The Virtual Papacy Of Benedict XVI

I know I seem like a dog with a bone, but I really have to go back to this. It's still big news, and at the end of my last post I included a link which had some fascinating content and I didn't have the chance to follow it further.

It was Benedict XVI's farewell address to the clergy of the Roman diocese. The audience took place in the middle of February and was noteworthy both for its elegaic tone and for a case of straightforward scapegoating of the media.

The pope gave personal reminiscences of the preparations and work of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), when "We were full of hope, enthusiasm and also of good will." He recalled the development of the various doctrinal statements. He concluded by drawing the following distinction. "There was the Council of the Fathers - the true Council - but there was also the Council of the media... And we know that this Council of the media was accessible to all. So, dominant, more efficient, this Council created many calamities, so many problems, so much misery, in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed liturgy trivialized ... and the true Council has struggled to materialize, to be realized: the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council." (my italics)

Come on now, could the pope really read my book and not honestly cite it! This distinction repeats precisely the central idea I developed in Virtually Christian: the existence of virtual Christianity in popular culture outside the official institutions. Only the pope saw as negative what I saw as positive!

Benedict blames the mass media, for popularizing, trivializing and de-centering what should have been closed off, serious and centered.

But, hang on again, just for a moment, I was also there right at the time... in a seminary just like he describes and, for the sake of the record, it was actually nothing like that.

We were a bunch of students and priests and the only media we read on the Council were the Catholic journals. And it was not the media that was pushing the change, it was the seminarians and priests. By far the majority of transformations in our lifestyle and attitudes came from within the student body itself and the priests who were its mentors. In meeting after meeting we abandoned elements of rule, including strict timetable and clerical dress, sought and received permission to smoke, to visit each other's rooms, to watch hours of T.V., etc. Everything was decided by the strongest voices invoking the Council principles of aggiornamento (bringing up to date) and renewal. At the same time there was a powerful self-questioning going on in many, including many priests, about whether they in fact had a calling at all. Many people simply left. Everything happened in a massive spontaneous upwelling and there was not one single source to blame, unless it was the "true Council".

If the truth is told the Council itself embraced a massive "virtuality" in the very sense I used it in my book: the sense that the church could be open to the world because God was also dynamically at work there.

Here are a couple fairly representative statements (with due apologies for the Latinate prose). "Thus, far from thinking that works produced by man's own talent and energy are in opposition to God's power, and that the rational creature exists as a kind of rival to the Creator, Christians are convinced that the triumphs of the human race are a sign of God's grace and the flowering of His own mysterious design." And "Christ is now at work in the hearts of men through the energy of His Holy Spirit, arousing not only a desire for the age to come, but by that very fact animating, purifying and strengthening those noble longings too by which the human family makes its life more human and strives to render the whole earth submissive to this goal." (From the document, Gaudium et Spes [Joy & Hope]).

But if you try to reconstruct a still-hierarchical church on sudden openness to this kind of virtuality I think you're going to get the results the pope describes. The impact is overwhelming and unpredictable. But maybe that was just what the Spirit was proposing! In which case the Spirit was saying that the days of the massive top-down institution are over. Which, again, is the argument of Virtually Christian and its chapter on the emergence of the single-cell church: a newly-evolving creature swimming freely in the sea of Christian virtuality...

Underlining this shift we have to recognize that Benedict's action resigning the post as "Successor of Peter" basically says that Peter looked elsewhere for help and authority: exactly as I pointed out in the story of James of Jerusalem taking the initiative over the actual Peter (Acts 15, see pp.175-77). It's impossible to have this both ways. Once Benedict cited the contemporary questions of relevance to faith and someone else needing to deal with them, then either Peter is not quite Peter, or he is exactly Peter---one of many brothers and sisters who reach out to each other in serving the church. In this way he has critically demystified the "eternal papacy".

Here is a quote from a wonderful interview with Dr. Tom Schirrmacher, chair of the World Evangelical Alliance Theological Commission, someone who has followed the career of Benedict very closely. It says exactly this in a gentle, clear way.

"(Benedict) once said to the cardinals that a pope is fallible most of the time. In most of his masses and addresses there are hints that he makes mistakes, that he seeks forgiveness from God and the Church, and that he can only hope that God will protect him from wrong decisions. That even applies to his short resignation announcement. This was not the case with John Paul II. That includes the continual indications made by Benedict that he is not head of the church but rather that Jesus is."

