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Posted by on Aug 29, 2007

St. Augustine: The Once and Future Giant

St. Augustine: The Once and Future Giant

 

St. Augustine of Hippo by Sandro Botticelli

August 28th. is the feast day of Aurelius Augustinus Bishop of Hippo.

St. Augustine (354 to 430) was one of my boyhood heroes. I read Louis de Wohl’s biography of the saint, The Restless Flame. As a German writer in the 1920’s and 1930’s, de Wohl was immensely successful as a writer of thrillers and he brought this sense of action to his religious historical novels written in English after World War II. I was introduced to Augustine as a man of great learning and action, a man who moved mountains and changed the course of oceans of thought and action.

Later, when I read his Confessions and the City of God in Latin, I met a more complex man, very much at odds with mid-twentieth century psychology. Yes, Augustine was a giant of Western thought, but he was also a major force for movements and institutions that had been blown apart with the end of the modern era when World War II left Christendom in smoke and ashes.

The alliance of empire and church, the oneness of truth that allowed for state violence to save those in rebellious error, the primacy of celibacy, and the utterly fallen nature of humans conceived in original sin are significant positions which post-modern thinkers judge to have been more harmful than helpful.

The development of history as a critical discipline in the 19th century blossomed in the 20th with the tools of science, linguistics, and anthropology. The political, human, and moral catastrophes of saturation bombing, genocide, and nuclear weapons have led to a profound soul searching about what brought us to this point. Needless to say, many of Augustine’s positions came under fire by revisionists.

John J. O’Donnell, in Augustine: A New Biography, presents Augustine as a man of his time, with more warts and wrinkles than a halo. The dreaded heresies Augustine defeated, Donatism and Pelagianism, come in for a revisionist appraisal of their good points. David Hunter, in his review of O’Donnell’s book in America magazine, takes the author to task.

“This Augustine will surprise many readers. The following section headings, although taken from a single chapter, characterize the tone that prevails throughout the whole book: “Augustine the Self-Promoter,” “Augustine the Social Climber,” “Augustine the Troublemaker.” O’Donnell’s Augustine never seems to have outgrown his youthful aggressions and ambitions: “When writing about his first book in the Confessions, he reproached himself for his worldly ambition, even as, with the Confessions, he was carrying out an ecclesiastical version of the same social climbing.” O’Donnell duly documents Augustine’s later associations with powerful Roman generals as evidence of his subject’s lifelong attraction to power.”

O’Donnell has tremendous crediblity as the author of a three volume commentary on the Confessions of St. Augustine. However, his critics excoriate his portrayal of Augustine as less than saintly.

St. Augustine will rise again after this bout of historical criticism because the positive aspects of his legacy, his passionate devotion to Christ, his attempts to build a theology on scripture, the constitution of the human being as being body and soul, and the power of love, will, and memory will all come to the fore once again. From time to time St. Augustine may suffer from our ambivalence, but he is the pivotal ancestor that believers and non-believers in the post-modern world cannot deny.

Take a look at O’Donnell’s profile on the Georgetown University website and select some of the reviews. It’s an eye opener.

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Posted by on Aug 23, 2007

Harden Not Your Heart

Many years ago I was teaching a 5th and 6th grade religious education class (otherwise known as CCD in Catholic circles). It was a lively group of children, many of whom were quite outspoken. We gathered weekly in a church hall after their regular school day. I always let them move around a bit, talk with each other and work on a cross stitch project while I was getting the space ready for our class. It helped them transition into the time we would spend together. It also helped them get to know each other, because they came from four or five different schools.

One particular day, a very lively, expressive girl, I’ll call her Marcie, decided that she didn’t like something I had said in greeting or in calling the group together. I don’t remember now what it was, but none of the other children thought anything of it.

When I called the children to gather in a circle for our opening prayer verse and song, Marcie joined the circle but faced away from the rest of us, towards the outside, saying she wasn’t going to be part of the group because she didn’t like what I had said.

