A Metaphysical Conversation: Heidegger, Stein, and Conrad Martius

 After considering the problem of absence and presence, Real and Unreal, the "zero" and "empty set" problems, I thought it would be fruitful to put Heidegger's Being and Time and "What is Metaphysics," Edith Stein's Finite and Eternal Being, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius's Realontologie in conversation under their own voices, that is, what I surmise those voices to be like. The setting is Bergzabern, very near the Palatinate Wine country. Perhaps some delicious Riesling has already been tasted. Three giants of 20th century philosophy are sitting down. Some conversation has already taken place. We catch them when the talking resumes after a long silence...

Martin: (Looking outward toward the distant line of forest, speaking slowly, as though measuring each word against an invisible depth)

You both continue to approach finitude as though it were ultimately explainable through structure—as though the human situation could be stabilized by ontology or secured by metaphysics. But finitude is not a bounded object, nor a defective substance awaiting supplementation. It is the ecstatic exposure in which Dasein is always already delivered beyond itself.

The errors begin the moment one imagines finitude spatially: as a container, a vessel, or a measurable perimeter. Finitude is not an enclosure. It is the exposed openness in which beings first become manifest at all.

And this openness does not arise from beings themselves. In Angst, beings as a whole slip away in their ordinary significance. The world loses its familiar grip. What comes to presence there is not another entity, not a hidden substrate, and certainly not a supreme being standing behind appearances. What announces itself is Das Nichts—not as an object, but as the withdrawal through which beings are disclosed in their strangeness.

You both continue to interpret the Nothing as though I had proposed some strange shadow-substance lurking behind entities. But the Nothing is not a thing. Nor is it the logical negation represented in mathematics. It is encountered only in the disclosive event in which beings as a whole recede. The Nothing nihilates because disclosure itself requires withdrawal. Without concealment, there is no clearing. Without the retreat of ground, no being could emerge into unconcealment.

Edith: (Calm, exact, her voice carrying the disciplined clarity of phenomenological analysis and Carmelite peacefulness)
Your description of existential exposure is profound, Martin, and I agree entirely that finitude must not be imagined spatially. The finite being is not a vessel containing non-being. Nor is temporality a box through which existence travels.

But phenomenological rigor obliges us to ask what precisely is disclosed in this experience of receding significance.

When the world withdraws in Angst, what remains is not a positive encounter with “Nothingness” as such. What remains is the stark revelation of the finite being’s inability to ground its own actuality. The experience is temporal before it is spatial. The finite entity possesses itself only in the razor-thin actuality of the present moment. It does not hold its future in advance, nor retain its past by its own power.

And here the distinction between essence and existence becomes unavoidable. The finite Wesen does not contain within itself the sufficient reason for its continuing actuality. It is a real essence, yes—but one continuously poised over non-being.

If phenomenology follows this dependence rigorously, it discovers not a dynamic abyss, but the impossibility of self-sustaining finite existence. The question therefore becomes unavoidable: why does actuality persist at all?

Martin: (Turning toward her sharply)
And immediately you cross the threshold from phenomenology into metaphysical reassurance. You cannot tolerate the unresolved character of disclosure itself. The uncanniness of existence becomes, for you, evidence of donation from an infinite source.

But the very move toward Actus Purus domesticates the question. You transform the openness in which beings appear into a rationally secured order grounded by supreme actuality. In doing so, you close the clearing too quickly.

Perhaps the openness in which beings emerge is older than every metaphysical distinction between essence and existence. Perhaps Being is not an entity, not even an infinite one, but the event of disclosure itself.

Hedwig: (Leaning forward slightly, her voice firm, lucid, carrying the weight of realist conviction)
Martin, your resistance to reducing Being to a highest being is entirely justified. Your critique of ontotheology has genuine force. But you commit a different error: you allow withdrawal itself to inherit explanatory authority.

Let us proceed carefully.

You now clarify that the Nothing is not a thing, nor a hidden substance. Very well. But the disclosure-event you describe still presupposes realities already capable of manifestation and recession. The slipping-away of beings cannot derive its operative force from non-being itself.

To say that beings recede is still to speak about beings.

The phenomenon presupposes entities, essences, consciousness, relational structures, and the objective intelligibility of the real. Therefore the operative reality belongs to those structures—not to “the Nothing.”