To deconstruct the papacy in this way is no accident. It is to admit that the old monolithic structures no longer do the job, indeed they are no longer necessary. Pope Benedict XVI was, whether he admitted it or not, a man of contemporary Christianity, of its intense modern "virtuality". His last act as pope was to surrender the papacy to this emerging and thrilling new meaning.

Tony Bartlett, T&P Contributing Theologian

Kicking The Can Of Celibacy

With the Richter-scale crack in Roman Catholicism caused by Benedict XVI's dramatic resignation it seems an apt moment to take another look at priestly celibacy. If the retiring pope seeks to make way for a more energetic successor, one able to confront the "questions of deep concern to the life of faith", issues of sexuality, gender, and relationship in general must be front and center. The RCC's response in all these areas is existentially conditioned by its insistence on celibacy for ordained ministers

Jesus states clearly that celibacy is a gift and an option "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:10). In other words it's a possible choice to be made by some for whom the coming of God into the world is an overriding personal event and meaning. There is nothing about a "vow of celibacy" in his statement. Simply a decision for something--from one point of view quite brutal ("making oneself a eunuch," i.e. desexualized)--because another, transcending relationship has completely overwhelmed and replaced this vital aspect of human existence.

A living sense of the in-breaking of God in the world could do this, I am quite certain. But it seems evident that this is a deeply personal, individual choice, a solitary Kiekegaardian leap of faith, not a standard membership rule of an institution.

There are other, more human reasons for the rule of celibacy. The classic one is taking arms to fight for king and country. A war disrupts all normal domestic life. By and large a conscripted man or woman will be deprived of sexual relationship during the course of active service. The urgent necessity of confronting the threat of the enemy overrides this most basic of human situations.

But in the case of war enforced celibacy is temporary. It is contingent on the time of war and its extraordinary emotions and responses. Once the war and its supercharged mood are gone, ordinary sexual relationship will resume. The church instead requires that the extraordinary condition of celibacy determines the whole of the priest's life, and--again--does so as a matter of a rule.

As a point of historical reference one of the underlying causes for the progressive enforcement of celibacy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (known as the Gregorian reform) was its part in a struggle to wrest control of ecclesiastical appointments from the German nobility. To be unable to marry was a critical way of signaling a "real" priest, different from the worldly men appointed by feudal lords for worldly reasons. There is, therefore, an enduring element of Roman Catholic "spiritual militancy" against the saeculum in its celibate tradition. This militancy does not use weapons of war but turns the suspension of sexuality into its own form of weapon against the world.

But it is Mimetic Theory which perhaps enables us to reflect most acutely on the question of celibacy. Mimesis and its cousin science of mirror neurons show us how profoundly the self is made up of and by "the other". Either we are governed by the other in a relationship of rivalry, or we experience identification with the other through what Girard calls a relationship of "vertical transcendence," where we look on the other in awe and refuse to enter into rivalry. But there is also the third possibility, one of identification through surrender in love, something Girard does not talk about but must certainly be the goal of marriage. The key question here is who or what is the other for a celibate?

In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, over the years I was a celibate, I experienced at first hand the collapse of the old-style vertical transcendence in respect to the church: the habit of looking at it with awe as a perfect institution. In its place there really was a tremendous sense of rivalry with established authority with its rules and regulations. The walls really did come tumbling down. I believe the Council intended to seek out and discover the third possibility in regard to "church": the surrender to each other in love of active Christian community. But that is spiritually very demanding and, against the background of continuing hierarchical structures and mass membership parishes, I think people hardly knew how or where to begin. When they tried the Vatican generally hated the results. In the meantime I believe priestly celibates fell into four broad groups and my guess is those groups still basically cover the territory.

1. First: in-group gays who were closeted but experienced a clear liberation in terms of self-affirmation and, to some degree, lifestyle. In my experience this group made up at least a third of priests and they were definitely the happiest group around.

2. Second: church militants. These were men who hung on to the medieval sense of an embattled church taking on the forces of a hostile world. The church was a noble cause to which they had given their lives, and for them "vertical transcendence" was still real.

3. Third: the rest. This was the amorphous group which included alcoholics, chronic malcontents, sex abusers, materialists, men having affairs with women, sports fanatics and pure intellectuals. Until I left I essentially belonged to the rest.

4. Genuine celibates. Having said "the rest" there doesn't seem to be room for another group, and there are so few of them they really should be included in number three. But because this handful of men (and personally I think I knew three or four) was so exceptional in every sense it really merits a group on its own.

