Why I am a Catholic

12/24/2011

5 Comments

 
Many of us could give a number of reasons for our faith.  These range from the deeply personal, like a conversion experience a la Tolstoy in William James, to the logical approach Sheldon Vanauken describes in A Severe Mercy where he assents rationally to Christian doctrine without any actual feeling of faith, without making the "leap of faith" that Kierkegaard describes.  I remember once defending Catholicism to a skeptical atheist on the grounds of its survival in the face of nearly impossible odds.  "Think of it," I'd urged as I paraphrased Pentecost, "11 uneducated blue-collar laborers running around claiming they'd found God!  Who would have listened?" without - I argued - the impetus of grace.

These reasons are all very well and good.  Today it is not-quite Christmas, and so I think it is appropriate to share some of the recent feelings I've had towards Christ.

In Brideshead Revisited, the following dialogue caught my attention:
“Is it [Catholicism] nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”
"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."
"Can't I?"
"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass."
"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."
"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."
"But I do. That's how I believe."

It is a lovely idea, indeed, to arrange a manger scene and show kings and mighty spirits bowing to the innocence of a baby.  A lovely idea, too, that we selfish small-souled people could turn our right cheek to someone who had struck our left.  That we could bless - or even be - the meek, the humble peace-makers.  That we would place others before ourselves; love our enemies; give our cloak to the one who had asked for our shirt; and cease to be Scrooges, even briefly.

How often do we do these things?

Not very, perhaps, and with the feast of Christmas arriving tomorrow it's a timely moment to re-read the Sermon on the Mount, arguably the most beautiful and utopian ideal for humanity that has ever been envisioned.  As Chesterton said, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."  This leads me, then, to a short passage from The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis that has somewhat defined my faith of late.  It is Puddleglum addressing the evil queen as she tries to convince the protagonists that no "over-world" exists, but only her own dark, underground kingdom.  Aslan is the Christ-figure in the books:

"One word, Ma’am . . .One word.  All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder.  I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst of things and then put the best face I can on it.  So I won’t deny any of what you said.  But there’s one thing more to be said, even so.  Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things–trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself.  Suppose we have.  Then all I can say is, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.  Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.  Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it.  We’re just four babies making up a game, if you’re right.  But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.  That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world.  I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.  I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia.  So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland.  Not that our lives will be very long, I should think, but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say."

And so goes our faith to an extent.  It is a lovely, beautiful, often-untried idea.  It seems so improbable, so impractical, so old in the midst of modernity.  But that Sermon on the Mount, and the personality and vision of Christ expressed in the Gospels, remain among the most objectively beautiful passages ever written.  Remain among the most compelling worldviews ever made.  And - with a nod to Pascal and his wager - I am going to live as much like a Christian as I can, even if there isn't any Christ or Heaven or Hell (although I believe that there is).  It's not a question, sometimes, of the truth of my faith or of my feeling secure in it.  It is a question of exquisite beauty, and this our faith possesses abundantly.

Merry Christmas and God bless us, everyone!

-LC
5 Comments
Jack
12/24/2011 05:40:24 am

Lilly, this is a lovely, thoughtful reflection on the nature of Christianity and why it can hold such great value even in the face of criticism based on a perceived lack of facts to back it up.

I was just thinking the other day that people who choose not to believe in Christianity (or, for that matter, any other belief system geared towards a transcendent love) because they doubt its facts and its historicity are missing the point. Even if one accepts that it might not have happened exactly the way the Gospels relate, or even if one accepts that it didn't happen at all, does it really lose its value? Even if the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass didn't really appear exactly the way they are described, do they lose their significance? Does a lack of undeniable, historical fact make it any less True? Is Truth synonymous with fact?

I think not.

The value in faith lies deeper than fact. There is a beauty in it that transcends mere historicity, and I think both non-believers and uber-believers should think about that from time to time.

So thank you for this post. I think it's a great read to have right before Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone. I miss you all so very much.

Ciao

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Joey
12/30/2011 07:03:53 am

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Lilly. They strike me as similar to Dostoevsky's vision in The Brothers Karamazov, specifically the part where Alyosha says to "love life, in spite of logic." The passage from The Silver Chair also strikes me as surprisingly similar to something that Nietzsche would say. He viewed religions and morality as human creations, but did not believe that that made them any less valuable or beautiful. Even if it was all an illusion, he thought, sometimes an illusion is better than truth. As he points out at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil, why have we Westerners come to value the Will-to-Truth so much? What is so great about bare, naked truth? So he saw religions, morality, myths and traditions as beautiful and fragile cultural products that needed to be protected. That's why he viewed art and culture as the most supremely valuable things in life. In fact, it seems like the only real difference between your view and Nietzsche's is that you say you actually believe in the reality of Christ and Heaven and Hell, whereas Nietzsche regarded that all on the level of mythology.

Which brings me to Jack's comment. I have to disagree somewhat about the importance of actual facts and historicity. If the story told by the Gospels is not factually true, at least some parts of it, then Christianity must be viewed as a mythology, not as a religion to be believed in dogmatically and literally. The lack of an undeniable, historical fact does not necessarily make it less beautiful and valuable, but it does make it less true--or at least, it makes it a different kind of true. It makes it True in the same way that the Bhagavad Gita and the stories from Greek mythology are True, in a mythological sense. And if one only believes it is true in that way, then it makes the whole idea of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" a dangerous heresy. All the official dogmas and precepts of Roman Catholicism collapse if you pull out the undergirdings of actual, historical fact. So, in that sense, Puddleglum's mystical, seeking faith is very different from the strictly orthodox faith of a committed Roman Catholic. There in an incommensurable leap between Puddleglum's commitment to seeking for an over-world *if* there is one, and claiming definitively that there is one.