It’s not often that a teacher gets such a perfect example handed her on a platter, so I shamelessly moved ahead and used it! We were, after all, studying the sacraments, including Reconciliation, that year. I asked the other children to look at Marcie and notice what she was doing. She had chosen not to be part of the group and had turned away from us. We had not turned from her. None of us had rejected her in any way. It was her choice to turn away and would be her choice to turn back to join the group. That is the way it is between us and God. God never turns away from us. We may choose to turn from God — and we are the ones who can choose to turn back at any time. God will never force us to act in either direction. It’s entirely up to each of us.

And what did Marcie do while I was speaking? Before I finished the first sentence, she had turned back to the group and was apologizing to all of them for giving me the chance to make a “religion” lesson out of what she had done. They were quick to make her feel at ease again.

I remembered Marcie and that day today as we prayed the Psalm at Mass. “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your heart.” (Ps 95:7-8) God’s voice calls us. I hope we can respond as quickly as Marcie and the other children did to join the circle listening to His voice.

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Posted by on Aug 13, 2007

Edith Stein – A Woman For All Seasons

August 9 is the feast of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was not only a Carmelite nun who went to her death at Auschwitz but also one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century, Edith Stein.

The broad outlines of her life are well known. The cherished youngest child of a Jewish family, the brilliant atheist student of Edmund Husserl converts to the Catholic faith after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. She tries unsuccessfully to get an audience with the Pope in order to encourage him to issue an encyclical denouncing anti-Semitism. Edith Stein joins the Carmelites and becomes Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross as the Third Reich begins its restrictions on German Jews. Her order tries to protect her by moving her to the Netherlands. She is once again in danger after that fall of the country to Germany. The Dutch bishops issue a statement denouncing Nazi anti-Semitism. In response the Nazis round up Catholic Jews including Edith Stein and send them to Auschwitz where she was gassed to death within a week of arrival.

Edith Stein resonates deeply within the major human questions facing faith and society today. Her life and work dealt with the foundations of human self-awareness, the ability to know, and empathy. Relations between Christians and Jews, the identity of Jewish Christians, the response of the Catholic Church to the holocaust were personal issues for Edith Stein and are major social and religious challenges today.

At the turn of the century, while Freud was trying to understand neurosis in women, Edith Stein was among a vanguard of scholars interested in the nature of human understanding and consciousness. Today we would say that she was interested in neuroscience and psychiatry. Psychology was still a sub-discipline of philosophy. This focus on the nature of experience and awareness is called the study of phenomenology. One of her major contributions was the notion that we become aware of ourselves by experiencing the awareness and feelings of others. This is, of course, a great oversimplification. However, she rescued the ego from an encapsulated shell and posited that our sense of identity and awareness is the product of the experience of the other. The “I” is not something I create but is created in the process of interaction based on feeling what the other feels, knows, and senses.

The term in German is broader than our sense of empathy. It is an experience of oneness or solidarity, we might say. This solidarity with her Jewish identity did not leave Edith Stein and it was her wish that her baptism would not spare her from the fate of her fellow Jews. Her courage derived from a faith in the cross and hope in the resurrection for all people even those who put her and her family to death. The realization of the self in selfless service – from philosophy to a life that might have been called tragic if it had not been suffused with so much meaning.

If you have an interest in philosophy, I recommend Marianne Sawicki, Ph.D.’s Personal Connections: The Phenomenology of Edith Stein.

American Catholic has an easy to read summary St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

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Posted by on Aug 3, 2007

Theology in Harry Potter?

So how can I follow posts on heavy topics such as the meaning of human suffering (Richard Rohr, OFM) and the consciousness of God in all things (Ignatius of Loyola) with Harry Potter? A lot of Christians would say the whole series is anti-Christian, pro-witchcraft, and neo-pagan, although some naysayers have had a change of heart. When we look at the basic themes, there is a similarity. Rohr’s focus on the discovery of God “at the bottom,” when everything has gone wrong, finds its echo in the story. The presence and activity of God in our daily lives, as taught by Ignatius Loyola, and our being led by the Spirit, finds an analog here as well.

Lev Grossman in his July 21, 2007 Time Magazine pre-publication review of the seventh and final volume of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, summarizes the “cosmology of the Potterverse”.

