Advent and Distance

 

It happens every year. Thanksgiving, then the season of Advent, then suddenly Christmas explodes upon us. Though Santa comes at the end of the parade, he always seems to be at the beginning of something, something trying to get itself started, something that thinks itself at the beginning of the parade.

In the beginning was the word.

Beginnings distance themselves from us, and they appear as if beginning all over again. Advent is like that. It is always suddenly upon us, short-circuiting, subverting even, the distance required to make itself appear. No one really doubts the appearance of the season, the rush to the Nativity. We remain incredulous that the distance could contract like that.

The time it takes the light to reach us…this is the way we talk about heavenly bodies. Astronomy, like most of us, is surprised by the newness of the ancient, and the distance--the suddenness of the distance--that shrinks to let something wonderful appear.

Advent is the celebration of anticipation, of the distance that dwindles down to the appearance of the Nativity, the beginning of the word among us. We never cease to be surprised by the word. The distance, couched through the ages in prophetic promises, measured in promises, now promises the promise of the promise. Anticipation and expectation could neither anticipate nor expect such an erasure of distance that shows the word, enfleshed and staying for a while.

Jesus stayed a while with some disciples on the road to Emmaus. While the hearts of the disciples burned, the distance to their destination grew shorter. While all travelers seem to arrive at the same time, the most powerful arrivals occurs in the breaking of the bread. The disciples arrive where Jesus finds them (and he them) in the breaking: that which calls them to the moment and their reception of the call arrive at the same time in the appearance of Jesus, even if that appearance is a disappearance. The distance traveled is yet another advent. Matthew's Magi would have it no other way: the gentle shock of an infant kicking them in the head.

All this is starting to sound a bit like phenomenology, at least Jean-Luc Marion’s version of it. As Marion would have it, the incoming call arrives simultaneously with its reception—the arrival of the receiver, or the gifted--immediately, suddenly, sometimes with bedazzlement, sometimes with a saturation that is known by an iconic disappearance. Phenomenality, that’s another story.

Merry Christmas.

Synod and Synodality at Risk

 The Synod on Synodality, called by Pope Francis in 2021 to explore how the Church will move forward in the 3rd millennium, seeks to explore just what "synodality" should look like, and how it should work when it solicits the thoughts of all the people of God, including the laity, which is unprecedented in the history of the Synod of Bishops since its beginning in the Second Vatican Council. "Synodality" itself is the subject of this "walking/journeying together," as the word "synod" is translated from the Greek (syn, "with" and [h]odos, journey; we can hear this term in the name of the Book of Exodus [ex, out, odos, "journey, going forth"]). The Synod has had a spotty record; perhaps one need look no further that its dismal failure to detect and effectively address the sexual abuse scandal. As things stand now, the Synod has been extended one year (originally envisioned to wrap things up in October 2023), to the end of 2024. The German experience has underscored that even under rigorous preparation, people will be people.

The pope has expressed disappointment and dismay over how synodality has unfolded in Germany. The German "synod," not really a synod at all, began in 2019 to test the limits of the process, perhaps not its stated intent, but certainly its effect. The "Synodal Way" in Germany has already embraced solutions to the most divisive issues facing today's Church, and it is prepared to announce paths to same-sex marriage, special accommodations to LGBTQ, priestly celibacy, among other hot-button issues in its final meeting scheduled for March 2023.

According to the vademecum designed for the global Synod on Synodality, the synodal process is far from a wandering in the desert. The synod is led by none other than the Holy Spirit itself, an infallible guide that cannot lead astray. Each official step on the path is inaugurated by the invocation of the 3rd person of the Trinity: Adsumus Sancte Spiritus, which orders the participants to the lead of the Spirit. The German experience tells us that the human spirit can trump the Holy Spirit. It's difficult to speak of a dark side of the human spirit, as the term always has both positive denotations and connotations. Nonetheless self-interest, not the interests of the universal church, seems to have driven much of what the German bishops have heard and what they are prepared to suggest to Rome. Guided by the human spirit, the bishops have heard the call of those whom the Church seems to have marginalized; they can feel the hunger for belonging, the hunger for communion, the hunger for the Eucharist. It seems the German bishops have conflated the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. The poignancy of such a moment can be quite powerful; yet the authentic synodal way calls first and foremost for discernment, especially discernment of the Spirit. And there's the rub.

The Synod on Synodality is at risk for devolving into precisely what the vademecum warns against: a parliament of aggrieved voices and a cacophony of needs and wants, a coffee-table book on coffee tables. Perhaps it's difficult to take the Holy Spirit seriously, especially at a time when discernment is something seriously catechized people used to do in the past, but is now a step easily missed or otherwise abused.

Perhaps a Synod on Discernment would have been a better place to begin, even better that the more obviously logical focus on synodality itself. What one says, what one hears, how one says, and how one hears presuppose a process of meaningful and effective discernment. Renew the face of the earth? We need to renew our hearts, empty a tad of our human spirit to accommodate the one revealed Spirit. Perhaps then the path on earth will find a clearing where renewal can flourish.

Liturgical Reform?

Is division in the Church over its liturgy a tempest in a teapot, or a real threat to the mystical body of Christ? On the one hand, the whole church is already divided by heresy, schism and myriad denominations, all of which might be, by the way, providential, confounding as they do the tongues of those pointing arrows in all sorts of directions in the name of truth. The church is now used to division, so why all this hubbub about the liturgy? On the other hand, the Catholic Church is known by its unity. Unity is the sine qua non of Catholicism. Is it a matter of kooky kat'liks spreading their wings in their 15 minutes, or is the matter far graver?

Sancrosanctum Concilium (SC), the first constitution (on sacred liturgy) to emerge from Vatican II, sought to put into practice for the whole Catholic Church the reforms initiated here and there over 100 years prior to the start of the Council in 1962. The sole purpose of the renewal of the liturgy was to authenticate the role of the laity in the rites of the sacred liturgies ("Mass" in the western church). "Authentication" of this role refers to the ratification of the priesthood of the baptized, meaningful participation in the celebration of the mass, and the effecting of catechesis that would accomplish these goals. 

