Kant and Wittgenstein. He therefore believes that the truth of Christianity "has to be retrieved independently of the metaphysical frameworks which provided a stable background at the time the doctrines were formulated." In other words, the Christian Faith must no longer be saddled with the "inherently dubious" and now discredited tradition of western theological metaphysics. O'Leary writes:

In this postmetaphysical context ... the Nicene prohibition of denial of Christ's true divinity remains in force, but a positive definition of what this "true divinity" means becomes elusive; at best it becomes another rule of speech: "what is said of the Father as God must be said of the Son as God." Within a certain conceptual horizon, a certain language-game, such rules impose themselves, but the absolute necessity and validity of such a take on the divine may remain open to question.... This dogmatic minimalism undercuts the arrogance of a christological discourse that would directly speak of divine and human natures and hypostases, as matters of objective knowledge, obliging it to be rephrased in a tentative and hypothetical mode: "if we were to choose to speak in this archaic and rather problematic style, then this is what we would be obliged to say." [And this] apparent enfeeblement of dogma in fact renders it more functional and effective, calling it to its role as defender of revelation, and preventing it from becoming the foundation of an alternative system of Christian truth in rivalry with the order of events that unfolds from Scripture. (emphasis added, p. 7) [Note again the irony as well as the presumption: the "enfeeblement" of dogma (i.e., Rome) renders it more effective in defending Revelation (i.e., the existentially encountered "Christ event" experienced in subjective inwardness). Here's the ticket: dogmatic traditionalism is dismissed as benighted arrogance in view of radical skepticism concerning the limitations of metaphysical knowledge (on the authority of Kant's and Wittgenstein's critiques), therefore: Revelation becomes a wax nose divorced from dogma that can mean whatever O'Leary and his friends want it to mean.
Convenient.]

Summarizing his discussion of these four trends of "hermeneutical awareness," O'Leary writes:

"Given that metaphysics is now so problematic [Oh, really? Is it?], and that classical doctrine has relied heavily on a metaphysical background, it is clear that the task of recalling Chalcedon to its roots in the encounter with God in Christ [I hear violins playing . . .] cannot be simply a matter of fleshing out skeletal categories with the richer languages of Scripture. It involves a fundamental overcoming of the Chalcedonian perspective ...." (emphasis added)

Heavens! So here we have it: that portion of the Sacred Tradition of the Church represented by the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon is to be "overcome" ... And how? O'Leary answers, "through subordinating it to the more originary horizon within which Paul and John sought to articulate an intangible and encompassing reality, the Risen Christ (emphasis added)." [Those violins again ...] Within this sphere of "encounter," suggests O'Leary, the language of Chalcedon falls away as something almost incidental -- as something having the status of a kind of legal codicil, to be invoked only when needed." O'Leary does not deny that it is ever needed, but he does say: "Dogma builds a barbed fence about the burning bush of revelation, and it has been a common idolatry to venerate the fence instead of the bush or what is encountered therein." (p. 8)

The question is, what is encountered therein? "Chalcedon," O'Leary says, "is at the service of encounter," its four negative adverbs warding off "falsifications of that encounter," urging us to respect the integrity of Jesus' humanity and divinity, neither fusing, altering, dividing nor separating them. But the Neoplatonic language need not be characterized in a "cold, neutral" way, in which the hypostasis and natures of Christ are "objectified and torn out of the context of lived encounter." Thus, O'Leary laments the "phobia about speaking naturally of Christ's humanity" that followed Chalcedon and undermined "incarnational realism." It was especially the condemnation of Nestorius, says O'Leary, that was most fateful for the history of Christology, because it made simple and natural language about Jesus impossible.

The true significance of O'Leary's criticism of post-Chalcedonian Christological language and theology becomes clear when we learn what he prescribes as a remedy: Rudolf Bultmann! A fundamental influence in Bultmann's thought, it will be remembered, was Heidegger's existentialism. Butlmann, says O'Leary, "remains an indispensable point of reference in the step back from an objectifying substance-based christology to one based on encounter" (emphasis added). So as to make no mistake about his meaning, he quotes Bultmann himself: "Jesus Christ is the Eschatological Event as the man Jesus of Nazareth and as the Word which resounds in the mouth of those who preach him.... Christ is everything that is asserted of him in so far as he is the Eschatological Event.... He is such -- indeed, to put it more exactly, he becomes such -- in the encounter -- when the Word which proclaims him meets with belief." (Rudolf Bultmann, Essays, Philosophical and Theological, London, p. 286). [In other words, belief constitutes Jesus!! Believing makes it so. Believing the earth is flat, flattens the earth -- at least, for you.]