This whole post and subsequent discussion raises the question: If you believe in the mythological/mystical Truth and beauty and value of a religion without any certainty as to its actual, historical, factual reality, are you then obligated to assert its actual, historical, factual reality for the sake of others--for the sake perpetuating this beautiful story that may only be an illusion? In other words, are you obligated to perpetuate a Noble Lie? Or is there something dishonest and even immoral about claiming something to be objectively true when you actually have no reason to believe it to be so?

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Jack
12/31/2011 06:29:39 am

Joey,

Thanks for making those points about my post. I don't think I did a very good job explaining what I meant. I think that I was trying to assert the value of the sort of truth in something like the Bhagavad Gita or Greek mythology is something that people can take away whether they believe in them historically or not. Even if you only view them as mythology there is still value in there and a type of truth that can be separated from historicity.
But, as you pointed out, there is also a form of truth that relies on facts and if you take away the facts then ones perception of that truth changes dramatically. It's a different kind of truth.

I wasn't trying to say that there is no historical truth to Christianity. On the contrary I believe in the history of Christianity. I guess I was trying to point out that, for those people who doubt the factual nature of Christianity, there is still value in it. But it's a different kind of value than what someone who believes it historically will bring away (and very probably, a lesser value).

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Joey
1/6/2012 12:20:43 pm

For what it's worth, I came across this article in Commonweal magazine that seemed to pertain to this thread:

Myth & More
WHY HISTORICAL FACT ISN’T ENOUGH
John Garvey

Myth is a necessary way of understanding, but it is deeply misunderstood. The place of myth—and its misplacing—have a lot to do with the divide between fundamentalists and other believers.

Myth does not mean “things that aren’t true.” Rather, the “language” of myth has to do with what is truly timeless. Myth is not bound by the limits of historical thinking, which deals with time-bound and passing phenomena. Myth is a witness to the fact that some things are true forever. Jesus told stories that are not historically true (the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example) but point us to enduring truths.

There is a debate in Christian circles over the historicity of the Fall. It exists in muted form even in nonfundamentalist circles. What primordial event might have happened to explain our current sad state? In the Orthodox Church, interpretations have ranged from the allegorical to the literal. In the Roman Catholic Church, Pius XII (who opened up Catholic biblical studies in many ways) wanted to hold on to some version of Adam and Eve having actually existed.

The caution of a religious or theological tradition is understandable. To throw out or doubt the truth (which is not to say the facticity) of a traditional story, rather than try to see it clearly in its context, without present prejudices, leads to wildly silly things, like just about anything Bishop John Shelby Spong writes. But to be so cautious as not to see how myth works is also to develop, even cultivate, a tin ear.

Were Adam and Eve a real couple (the only one, really) at the dawn of human being? My own belief, one pretty well backed up by tons of scientific and, more important, mythic evidence, is that this is impossible scientifically, and undesirable symbolically. The idea that the Fall is in any way historically true, an event in time, distracts from the truth of the story, which really is timeless. The story of Adam and Eve is more true than Waterloo or Watergate, because what it means goes so much deeper, involving our most basic motivations and appetites and longings. We want to be our own gods and to have our own lives in our own hands, and we cannot. The desire we have is to live in Eden without the self-emptying that real gratitude and true worship entail. This is eternally true of us, to our sorrow.

The ancients knew this. The compilers of the Hebrew Scriptures put contradictory creation stories side by side, not because they didn’t notice the difference between the first two chapters of Genesis, which anyone can see, but because both stories told the truth, and both were found in the story-telling culture of ancient Israel. Both were worth holding on to, and passing along to succeeding generations. The efforts of biblical literalists to reconcile them are pitiful examples of missing the point.

The fundamentalist sees the slippery slope everywhere. If Adam and Eve and the flood and Jonah aren’t all historically factual, why not see the Resurrection as a mere allegory? Looking at what myth means at its depth, however, we can make the argument that at one important level the Resurrection really is outside of history—and to that extent mythical. It really is more than historical. If all the Resurrection means is that a corpse got out of a grave, it’s a zombie story. On the other hand, if, as in the alternative, homeopathic liberal version you occasionally encounter, all it means is that Jesus lived on in the hearts of his disciples, it is a sentimental cliché.

I believe that the tomb was really, literally empty. No one can comprehend the fullness of what this means, or even the edge of a part of it. The tomb is empty—but Jesus is not what we might expect. Mary mistakes him for a gardener, until he addresses her by name. The disciples on the road to Emmaus do not recognize him until the (obviously eucharistic) breaking of the bread, when he vanishes, leaving them to remember how their hearts were burning within them. The disciples have to be reassured that he is not a ghost, and by eating something he shows them that—as transformed as he obviously is in some ways—he is really flesh.

It is clear from these accounts that the life of the risen Christ has to do with something real, embodied, and not within our power to imagine in simple historical or physical ways. This is reality at a level we are not yet capable of understanding. I want to suggest that this really is a part of myth’s realm, and that it’s real. The tomb is empty, in factual history as well as in myth. History says only that the tomb is empty. Myth points us toward what this might mean.

Unless Jesus really rose—that is, unless our death, all death, was in some ways overcome by his death, an

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Joey
1/6/2012 12:21:52 pm

(Oops - the end got cut off. Here it is.)

Unless Jesus really rose—that is, unless our death, all death, was in some ways overcome by his death, and he lives in a fullness that includes his flesh, which is to say the fullness of his humanity, a fullness that allowed him to share his divinity with us—our faith really is in vain. This does not mean that myth has no place in the story, only that their mythic dimension does not empty the Resurrection stories of their purchase in real time. Those moments open real time onto a deeper reality, one that in its complicated “already—and not yet” way is even now a sign of something present to us that will finally be fully disclosed. As we will be.

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