Your Nothing remains entirely derivative. It is an abstract designation for the recession of the real.

Martin: (Quietly, but intensely)
Derivative perhaps—but not unreal. Withdrawal belongs intrinsically to disclosure. The clearing is never a fully illuminated field. Concealment is not added afterward; it belongs to manifestation itself.

Hedwig:
Yes—but concealment is not therefore an ontological principle.

You take a genuine phenomenological feature of finite manifestation and dangerously elevate it into quasi-generative status. The language begins to slide. “The Nothing nihilates.” “Withdrawal grants disclosure.” Soon absence itself acquires an active role.

But what ontological standing does absence possess?

Here the reduction must become absolutely rigorous. If something is real, it must possess its own Wesen, its own determinacy, its own Selbsthaftigkeit—its autonomous ontological density.

Now examine Das Nichts under that requirement. Does it possess essence? Determinacy? Independent structure? No. It is the absence of these.

And this is why the comparison with the empty set is illuminating—not because existential disclosure can be reduced to mathematics, but because both cases reveal the same ontological condition: complete absence of intrinsic content.

The contents of the empty set possess no essence, no predicates, no reality. Likewise with the Nothing. In both cases, absence remains parasitic upon what is absent.

Absence can accompany the limits of beings. It cannot become an ontological actor.

Edith: (Nodding slowly, though not without reservation)

Hedwig’s clarification is decisive. The issue is not whether withdrawal is phenomenologically real as experience. Of course it is. The issue is whether non-being itself can bear explanatory weight.

And once that distinction is maintained, Martin, your abyss loses its ontological independence.

But Hedwig, I would also hesitate before allowing Realontologie to stop at autonomous essence alone. For the very temporal fragility we encounter phenomenologically presses the question further.

The real entity genuinely possesses its own objective density. It is not constituted merely by consciousness. On this I fully agree with you.

Yet the finite entity remains radically unable to sustain the actuality of its own being. Its essence is real, but its existence is received.

The finite being is not a container of existence. It is a continuously actualized event of existence.

Martin:
Again: participation, donation, grounding. You cannot leave the wound open.

Edith: (Without defensiveness, almost gently)
No, because phenomenology itself prevents me from doing so.

The finite being appears as radically contingent—not merely conceptually contingent, but existentially contingent. Its actuality is never self-originating. If one follows that insight without evasion, the question of sustaining ground emerges necessarily.

But the Ground I speak of is not a supreme object standing somewhere beyond beings. Nor does it close the clearing into a rigid metaphysical system. The infinite Act is not another being among beings.

Rather, finite existence continuously participates in actuality it does not own.

Hedwig: (Turning slightly toward Edith now)
Perhaps. But ontology must proceed carefully here.

Realontologie establishes first the autonomous density of the real itself. The task is to preserve the integrity of finite Wesen before dissolving reality too quickly into dependence. Otherwise metaphysics risks absorbing the reality of finite beings into mere derivative appearance.

Edith:
I agree entirely that finite beings possess genuine ontological integrity. Participation does not abolish reality; it enables it.

Indeed, only what possesses its own real essence can participate at all.

But integrity alone does not explain actuality. The question remains why real essence exists rather than not.

Martin: (Looking again toward the darkening horizon)
And perhaps that question itself already belongs to the metaphysical destiny from which I am trying to awaken thought.

You both seek ultimately to secure beings through ground—whether realist or theological. But I remain unconvinced that the openness in which beings emerge can ever be mastered through the language of explanation.

Perhaps the mystery is not that beings require support, but that unconcealment occurs at all.

Hedwig: (After a long silence)
Perhaps the deepest error, Martin, is not that you speak of withdrawal, but that you imbue withdrawal with the explanatory authority that belongs only to the real itself.

Concealment accompanies finite manifestation. Certainly. But accompaniment is not causality, and negation is not ontology.

The clearing does not require a hidden kingdom of non-being standing behind beings. Reality itself—with its structures, essences, emergence, and limits—is already sufficient to account for manifestation.

Edith: (Softly, as evening begins to settle over the vineyards)
And yet reality’s very insufficiency to sustain its own actuality still points beyond itself.

Martin says the mystery lies in unconcealment. Hedwig says it lies in the integrity of the real.