The Council fathers desired to promulgate a palpable change in the experience of attending Mass. The shape and sense of the change was called aggiornamento, renewal, updating (not modernization), a sprucing up, a cleaning up of stained-glass windows to let new light shine through. Where is aggiornamento today? I suppose it's a bit old, if not wizened, and if it's anywhere, it's more in the camp of those who champion the old rite of the mass--the Tridentine Mass--where a fraction of the practicing faithful have experienced a new sense of belonging, communion and faith in action, than in the novus ordo camp--the authorized version of the old rite made new--(new order of the Mass). 

So, what's going on here? The Council fathers had no intention of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: they had no concept of the total replacement of the old rite with a new one. Aggiornamento doesn't start from scratch; it works with what's already there to let light shine more brightly on what lay beneath crusted candle soot and rote, tired movements and speech.

I recall that my family attended Mass on every Sunday and holy days of obligation. I received my first Holy Communion under the 1962 missal and Confirmation under the novus ordo. I had a sense of the transition from one to the other. It was an exciting time to be Catholic. We were singing more (even my father would sing, a man whose voice was not known for anything close to a velvet fog) and most amazingly, we were speaking Latin. "Et cum spiritu tuo!" All the kids in the neighborhood (mostly the Catholic kids) were chanting Latin in the streets: et cum spirit, 2-2-0--ohh. Well, we certainly knew what we were saying in church--the large, folding missal cards were printed in red and black, and the English translation was clear. In retrospect, the council fathers had achieved something special and good. Alas, how long could a good thing last?

While the Tridentine liturgy had truly passed into a new reality--true renewal and updating--they are not long the days of wine and bread. Time happened. The music began to change: lyrics and melody/harmony became so pedestrian as to give "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" a new luster. The words of the liturgy itself became vague and prosaic, for example, "Lord I am not worthy that you enter under my roof..." became "Lord I am not worthy to receive you...," erasing any direct reference to the Gospel's healing of the centurion's servant (interestingly, after 30 years, this debacle was corrected in the current missal). Much of this has gotten better and real desecrations have now been expunged from the newer missal, but the effects have been devasting: poor mass attendance (the pandemic notwithstanding), horrible catechesis buttressed by ambiguous liturgical theology (a recent, and now famous Pew study demonstrated that 66% of American Catholics have no sense of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and 33% of regular Sunday worshippers think the consecrated bread and wine--the body of Jesus Christ and his precious blood--are merely symbols of Jesus); old-fashioned traditional Catholics now have the moral, theological, devotional high ground with a Tridentine liturgy they fully understand and find wholesome, devout, transforming, holy, sacred. As such, a sliver of the church seems poised for schism. Pope Francis is at a loss for a pastoral solution (Saint Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict had little luck with their own pastoral approaches).

The best Pope Francis can come up with is placing restrictions on the Celebration of the Tridentine rite. He wants to phase it out--not wipe it off the face of the earth, but put it in its historical context, juxtaposed with the novus ordo, and he wants to clarify the continuity of the one rite with the other, much as we had sensed so many years ago. That seems right to me. The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, reserves the right to celebrate the Mass according to its increasing understanding of its ecclesiology, Christology and various theologies. That the Tridentine Mass is still celebrated is at best peculiar, for there has never been a timeless, unchanging rite of Christian worship. In fact, change and dynamism are more to the point than some idolatry of the etched-in-stone. Sadly, the bishops continue to underestimate the intelligence of the laity (are American Catholics so ineducable that they cannot learn enough Latin to continue a Latin rite, at least in part...in Latin?!?!), and their pathetically paternalistic attitudes combined with theologies of the what's-happening-now, had until recently given the Faithful pablum instead of the very real presence of Christ's body and his most precious blood. We'll just have to wait and see how their attempt at Eucharistic renewal turns out.

As Sebastian Maniscalco has duly noted, "I blame the parents," or in this case, the fathers. 

"Sacramental Slapstick" and Ecclesiological Banana Peels

 In a recent comment on my review of CM Gschwandtner's Welcoming Finitude, Joseph Charles noted a preposterous story appearing in the Associated Press, which reported the possibility that some infants might not have validly received the sacrament of baptism because of an anomaly in the form of the sacrament ministered by a certain deacon who altered the language "I baptize" to "We baptize." Joseph appropriately dubbed this hilarity with the hilarious phrase, "sacramental slapstick." Now while Joseph's critique of Catholicism runs very deep and sharp, far more deeply and sharply than his detour through a modicum of levity (indeed, he might find more "slapstick" in what follows), it does serve to underscore what's been afoot in Catholic circles these days.

First, a little reassurance for the worried well: unless the deacon was a malicious and evil person---intending to defraud the church---then the sacrament is valid (even if liceity is put into question). To keep things simple, a review of the basic tenet of sacramental theology: a sacrament has a hylomorphic structure, that is, it is constructed of a form, in this case the words used in the ceremony/liturgy, and the matter, in this case, water. In the sacrament of baptism, the core of the form is "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," not "I/we" (which are always ambiguous). Moreover, any baptized Christian can baptize, so long as she does what the Church has always intended to do. Now if the deacon deliberately intended to do otherwise than what the Church has always done, there could be a problem with validity. The first-person pronoun's use here would not invalidate the sacrament in and of itself.

So just what has turned sacramental theology into low comedy's banana peel in the path of everyday Catholics? My surmise is the appearance of the ugly head of ultramontane fundamentalism slowly creeping into the life of the church. One needn't look too far to find well-meaning but misguided Catholics who have lost faith in Pope Francis because of his human frailties, as if the pope were himself the Church. When such fundamentalist Catholics put all their faith in a particular personage, it is easy to see how fragile such faith can become. Such faith has recourse only to dogma, and closes itself off to the living, breathing Catholic faith.

