By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Chesterton once remarked that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. This suggests some thoughts regarding the philosophical systems produced by modern intellectuals. The Germans’ idealist tradition is especially notorious for producing these systems, but it is far from unique in this regard.
The kind of thought I have in mind here is characterized by huge labyrinthine systems. Those of us so unfortunate as to have attempted to read the works of these thinkers get hopelessly lost (reminding me of a remark I once made about Proust’s sentences — that you can get lost in one of them and it will take hours to find your way out — if you are lucky).
I would suggest that the authors as well as the readers of idealist tomes experience this. They are what college students call “heavy” books. A system is a heavy burden to bear when you try to force all of reality into it. Compare the systems created by Kant and Hegel to the easy familiarity with the order of creation found in the works of people like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton.
There is something that happens after you spend a number of years at least trying to be a serious Christian — you begin to notice that you are living, at least at times, in a rather strange region located along the border between Heaven and Earth — the meeting between time and eternity, the “point of intersection of time and the timeless,” becomes real for you, at least at moments.
For example: An immature Christian will pray, but usually without any strong conviction that his prayer is being heard. But later, he may come to a time when he gets hints that his prayer actually connects to something beyond. Somewhere around the onset of middle age, for instance, I began to notice that here and there, when I prayed for someone, something happened that at least looked like a result. More than once I have prayed for a dying person who had been alienated from the Church for a long time, only to learn, after the person’s death, that, not long before that event, he had asked for a priest, received the sacraments, and died peacefully. It really happens.
The experience of conversion is also a kind of revelatory experience. My youth was marred by the fact that I had become obsessed with certain anti-Christian ideas (often in the form of “liberal Christian” theology) that, on some level, I knew to be anti-reality. Yet instead of rejecting them, I struggled for years to force reality to fit the ideas (this is what happens with totalitarian ideologies — the leaders try to force human beings and human behavior to fit the ideology and when they obstinately resist, they kill them).
After several years of obstinately struggling against reality, it suddenly occurred to me to turn around and, instead of looking to the ideas (ideology, really) to tell me about reality, to look at reality and see what it could tell me about itself. Suddenly, all kinds of things made sense and didn’t require complex, convoluted explanations (see the note about system builders, above).
False, distorted ideas and reality don’t go together. When you try to fit them together, it doesn’t work. One or the other has to go — reality or the false ideas. When you choose the false ideas and struggle to make them fit reality, you know instinctively that something is wrong. When you choose reality, you know instinctively this choice works, hence something is right. This is an experience of freedom. It is as if you are in a prison and suddenly look out and see the earth and the sea and the heavens and realize that the prison gate isn’t locked and all you need to do is to get up and walk out.
Dostoyevsky is excellent on this. In his novel Demons (more commonly translated as The Possessed) we see the false ideas of the so-called Enlightenment as demons which take possession of certain people and enslave them. Now, Dostoyevsky may have been speaking figuratively in comparing these ideas to demons. Or maybe not. He, after all, was an Orthodox Christian who believed that demonic possession was a reality.
At the very least, they reflect serious demonic influence on the minds and souls which accept them. If angels are pure forms, pure disembodied ideas, then so are the fallen angels, except that in their case, the ideas are twisted and distorted.
So let us pray to be delivered from them and vow never again to be enslaved by them. Long live Christ the King!
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Many Catholics today are fond of contrasting the authoritarianism and arrogance of the pre-Vatican II Church to the openness and freedom of the post-Vatican II Church. Without dismissing this picture out of hand, a couple of points need to be made:
While there is some truth in the accusation of arrogance leveled at the pre-Vatican II Church, it is a partial truth. All of us (by which I mean those of us over 60) remember priests who would chew penitents out mercilessly, sometimes making them so afraid of Confession that they never returned, and bishops who would tolerate no questioning of their decrees, especially not by the laity. There were also wonderful priests and bishops who saw their role in the Church as one of service to all, who didn’t take themselves so seriously as to preclude having a sense of humor — like Chesterton’s angels, they could fly because they took themselves lightly.
Think of Archbishop Sheen and of Pope Pius XII, who, while dismissed as an authoritarian and a reactionary by many, was really not so. He was certainly more formal in his public manner and more attached to Vatican protocol. After all, he was Pope before his Successors began to loosen up some of these externals. He initiated liturgical reforms in the 1950s. He helped to save hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, using up his personal wealth in the process. Friends recall a kind, affable man with, yes, a sense of humor.
In contrast to this picture, it has been my observation throughout the post-Vatican II years that there is no one more authoritarian than a liberal bishop. He will get up and tell his flock that he is their waiter, there to serve them, but he loses no time lowering the boom on anyone, priest or layman, who dares to question anything on his liberal agenda.
The norm for the exercise of authority in the Church comes from two passages in the Gospels, Matt. 20:25-29 and Mark 10:43-45. I will quote Matthew:
“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”
This is normative, but because the Church is made up of sinners, we again and again fall short of Christ’s teaching. And we again and again try to return to faithfulness to that teaching. That is why the Church, throughout her history, has repeatedly needed reform. It is the wheat and the tares allowed, by God’s mysterious will, to coexist until the end of time.
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(© 2017 George A. Kendall)
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