Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (102 page)

René Descartes's
Discourse on Method
(1637) asserted that truth can be arrived at only on the basis of what is immediately self-evident, which eliminates knowledge gained through the unreliable senses. Therefore it is impossible to really know the truth—an impossibility that condemns the human mind to skepticism. It is this skepticism that the Catholic scholastics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries went to war against, and though they wrapped themselves in the mantle of Thomas Aquinas, calling themselves Thomists, they narrowly defined truth as the unambiguous conformity of the mind to the objective truth, without any sense that ambiguity might be a property of that mind. Enlightenment science had adopted a mechanical view of the universe that eliminated God (Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zarathustra
announced the death of God in 1883). Ironically, to defend God the Thomists assumed an equally mechanical view of the universe, with a gear-like correspondence between nature and grace, subject and object, mind and truth. Imprecision, ambiguity, paradox, doubt, and mystery had as little place in the mind of a Catholic scholastic as in the mind of a catalogue-obsessed nineteenth-century naturalist.

Both are instances of what the Jesuit philosopher William Lynch calls the "univocal mind." A univocal word has only one meaning, and a univocal community has only one voice. "The basic drive behind the univocal mind," Lynch wrote, "is the tendency to reduce everything, every difference and particularity in images, to the unity of a sameness which destroys or eliminates the variety and detail of existence."
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This Catholic view of truth meshed perfectly with, indeed required, the nineteenth-century view of Catholic authority, whose role was to guard against ambiguity—which it could do, after 1870, infallibly. Once the Church, in its hierarchy, and in particular in the pope, had defined the objective truth, the duty of the Catholic was univocally to conform his or her mind to that truth.

But history has a way of challenging such ideas. The implications of Darwin's theory of evolution outran its first adherents and soon frustrated the most compulsive cataloguer. Human knowing is as dynamic as the development of species is. The absolute truth can in no way evolve or change (God as the Unmoved Mover), but what if everything else does? Then, in 1918, Albert Einstein published
Relativity: The Special and General Theory,
suggesting that neither the ground on which one stands while thinking nor the time in which one pursues a thought to its conclusion is free of ambiguity, paradox, contradiction, movement—relativity. Suddenly thinkers had a new language, based in physical observation, with which to describe the fact that every perception occurs from a particular point of view and that not even the point of view is constant. Every person is a perceiving center, and every perception is different. There is no absolute conformity of the knowing subject to the known object. Therefore truth can be known only obliquely, and, yes, subjectively.

Change is built into the way truth is perceived, and every person's perception has something to offer every other's. Therefore revision, criticism, dialogue, and conversation are far more relevant to truth-seeking than conformity to dictation from above. This flies in the face not of Catholic tradition but of
recent
Catholic tradition. For example, this existentialist framework fulfills the apophatic impulse of Nicolaus of Cusa, whose
Learned Ignorance (
1440), affirming that God, and therefore truth, can be approached only indirectly, set the stage for his celebration of pluralism.
Peace Among the Religions
(1453). Unfortunately, Nicolaus of Cusa stood by another of those roads not taken. Catholic theology spent much of the twentieth century recovering from the defensive rigidities of Counter-Reformation scholasticism, but the recovery is not complete. Vatican III must retrieve for the Church the deep-seated human intuition that mystery is at the core of existence, that truth is elusive, that God is greater than religion. "The heart of the matter is mystery in any religion," David Tracy said. "The Law is there for the Jew to intensify that sense of mystery, not to replace it. The Church is there for the Catholic to do the same."
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If mystery is at the core of religion, then ambiguity, paradox, and even doubt are not enemies of faith, but aspects of it.

This is what Abelard saw, and Nicolaus of Cusa, and John Henry Newman, for whom the truth was like a tapestry, but seen from the reverse side, with all the imprecision that implies. Newman, who, after the fact, assented as an obedient Catholic to the infallibility decree he had opposed, nevertheless insisted that the nature of truth required modesty toward oneself and respect toward all others. "He was capable of holding a position," as the theologian Gerald Bednar observes, "while at the same time admitting the validity of a system very different from his own."
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But how? Are we condemned to a mindless pluralism that is ready to equate the shallow with the profound, the stupid with the wise, the cruel with the kind, all to avoid the monotony of the "one voice," the tyranny of the univocal? Does subjectivity condemn the person to the tyranny of the self? Does subjectivity condemn the community to, in David Tracy's phrase, "the void of sheer fascination at our pluralistic possibilities"?
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Fearing the answer to those questions had to be yes, the Church set itself against democracy, and still openly regards pluralism with suspicion. But Lynch, Tracy, and others suggest that the antidote to the equivocation of modern skepticism is not the univocal but the "analogical imagination," which, in its approach to truth, as Lynch puts it, "insists on keeping the same and the different, the idea and the detail, tightly interlocked in the one imaginative act." Instead of a dualistic universe, with nature and grace impossibly alienated, or conformed into the mold of one or the other, the analogical imagination posits a world in which every affirmation contains its own "difference, without ever suffering the loss of its own identity."
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Difference, therefore, is to be respected, not condemned.

This idea, rebutting the excommunicating either-or of scholasticism, returns us to the both-and mind of Abelard, whose
Sic et Non
affirmed doubt and ambiguity as essential to the theological method. And recall that, in that crusading era, Abelard stood apart from his peers in his inbuilt positive regard for Jews, as reflected in his
Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian.
Alas, he too stood by a road not taken, but, with Nicolaus of Cusa, he lives on in the memory of the Church as a reminder that the road is still there.