Such Catholics find reassurance in "knowing" just how many people are in hell, for example, and shiver in their boots at the suggestion that humans on earth cannot know the judgement of God at the end of any human life. It seems such people cannot have faith in their own 'heavenly reward' unless the reward of bad people is clearly stated, known and an incontrovertible fact. For such people, there can be no beatific vision without the music of the sizzling flesh of the damned.

Many such Catholics identify themselves as "traditional," and as such, embrace many Catholic devotions, such as the Tridentine Rite of the Mass. Truth be told, I personally have great admiration for the beauty and majesty of that rite; it is the rite of my own childhood. There is nothing in the 1962 missal that warrants the fundamentalism that slips on the banana peels of the "I/we," or the reluctance of a pope who is slow to judge. 

Whatever happened to the notion of the indefectability of the church? Popes come and go, but nothing can militate against the abiding presence of Christ in the church. The 1962 missal has become a stumbling block, a wedge between Catholic and Catholic, a scandal that threatens to reduce ritual and liturgy to "slapstick," and fertile ground for the work of the devil's divisiveness. The blinding zeal of fundamentalism will undoubtedly lead to a blindness to banana peels. When did the likes of Jerry Lewis become papabile?

Celebrating Being There: A Review of Welcoming Finitude

In her introductory remarks to Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy (New York: Fordham Univ. Pr., 2019), Christina M. Gschwandtner engages over a century of phenomenological discourse, emphasizing more recent developments and thinkers, and how these will inform her philosophical analyses of liturgical experience. She prepares us for what follows in due course: a critical analysis of the “experience and meaning of liturgy” and “opening new paths for thinking about religious experience more broadly” (29). What emerges is a compelling presentation of the salient features of phenomenology from Husserl, through Heidegger, to the thought in contemporary French phenomenology in the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Louis Chretien, Emmanuel Falque, Michel Henry, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with productive references to American phenomenologist Anthony Steinbock, and the great hermeneuts, Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Further, Gschwandtner brings her critique of these thinkers to bear on this timely and useful study of the structures and modes of the human experience of the liturgical event.

To fulfill her commitment to address an audience of liturgical theologians, phenomenologists and informed Orthodox in the Preface (xi-xx), most chapters begin with a theological perspective on an aspect of liturgy, which is then followed by a general description of a particular liturgical practice, cycle, or event, leading to a discussion of certain phenomenological thinking which provides a springboard to her own careful analysis of the liturgical matter at hand. The topic of each chapter, moreover, is a conceptual area of interest to phenomenology. Seven chapters form, therefore, the heart of this work: 1) Temporality; 2) Spatiality; 3) Corporeality; 4) Sensoriality; 5) Affectivity; 6) Community; 7) Intentionality.

Chapter 1, “Temporality,” exemplifies the broad approach to the phenomenological focal points taken in the book. Gschwandtner begins with a colorful quotation describing “the height of Orthodox liturgical experience: ‘…The resurrection of Christ is a high festival in the whole Christian world, but nowhere is it so luminous as in Orthodoxy….’” She notes laconically, “Not only does liturgy take a lot of time, but much of it is concerned with time” (31). Her argument moves swiftly to a discussion of the problem of time in liturgy, the tension between quotidian, seasonal, cyclical time, and chronological time, clock time (the march of minutes and hours), calendar time (the march of days), linear time. Liturgical theologians struggle with the paradoxes presented by anamnesis and anticipation, by a lived past, an experience of the liturgical present, and by an eschatological future. Heidegger’s Being and Time makes an expected appearance here, used to outline the human experience of time as not fundamentally chronological, but as an ‘ek-static’ temporality (38), where past and future uncannily always arrive in the present. Moving the phenomenological description forward, she cites Lacoste’s distinction between kairos and chronos: the former governing liturgical, eschatological experience, and the latter our mundane experience of our day to day world. Before throwing down her gauntlet, she concedes that Lacoste’s analysis (as he himself insists) does not focus on “actual liturgical practices” but on “fundamental structures…of human existing vis a vis the Absolute.”

Gschwandtner takes Lacoste with a grain of salt. She will not buy any facing of any Absolute “unless we look to the reality of religious experience that might suggest such a possibility” (41). She presses on to a productive face-off of the “tension between memory and anticipation” of the liturgical theologians and the insights provided by the phenomenological investigations she has just outlined. For example, she finds Cuneo’s strictly linear understanding of time wanting, while rehabilitating Heidegger’s dismissal of “theological accounts of time” in a provocative rewriting of Sorge into her own phenomenology of liturgical time. “In the experience of liturgy, past and future become present, but not as recreations or reenactments of historical events, but as liturgical events that are experienced ‘now,’ appropriated by our experience of the event in the liturgical moment” (43). We have an interest, a concern for liturgical anamnesis and eschaton, and while we do not create these de novo, or unfold ourselves into the past or future, we do indeed participate in the “possibility” (46) that we “become dispossessed” in the swerve of the elements and movements of liturgy (46). Nowhere is this clearer, for Gschwandtner, than in the kairological flow of fasting and feasting, a pairing that provides an undergirding for all the analyses that follow, here and in subsequent chapters. Fasting and feasting, guilt and contrition, repentance and celebration, wound and healing, light and darkness, sound and silence mark the time of liturgy as it does the liturgical year. Without denying the march of chronological time, she describes the experience of liturgical time, not as Lacoste’s ‘added time,’ but as a time outside of calendars and clocks, or at least time alongside them. She can speak of a thickening of time at moments of feasting, without, for example, speculating on time dilations as they are known to physics (47). Indeed, by maintaining a clear distance between her ontological concerns and the concerns of the ontic disciplines, she leaves no room for any slippage from phenomenological depiction to mere interested, scientific inquiry.

The argument in the book moves deliberately and persuasively through each chapter. Were I to find an instance where the discussion seems problematic, I would look to the final chapter, “Intentionality.” Because the matter of intentionality is generally of great interest to phenomenologists, and the term itself is a technical one, designating as it does the fundamental move of pointing the gaze at what is given to consciousness, I found myself confused at a few junctures where it seemed to me unclear how the technical meaning of the term was not collapsing on the colloquial sense, where intention is what someone might bring to a celebration of liturgy—what a particular someone might intend to experience, or intend to happen.

