Contemplating the Past

Beginning at Jerusalem: Five Reflections on the History of the Church, by Glenn Olsen

A Featured Book Review by Thaddeus J. Kozinski

"This is our situation. We have largely lost the sense of God and therefore do not understand man. . . . We can hardly imagine ourselves freed from the confines of immanence and increasingly think of life not as a gift or a sacred trust but as something to be manipulated, even reshaped or redefined, by reconfiguring matter. Those of us who remain Christian are filled with a profound uneasiness made possible by being able to compare a culture in which God was at the center with one from which God has largely been removed. We sense that no amount of miscellaneous retrieval of the past will heal our decenteredness." (pp. 15-16)

If you resonate at all with this grim but trenchant assessment of our present age as a kind of prison, you have already, to some extent, broken out; for, the capacity of discerning loss presupposes awareness of a previous possession. We traditional Catholics have been gifted with an immemorial Mass where God is at the center, and we know that the manifest decenteredness of so many souls today and of our society as a whole has something to do with traditional liturgy having being relegated to the periphery, both in the world and in the Church.

Yet, are we not able to go beyond a “miscellaneous retrieval of our past?” by immersing ourselves in the traditional Mass? Yes, the immemorial Mass serves as an inexhaustible, archaeological treasure of Catholic cultural history, and in its timelessness, we transcend history as well to break the “confines of immanence.” However, grace builds upon nature, and if we desire to retrieve our entire Catholic tradition and effectively make it our own, the grace of a historically suffused liturgy must be built upon the nature of a historically informed mind. In this sense, Glenn Olsen’s Beginning at Jerusalem: Five Reflections on the History of the Church is not only an outstanding study of Catholic history, but it is also indispensable preparation for Mass.

Glenn Olsen, a professor of history at the University of Utah and a specialist in medieval history, has written a Church history that is at the same time a Catholic theology of history and a history of Catholic theology; it is a vivid portrayal of our Catholic Tradition that is amazingly erudite and pervaded by a traditional sensus Catholicus; he also displays a robust and properly belligerent resistance to any kind of ideological compromise or intellectual dishonesty. His writing and thinking bring to mind Christopher Dawson, Etienne Gilson, and Christopher Ferrara.

What Dr. Olsen gives us is, in his words, a “contemplation of the past” in which we can “compare a culture in which God was at the center with one from which God has largely been removed.” Olsen writes:

The easy answer to explain the increasing unintelligibility and unfamiliarity of central Christian teachings and practices in our culture is that the age is opposed to them. Schools, parents and pastors are disinclined to teach them and often themselves lack the education to do so. The more discomfiting answer is that these teachings took form in a very different historical situation, but also in important ways depend on that earlier world. The answer implies that our problems are not “merely” doctrinal or moral, but cultural. If this is so, our task must in some degree be recovery of certain habits of being, certain ways of looking at the world, which are not usually perceived as, strictly speaking, at the heart of Christian faith (11).

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The easy answer to explain the increasing unintelligibility and unfamiliarity of central Christian teachings and practices in our culture is that the age is opposed to them. Schools, parents and pastors are disinclined to teach them and often themselves lack the education to do so. The more discomfiting answer is that these teachings took form in a very different historical situation, but also in important ways depend on that earlier world. The answer implies that our problems are not “merely” doctrinal or moral, but cultural.

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Insofar as “the later world” has neglected to incorporate earlier neglected to incorporate earlier “habits of being” into its new cultural forms, and insofar as familiarity with these past habits of being is necessary to appropriate the supernatural doctrines and practices contemporaneous with them, then in our modern and now postmodern age, both predicated upon the explicit repudiation of tradition or history as a source of truth, we are at grave risk of becoming incapable of grasping vital Catholic teachings. Yes, we may possess the Tridentine mass and the Catholic Catechism, but without some way of coming into contact with the historical epochs in which authentic Catholic liturgy and doctrine developed, we are bound to perceive and practice the Faith through the distorting intellectual and imaginative lens of the contemporary zeitgeist. Contemplation of history can help us to remove this lens, as Olsen suggests: “A past age appears less something from which in isolation we can retrieve this or that element than an integrated whole that we may place before our imagination to suggest alternatives to our own times” (14).