Though thematically speaking it’s a sidelight, it’s one of the key differences between Rowling and her great literary forebears. Rowling has been careful to build Harry up from boy to man, student to leader, but she has been equally attentive to the task of breaking Dumbledore down, from a divine father-figure to a mere human. Her insistence on this point is a reflection of the cosmology of the Potterverse: there are no higher powers in residence there. The attic and the basement are empty. There may be an afterlife, and ghosts, but there is certainly no God, and no devil. There are also no immortal, all-wise elves, as in Tolkien, nor are there any mystical Maiar, which is what Gandalf was (what, you thought he was human? Genealogically speaking, he’s closer to a balrog than he is to a man.) There is certainly no benevolent, paternal Aslan to turn up late in the book and fight the Big Bad. The essential problem in Rowling’s books is how to love in the face of death, and her characters must arrive at the solution all on their own, hand-to-hand, at street level, with bleeding knuckles and gritted teeth, and then sweep up the rubble afterwards.

According to Grossman, there is no God in the universe of Harry Potter. To quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Well that about wraps it up for God.” Or does it?

Earlier in his review, Grossman reviews the primary theme of the series:

Deathly Hallows is of course not merely the tying up of plot-threads, it’s the final iteration of Rowling’s abiding thematic concern: the overwhelming importance of continuing to love in the face of death. On this point, at least, we’re not waiting for a new wrinkle. Dumbledore has been schooling us on this subject since Goblet of Fire, if not longer — when in doubt Rowling tends to err on the side of quashing ambiguity, both telling and showing when one would probably do. So we have known for a while that Voldemort cannot love, that he has been spiritually ruined by his parents’ deaths, and he will kill anyone to stave off his own death. Harry, though also an orphan, has found the courage to love. “Do not pity the dead, Harry,” a wise man tells Harry in Deathly Hallows. “Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love.”

Grossman does not give the ending – or even much of the story – away. So after reading his review, my hopes for a theology of Harry Potter appeared to meet the fate of most of my bright ideas. Nevertheless, I mentioned it to my in house Potter expert, my 14 year old Rosie. Her answer was prefaced by that sort of perplexed look she inherited from her mother prior to asking me to get down – very carefully – from my cloud. Her question was obvious. “How can there be a theology if there is no God in the series?”

Although my intellectual backhand has never been very good, I can sometimes get it to return the ball over the net. “Well,” I said, trying to sound neither too defensive nor too academically pompous “some German theologians published a paper on the theology of Harry Potter some years ago, so…” The flash in her eyes indicated that I was getting into the forbidden “lecture zone,” so I knew I had 5 milliseconds to change the topic before I got the dreaded wrinkling of the eyebrows, signifying an impending system lockout heralded by the morning comics coming up to somehow mask the rolling of the eyes that burned through the newsprint anyway.

Deciding that a diplomatic back channel through a third party might give me a chance to make my argument, I pivoted by gaze to my wife Kathy, whose eyes came up from her morning toast with her best “to the rescue” look of quizicality. I made my case.

In “Harry Potter and the Art of Theology 2” Wandinger, Drexler, and Peter (2005) present their analysis of an implicit theology.

J. K. Rowling’s novels are read as containing an implicit theology that is essentially Christian. We argue this case here for a theology of sacrifice and the novels’ allusion to a Messianic calling of their main character.

I pointed out that the basic themes were all there, even if they were buried beneath the post-modern, post-Christian rubble of a 21st century deconstructed worldview.

A few days later, after we had read the final book, I sat down at the table and Rosie said, “Do you always look so smug when you are right?” She continued “a sacrifice — he goes willingly to save others – a resurrection of sorts.” Flabbergasted and delighted, the only thing that I could think to say was the obvious. “I inherited it from my children.”

Post Script:

Behold A Phoenix, a blog about the Christian values in the Harry Potter series takes on Grossman’s atheistic interpretation and counters it with Rowling’s views as quoted in a Vancouver interview. The author declares that she is a Christian and that her admission would probably be more disturbing to the Christian right than to athiests. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows appears to reflect very central Christian themes of faith, love, and hope in the face of death and trust in the resurrection. Will Rowling be the new C.S. Lewis?

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