Marion has borrowed the term “anamorphosis” from art history and criticism to describe a structure of the given, how givenness can position a recipient to better receive what gives itself into phenomenalization—influence the intentional aim. Gschwandtner had briefly touched on this idea in her discussion of excess and sensoriality (chapter 4, 118—the term “anamorphosis” appears here only; it is not indexed), but shuts down any role here. Yet, she does not hesitate to affirm “we can phenomenologically examine how liturgy shapes intentionality” (183). Because she will not drop 'anamorphosis' on liturgy’s doorstep, perhaps out of a distaste for grandiosity or simply from a dislike of mere speculation, her move here is toward hermeneutics, which by this point in her argument has become thematic. For Gschwandtner, liturgy references religious events, personages, even the eschaton; but liturgy is itself none of these things. If it shapes the intention, it does so not by a describable anamorphosis, but through its texts and gestures that unfold within the space and time of the liturgical moment, mediated through the human bodies that move through it with all their affect and senses. Liturgy is the horizon of all liturgical phenomenality, not some horizon of love, or hope, or fear, or anxiety, or even the body, against which givenness might appear. 

Gschwandtner proceeds in a distinctively understated manner to a thorough analysis of each philosophical topic. Her discussion of 'hospitality' underscores a unifying theme of the whole book, which demonstrates how liturgy welcomes human finitude, how it prepares a way for human limitation, foibles, imperfection and predicament to its possibilities, despite such finitude’s confrontation with its own most, the possibility of impossibility, the place of the end of possibilities, the burning concern with the end, a being-toward-death. I cannot help but understand her here as showing us not only how the world of liturgy opens up our own being-in-the-world, how liturgy “thickens” time, but how our very finitude gets a little fatter, too, and opens upon a finitude that is more welcoming than it might have been had it recourse only to the march of calendars and clocks, the nine to five’s of offices and shopping carts.

Welcoming Finitude is a fine addition to the tradition of phenomenological inquiry of religious experience that begins with Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life and continues today in contemporary French philosophy of religion, and French phenomenology in general. Without denying the ambitiousness of her project overall, I find Gschwandtner’s approach even-handed and sobering in a field of over-arching claims for the extraordinariness of phenomena in general and for religious experience in particular. I anticipate the book will prove to be both a powerful reference tool (the copious and meticulous notes are exhaustive, as is the bibliography) and another platform for her already strong voice in philosophy. The author has kept her promise to speak to a large audience in, for the most part, plain English. Students (and I mean this term very broadly) of liturgy, theology, phenomenology, religion will find it a welcome addition to their reading lists and libraries. While at times written specifically for an Orthodox audience, any Christian, especially Roman Catholics, will appreciate the rigor of the book’s method; indeed, anyone interested in the philosophy and phenomenology of religious experience will find Welcoming Finitude quite hospitable, and not without a noticeable conviviality.

Michael Voris and the Fall of the Church

 Michael Voris, through his Church Militant organization and his YouTube channel, 'The Vortex', has recently and uncompromisingly condemned the hierarchical church not only for its failure to stem the  tide  of sexual abuse in the church, but for its fostering of this criminality.  He traces the heinous acts of predatory clergy to a communist plot to plant gay men within seminaries in the Americas.  According to Voris, the infiltration of the church began in central America and spread northward. Of course, theories of communist infiltration of the church (to 'destroy it from within') are not new, and seem to have begun in earnest during the approach of Vatican II, and certainly in its aftermath. While it is obvious that Voris has an ax to grind with the gay community ( at least the gay Catholic community, though he might point to an oxymoronic character of that syntagm) and his conspiracy theory quite incredible, his overall analysis of the crisis in the church is quite sound:  Power corrupts and no crime is too large to place in its interest. Regardless, it seems that the church does not need a communist plot to undermine its mission; all we need is what we have: a callous structure, power-hungry men, and a seminary system that functions as a magnet for sexual predators.

 Recent revelations continue to demonstrate that the crisis in the church is not limited to the Anglophone world; for example, the sad and disturbing news from Germany underscores the systemic metastases of sexual abuse within the body of Christ.  It certainly appears that wherever the church is,  there are victims of hierarchical horror. For Voris, the matter is simple: homosexuality in se has seeded the church with evil acted out in criminal predation. I am not suggesting here that Voris asserts all gay men are predators and natural-born child abusers and ephebophiles, or even that members of the LGBT community cannot be faithful Catholics; he remains clear that practice, and not nature, is the culprit ( he uses the term "sodomy" more frequently than the term "sodomite"). 

As a straight male, I have little insight into the gay life-style, with all its attendant issues and struggles; but as an informed Catholic (Voris might challenge that assertion as well), I have a good sense of the Catholic Tradition, and its fundamental teachings. Moreover, as a physician, I am not prepared to say anything more than what good research has already suggested: gay men are no more likely to be sexual predators than straight men, no more likely to be child abusers than straight men. The scientific literature is far less robust in matters of ephebophilia, or sexual harassment---the kind of abuse a cleric might visit upon an adult male seminarian or adolescent male involved in his church. In addition, there is no literature that suggests that gay clergy are more or less inclined to succeed in celibacy than straight clergy. Celibacy is a gift, or it is not, so it appears.

The problem with Michael Voris's posture in the matter of the crisis in the church, then, is not an intellectual one, but perhaps a political one. His critique is sound, but his hermeneutic is suspect. He and I land in much the same place regarding what must happen in the church if it is to survive, but we part company when it comes to LGBT persons and their place in the church, whether in the pews or in the rectory. The matter of sexual orientation becomes irrelevant if celibacy is a real gift, a real expression of human sexuality and personhood. If celibacy is a farce, then we are left with the irreducible teachings of the church on natural law, idolatry, marriage (to name a few). Though readers of this blog already know that I put into question the very idea of 'nature' as it appears in the Magisterium, I continue to wonder how it plays out in the lives of all Catholics, of all Christians. What is not in question, however, is the nature of evil, and evil natures. When the heinous acts of the hierarchy, whether of sexual predation or the cover-up of such acts, are reduced to political terms, ethics, and even morality go out the window. Identity politics, the worst kind of politics, is a construct whose days are numbered, and it has no role in the solution to the crisis.

