Against dumbing down religion

Something I like about the Catholic Faith is that it is simple enough to be embraced and loved by a child, yet deep enough to defy the efforts of the most erudite intellectual to fathom its depths. This is altogether fitting, in that Jesus welcomed the children to come to Him, and yet St. Paul, the protégé of the great Rabbi Gamaliel and the best-schooled follower of Christ in apostolic times, couldn't begin to fathom the mysteries of redemption, and at times almost seemed tongue-tied when trying to describe the "depths," "riches," and "glories" of the "unfathomable mysteries" of God's love.

My purpose in this post is not to question the simplicity of the Faith on one level, or its unfathomable profundity on another level, but to question the wisdom of those who, without denying its profundity, suggest that the whole mystery of the Faith should be reducible to simplicity and transparency. Some of my examples will be taken from liturgy, but the issue is much larger than this. It concerns our religion itself.

One complaint I sometimes hear about the Traditional Latin Mass is that it's inaccessible, in Latin, incomprehensible, and that it just strikes those unfamiliar with it as, at best, unfashionably strange. "People just don't want that anymore," said one priest. "I don't want to hear Latin when I go to Mass," said an acquaintance. "I want to hear English." Thus, four decades after the introduction of the new Mass, the old one strikes most people as utterly alien. (In fact, most people probably wouldn't find it much less alienating if the new Mass were celebrated in Latin with the priest facing ad orientem, the way it was first prescribed, but that's another story.)

What about this? How could it possibly be right for worship to involve a "learning curve"?! Why shouldn't we be free to worship the Lord out-of-doors, St. Francis-like, spontaneously as our heart leads us? Shouldn't worship be something straightforward and obvious? Shouldn't liturgy be "accessible," or made "more accessible" if it's not? Shouldn't we expect true religion itself to be something intuitively transparent and easily understandable?

The first thing that strikes me about this sort of response is how much it resembles the secular agnostic complaints about the Christian faith. "I have no problem with people wanting spirituality," they'll say, "but who on earth would want any part of organized religion?" Religion strikes most non-joiners as so much incomprehensible nonsense -- silly dogmas for credulous, tender-minded souls, and silly authoritarian taboos with no prima facie rhyme or reason to support them. Why shouldn't people just accept the empirical facts and forget all this groundless and repressive metaphysical mumbo-jumbo? Why waste time trying to understand it? There's nothing to understand.

The second thing that strikes me, as a former Protestant, is how similar this sort of response is to that of most Protestants when confronted with a defection from their ranks to the Catholic Church. Why would a person with any common sense want to convert to THAT religion? It's so "medieval," "authoritarian," and "superstitious"! And what's with this genuflecting and bowing and scraping in front of a wafer, for crying out loud! What could be more preposterous: God in a Ritz Cracker? Gimme a break! Spending a "holy hour" in front of an ornate Tabernacle containing a wafer, or bowing piously before a wafer carried aloft by a priest in a Monstrance! What is this but the crudest form of superstition, idolatry, and bread worship! And we haven't even mentioned all these ridiculous beliefs about contraception, celibacy, divorce, Lenten fasts, Our Lady of Fatima and the Infant of Prague! Jeepers-creepers! Become a Catholic and you have to throw your brain out the window!

The first thing any Christian believer realizes when confronted by the skepticism and ridicule of an unbelieving agnostic is that there is much about the Christian Faith that is simply incomprehensible from the outside. Things are not as they seem to be on the surface. There is a deeper interiority or inscape to the believer's perspective that simply escapes the skeptic's eye. It's not that the skeptic or the agnostic lacks intelligence. It is simply that they lack the pre-requisite eyes of faith to see what the Christian sees.

The philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein addressed this conundrum in another context by means of an illustration he called the "duck-rabbit." Seen from one perspective, the same drawing can appear to be a duck; from another perspective, a rabbit. By the same token, we may say that the Christian and skeptical agnostic confront the same data but interpret them in radically different ways. Thus, Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who garnered world fame for being the first man in space in 1961, came back to earth and declared that he did not see God anywhere. The next day, Billy Graham was reported in the newspapers as responding that, on the contrary, he had just talked to God "this morning." The same data, different understandings. They cannot both be right, of course, but how is the partisan of one interpretation going to convince the other?

The first thing a practicing Catholic realizes when confronted by the skepticism and ridicule of a hostile Protestant is that there is much about the Catholic Faith that is simply incomprehensible from the outside. Things are not as they seem to be on the surface. There is a deeper interior aspect to the Catholic perspective that simply eludes the skeptical Protestant's eye. It is not that the Protestant lacks intelligence. It is simply that he lacks the pre-requisite of faith in the Church and her authority to see what the practicing Catholic sees.