O'Leary continues: "Through a nuanced hermeneutics, it may be possible to square this orientation with the claims of orthodoxy." How this squaring may be achieved through this nuancing is illustrated by O'Leary, first, with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, and, second, with respect to the doctrine of the Incarnation: "Orthodoxy as regards the Trinity is satisfied with the recognition of some kind of objective distinction in God between God, Word and Spirit .... But the elaborate superstructures built on this in speculative trinitarian theology need to be dismantled if the original core of dogma and its necessity are to be brought into view. Ortodoxy as regards the Incarnation is satisfied with the assertion that the final meaning of Jesus is inseparable from the divine Word. The personality of the human Jesus and the personality of the divine Word cannot be one and the same, since an infinite abyss separates human personality from what we project as divine personality. The identity of Jesus and the Word has to be rethought in terms of event and process, as a coincidence of the human historical adventure of Jesus with the revelational activity of God. To encounter the risen Christ in faith is to encounter the divine Word .... But since the divine nature cannot be mingled with the human or subject to change ... Jesus is free to be integrally human, with all that this entails." (p. 9, emphasis added)

"Nuanced hermeneutics," "event and process," "encounter with the divine Word ...." Before pulling up a chair to play poker at this Bultmannian table, one would be well-advised to examine the deck of cards O'Leary is dealing you with some care. You will immediately note the markings of their Heideggerian existentialist genealogy. What would be the yield of a rich Heideggerian biblical hermeneutical poker game such as O'Leary envisions? Hold on to your wallets my friends, and watch his eyes as he speaks: "When we recall Chalcedon to its biblical basis," he begins . . . [Note carefully the pious-sounding hubris here: an Ecumenical Council whose deliberations the Church holds to have been guided, like those of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:28), by the infallible direction of the Holy Spirit, is declared by O'Leary to be "recalled to its biblical basis," as though that God-breathed (GK. theopneustos) product of divine guidance (Holy Scripture) could contradict the decrees of the Ecumenical Council. There is nothing shocking in the least here for O'Leary, of course, because he does not believe for a moment that either the inscripturated words of the biblical writers or of the authors of conciliar decrees are anything more than a wax nose to be bent (or "nuanced") as he (O'Leary) sees fit. The "authority" of any of these written words is a convenience that may be appealed where they can be used to support his own agenda and ignored where they do not.] O'Leary's quotation, in its entirety, reads thus:

When we recall Chalcedon to its biblical basis, we find that it is no more than a footnote to the incarnational vision expressed in John 1:14. But that text may allow of a subtler and wider exegesis than classical dogma countenanced. "The word became flesh" may mean: "The divinity manifest in the creative Wisdom through which the world was made and in the Torah through which the holy community of Israel was assembled is now manifest in a more fleshly, historical form, in and across the entire career of Jesus." It is not Jesus as an artificially isolated individual, but Jesus in the entire extent of his connections with Jewish tradition and his ongoing pneumatic presence within the community as the "firstborn of many brethren" (Rom. 8:29), who is the enfleshment of God's creative, revelatory Word. God made Godself known in Israel .... It is not through a radical break with this tradition or some monstrous metaphysical paradox that God once again dwells among us in the warm fleshliness of Jesus, that is, . . . in the anamnesis of the Christian community. (p. 10, emphasis added)

[So what is important about Jesus Christ is no longer the "artificially isolated individual," the historical Jesus who lived and died, and, according to tradition, is also the Christ of faith who rose again for us. No, what is important is that which is distinguishable from this "artificially isolated individual" and historical Jesus, which is incarnate in the whole historical community of Israel -- something much larger than just one man, even the man Jesus Christ. What is larger and more important than this "artifically isolated individual" is the "pneumatic presence" of the Christ of faith, as distinguished from that isolated and relatively unimportant Jesus of history (whoever he was), because this is what is alive and living in the collective spirit of the community in its encounter with the living Word of God (which -- lovely! -- means just about whatever we want it to mean). And by no means should it be supposed that this Christ of faith continues to dwell among us through some sort of "monstrous metaphysical paradox" as, for instance, would be required in supposing that He was really bodily there in the consecration, the Blessed Sacrament, or in the Tabernacle. All that's so much "hocus pocus," really (which, of course, is a protestant corruption of the Latin words of consecration: Hoc est …corpus meum -- "This is my body"), and it's good that we modern or postmodern Catholics are done with such medieval superstitious nonsense. Thus O'Leary suggests here.]