To paraphrase St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Michael Voris unfortunately plants the seed of intolerance in his politics. He might argue that a hard teaching is the first act of charity, but I would respond that a hatred of persons is never a disguised act of love. Is there room in the Magisterium for a broader idea of nature, or is that room the workshop of systematic evil? The discussion is a very Catholic one. If we do not meet all of humankind at the church's doors with the blood that issues from the side of Christ, those doors melt away, as the foundation falters, and the church falls, just as it is now falling from the hatred of the other in acts of sexual violence and the love for it on the part of those who want to hide it, call it something else, soften it, and erase its victims.

What's in a Scandal? Let's Not Lose the Face of the Victim

While this thing was always scandalous, we cannot continue to call it a scandal, though we will forever be scandalized. We really must call it what it is: systematic, institutional criminality. The victims of rape and other sexual abuses by the hierarchs of the Church dissipate under the cloak of the merely scandalous. The face of the victim recedes behind the veil of scandal. Survivors must be seen so that evil comes to light. Scandal. The only scandal here is that anyone refers to the irrevocably diabolical as a scandal. Enough.

That evil can rock the Church is one thing, but that it can destroy it is another. Christ himself indemnified the Church, stating definitively that the gates of hell will not prevail against it; but that of course assumes that good people will not simply stand by and be amazed, disgusted, violated, appalled, etc. Catholic action must now accuse the shepherds, and rid the Church of all the agencies of violence, sin, crime and other movements of evil in the flesh. It's really not a matter of not 'going to church', or withholding donations or other kinds of giving. Catholics must give the Church its blood back, its spine and its conviction, all of which has been lost. We have all, clergy and laity alike,  known too long about this cancer within the body of Christ, and we have let it metastasize. 

It's all well and good that the civil authorities now move legally to identify and prosecute criminals masquerading as leaders of the church and shepherds of the faithful, finally lifting the corporate veil covering up the most egregious sinfulness and criminality; but only lay Catholics have the moral authority to accuse systematic evil and wrest the Church from its clutches and exorcise the malignancy that threatens to undo the people of God.

No adequate sacramental theology can retain holy orders in the pedophile or ephebophile; God does not bless the devil. The Church does not breed pedophiles and ephebophiles, but it apparently attracts them, harbors them, protects them, and enables them to infiltrate the trust of the faithful, and then destroy that trust. This horrific and obvious impediment to reception of orders renders the sacrament automatically annulled, in a way analogous to the impediments that might make the reception of matrimony automatically annulled. An indelible mark cannot be etched into the soul of the violent, criminal sexual predator; and what makes matters worse is that he knows it, and pretends to that which is unattainable to him: holiness, service, love. There is simply no role for the niceties of the work worked (ex opere operato), or the work of the worker (ex opere operantis) here. We simply no longer know who or what is working what and why. To give sanctuary to sin and erase the face of the victims is to nourish the virulence of the malignancy.

From time to time, some people suggest that celibacy, with or without the complexities of a single sex environment, leads men to transform from normal and healthy sexual beings into predatory monsters. Celibacy arguably pertains only to those of superlative ascetic being, but does a choice for celibacy as part of an authentic sexuality committed to service to the other unencumbered by commitments to family necessarily lead to sexually poor health? Too many good and loving celibate clergy witness against that conclusion. Perhaps, then, an authentic celibacy might be part of the solution to part of the problem. Nonetheless, celibacy cannot be visited upon those who vicious predations have brought the rectory to its knees. The voraciousness of the predator laughs at the prospect of an authentic commitment to the other, whose sole purpose is to slake its thirst for violence. Nonetheless, and irrespective of the sexual orientation of one whose vocation to the priesthood is from the Spirit,  an authentic celibacy remains at least a possibility. Of course, the possibility that a true vocation moves a married man to the service of sacerdotal priesthood cannot be excluded, and the Church, in its reception of married clergy from other Christian traditions as Catholic priests, attests to this admission.

 The delusions of sacramentality must dissolve under the work of the Spirit. And the Spirit beckons all Catholics (indeed all Christians, if not all people of good will) to act in service to the victims of the hierarchs' horrors. What is Canon Law to the face of the human other? Canon Law wilts in the face of the other, for within the face is the trace of God. The Spirit calls us to absolute solidarity with the victims of the hierarchical church.

Toward the Dignity and Justice of Being

The way of thinking proposed here does not fail to recognize being or treat it, ridiculously and pretentiously, with disdain, as the fall from a higher order or disorder. On the contrary, it is on the basis of proximity that being takes on its just meaning. In the indirect ways of illeity, in the anarchical provocation which ordains me to the other, is imposed the way which leads to thematization, and to an act of consciousness.


---Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence (trans. A Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Pr., 1981)








The entry into being does not entail a fall into absolute moral indifference, or even corruption. While Levinas could criticize Heidegger for the paucity of morality in Being and Time, no phenomenology of ontological difference necessarily leads, by its very method, to a disregard of the other as completely other. In the passage above, Levinas sets up his case against a philosophy that 'reduces, by an abuse of language, saying to the said and all sense to interest' (Otherwise Than Being, OTB,16). Already in Existents and Existence, Levinas poses the metaphysical problem of just what takes place prior to an existent's insertion into being, the reluctance if not refusal to enter into a cont[r]act with being under the conditions of insomnia, fatigue, indolence. Speculatively, Levinas posits these structures of pre-phenomenality, of pre-consciousness, where passivity holds sway. Taking a stand before being, what Levinas has named hypostasis, provides the liminality encountering an existent, which is always just out of phase with existence (being).