Perhaps the deepest question is whether the actuality of finite being is itself already a kind of gift—one so constant that thought forgets to notice it.

No one speaks. The horizon remains hard and motionless in the fading autumn light.

Peace, Advent and The Event

Advent reminds us of the great messianic tradition we have inherited from Judaism. The liturgical calendar embraces the kairos, the seasonality, the right-timeness of hopeful anticipation, the catching a glimpse of something approaching from the horizon. Liturgically, we come before God, love, joy and peace. Something’s coming, familiar and strange, known and as if unknown. If we let it free, it comes at us completely new. Something must be truly free so it can release itself, give itself.

The evangelist of Matthew’s gospel presents the Nativity as an event so surprising, so expectant and unexpected, that the earth alone cannot contain it, cannot bear it alone; and so he gives us its extension in the heavens, a supernova, a release of cosmic energy arriving just in time to herald an event of astronomical magnitude; yet more than just a herald, a light to the nations. 

Pax in terris. A righteous hope or a cruel joke for the holidays? Sometimes it seems the public sphere has lost its stomach for peace, hope and revelation. Here in the United States many of us prefer freedom from religion to freedom of religion, prefer to think religious things as if a 19th century child, something seldom seen and never heard. Where is the peace? Where can a sea of faith rest its head? When Motl Kamzoil asks, after hopefully suggesting that it would be a good time for the Messiah to come now, now that his community has been exiled from the shtetl, the Rabbi simply says, “we will have to wait for him someplace else.”

Where shall we wait for the Messiah? In our homes, in a closet, in a shrinking recess of our hearts? How will peace ever find its way to where it needs to be that way? Advent bears the progeny of divine love, of an irrevocable event of peace in the irrevocable event of the union of the human and the divine.

Advent speaks of and to interstellar and intrastellar happenings. Advent truly speaks to the heart, to the secret places, to the slivers of the smallest spaces. Advent also speaks in the larger spaces, in those places in desperate need of peace. It is a message of peace, and if something other than peace is heard, I suppose we’ve forgotten how to hear.

Mater Populi Fidelis, An Opportune Moment

On 4 November 2025 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith (formerly the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the Holy Office) promulgated into the ordinary magisterium of the Catholic Church Mater Populi Fidelis, perhaps the dicastery's final word on titles for the Blessed Virgin Mary. In particular, the document, named a "doctrinal note," forcefully discourages the loosely used and problematic Marian titles, "Co-Redemptrix" and "Co-Mediatrix," arguing that only Christ Jesus redeems and mediates humanity, while doing no harm to the honor, the hyperdulia, due the Mother of God. The language of the note is concilatory but firm, and should be a win-win, a win for both Mariology and Christology.

The doctrinal note adds clarity for both those with high and low Mariologies. I imagine the document will comes as something of a disappointment for those who embrace extremely high Mariologies, for example Vox Populi Mariae Mediatrici, a lay group whose intellectual wing resides (or resided) in Steubenville, OH, at the Franciscan University, where theologian and strong advocate for the promulgation of a fifth Marian dogma, Professor Mark Miravalle, indefatigably championed the cause. In no way can Catholics construe Vox Populi as dissenting from Church teaching on the honor and prerogatives of Mary, or as remotely schismatic, or proto-schismatic. The membership in the group understands full well Catholic Christology, and understands the terms co-redemptrix and co-mediatrix in a way that poses no threat to Catholic orthodoxy; but the Dicastery nonetheless determined that those terms, however nuanced, would confuse rather than enlighten those Catholics (and Christians in general) whose catechesis is limited to the essentials and fundamentals of the faith.

The number of Marian dogmas will remain at 4, and the mysteries contained in them offer vast spiritual nourishment for those whose Mariologies run the gamut. These dogmas become intelligible only through the lens of sound Christology. Marian apparitions, the most famous of which move the devotions of many toward the terms now to be avoided when thinking of Mary, should garner reconsideration, not of their recognition, but of their meaning in proper devotion and sound theology.