Meanwhile the celibate who does not know a self-transcending relationship is up against himself as his sole horizon, and must inevitably, I think, fall into group three. The married person is up against an/other, they live the self-as-other relationship day by day. This may become boring and dull, but it is still a fact. It may become unbalanced and destructive, in which case it is in need of healing, and at limit of being dissolved. But in the age of the collapse of vertical transcendence--the thing that Girard regards as the character of modernity--celibates are at an enormous risk of at best shallow, at worst destructive lives. When the celibate looks in the mirror there is far too often an endless presence of the same, where there should be the transcending gaze of the other.

My guess is Benedict knows all this in his heart of hearts but has kicked the can down the road. He can only kick it so far. His abdication is the historical equivalent to John XXIII's calling the Second Vatican Council back in January 1959. It was an enormous shock then, because hardly anybody in the Roman church saw its ecclesial necessity. Benedict's decision is an inverted way of taking exactly the same revolutionary step. The cultural urgency comes from outside the church, just as it did back then, but Benedict cannot convoke a council. He is too compromised in the negative reaction he has led against the last. He now surrenders his papal voice in order, I believe, for someone else to have the courage to make the call.

Tony Bartlett, T&P TinR

Ashes and the Beginning of Lent

As abbot of St. Gregory's Abbey, I celebrate the Ash Wednesday mass with the distribution of ashes. I always give a brief homily. I commented on the challenge of forgiveness in the film/musical Les Miserable which I discussed on my blog last week. For my blog this week, I offered some more reflection on the social dimensions of Lenten disciplines in a post called "Turning on Ash Wednesday." The title is taken from T.S. Eliot's poem as two lines near the beginning reflect clearly on mimetic desire before going on to other dimensions of desire.

It happens that I was assigned to celebrate & preach tomorrow, the First Sunday of Lent with the Gospel being on the temptations of Christ. I have posted my reflections on this important story "Stumbling Blocks in the Desert."

You can log onto the blog on the main page if you wish.

A holy Lent to all.

Messiah At The Door

Jerry Shave who attends our Friday night bible study believes me to be an optimist type. He's not the first one to accuse me of the last plague out of Pandora's box, but he's one of the more sympathetic. While others might interject "naive" before the descriptor he has been known to put terms like "intelligent."

It is no small matter.

Growing up I spent some of my most impressionable years in the shadow of a British penitentiary. It was a bleak estate of cramped army billets for families of the guards, just outside the fifteen foot granite walls which held the convicts. Allied to the harsh atmosphere was a sour, tense mood in both my parents, for a number of reasons, mostly to do with sad, repressive religion and its consequences. Our family situation improved but, without going into it all Angela's-Ashes-style, you can guess that a lot of the direction I followed in later life--spiritual and intellectual--would be a working out of the major features of that experience.

What sustained me? Was there hope in all this? There was, of course, the native instinct of a child to survive and find as many ways of entertainment and happiness as possible. I can even look back on some of that time with affection and pleasure. But when things really were grim and native spirits deserted me and I was scared and alone, it was something else that kept me going. There was a feeling in the middle of it all, too deep or dark to give it a name or even be properly aware of it: a weird, improbable feeling that there was a profound structure to everything and it was good. Although all present appearance might seem to be against it, the goodness was always there and one day it would win out.

I believe that awareness is in fact properly named hope. It is not a surface sentiment of good intent and positive attitude, a superficial golly-gee-look-on-the-brightside thing. It belongs actually in the midst of darkness, not light. It is planted in a field of stones. It is not inappropriate for a child, because "the kingdom belongs to such as these". The key word is structural, but a sense of structural that goes way beyond ordinary up-down, left-right, like the shape of a room. The experience has profoundly affected all my later understanding of the world.

It is really the structure of love: something that does not force itself on the world but shows its face where the world is overturned and cruel on its underside. It is "Blessed are the hungry...Blessed are those who mourn" become real according to its own wonderful oblique logic. I can't say that I knew this in any direct way, and that I am not now perhaps overreaching names for my experience looking back. But something kept me going and this is the best language for it I have. I depended on it totally to survive as a person in my world, in my time.

Subsequently I needed the better part of thirty years to figure out that this structure of love was not necessarily the sense of the "Religious Life" to which I later committed my life. I set out on that road (in a religious order of the Roman Catholic church) in a spirit of profound rejection of the world. Classically called fuga mundi (flight from the world) I took much delight in accomplishing this gesture, not realizing that it was really the attitude of someone who had never been given the world in the first place. I mostly acted out of spite. And the church went along with it. I had to leave it all behind in order to find and embrace that deep structure which I first dimly sensed as a child.