Tracy explains the vivid connection between such a frame of mind and the respect for a formerly hated other: "We understand one another, if at all, only through analogies. Each recognizes that any attempt to reduce the authentic otherness of another's focus to one's own with our common habits of domination only seems to destroy us all, only increases the leveling power of the all-too-common denominators making no one at home. Conflict is our actuality. Conversation is our hope."
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Conversation is our hope. In that simple statement lies the kernel of democracy, which is based not on
diktat
but on the interchange of mutuality. The clearest example of conversation as the sine qua non of democracy is the electoral process, in which candidates literally engage in conversation with the citizenry, opening themselves so that voters can judge them, but also changing their minds in response to interaction with the public. The proliferation of town meetings and debates in recent American political campaigns exemplifies this social equality and supports it.

There is a special tragedy in the fact that, for contingent historical reasons, the Catholic Church set itself so ferociously against the coming of democracy—tragic because Christianity began its life as a small gathering of Jews who were devoted to conversation. This was, of course, characteristically Jewish, since Judaism was a religion of the Book. Indeed, that was what made Judaism unique. That the Book was at the center of this group's identity meant that the group was never more itself than when reading and responding to texts, and while the rabbinical schools may have presided over such a process, all Jews participated in it, especially after the liturgical cult of sacrifice was lost when the Temple was destroyed. Gatherings around the Book became everything. Conversation became everything. The assumption among the followers of Jesus was that they were all endowed with the wisdom, insight, maturity, and holiness necessary to contribute to the pursuit of the truth of who Jesus had been to them.

The religious language for this assumption had it that all believers were endowed with the Holy Spirit, which was seen to reside in the Church not through an ordained hierarchy but through all. That is why the apostolic writings are nothing if not manifestations of pluralism. Indeed, there are four Gospels, not one. Each has its slant, and each slant, in this community, has its place. "That there is real diversity in the New Testament should be clear to any reader of the text," David Tracy comments, and he goes on to note that the first Christians could admit the validity of positions not their own—from the charismatics to the apocalyptics to the zealots to the prophets.
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There is even a diversity of images that disclose the meaning of Jesus' life, with some giving emphasis to the ministry, some to the death, some to the symbolic assault on the Temple, some to the expected return. There are those who emphasize bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles and those who insist on the Gospel's place within the hope of Israel. And because the texts gather all of this, honor it, and declare it
all
sacred, nothing could be further from the mind of the early Church than making its subjects conform to a narrowly defined "objective truth." The Spirit was seen to be living in all, and the truth, for all, remained shrouded in mystery.

It would be anachronistic, of course, to read this as evidence of an early Church polity that was what we would call democracy. That does not mean, however, that democracy, by taking each member of the community as of ultimate worth, equal to every other, is not a fulfillment of the biblical vision that attributes just such valuing of each person to God. Isaac Hecker, the American who founded the Paulist Fathers, the religious order to which I belonged, argued that America and Catholicism were inherently compatible because of this. To Hecker, the equal rights of citizenship was a secular expression of the religious "indwelling of the Spirit" in each person. When this idea was brought to Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, Leo XIII condemned it as the heresy "Americanism." In particular, the pope denounced the idea "that certain liberties ought to be introduced into the church so that, limiting the exercise and vigilance of its powers, each one of the faithful may act more freely in pursuance of his own natural bent and capacity."
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The anathemas were nearly pronounced over Hecker himself. My own life as a twentieth-century Catholic, in dissent from a nineteenth-century Catholicism, began with my falling under Hecker's spell. Vatican III should rescind the condemnation of "Americanism," acknowledging that the "pursuit of happiness" assumes the "pursuance" of one's natural bent and capacity, and that nothing better defines the purpose for which our Creator made us.

So the answer to Pilate's question, What is truth?, matters. If truth is the exclusive province of authority, then the duty of the people is to conform to it. That answer to the question fits with the politics of a command society, whether a monarchy, a dictatorship, or the present Catholic Church. But if truth is, by definition, available to human beings only in partial ways; if we know more by analogies than syllogisms; if, that is, we "see in a mirror dimly,"
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then the responsibility of the people is to bring one's own experience and one's own thought to the place where the community has its conversations, to offer and accept criticism, to honor the positions of others, and to respect oneself, not in isolation but in this creative mutuality. The mutuality, in this community, has a name—the Holy Spirit.

The implication here is that truth is not the highest value for us, because, in Saint Paul's phrase, "our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect."
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Which is why the final revelation of Jesus is not about knowing but about loving. This, too, places him firmly in the tradition of Israel, which has always given primacy to right action. "Beloved," the author of the First Epistle of John wrote, "let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love." This statement of a biblical faith in the ultimate meaning of existence as love is a classic affirmation of what one might call the pluralistic principle: Respect for the radically other begins with God's respect for the world, which is radically other from God. In other words, God is the first pluralist. "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."
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Religious pluralism begins with this acknowledgment of the universal impossibility of direct knowledge of God. The immediate consequence of this universal ignorance is that we should regard each other respectfully and lovingly. But our clear statement of Christian openness to the other is its own revelation. The epistle just cited is attributed to John, the author of the fourth Gospel. It was written, apparently, about the same time as the Gospel, around the turn of the first century. It was addressed to Christian communities that were riven with the disputes that had come after the destruction of the Temple and with the first serious conflict between what was becoming known as the Church and the Synagogue. This plea, whatever else it referred to, concerned the tragedy then beginning to unfold—it is John, as we saw, whose Gospel demonizes "the Jews" above all. And the tragedy is underscored by the fact that in this same letter John, as if understanding already what is at stake in the conflict, begs his readers to "not be like Cain who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous."
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The tragedy, and the sin, and what must forever warn us off cheap talk of love, is that all too soon, and all too easily, the followers of Jesus were content to read these words and identify Cain with Jews.