Much of what the believing Catholic holds to be true takes a great deal of hard work to understand, even for the Catholic -- such as the sinfulness of contraception, homosexuality, or divorce and remarriage; the desirability of an all-male priesthood; the goodness of such things as priestly celibacy and consecrated poverty, chastity and obedience; the indefectable authority of the Church, or the profound trustworthiness of all that the Church formally holds and teaches. But for those who are willing to sincerely seek out the answers, there are very good ones. Solid, satisfying ones; yet not ones that you would always call immediately transparent and obvious. Finding the truth often takes some work and effort.

Does this mean that a child cannot understand or love Jesus, or pray spontaneously from the heart while surrounded, St. Francis-like, by the glorious songbirds of spring? Obviously not. God can reveal Himself to the simplest child without a need for long and arduous learning and theological instruction. Does this mean that some of the most basic truths about the way to salvation cannot be summarized simply in, say, "four spiritual laws," as some Protestants (and even some Catholic priests) have done? Obviously not (although such summaries may often contain misleading omissions or distortions).

On the other hand, does this mean that the fullness of the Catholic Faith can be reduced to a personal experience of God's love, personal Bible interpretation, extemporaneous prayer, or that liturgy is at best a secondary and relatively unimportant matter? Not at all. Such a view would represent, at best, a radical rupture with Catholic tradition in its understanding of the Faith. As much as we wish to communicate the Faith to others in its essential simplicity, the fullness of this Faith is something profound and challenging, even to the finest intellects and holiest of souls. We can no more jettison two millennia of doctrinal development in Church history than we should imagine we can reject two millennia of liturgical tradition.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity was only defined dogmatically beginning with the Council of Nicea in AD 325. All the books of canonical Scripture were officially listed only sometime around the time of St. Athanasius' Easter encyclical of AD 367. The doctrine of transubstantiation was only defined dogmatically at the 4th Lateran Council of AD 1215. These truths, even if they existed in seed form since apostolic times, were not fully realized until the seeds grew, in the course of time, into the great oak trees of Church tradition.

The same is no less true of liturgy. There have been some renegade attempts to strip down the liturgy and make it something completely transparent, one-dimensional, and merely human, particularly in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. But like the doctrines of our Faith, the liturgy is something we receive, not something we cobble together. Like Scripture itself, it is part of what has been "handed down" (Gk. paradosis, Lat. tratitio). The tradition of Gregorian chant, as Fr. Fessio once discovered from a Jewish rabbi in New York, was something we Catholics inherited in a pre-Christian form from them. Neither our doctrines nor our forms of worship can be understood accurately as "banal, on-the-spot products" of committees of technical experts. They have been historically received from Catholic tradition with such reverence as from God Himself. The Eastern churches seem to have preserved more of a sense of this, at times, than we have in the West.

According to Catholic tradition, God is not transparent to our human minds, but incomprehensible. St. Thomas Aquinas states that no human concept is adequate to comprehend the mystery of God. We can know what God is like. We can know what He is not. But we have no human way of apprehending what He is. This is something that both Protestants and Catholics have historically accepted and understood about the Christian Faith: God is, strictly speaking, "incomprehensible." Does this mean that we can't love God or trust Him or have some personal relationship with Him by faith? Absolutely not. It does mean, however, that we can't begin to fathom the depths of His divine nature.

Is there a learning curve in coming to know the Christian Faith? Absolutely. Is there a learning curve in coming to understand the Catholic Faith? Yes, even more so! Is there a learning curve in coming to understand the traditional liturgy of the Catholic Church? Most certainly. There is much about our Faith and our liturgy, particularly in its traditional Latin form, that is anything but simple or transparent or easily accessible from the outside.

Is this a bad thing? No. A challenging thing, maybe; but not a bad thing. As Blessed John Henry Newman once noted, "to go deep into history is to cease to be Protestant." By the same token, to go deep into the Catholic Faith is to cease to be superficial. By conforming our beliefs to the rich resources for faith and morals in Catholic tradition, we enrich our lives beyond telling. By slowly and painstakingly submitting ourselves to the discipline of the sacred liturgy, by making its forms and prayers our own, we enrich our lives unspeakably. Our souls are conformed to Christ more fully, and we are not thrown back, like orphans, on whatever poor resources we may have to muster from the shallow puddle of our own experiences.