For Levinas, an existent and existence do not coincide precisely; a lag presents itself. A diachrony characterizes the interface of an existent with existence, where the encounter with the other in proximity occurs and seizes what, for the existent, has not yet become a self realized into being. So in this metaphysical frame (which potentially gives being its dignity and justice) the other who holds me hostage and for whom the 'I' takes full responsibility---and the responsibility even of the other's own responsibility---in substitution, provides the locus of ethics. As Levinas summarizes, he has interpreted 'the subject as a hostage and the subjectivity of the subject as a substitution breaking with being's essence' (OTB, 184).


Levinas, whose allegiance to Husserl is palpable, finds limitations in classical phenomenology, and in order to locate transcendence in its proper frame, opens upon a metaphysics, a first philosophy, of ethics. By placing the ethical moment prior even to ontology,  Levinas introduces a 'morality clause' into the contract with being. Because the other and the approach to the other, the encounter with alterity and illeity, is prior to the self of the subject-in-the- making, ethics shapes the posture of the hypostasis, or what I have dubbed the 'hypostatic union' of the existent with existence. Being is therefore extricated from the problematics of Heideggerian phenomenology, ontology and its existentialist demeanor, in which Dasein's being in the world flirts with the Volk, permitting, in the darker corners of Dasein's moods, all kinds of savagery.


Ultimately, though, Levinas never really parts ways with phenomenology, or at least the spirit of phenomenology. He will eventually come to say that what he was doing through OTB, was phenomenology all along. His approach to the problem of ethics could not fit within the scope of the phenomenology of his day, or at least the orthodoxy of its method. His metaphysics of ethics speculates upon the very nature of phenomenality and therefore of givenness. Because such a metaphysics is embedded within consciousness itself, I am comfortable describing it more along the lines of a radical phenomenology, one that is still thinking the given and therefore within the purview of phenomenology itself. A phenomenology of givenness provides the logical step from Levinassian ethics as first philosophy, yet retains the phenomenological posture. I attribute Jean-Luc Marion's debt to Levinas, at least in part, to this tacit acknowledgment.


Marion's argument with Heidegger is not primarily ethical, though its commitment to the given certainly has ethical if not moral implications; and the inadequacy of the reduction to being or ontology compels Marion to explore just how far down the reduction can go, hence his 'third reduction' to givenness. That a radical phenomenology quests for the end of metaphysics by no means spells the end of speculative thinking; the quest simply critiques the limits of any metaphysics bent on determining the validity of all kinds of phenomena. To privilege givenness does not hold being with disdain or in contempt. Rather, the privilege rescues phenomena from the hegemony of metaphysics, of ontology and ontological difference, of any positivism, and in particular from their tendencies to determine what any kind of knowledge can and cannot be.


Nihilism, too often the final face of existentialism and the positivistic stamp on rationality, impugns all of reality and makes something very small of being. Nihilism opposes any dignity and justice of being. The antidote to nihilism is thinking the thing from itself as it gives itself, as the antidote to mere being is life. As Agamben has convincingly shown, bare life, zoe, is already stripped of dignity and justice, and thematized life, bios, is at least poised for them. For Levinas and Marion, there is no state of exception, no state of being (or givenness) unworthy of dignity and justice. It remains part of my project to locate the origins and locations of dignity and justice in this thing called being, and in part, it attempts this move by asking just what is this thing called love.

No Greater Love: A Reflection on the Triduum

For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son...






οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ’ ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον




(Please note an afterword below)

The gift of the Son defies any notion of giving on the side of being. Within being, the gift is wrapped as a ransom, a human sacrifice, a gift with all the strings that being can attach. The gift, what Christians call the Incarnation, does not unfold, finally, in being, in any ontological difference, in any fundamental or regional ontology. The aporia of the gift, this gift, can only unfold within the horizon of its givenness: love. Love bears the same structures of phenomenality as the gift. Love, like the gift, is an 'all or nothing' phenomenon. One does not love a 'little bit', partially, conditionally; whatever strong feeling of desire, affection or attraction might fall under the categories of love in a metaphysical system of prefabricated concepts, styles or fads, what we call here 'love' is nothing like such systems that pass for love in other contexts. The same holds for the gift: what is a gift if wrapped as a promissory note? The love we speak of here, the love of God, enjoys utter anteriority to being itself; love answers to its own givenness, prior to being.

The Incarnation---the Christ-event---by which we mean the nativity of Jesus, his life and ministry, his trials and tribulations, his judgment by the world, the way of the Cross and the Resurrection, while certainly historical and real, does not manifest itself in any fullness in justice within being. What on earth can the death of God mean in the rationality of metaphysics? Or for that matter, what does the impossibility of a God-Man, a Word-made-flesh, of any notion of a 'greater love', do within being if they do not first quicken in the priority of love, and its logic and rationality?

Try as we may, the Cross will always get twisted when we force it into ontology, into any metaphysics of presence, however rarefied a presence we can construct within systematic metaphysics. No rationale for the Cross plays out satisfactorily within the categories of being. No effort, however noble, or rational, or analogical gets us much past onto-theology's bugaboo: theodicy (0r at best, the onto-theological god that fell to his death off Nietzsche's tightrope). We have visited the notion of a theodicy without theodicy recently, and nothing seems to happen on the planes of theodical thinking; vectors of thought point outside such structures, but cannot escape them.

To begin to enter the logic of love, the unfolding of the erotic reduction and the release of the erotic phenomenon, all appeals to causality, empirical reasoning, and being itself must collapse; for love to appear categories and concepts must yield their place of honor in pure reason: the first critique has left the building. In the instance of this love we speak about now, we must allow the Father and the Son to appear, not within frameworks we have constructed for them, but as they appear to each other in the logic of love that can unfold in a practical reason. In the Johannine tradition "God is love". For God so loved the world, the logos gives up his life for a friend. Here begins the logic of love, and it provides the only lens through which to envisage the Father and Son in their face-off at the Cross. Only then can the gift of the Father and the Son manifest as the gift to the 'gifted', or the recipient---in short, to us.