Yet, there is a memory hole at the center of our consumerist, individualist, technocratic, illiterate and anti-historical culture. But even so, Olsen sees a peculiar redemptive possibility in the modern eclipse of the past. “There is a sense,” he writes, “in which loss of the past is a precondition for its reappropriation. It is only when we have developed a new world, with its own logic and coherence, that we have a contrast by which we can at least in part understand what we have lost” (14).

There is an obvious application of this principle to the loss of our Catholic liturgical tradition. Could it be that the post-Vatican II suppression of the Tridentine Mass was providential, a God-permitted evil from which the Church could finally gain the kind of profundity of understanding and depth of gratitude for her liturgical treasure that she could never posses absent the experience of almost losing it? Would the level of devotion, richness, and depth of perspective regarding traditional Catholic liturgy and culture, evinced in the writings of this journal, have been possible absent the post-Vatican II crisis?

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Could it be that the post-Vatican II suppression of the Tridentine Mass was providential, a God-permitted evil from which the Church could finally gain the kind of profundity of understanding and depth of gratitude for her liturgical treasure that she could never posses absent the experience of almost losing it? Would the level of devotion, richness, and depth of perspective regarding traditional Catholic liturgy and culture, evinced in the writings of this journal, have been possible absent the post-Vatican II crisis?

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Dr. Olsen’s study is divided into five chapters outlining the five major historical periods of the Church’s history. He also includes two appendices composed of beautiful meditations on prayer, as relation and as covenant drama, through a careful reading of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Olsen’s book itself is only 197 pages long, so this is obviously not an event-by-event history of the Catholic Church. Instead, Olsen gives us a historically informed theology and a theologically informed consideration of certain key aspects of the Church’s history. His primary lens is the simultaneous secularization and sacralization process at work in all periods of history, including our own. His other lenses are as follows: an evaluation of the writing of Church history itself (ancient Christianity); the development of a cosmological liturgical consciousness (late ancient and early medieval); the social, economic, and political ramifications of the Incarnation, as well as the development of scholasticism and the subjectivity of religious consciousness (high medieval); the Ignatian project of seeing God in all things (Renaissance to Enlightenment); and the problems of modernization and the Church’s relation to culture in our day.

Olsen is able to clarify and express immensely difficult concepts and complex historical dynamics with both brevity and depth, and since it is impossible to address everything the book, what follows are several passages of Olsen’s words that give expression to his most interesting and provocative ideas, accompanied by a brief commentary.

About ancient Christianity, Olsen writes:

To be ignorant of ancient Christianity is to be unaware of ways out of modern dead ends, to be impoverished in our imaginations, to be unable to make the comparisons that could lead to critical assessment of our own assumptions, and to leave much of the doctrinal heritage of Christianity a largely closed book (38).

For Olsen, there is an individualist ideology at the heart of the modern mind, one that precludes any real comprehension of ancient Christianity:

Many contemporary assumptions make it difficult to appreciate the central Christian doctrines of the Trinity, original sin, redemption through the saving act of Christ, baptism, the Eucharist, and the communion of saints. In each case, the individualism of a noncontemplative society stands between us and the appropriation of these doctrines (35).

A myth with which we are all familiar depicts the medieval world as full of ignorance, superstition, destitution, and the physical and mental anguish of a life perpetually focused on gaining a heavenly compensation for the price of an incorrigible earthly misery. But what is overlooked in this myth is the ecstatic joy that medieval man experienced knowing he was an integral part of the grand cosmic scheme of a loving God.

[T]oday we live in a world that has been largely denuded by science and technology of everything that in past times connected it to the heavens. . . . Early medieval peoples faced many material and physical difficulties, but they were not isolated from the world in ways that we are; they were not “lost in the cosmos” (43, 45).

A feeling of cosmic community was especially present in medieval liturgy:

Gregory the Great’s image of men and angels united in the earth-transcending core or column rising from the altar, the great “Sanctus” . . . stands in rather striking contrast to a certain emphasis on a horizontal sense of community found after the Second Vatican Council. This horizontality had rendered our worship mundane, unholy, and egocentric. The Early Middle Ages presents us an alternative (49).

Proceeding to the high-medieval era, Olsen sees a pronounced development of the social and political significance of the Incarnation, with its main proponent Pope Gregory VII:

What would a life be like that was unreservedly built on the gospel, as opposed to the inherited institutions of man? Gregory took the question to a new level by asking what the implications of the gospel were, not for an individual life, but for society itself (76).