What is new about the new Covenant, says O'Leary, is not the presence of the Word, which was living and active from the beginning, but rather the role of the flesh in a more intimate presence with us. Note carefully where O'Leary goes with this incarnational thought. Take, for instance, the statement: "The word became flesh." If we take this, he says, not as a metaphysical statement, but as a "resume of Christian experience," we can get beyond trying to pin the event down to "objective ontological privileges enjoyed by Jesus." [Follow this now!]"Rather than a once-for-all ontological conjunction, somewhat magically and fetishistically located at the moment of Christ's conception, can we not think of incarnation as the transformation of this human life, in all its extensions, into manifestation of God, just as in the Eucharist ...?" he asks. [Why does O'Leary favor understanding the incarnation as transformation of "this human life" of Jesus, analogously to the Eucharist, rather than as understood traditonally in the moment of His conception, which he dismisses as somewhat magical and fetishistic? The answer is that existential theologians cannot wrap their minds around the motion that the Christ of Faith might also be the Jesus of History. In the neo-Kantian tradition, they split off values from facts, the noumenal from the phenomenal; and since the Jesus of History, on their reckoning, is just a fallible human being whose bones are mouldering somewhere in Palestine, he surely cannot be identified as the Christ of Faith. Hence, if there is an Incarnation at all, on their view, it must be a "transformation" -- like the Eucharist -- without residue: the Incarnate Christ is a docetic Christ, a gnostic Christ a divine Christ with no human residue. This answer would seem provide yet another means for O'Leary and Company to pry loose their own dreamy vision of what constitutes divine "Incarnation" within a human community from the orthodox magisterial understanding of what Christ's incarnation means.] O'Leary continues:

"This more open-textured interpretation of incarnation attenuates the clash between the Christian claims and non-Christian religions, for the incarnation of God in Christ continues to unfold along the paths of historical, fleshly contingency as his Gospel and his pneumatic presence are redeployed in different cultures, and enter into dialogue with other historical apprehensions of divine presence in the world" (p. 11, emphasis added). [Here is what O'Leary really wants, you see -- for "the incarnation of Christ" to be translatable into "other historical apprehensions of divine presence in the world." Let me simplify: for Christians, there is J-e-s-u-s; for Buddhists, there is B-u-d-d-h-a. Either one is simply another name for what Christians have called the "Incarnation" -- viz., a culturally relative apprehension of the divine (whatever that really means) by yet another fallible people among the family of multicultural human peoples. To this extent O'Leary is Hegelian: there is no vantage point outside the river of history from which an absolute judgment about any historical "truth" may be rendered. To this extent O'Leary is Feuerbachean: anything we say about God and His truth is only by way of subjective projection. In short, to put the matter crassly: we're screwed. We're just a bunch of individuals sitting around talking to ourselves. There is no Word of God that has broken through the scrim of heaven to divulge any infallible truth to us. There is only "encounter" with the ineffably "divine," which is usually a touchy-feely way of pretending to know what you're talking about when you're talking nonsense and trying to pull the wool over the eyes of your audience before fleecing them.]