Almost immediately I left the order I encountered the work of Rene Girard, and I then understood that the deep structure of the gospels has infected the whole of human culture. Why not? If it could speak from the grim prospect of a prison estate, surely it could announce itself in just about every other situation!

Many people have remarked on how Girard has transformed their lives. There is even a facebook page dedicated to it! For me his work provided a fundamentally new way of understanding the Christian gospel at work in the world, allowing a new theology which raised the structure of hope to full, plain view. But at the end of his career, in his last book, Girard turned to a pessimistic view, seeing human history as essentially a duel between rivals, escalating toward some inevitable cataclysm. The structure of hope now seems to be missing.

That is why I have now turned to other authors, not abandoning basic mimetic insights, but seeking out a further articulation of hope to affirm the direction I first glimpsed there. Here is the core point of this blog.

One particular author who has helped supply this character of hope is Giorgio Agamben. His short book on Romans, The Time That Remains, is a goldmine. In it Agamben pays close attention to the quality of time released and expressed in the New Testament.We are used to seeing time in a purely sequential way, thinking that it doesn't have much bearing on spirituality. It is only the period or interval in which we are--or are not--"saved". Space is the key dimension, the place where we are now (bad) and the place where, finally, we're going (much better).

But time is the medium of spiritual relationship. It puts you in tension toward something. Or rather it is that tension which produces the quality or nature of time itself. The philosopher Heidegger famously made death to be the meaning of human time, but the New Testament put the whole world in a relationship with Christ. It has thus produced a critical change in time right here in the present. Heidegger is known in fact to have plagiarized this New Testament Christian time to produce his own existential time. The churches, on the other hand, have tended to reduce Christian time to a mere flat sequence between one spatial order and another. Allowing too much tension in the present creates disorder.

Agamben's point is that every present moment bends under the weight of Christ and so the quality of time is changed from within. This is the meaning of 1 Corinthians 7 : 29,  ho kairos synestalmenos estin, "time is contracted". Time is contracted like the wave pattern of sound, producing a very different frequency of experience right now. Or it is like a woman about to give birth. Any sensitive mind and heart, not deafened and blinded by the constant stream of media, has to hear this crucially different pitch and quality in time in which we're living in today.

Agamben points out that the famous distinction of chronos (clock time) and chairos (season time) in the New Testament is not an absolute distinction. Chronos contains chairos, and vice a versa. Every tick of the clock is fractured with the kingdom of God. This is the concrete structure of hope. That no matter what happens to space our relationship is always with a radical newness here and now, and that relationship inevitably will include space too!

So if humanity is looking down the collective barrel of a gun it is also, at the very same time, glancing at the Messiah at the door. Messianic time trumps apocalyptic time, that is Agamben's New Testament analysis. By not constantly teaching, structuring and communicating this radically transformed sense of time the churches lose authority in the world, forfeiting their message to a "bye and bye in the sky." Meanwhile the world cocks the rifle. But even if it shoots--and this is the most profound point about the structure of hope--the Messiah is still at the door, transforming every element of that moment. The earth is not taken away by men, it is remade by Jesus even as they may pull the trigger.

And because this is our hope--differing from Girard--that final, extreme trigger can and never will be pulled.

This indeed is the structure of hope. It is, I am certain, an intelligent hope.

Tony Bartlett, T&P Contributing Theologian

An Encouraging Review and St. Benedict's Wisdom about Human Discussion

Last week, I received a review of my fantasy collection From Beyond to Here from Kirkus Reviews. What they had to say about my book was quite favorable, which gives me some hope that this book and my other fantasy fiction has the potential to be helpful to both younger and older readers. You can read about the review and, if further interested, follow the link to my blog page for the book at Kirkus Review for From Beyond to Here.

Today, I posted a blog entry that offers St. Benedict's advice for human discussions and meetings. Maybe Benedict didn't have Internet access at Monte Cassino, but he already knew how one should conduct oneself in online conversation. They are the same rules for conventional face-to-face discussion. This post is available at A Way of Meeting with Others.

Update: I have just added a post after having just seen the movie of the musical Les Miserables.

Turning The Aircraft Carrier

How long does it take to turn an aircraft carrier at sea?

The question is proverbial, for the time and difficulty involved in changing an institutional culture. One of those behemoths at sea, under full power, will take for ever to turn round.

The contemporary springtime in Christianity has to struggle mightily with the question. True, you could hardly say of mainline churches they are "under full power," but the point is precisely the institutional culture, not current morale and size of congregations.

