Nicholas Knisely has kindly noted my reaction to his blog about relativism, science, and Pope Benedict.
. . . Julian is asking a basic question of any one who tries to connect the insights of modern physics and theology (and/or philosophy); “Should an understanding of the nature of reality in one field have to be accepted in another?”
The short is answer is that I believe they need to be.
I don’t disagree, but that doesn’t mean that I agree entirely. I don’t know of any requirement that one field’s insights be accepted by another. Moreover, it’s been almost an article of faith in the humanities and social sciences, since the so-called linguistic turn, that academic discourses, like cultures, are incommensurable.1 I’ve mostly thought incommensurability a wrong-headed notion, but there are cases that argue otherwise. If there weren’t, epistemology might be reducible to psychology or vice versa. On the other hand, postmodern literary criticism has owed much to Marx (especially as understood by Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Herbert Marcuse, et al.), to Freud (especially as understood by Lacan), to Heidegger (especially as understood by Derrida, Sartre, Gadamer . . .).
I also said I think uncertainty in physics and epistemological uncertainty have different bases. They come together in Kuhn’s critique and in the spate of theorists who have followed Kuhn, but one is grounded in a famous series of experiments with light and the other is grounded in a discourse that includes Kant and Hume but goes back to the beginnings of philosophy. These thoughts leave me with the partially unsatisfying observation that it is sometimes useful and possible to think across disciplines and sometimes not. Sometimes différance is not only inevitable but desirable.
I teach a course these days in which students read a variety of modern and postmodern classics in an exercise I hope will enable them to make connections between ideas they have encountered in separate domains. Recently we discussed Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return, wherein the author tells how an ethnographer, traveling in the Balkans in the 1930s, discovered a story to the effect that a particular young man had been enticed off the face of a cliff by a jealous mountain fairy. Shepherds found his body and returned it to his village, whereupon his human intended, the source of the fairy’s jealousy, uttered a formal lament in verse, “full of mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty,” which was quoted as part of the tale.
When the ethnographer discovered that the intended was still alive, though now elderly, he visited her. She gave a prosaic account of the tragedy that differed materially from the tale the ethnographer had heard and most particularly did not include the mountain fairy, though she did say that she and other women of the village “had repeated the customary ritual lamentations” at the funeral. When the ethnographer confronted the villagers with the intended’s account of the death as an ordinary accident, “they replied that the old woman had forgotten; that her great grief had almost destroyed her mind.”
I asked my students to suppose that the ethnographer had tried to interpret this tale of the unfortunate young man and the jealous fairy princess to the villagers who told it by reference to Eliade’s theory of myth. Suppose he said to them something to this effect: “Here’s what you’re doing. You’re defending yourself against the novelty and irreversibility of history and the finality of death by preserving a memory of this young man not as a particular, personal, historical being, but as the mystical, transpersonal hero of a tragedy, fusing the individual with an archetypal category.” If the ethnographer had said this to the villagers, don’t you suppose they would have thought him strange, perhaps a little crazy, just as they thought the elderly intended senile?
I’m arguing that there is a common sense that belongs to positivist ethnographers and a common sense that belongs to Balkan villagers and that they are not the same, though both seem in this case to employ a category we might call matter of fact. But I don’t mean this story as an illustration of incommensurability. I see it rather as an illustration of the perils of translation. I have no doubt that ethnographer and villagers could have sat down and smoked, shared draughts of the local brew, and found commonality. Doubtless there would have been stories for them to share (tales for them to swap), and at some point the conversation could have become like that reported by a Greek folklorist I heard speak years ago as he was traveling in Oklahoma looking for correspondences between native American music and his own native folk ballads. He described a meeting with an elderly Choctaw chief in which he (the folklorist) drummed and sang a song (which he also sang for us). Upon hearing the song, the old chief’s face broke into a thousand smiles, and he exclaimed “Indian song!” “No, Greek song!” countered the scholar. Nevertheless, there had been a meeting across incommensurability. The old chief had found that a foreign song was not Greek to him.
But there’s another lesson. In rejecting our hypothetical ethnographer’s theorizing of their story, the Balkan villagers would have been more right than wrong. It has been a dream of the geisteswissenschaften to construct a metalanguage into which the languages of common sense can be translated, a dictionary of culture like the key to all mythologies that George Eliot parodies in Middlemarch. I personally think this idea is a hangover from the culture of Latin learning, but whether it is or not an English double negative is reducible neither to Latin grammar nor to simple algebra. Resort to the dictionary produces what translators call a trot. Real translation calls upon the same sometimes tedious negotiation required by other human attempts at understanding across cultural boundaries, carried out for the most part at the level of common sense (translation is theoretically impossible, but we translate).
Which brings me to Benedict.
In the essay on relativism to which Dean Knisely refers, the Pope argues against positivist reductionism in much the same way I have here. Reductionist science naively substitutes its own categories for the categories of discourses and phenomena it rediscribes. But Benedict, in this essay, unfortunately does something very similar in claiming that a naive relativism must of necessity be the philosophical foundation of democracy. American democracy is pluralist, not relativist.