"Christian faith and devotion gravitates to Christ in a spontaneous and instinctive way, conferring on him the high titles which dogma subsequently interprets in a critical clarification. Is this gravitation a brute given, or can we map it as a geodesic within a relativistic interreligious space? Is the Incarnation a massive and unique event, the central reality of history and indeed of being? Or is it a cipher for a more subtle, historically textured disclosure process which is intimately linked with the broader web of human evolution, not as dominating that web, but as drawing its sense from it?" (p. 11, emphasis added)

[O'Leary poses these sentences in the interrogative form, perhaps thinking them less likely to get him tagged for the heretical nonsense they imply. But it's far too late for such subtleties here. It's altogether clear where his sympathies lie and where his heart is. He embraces "interreligious dialogue," not by virtue of any interest in evangelization or invitation to convert to Christ and to His Church in anything resembling the ways these have been intended by Catholic Tradition, but because he believes what historical Christianity offers is only one relative instance of what can be also found among many other religions. The Judeo-Christian tradition, whatever its claims to special revelation, has no monopoly on truth. His alternate sentence expresses O'Leary's own view more accurately: the Incarnation is "a cipher for a more subtle, historically textured disclosure process which is intimately linked with the broader web of human evolution." Here his thinking is of a piece with that of process theologians, such as John Cobb, Charles Hartschorne, and their mentor, Alfred North Whitehead. The metaphysic of "substance" is eschewed for a paradigm of "process" and "event," in which no-thing is finally identifiable because it is in flux. Who knows what new reality, new conception of the divine, new revelation, may lie ahead in the evolving species? The trick is to eschew the arrogant posture of certitude and remain "vulnerable," "open" to infinite possibilities. In truth, it may not so much be that the Buddhist is an "anonymous Christian," as Karl Rahner once suggested, groping in ignorance towards what is made explicit only in Christ; but rather, that the Christian, bowing before the Incarnation, is an "anonymous Buddhist," groping in ignorance toward the truth of Buddhism that he who knows does not speak and he who speaks does not know, and that all is ultimately empty (Sunyata), since everything is Mind and Mind is no-thing, and the self is no-thing, and there is ultimately no nirvana because there is no self to attain it and because nirvana is, after all, no-thing and therefore nothing to be attained.]

Part III of O'Leary's article is entitled "The Demystifying Role of the Historical Jesus." Here O'Leary argues that closing the gap between the Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History requires demythologizing the Incarnation. In view of the liberal protestant biblical scholarship on the historical Jesus over the past two centuries, of which O'Leary speaks with unqualified and uncritical approval, "The 'God incarnate' schema seems to impose an alien mythological framework on the eschatological prophet [he means Jesus] who announced the imminence of God's Kingdom ...." In other words, the historical Jesus yielded by historical-critical Bible scholarship (whatever its multitudinous recensions) seems so vividly and familiarly human that the "God incarnate" thing seems like a foreign interpolation -- perhaps by the later believing community, the Church, and its dogmatic fulminations. So how does O'Leary propose to "close the gap" between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith (and dogma)? "In order to close the gap a degree of demythologization of the incarnational tradition seems to be required," he says. Now think about the move O'Leary is proposing here: he says he wants to close the gap between the Christ of Faith and Jesus of History -- by doing what? By means of a degree of demythologization. What needs to be demythologized? The Christ of Faith, with its Incarnational dogma. How does this close the gap? There are at least two options at play here. First, it would seem that he might be proposing to close the gap by eliminating the Christ of Faith altogether, by collapsing the Christ of Faith into the Jesus of History. Such an option would close the gap by effectively eliminating it, by leaving nothing but the Jesus of History with nothing beyond it opening a distance to be spanned. But that would be the alternative of simply naturalistic atheism, and that is too simplistic for O'Leary, even though atheism's naturalistic assumptions utterly dominate the hermeneutic he embraces when confronted by the data for the Jesus of History. He does not consider himself an atheist, any more than other existentialist theologians such as Bultmann, Barth or Tillich would. Second, it would seem that O'Leary's only other option would be to re-open the gap again by some sleight-of-hand after having claimed to have "closed" it by demythologizing. How is this to be achieved? By his process of regression, or "stepping back," from Chalcedon to the primal "Christ event" "encountered" in "Revelation" itself (the quotation marks signal the technical existential significations of these term). Hear it from O'Leary himself: "The step back from Chalcedon to Paul and John has to be followed by a further step back to earlier understandings of Jesus, including his own self-understanding." What does this mean? It means that we shouldn't take the Church's word for who Jesus Christ is. We need to step back from the dogmatic Christ of creed and tradition and examine the living faith of Paul and John in their New Testament writings -- a step away from dogmatic definition and towards the living fluidity of subjectively experienced "event" and "process," in O'Leary's paradigm. But even this New Testament framework is too constrictive. O'Leary would have us "step back" to even earlier understandings of Jesus, "including his own self-understanding." And how is that to be retrieved? Through the expertise of the "scientific" historical-critical research of Bible scholars over the last 200 years as adjudicated by the paternal expertise of wise and knowledgeable ministers of theological truth such as O'Leary himself, it almost goes without saying.