What kind of fatherly love is this that allows the son to die? Why does the father not extricate the son, certainly a small task for the causa sui? The impotence of the verb 'to be' and references to causality underscore that what goes on in the Cross---the event harbored in the Cross---has nothing to do with being, and everything to do with what is prior to being: God loves before he is, and he so loved the world that only the release of absolute holiness through death and resurrection could ratify once and for all love's anteriority to all things related to being. Only the absolute abandon of the self without reservation, with absolute totality of self-emptying can the logic of love, in this case, the logic of the Cross, declare itself from itself, completely and irrevocably. The gift that gives its self, gives itself fully and with abandon to the recipient of the gift, the 'gifted', she who believes in order to see and to hear, she who receives kenotically, with an accommodating self-emptying, a making room for the gift. What is faith, what is belief if not a willingness to open oneself to the possible, to vacate a prejudice to make room for the truth?

This absolute abandon unites love and the gift. Love...gift. This is not really a sequence, for language does not allow representation of equality (or better, identity) here: love and the gift are not separate: they are the same, and as such they belie the differences among philos, eros and agape: for they are one and the same kenosis, the same event of kenosis. This is not the kenosis of Caputo or Altizer---the emptying of transcendence into immanence once and for all in the singular death of God. This is the kenosis of the univocity of love. The one and only univocal term---God loves as we love. We receive the gift in the same love in which it is given. We receive love, when it manifests against a screen of the structures of love.

Who is this friend, this beneficiary of no greater love than this? It is the other, the face of the other, the icon. The face that has me before I am even a self, before I am, in the elemental place that is otherwise than being. Are we helpless before the other? Is this even the right question? Can we then not also ask, is God helpless before the Cross? If these are the right questions, then they come from the seedbed of ontological difference, from being, as if being were absolutely prior, even prior to the nothing, prior even to the matrix from which the self is pulled by the horizon of being. But these are not the right questions, for this is the language of theodicy, theology's dead end and cause of death. To ask these questions is to force the uncontainable into a container.

Before God is before the Cross, the Father loves the Son. How does being fare before the absolute gift? If God is love, then this univocal love appears not merely as a love for the world but the selfsame love of the perichoresis within the immanent life of the Trinity. Being therefore has no standing before love, before the gift, before the kenotic movement that goes by the name, 'love'.

If faint strains of Jean-Luc Marion or Emmanuel Levinas echo in this little Lenten reflection it is because their work has entered my thinking, my seeing and hearing, through their signature ideas of the saturated phenomenon, the face of the other, alterity and the self-as-hostage, as these ideas gel across the shadow of the Cross (In another piece, I shall substantiate my gratitude to these thinkers in the more conventional form of citation). Catholic thinking places no premium on human suffering, a torturous death, or reciprocity of the gift. Instead, it offers its Tradition as a gift, and understands that gift within the absoluteness, the all-or-nothing, of love. What, ultimately, can this gift be, if not Christ himself?


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Afterword


I have heard, quite literally, from the four corners of the earth about the abysmal failure of this Lenten reflection. Perhaps in my haste to put something 'up for Easter' I have perpetrated both religious and philosophical sins. The gist of the critique runs something like this: the piece is too religious for something so 'phenomenological', and too phenomenological for something so 'religious'. Moreover, both the religion and phenomenology are suspect. I am grateful for the loyal readership and loyal opposition, and I should have exercised, in retrospect, better judgment in 'going ahead' with the piece. I will leave the piece up (it crossed my mind to delete it) for continued target practice, not that it didn't have enough holes in it already. I will chalk it up to a pitiful 'at bat', a strikeout, as it were.

We have all chosen to live and stay in the world, and so we exist with a ineradicable bond with existence itself. This piece was a distinctly wrong place to think existents and existence apart from one another. A logic of love and a propositional logic are not mutually exclusive; I do think it's difficult to think them simultaneously. To say that for one to appear the other must disappear misleads. To think the logic of love does not mean to leave one's brains at the door; the logic of love is no fantasy land.


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Spirit and Body: Levinas on the Cusp of an Awakening of Religion

To arrive where you are, to get to where you are not,

You must go by a way, wherein there is no ecstasy.

---T.S. Eliot, 'East Coker'

Whether on the roads to Marion's Damascus of the saturated phenomenon or Falque's metamorphosis of finitude and the spread body, Levinas's ghostly philosophy lurks in the shadows of forethought. It sometimes seems that all contemporary French phenomenology seeks its origins in Descartes' cogito, the ego that constitutes the world, the ego that thinks its therefore and finds being. Certainly Marion begins here, as does Husserl, the one discovering the straw that breaks the backs of noema and noesis, the other discovering a more pristine and powerful intentionality. Falque, of course, does phenomenology, but bends it toward his own wits, a phenomenology even splintered and splayed open to a post-metaphysical metaphysics, thereby releasing the event of just what goes on between the Cartesian res extensa and the phenomenological 'lived body'.  Levinas, on the other hand, remains skeptical of ontology and intentionality, and his eyes and ears are drawn less to the therefore, and far more intently to the fore-there.  

Il y a. The Levinassian there is. The 'there' prior to the there that is indeed there, the fore-there, where therefore is not even a forethought, where Prometheus sleeps. Such is what comes to Levinas's mind. Levinas's is a ghostly thinking, not quite ghastly, yet open to horror, the night that crutches the insomniac's watch, the creepy indolence that paralyzes before being, and the instinct to retreat into alter[ed]-states of consciousness. Walpole and Shelly have nothing on Levinas. The gothic shades of dark that recede in the Levinassian landscape give proof through this night that Heideggerian ecstasy is a little late to the party of being: there is a hauntology prior to ontology, some more fundamental difference anterior to ontological difference. There is a haunting.