However, Benedict’s real target is relativism with respect to religion and ethics. Here, tolerance and freedom are to be mistrusted as the enemies of the supremacy of Jesus Christ, and a distinction between relativism and pluralism is meaningless. Moreover:
In the relativist meaning, to dialogue means to put one’s own position, i.e., one’s faith, on the same level as the convictions of others without recognizing in principle more truth in it than that which is attributed to the opinion of the others. Only if I suppose in principle that the other can be as right, or more right than I, can an authentic dialogue take place.
Thus, the very practice of democratic discourse becomes what Benedict calls “[t]he relativist dissolution of Christology, and even more of ecclesiology.”
I almost wish I could take Benedict’s point that reason and faith must inform one another to be the primary argument of this essay, but I can’t. I rather think the point is to defend a traditional understanding of the church, that is the Roman church, against its competitors in modern life: Kantian skepticism, secular democracy, eastern religion, new age philosophy, pragmatism, protestantism (Benedict’s chief exemplar of bad theology is Presbyterian), modernism (as exemplified by Bultman, Barth, et al.), and most particularly liberation theology. He argues in order to confound those whom he takes to be his opponents, but with respect to his own position Benedict does not argue. Rather, he proclaims.
In short, in the revelation of God, he, the living and true One, bursts into our world and also opens the prison of our theories, with whose nets we want to protect ourselves against God’s coming into our lives.
He doesn’t proclaim more than this in the essay on relativism, but he hints at the rest of the proclamation by reference to the dissolution of ecclesiology, and in one of his American homilies, he spells it out entire.
In the exercise of my ministry as the Successor of Peter, I have come to America to confirm you, my brothers and sisters, in the faith of the Apostles (cf. Lk 22:32). I have come to proclaim anew, as Peter proclaimed on the day of Pentecost, that Jesus Christ is Lord and Messiah, risen from the dead, seated in glory at the right hand of the Father, and established as judge of the living and the dead (cf. Acts 2:14ff.). I have come to repeat the Apostle’s urgent call to conversion and the forgiveness of sins, and to implore from the Lord a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church in this country.
This is traditional Papal rhetoric, expressive of solidarity with the ages,2 and the claim to be Peter’s successor is neither accidental nor without special significance for contemporary Americans who for whatever reason do not share the Roman faith. I am remembering a Catholic funeral I attended here in St. Louis recently, in which the priest, just before the offertory, explained that non-Catholics were not welcome at the altar and advised us to remain in our pews and pray for the eventual restoration of God’s church.
Americans lionize celebrities. Benedict has come and gone, having more or less poked his finger in the eye of American public life which just gave him more visibility as a public figure than he is likely to encounter anywhere else in the world. He has articulated a view of the church that recognizes neither my baptism nor Dean Knisely’s ordination. And he has proclaimed again the historic claim of the Roman church uniquely to hold the keys to the kingdom of God. His absolutism is not Kantian, but an absolutist he is; and though he seems to be trying to reinvent himself as Pope by distancing himself from the role he played as John Paul II’s grand inquisitor, he is chiefly concerned, I believe, to proclaim and maintain the authority of the church and particularly the authority of the priesthood, in a time of scandal and other stresses. His apologies to victims of sexual abuse did not criticize any bishop. Indeed, he seemed primarily to be bent upon shaping and refining a theory of American life that gives special prominence to the Roman church.
The readings of today’s Mass invite us to consider the growth of the Church in America as one chapter in the greater story of the Church’s expansion following the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
And with respect to the future:
Young people need to be helped to discern the path that leads to true freedom: . . . The challenges confronting us require a comprehensive and sound instruction in the truths of the faith. But they also call for cultivating a mindset, an intellectual “culture”, which is genuinely Catholic, confident in the profound harmony of faith and reason, and prepared to bring the richness of faith’s vision to bear on the urgent issues which affect the future of American society.
In another homily, Benedict decries the diminishment of the church’s authority in American society, “which rightly places a high value on personal freedom.” Personal freedom, that took literally ages to acomplish for ordinary persons like me and even longer for other citizens of my country, a condition whose absence continues to signal death and destruction in the world, one of the chief accomplishments of the Christian west, Benedict dismisses as paltry, even while he seems to praise it, contrasting it with real freedom, “God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free.”
One might dismiss this last claim as conventional sermonizing but for it’s context. Here is a Pope, standing on an American stage yet speaking for the ages; but the message sounds a lot like Richard Neuhaus. It’s impossible to hear it without being aware of the political baggage it carries. I live in a Catholic Archdiocese whose Archbishop has excommunicated two women for having the effrontery to be ordained Roman catholic womenpriests, who has excomunicated the board of a local Polish congregation in a property dispute, who forced a local high school to cancel a scheduled commencement speech by Claire McCaskill, whose daughter was to be in the audience as a graduate, who has threatened to deny communion to John Kerry and other politicians whose views conflict with Catholic teaching. I expect him to be elevated to the college of cardinals any day now.
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1The best single defense of incommensurability I know is Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Renato Rosaldo and Paul Feyerabend have argued persuasively on the other side. See Feyerabend’s review of Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth (Boston, 1993), in Common Knowledge 3 (Fall 1994) 16-22.
2Kathleen Hall Jamieson has written a good deal about Papal rhetoric. Her analysis of the language of Paul VI is especially useful to me here. See “The Metaphoric Cluster in the Rhetoric of Pope Paul VI and Edmund G. Brown, Jr.,” (The Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980) 51-72.