But this is interesting: how does O'Leary propose to retrieve Jesus' own self-understanding, really? He criticizes Hans von Balthasar's opposition to critical exegesis in the latter's work, Kennt uns Jesus -- Kennen wir ihn? (Does Jesus Know Us? Do We Know Him?, Ignatius Press), in which von Balthasar presents what O'Leary calls an "idealized" account of Christ's life "from which historical contingency is banished" and the whole Gospel is presented as a cosmic drama and divine work of art. "But it is precisely to the extent that the Gospels are literary works of art that we must suspect them of being false to the murkiness and accidentality of real life," objects O'Leary (p. 13, emphasis added). "But a theologia gloriae which misses the broken, all-too-human texture wherein we are given intimations -- 'hints and guesses' (Eliot) -- of the divine glory, or which stylizes this fleshly texture into a sacralized icon, undermines the reality of the divine assumption of humanity in Christ" (p. 13, emphasis added).

O'Leary quickly comes to the point: "Reference to the historical reality of Jesus before the post-Easter interpretations provides an invaluable critical resource over against the entire christological tradition, preventing it from balooning off into vacuous idealism." Setting aside the implication that the whole Catholic christological tradition has presumably "balooned off into vacuous idealism" in theologies of glory and incarnation, it may be wondered how "the historical reality of Jesus before the post-Easter interpretations" arose are to be accessed. Conceding the difficulty, O'Leary valiantly endeavors to make a virtue of necessity: "The very difficulty of such a reference, the uncertainty and obscurity of the enterprise, can [note the irony] free our faith from a narrow positivism of facts as much as from a blithe confidence in theological portraits of Jesus" (p. 14, emphasis added). So ignorance and uncertainty has the virtue of freeing faith from the cumbersome world of facts, as well as from blithe confidence in the post-Easter theological portraits given us by St. Paul and Catholic Tradition. One can't help but be impressed at O'Leary's ebullience over such sublime nonesense. Freedom from fact! Freedom from certainty! Freedom apparently to believe in anything!

He continues: "We can no longer rest uncritically in our imaginings of Jesus; we realize that they are a 'skillful means' (Buddhist upaya) suited to a given epoch and in need of constant readjustment." And what does O'Leary think "our imaginings of Jesus" are in which we must no longer rest uncritically? These, of course, are the portraits of Jesus handed down to us in Catholic Tradition -- in art, iconography, hymns, chant, children's stories, Sunday sermons, and writings, spanning everything from the portraits given in the New Testament itself to the ecumenical creeds, and defined dogmas of the Church. These, he says, are merely "skillful means," borrowing an expression from Buddhism for the half-truths and myths concerning Nirvana, Bodhisattva, Karma, and reincarnation, which are entertained only because expedient in furthering the Buddhist goal of achieving a psychological outlook that most effectively effects an overcoming of suffering. Likewise, O'Leary is suggesting that what he takes to be our traditional Catholic "half truths" and "myths" about Jesus are mere expediencies "suited to a given epoch" for the purpose of furthering the Christian goal, which he presumably takes, by some contorted reasoning, to be some sort of analogous psychological or emotional state of well-being.

But if he wants us to give up our mythical "imaginings of Jesus," O'Leary also understands that we cannot simply cease these imaginings by a return to the "bare facts about Jesus," for as he notes, "these come clothed in religious interpretation from the start ...." Thus, he writes: "Even the earliest interpretations of Jesus, by himself and his disciples, are subject to historical contextualization and critical reassessment. There was an abundance of mythic schemata to draw on, and their application to Jesus was a human interpretive activity, however much it may have been led by the Spirit .... Since Christology is so much a product of the mythic frameworks then available, the retrieval of its truth for today demands a radical reinterpretation" (pp. 14-16, emphasis added). So we can't separate myth from fact or fact from myth, and therefore we must radically reinterpret the "truth" of the Christ myth (whatever that may be) for today. By what canons of veracity and interpretation, he does not say, though it's clear that it can't be the "bare facts about Jesus," because he knows that positivistic ideal is humanly unattainable. So it must lie in some contemporary existentialist criteria O'Leary thinks is available to him and others, though he doesn't spell out what they might be.