Before the ethics of Levinas's signature work, before the stark alterity and priority of the Other, this remarkable thinker has given us a preliminary study of his concerns, and certainly a critique of Being and Time. As a critique of ontological difference, Existence & Existents ( trans., A. Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1978, henceforth EE; page numbers in parentheses refer to this translation of the work 1st published in 1947 unless otherwise stated) stamps an indelible ethos upon what will later follow in his masterworks, Totality and Infinity, and Otherwise than Being. EE does not present a full-blown theory of the body, or a fleshed-out spirituality; but it certainly outlines an anatomy of consciousness, even a physiology of consciousness, that thinks the fore-there---that hypostasis precedes ecstasis, that position precedes being-in-the-world, that Being itself precedes beings. Do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit.

Levinas makes haste to describe the there is (il y a going forward to honor the term's untranslatability, unless it appears as there is in Lingis's translation) as the thing unresolved by death, the irreducible term that remains insoluble in the liquidation of finitude. Il y a comprises the locus where subjective and objective existence merge and blur in the event of being (4-5). Indeed, "ontology...affirms that what is essential in human spirituality...is determined by a relationship...with...the nakedness of this bare fact" of Being (3), which "harbors something tragic" (5). The human spirit is always already encountering a tragedy. The merging of existents with existence takes place within the il y a, an otherwise than being that seizes us by the throat.

The maternal wellspring from which an existent gets itself born, or from which birth yanks an existent into existence, is not sufficiently anterior for Levinas; he searches more deeply into that nook, to "that event of birth in phenomena which are prior to reflection" upon any regional ontology (11). He thinks the matrix from which a maternal wellspring might spring. In this regard, he analyzes 'fatigue' and 'indolence', not as mere mental contents, but as modes of a relationship with being, and cleaving of (to?) being. These mental contents express a 'weariness' before existence, and mark the mode of 'refusal' or balking at the contractual terms binding an existent with existence; yet such a refusal marks not a reflection upon such terms, but a pre-reflective, unthematic encounter with, engagement of, immediate response to, a generic document, whose lines remain unread, but remains a threat nonetheless (11-12).

The markers of refusal, though placeholders of retreat or evasion, point to an engagement with being. To engage being, to commit to a contact and contract with being, comprises the act through which an existent enters existence: "If the present is thus constituted by the taking charge of the present, if the time-lag of fatigue creates the interval in which the event of the present can occur, and if this event is equivalent to the upsurge of an existent for which to be means to take up being, the existence of an existent is by essence an activity" (25). This upsurge goes by the name of hypostasis, and the contractual contact of an existent with existence forms a hypostatic union threatened only by time, by another present which can put the union asunder. The hypostatic union, a term Levinas never uses, creates the locus of spirit, of the event of spirituality, though he never formulates this event in quite this manner. Regardless, here, in the hic et nunc of taking a position from which hypostasis becomes an upsurge into Being, time coalesces into the sacrality of a most vulnerable moment.

Though a less reckless strategy would visit the preliminary ideas of EE upon Levinas's later work, the risk of visiting Levinas's more mature elements upon EE, at least with respect to vulnerability, and even the Other, might reward; for the heart of Levinas's philosophical 'spirituality' rests in the structures thought here in EE.  Only in the fore-there of reflection, in the unthematic arena of the pre-ontological structures of consciousness, can we find the disclosure of vulnerability prone to insomnia and horror that hypostasis is heir to. True, for the most part, the Other appearing in EE is a thematic Other, one already clothed, one whose nudity finds itself clothed by form (30). This nudity, already thematic, conceals the body, and only in a relationship with nudity itself do we experience the alterity of the Other (31).

The nudity prior to nudity, the fore-there of an 'undressed being' (31), begins the entry into the il y a, the consummation of being in the experience of night (52), where the 'rustling of the there is...is horror" (55) ushering in the vigil of the insomniac so passive that the night itself 'watches' (63). Only in such utter passivity can the unthematic contents of consciousness (69) take position, a stance from which an upsurge into being poises itself as hypostasis. From such states, such stases, such static asymmetry,  a 'base', a 'place', "makes the body the very advent of consciousness", unconcealed in the vulnerability of an unthematic version of nudity. The body locates consciousness as an "irruption of anonymous being" and "is position itself" (70). The spirituality of the body is the event of its position, and the moment of its present, the sacred time of the hypostatic union, where Being and being, existence and the existent, contract a merger, "a pure event of being" (71). "Position is the very event of the instant as a present" (70).

The event of being harbored in the hypostasis, the hypostatic union, "signifies the suspension of the anonymous there is," for "on the ground of the there is, a being arises...By hypostasis anonymous being loses its there is character" (83). Truly this is sacred ground consecrated by human spirituality through the posture of the body, the body taking its position in the instant of its present, and there is no time like the present, yet is "not the future above all the resurrection of the present?" (94). Though there can be no redemption of pain, "the movement of the caress" of the consoler transports suffering " 'elsewhere' " (93). Hope should not be spent on wiping away every tear or avenging every death, for the wages of pain simply move into an instant that follows an instant; rather the object of hope should be the future itself, where every instant of every present receives salvation.

Hypostasis is anterior to, prior to, more essential than any ecstasy leaping into an already thematic being-in-the-world. It makes its upsurge from a matrix otherwise than being, and, for the visually minded, it is the photo-negative of Heideggerian ecstasis, the mold into which such ecstasy pours itself into the world. The unthematic contents of consciousness create the vulnerability that only an unthematic Other whose utter vulnerability can transgress---as the Other in the Same; not that alterity of the Other homogenizes within such sameness, but as the disruption,  the roiling of the waters in the pool of the Same; the other is totally other, despite a family resemblance. The Other in the Same provides the site of an uncontainable human spirit, a spirit that only "the gravest sin" attempts to put on the clock,  in the time of trains and the sun (101). Though Levinas can think the coalescence, a congealment, of time, any reification of the spirit within the timebound shuts down the instant, desecrates the preciousness of the present that must be cherished, and positioned for resurrection.