Abandon All Hope: Beau Wasserman in Hell

 

I recently stumbled upon Ari Aster’s recent Beau is Afraid while perusing Netflix in the increasingly difficult search for something entertaining. In it, Joaquin Phoenix brilliantly brings the titular hero, Beau, into vivid relief within a story-telling structure that never admits any of its action could take place in the same world as any viewer. This approach passes for surrealism while nodding to hyperrealism. Nothing in the film offers a handle, and anything that might offer hope of a way into the drama sets up failure. The viewer can trust nothing, not a scene, not a character, not a mood, not a spoken word. The movie simply happens, and that comes in at 3 hours. Lasciate ogne Speranza. Nonetheless, Beau is Afraid remarkably entertains, exasperates, abuses expectations and certainly challenges. Among other things, this film is Aster’s presentation of hell, a time-honored theme, and the last of the four last things that grates in the Catholic imagination (death, judgement, heaven, hell). The final scene, in which Beau traverses his Acheron and then faces his trial, judgement and sentence, certainly tempts the viewer into a theological arena of thought.

Beau’s hell is knit together with incessant assaults, both physical and mental. The perennial victim, nothing neutral happens to him. A neighbor blames him for blasting music while Beau himself tries to get some sleep before he must catch an early flight back home, where his mother awaits his return so that they might share in his father’s Jahrzeit, the one-year anniversary of his death. As he attempts to leave for the airport, his luggage and housekeys disappear from the entrance to his apartment while he briefly abandons them to retrieve a forgotten item. Even in a therapy session, his therapist assaults him with the idea that he might wish his mother dead. No safe place for Beau, ever, anywhere. He becomes a victim of violence when a serial killer stabs him, and a truck hits him as he flees. Rather than calling an ambulance or taking him to the hospital, the occupants of the truck take Beau instead to their home, where they care for him during a convalescence that continues when he leaves their house, which apparently doubles as an asylum.

He learns of his mother’s death by a horrific accident—a chandelier crushes her head into an indecipherable mess. Of course, dear old mom has faked her death, paying her loyal housekeeper to die in her place. I could go on, but the relentless sequences of misery must land in a viewer’s lap, where they can enter the experience of those beyond the fourth wall, a place made distinctly unsafe by the film’s treacherous landscapes. Nonetheless, mom's death heightens the imperative to return home, as Jewish observance, with its attendant ritual rooted in the Torah, requires a prompt burial, which mom has stated cannot take place in Beau's absence. These elements of Jewish practice open Beau's world to a strange theology, a godless one for sure, but a driver of the action. 

Without further piecemealing of the plot, why “hell” and not simply cinematic effect? Aster has created a very aggressive world, one the film itself cannot contain. Every laugh (and there are laughs) indicts the laugher. Everything that promotes the comic implicates the viewer, who must own every response. This interesting effect underscores a key feature of hell, ownership. The viewer knows she emerges from Beau is Afraid intact and unscathed, precisely because she owns the emotions passing through this roller-coaster ride. Beau remains in hell because he owns nothing, never has and never will. He refuses complicity in anything, and he lives his life as sponge that soaks up phenomena, content to experience only soaking. His shallow emotional constitution has a short menu of responses: outraged, yes; enraged, not so much (except for that one time with mom, and even that was castrating).

And that, I think, is what the brown recluse spider thing is all about. A sign on a wall in Beau’s apartment building informs the tenants that the creature lurks somewhere in the structure. We never really know just where Beau lives, where he travels. Does the spider live in its natural range, or did someone bring him into a region outside it? The fairly famous arachnid gets an awful lot of blame for lots of injuries to people for which it is actually blameless; how like the Oedipal thing Aster tries to pawn off on the unwary viewer! Anyone coming away from Beau is Afraid with a smug Freudian solution to the hero’s dilemma, has not paid enough attention during a taxing 3 hours. Just too easy to blame the spider. Anyone confident that she has actually met Beau’s mother needs to check again, as the cinematic ravings of the film have lulled her into poor judgement. The fault, dear Beau, lies not in our mothers but in ourselves that we have let life pass us by, even as we have allowed it to bludgeon us at every opportunity.

A life untouched by ownership of self can plunge us to the gates of hell, and all who enter there must abandon all hope. The human person seeks authenticity or stays mired in the adolescence of irresponsibility. Dante, not to mention Heidegger, was right, and so, too, Aster. Could there be any doubt we travel guideless through hell after the grin on the therapist’s face makes its appearance in Patti LuPone’s house, a grin that Mephistopheles himself would die for? Man, did Stephen Mckinley Henderson earn his paycheck for that or what? But that’s another piece…

 

 

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.