O'Leary is quite certain, however, that a hermeneutical regression is in order: we can't take the Christology of official Church teaching (Chalcedon) at face value, so we must go back to Revelation, understood as encounter with the divine Word (whatever that means). We can't take the portraits of Christ in Paul and John at face value, so we must go back to the "Christ event" they herald and presuppose. We can't take the portraits of Jesus in the Gospels at face value, because Jesus' own self-understanding and his disciples' understanding of Jesus are so assimilated in "the abundance of mythic frameworks then available" that they require critical deconstruction before they can be rendered serviceable for our postmodern contemporaries. So "Jesus' own messianological notions, thus, must in turn be interpreted against the background of Jewish religion and culture in yet another step back.... But under pain of naïve biblicism we must recognize that these Jewish categories also need to be demythologized. This applies even to the ruling idea of Israel's election, which cannot really mean that God binds himself to the physical descendants of Abraham; rather, Israel is the people of the Torah, and the Covenant is centered on that. Israel's identity is not secured by literal obedience to the Mosaic Law or to its Rabbinic reinterpretation, but more largely by its spirit of Torah fidelity ...." (p. 15, emphasis added) So we can't expect to garner true insight into the "Christ event" even by examining the Old Testament Jewish categories of Israel as God's "Chosen People," or even in terms of their Torah or "literal obedience" to the Law of Moses, but more properly through insight into Israel's "spirit of Torah fidelity"! Hence, it's not the literal demands of the Law (Torah) that Jesus says he came to fulfill that are important here for understanding who Jesus is, but rather Israel's (and, by implication, Jesus') "spirit of Torah fidelity"! But how is a "spirit of Torah fidelity" to be identified apart from and understanding of what would constitute "literal obedience"? Doesn't Jesus himself repeatedly stress the importance of being a doer of the law, and not a hearer only, of demonstrating true discipleship by keeping (rather than merely hearing) his commandments?

But O'Leary is adamant: all reduces to myth, which must be demythologized. It will not do to substitute Hebrew myth for Hellenistic myth: "The obsolescence of Hellenistic myth does not entail any rejuvenation of Hebrew myth. The task of rearticulation in contemporary categories what the ancients envisaged in mythic terms is even more daunting in this case, for however refreshing we may findthe older biblical representations by contrast with stale Hellenistic notions, it is the latter that harmonize with the tracks of thought most familiar in Western culture.... A reappropriation of the Jewish mythical categories in an existential translation ... may challenge theology to break out of its Hellenistic rut, but it will also cut a swath through the over-abundance of mythological motifs in the Gospels" (p. 16). Myth, myth, everywhere, and not a drop to drink! Where is the thirsting soul to turn?

O'Leary concludes: "We begin to see that the historical, Jewish fleshly existence of Jesus is the locus of his unique revelatory and salvific status, and that it is a bridge rather than an obstacle as our tradition opens out to other major loci of divine disclosure, especially the Jewish and Buddhist traditions." The thirsting soul must probe beyond the facades of historical mythologies and mine the sources of Revelation itself in the warm hot tub of existential encounter. From that comfortable vantage point, the mythological infrastructure of Christian tradition -- from the "Jesus myth" of the New Testament to the Christological myths of Chalcedon -- need not be viewed as "obstacle," but, rather as a "bridge" (in Zarathustran fashion, echoing Nietzsche), since hot tub religion of existential encounter allows its hallucinating adherents to perceive "the divine" as wearing many masks. Let the carnival revelers of this Dance Macabre be reminded that the sun also rises at Dawn.

NB:

• All pagination is from the printed internet essay (which may be vary with printer specifications), not from the published article in Archivio di Filosofia, vol. 67, 1999.
• Anyone wishing to access an online copy of O'Leary's essay my do so from O'Leary.Org.
• Blosser's critique of O'Leary's article was first published serially in the former's Blog, "Musings of a Pertinacious Papist" -- Part I (August 8, 2005), Part II (August 15, 2005), and Part III (November 28, 2005), with extensive comments by readers, including O'Leary.