The doctrine of the Incarnation, for example, mandates the harmony – not separation – of Church and state:

In such a theory, Church is not separated from the state, but distinguished from it or harmonized with it. The natural or political order has only a proper or limited autonomy, not a simple independence (81).

Olsen sees this medieval understanding of Catholic political theology as a needed corrective to the American “conservative” understanding of Church and state. Here, Olsen is at his most provocative:

Catholicism in America has been so co-opted by the “American experiment” that almost the whole spectrum of American Catholic interpretation declares, of instance, that Dignitatis Humanae, 22, that is, the “Declaration of Religious Freedom” of Vatican II rules out the confessional state. Thus liberalism rewrites and denies the explicit teaching of the encyclical tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making Vatican II mark a decisive break with that tradition and the acceptance of the liberal ideal of a state – if that is the right word – around the ideal of individual liberties. To think that other societies are somehow deficient because they have more communal values, less emphasis on liberty, or a larger agreement about religion than we do arguably is just one more expression of the combination of arrogance and ignorance that many find so insufferable in Americans. It also expresses a certain irrealism about the world, an attitude which, instead of appreciating the profoundly different ways in which various societies have developed, wishes them all to copy “the city set on a hill” . . . . Presumably in America we will continue to live in a political culture that at the first step, that is, the First Amendment, tries to prevent giving the form of Christ to the world (83, 84).

Many traditional Catholics will automatically dismiss Olsen out of hand for such “anti-American” sentiments, yet such facile dismissal of Olsen’s historically, theologically, and magisterially informed political perspective is symptomatic of exactly the kind of historical myopia that prevents even some of the most sincere traditional Catholics from grasping the practical implications of Catholic doctrine when it threatens their non-Catholic “habits of being.”

Olsen, in his chapter on the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, threatens another modern myth, namely, the tale of the “tolerant” nation-state that saved us and still saves us from the big, bad “Wars of Religion.” Olsen quotes William Cavanaugh, one of the Founders of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, whose recent scholarship has turned this tale on its head:

The “Wars of Religion” were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State: they were in fact themselves the birth-pangs of the state…to call these conflicts “Wars of Religion” is an anachronism, for what was at issue in these wars was the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance… Toleration is thus the tool through which the State divides and conquers the Church (133).

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Here the glory of God was expressed first of all neither in civic or domestic space, but in the liturgy, in an ecclesiological space that at once connected God and the soul through the altar…. The idea was not to conform the liturgy to the world, but to conform the world to the liturgy.

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Limited space forbids me to touch on the many other profound and provocative ideas in Olsen’s book, but the most satisfying to me is his treatment of liturgy and culture. Olsen thinks like a traditional Catholic, and his sympathies are obviously with the traditional Latin Mass. I conclude with Olsen’s description of the cultural vision of the Baroque era and the project of St. Ignatius of Loyola in particular. The similarities with with his project and that of this journal are remarkable:

Here the glory of God was expressed first of all neither in civic or domestic space, but in the liturgy, in an ecclesiological space that at once connected God and the soul through the altar…. The idea was not to conform the liturgy to the world, but to conform the world to the liturgy. The goal of the Baroque era was not updating that simply brought the Church into conformity to the age, but a reform of the world that followed on the reform of the Church…. If the seventeenth-century Catholic world had so many saints, this was in no small measure due to the coming together of Tridentine emphasis on attendance at daily Mass; Ignatian emphasis on an active life supported by the sacraments; and that most glorious of eschatological expressions, the Mass celebrated in a Baroque setting. This was the Catholic response to the disenchanted world of the Utopians (135-137).

[Thaddeus Kozinski, Ph.D. (cd) (pictured right), has a Masters degree in the Liberal Arts from St. John’s College and is close to completing a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University. He lives in Northern California with his wife Tami and their three children. His review article, "Contemplating the Past: Beginning at Jerusalem: Five Reflections on the History of the Church, by Glenn Olsen," was originally published in Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition (Winter 2006), pp. 34-37, and is reproduced here by kind permission of Latin Mass Magazine, 391 E. Virginia Terrace, Santa Paula, CA 93060.

Glenn Olsen (pictured left), author of Beginning at Jerusalem: Five Reflections on the History of the Church, is Distinguished Fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and Professor of History at the University of Utah.

Our thanks to Elizabeth Flow for assistance in transcribing the manuscript to electronic format.]