Thinking Inside The Box

• 7 years ago

By DEACON JAMES H. TONER

Praise, prizes, and promotions come to those who think innovatively and creatively; accolades come to those stalwart enough to think outside the box. That prepositional phrase means imaginative and progressive thinking — an attachment to and a love for novelty, as well as a yearning to listen to the tender counsel of the heart.

There is something to this, of course, for, as Blaise Pascal famously wrote, “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” The exact ratio between love and logic is something which poets and philosophers have tried to work out for centuries.

Let’s concede the importance of passion; it has its place. But as the frenzy of the lynch mob must not be preferred over the rational deliberations (one hopes) of the jury, so must emotion not be elevated over prudential judgment.

“Strong feelings,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “are not decisive for the morality or the holiness of persons; they are simply the inexhaustible reservoir of images and affections in which the moral life is expressed. Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, evil in the opposite case….Emotions and feelings can be taken up into the virtues or perverted by the vices” (n. 1768).

Emotion is meretricious, not meritorious; it can goad us, but not sagely govern us. By definition, emotion cannot urge us to dispassionate study of the past, in an attempt to preserve and apply “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold put it, but, rather, it exalts whirligigs of infatuation. One remembers the disordered passion of the men who lusted after Susanna: “They perverted their minds and turned their eyes away from looking to Heaven or remembering righteous judgments” (Daniel 13:9).

Here the warning of the French essayist Charles Péguy is instructive: “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” Or, we might add, sufficiently liberated or modern or uninhibited or able to think outside the box. One does wish to be among the avant-garde crowd, after all.

I would contend, in fact, that thinking outside the box is a source, if not the source, of the moral and mental problems of the contemporary Church. Here I mean more than the kind of autonomous thinking which takes as its theme song Frank Sinatra’s My Way (not God’s Way). I mean the kind of ideological thinking which insists that we can climb to the tops of the clouds and be like the Almighty (Isaiah 14:14). This is Pelagianism on steroids.

What is so often prized as path-breaking thinking may be merely a narcissistic reflection of the self, which, in modernity, has become divinized. “To thine own self be true” was, after all, the ambiguous advice of the shallow Polonius. The Christian, though, repairs to Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Never rely on what you think you know” (3:5).

To suggest that Catholics think within the box may be wiser than it first appears, especially when we think of the “box” as the tabernacle. “Our way of thinking,” wrote St. Irenaeus, “is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking” (CCC, n. 1327).

If we are well advised to test everything and to hold fast to what is good, by what measures do we test thoughts? I believe that we do so by thinking “in the box”; that is, we are called to think eucharistically, measuring what we think, say, and do by sacred Tradition, sacred Text (the Bible), and sacred Teaching (the Magisterium). Here we encounter the paradox of freedom, for we enjoy liberty only when we are devoted to what is True. And Christ is Truth.

In the Covenant Box (Heb. 9:4) were the manna (the Bread of Life), Aaron’s rod (priestly authority), and the Tables of the Law (Commandments) — the guides and guardians of what we ought to think and say and do. Chesterton recognized this and became Catholic in 1922, writing that to “become Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think.”

The same Blaise Pascal who praised the heart also believed: “Our whole duty consists in thinking as we ought.” Unless we are firmly grounded in virtue, we will be “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles” (Eph. 4:14).

“To boldly go where no man has gone before” may be a worthy mantra for a TV show about space exploration. It is, however, a recipe for chaos and catastrophe in the moral life. Catholics must ever call to mind the wisdom and virtue of thinking “inside the box.”