A key part of that culture is the inherited theology, something which comes with the stones and the bells: as unquestionable as cake at a birthday party! And no theme perhaps has been more unquestionable than the necessary violence of an all-powerful and pure God dealing with human sin. An enormous part of institutional change today is the effective questioning of this thought. Gathering force over the latter part of the twentieth century, it has been applying the rudder surely and steadily to the mighty craft of Christianity.

But the ship has only shifted one or two degrees.

The reason is that institutional culture is at least as much anthropological as it is theological. That sounds complicated, but really it is the most practical and down-to-earth part of the issue. Changing Christianity is both a change in God and a change in human beings as believers. They go hand in hand, and you cannot have one without the other. If we change the character of God in people's minds, and at the same time God's followers are not visibly different, then we incur the runaway risk an average person will conclude there really is no point in 'church'. They will say, "We can be just as good outside a church as inside one, and God is cool with everyone anyway!"

So what may a different "anthropology" look like? There are two parts to the answer, looking in, and looking out.

On the inside, at the very least, Christians are challenged to believe they are on a transformative human pathway, and the path has an urgent character. In other words, change in the fundamental ways we relate to the world around us is actually more important than ensuring we "get to heaven when we die." "Nonviolence" may be a good shorthand term for this change, but it vital to realize this is not a new ethical code (although it may perhaps be given ethical expression.) The key is relationship, a living, journeying relationship which molds individuals one-with-another as they continue walking together in community. Very little of this can be accomplished in the idealized formal setting of Sunday worship, redolent with sixteen hundred years of vertical theology. There has to be a multiplying cell-system, of small groups committed to this common journey, knowing each other and changing each other through prayer, study, and some measure of service and common life.

On the outside, we must think about Christianity and the U.S. In the U.S. there is an extraordinary relationship between the state and religion. The first amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." Of the three basic options, a state religion, a state atheism, and the "separation of church and state," the third obviously seems preferable. But it should never be forgotten that the state never does anything disinterestedly. To legislate originally against the establishment of religion is also to legislate for religion. The Constitution gives religion its assigned place alongside the state and requires, reciprocally, that religion grants the state a place alongside itself. And as religion constitutes an organization speaking on behalf of God, granting the state its independent space amounts to a kind of permanent blessing on the state.

Christians in the U.S. have become used to this comfortable relationship and as a general rule have a dewy-eyed, sentimental attitude toward the state. The situation is complex at the practical political level, but there can be no doubt that an anthropologically renewed Christianity will also have a radically prophetic attitude toward the state as war-fighting machine. Indeed this is part of the argument for cellular Christianity. Not having tax-exempt conditions (plant, endowments etc.) small-group Christianity can stand experientially on a humanly-renewed ground, beyond any collusion and blessing on war.

Jesus is a new form of humanity, and the state is the old form. As Jesus said to Pilate, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above." Far from reading this as a generalized backing by God of the Roman Empire, it means that the Father permitted this apparent power in order to reveal one much greater: the power of nonviolent love.

It is the concrete anthropological enactment of this love--viz. single cell Christianity--which has the power to turn the wheel of a ship two-thousand years big, toward a new human horizon.

Note. In point of fact how long it takes to turn a modern aircraft carrier is a military secret. But rumors are they may be surprisingly nimble these days, due to all sorts of advanced technology. It's possible that the advanced crisis of our times, so part and parcel of the Christian message, may make the church equally nimble. Maybe in less than twenty five years it really will be pointed in another direction entirely!

Tony Bartlett

mimetic deities and a divine wedding

My last two posts make quite a contrast but they both have to do with mimetic theory.

Last week, I posted a short piece on two YA novels, "The Mark of Athena" by Rick Riordan and "A Confusion of Princes" by Garth Nix. In their different ways, both novels show us what a world made of mimetic rivalry looks like. If the Greek and Roman gods are real, as they are in Riordan's novels, and they really are the top divine dogs of the universe, then God help us! These fantasy novels are what a lot of young people (as well as older ones like me) are reading and some of them, as in these two cases, can offer both young readers and older ones insights into mimetic desire. I hope to have a post from time to time commenting on books such as these. Those of you with children who read or are teachers might find this helpful for guiding them to some fun books that help them understand the issues of MT. I am still hoping that the stories I have published will prove to be some help along these lines one of these days. Arachne, Athena, and a Thousand Princes.

This morning, I published a post on the Wedding at Cana in Galilee. Like some other recent posts, this is based on the sermon I am preparing for tomorrow's Eucharist. Working with this cryptic story has helped me see some interesting connections with other passages in John's Gospel.  Strange Wedding.