paul j. griffiths

This past Thursday (19 November 2009), Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, gave an address at the Gregorian University in Rome as part of an event celebrating the centenary of the birth of Cardinal Willebrands, the first President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. In it, he made a distinction between first-order theological understandings of the Church, on which he thinks that there has been considerable convergence between Anglicans and Catholics since the Second Vatican Council; and second-order questions, the answers to which still divide, but  consensus about which, he thinks, is not as “vital for its [the Church's] health and integrity” as is that about first-order questions.

He distinguishes three putative second-order topics: the question of authority in the Church; the question of Petrine primacy; and the question of the relations between local churches and the universal Church. And he notes that the fundamental issue is the importance of these (and perhaps others), because it is about them that Anglicans and Catholics are divided. How can we, he asks, “properly tell the difference between ’second order’ and ‘first order’ issues”?

This is the right question. Williams clearly thinks that the three divisive topics he identifies are second-order, and that in light of agreement about the first-order theology of the Church differences about them should not remain a barrier to (some form of) sacramental unity. He asks of those who disagree with him that we provide a theological account of why what he thinks are second-order questions have sufficient theological importance that they ought to remain church-dividing.

I think he is wrong. Brief comments on authority — not just the authority of the Bishop of Rome, but also magisterial authority in general — may point to why. Obedience, I suggest, is intrinsic to filial holiness and communion with other believers, phrases Williams uses to identify first-order agreements about the Church’s nature. To separate obedience from filial holiness and communion by calling the former second-order and the latter first-order is already to set off in the wrong direction. As a Catholic I am required, by the doctrine and discipline of the Church, to exhibit obsequium religiosum to magisterial teaching, whether that comes in the form of personal instruction from my bishop, or in textual form from the Roman curia or the bishops of my national conference teaching in concert. (I here make a complex matter simple, perhaps too simple, for magisterial teaching comes in grades and kinds, and the response required to it also does; but a simplified version will suffice for the simple point I wish here to make.) That kind of submissiveness to authority, which is an enacted acknowledgment of heteronomy and dependence in matters intellectual and practical, is inseparable from sanctification — just as, to use a very imperfect analogy, submissiveness to the authority of my teachers in mathematics and to the community of mathematicians whose wisdom they have received and passed on to me is necessary for the development of mathematical skill.

Recall that vows governing the religious life typically include a promise of obedience. Those who are married know that such a promise belongs also to married life, whether made explicitly or not. Obedience is a feature of human life, and its enactment requires institutional forms. Obedience in an institutional vacuum is not possible.

Ecclesial obedience is, therefore, not a second-order issue. It is ingredient to filial holiness and communion. There are then two consequent questions. The first is practical: where, among the various ecclesial communities, are there structures that make enacted obedience possible? And the second is theological: where, among the various ecclesial communities, is Christ present in such a way that obedience to him is most fully possible? The answer in both cases is the Roman Catholic Church, the community of the baptized in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. The Anglican Communion has, effectively, no institutional forms to which obedience is possible. And it is Catholic doctrine that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, which answers the second question.

None of this calls into question the importance of theological convergence on the ecclesiological questions that Williams identifies as first-order. That convergence is indeed very important. Neither does it mean that entering into full communion with the Bishop of Rome requires abandonment of all local particularities: the question of how, exactly, to construe the relations between center and periphery is one of constant negotiation within the Catholic Church. And it certainly does not mean that the already-baptized need conversion in order to become Catholic. What they need is, rather, a clearer recognition of the telos of what they already are. But it does mean that there is a theology of obedience and a corresponding theology of authority which is not incidental to ecclesial identity. An act of submission belongs properly and essentially to the acceptance of the vocation of a Christian; and the partial forms of that act possible outside the Catholic Church yearn for fulfillment, even when that yearning is hidden from those who make them.

Some autobiographical reflections of a rather disjointed kind can be found here, in an essay published in The Christian Century on 3 November 2009.

My essay on what it might mean to call any desire natural, and why we’re better off not talking in that way, can be found here, in the current (December 2009) issue of First Things.

The Song of Songs is the Church’s original poem of desire. Its scarlet thread is everywhere in the poetry of the West, as witness these lines from Micheal O’Siadhail’s ‘Love Song’, from his Love Life (2005).

Fragrance of your oils.

L’amour fou. Such sweet folly.

Your haunting presence

Distilled traces of perfume.

Resonances of voice

Dwell in my nervous body.

My skin wants to glow,

All of my being glistens.

Divine shining through.

Your lips like a crimson thread,

Your mouth is lovely …

You’re all beautiful, my love.

Honeyed obsession

Of unreasonable love.

Pleased, being pleased,

I caress this amplitude,

Eternal roundness.

Voluptuous golden ring.

Sap and juices sing

Eden’s long song in the veins.

Spirit into flesh.

The flesh into the spirit.

A garden fountain,

A well of living water,

Flowing streams from Lebanon.

O’Siadhail’s beloved shapeshifts back and forth into the Song’s beloved: his italicized lines are from the Song. The poet’s love for his beloved, like the Lord’s love for you, is a honeyed obsession, utterly unreasonable. All of my being glistens: with the glister of the Lord’s radiance. This love solves no problems, provides no solutions. It is the transfiguration of all difficulties, not their removal.

Is it contradictory to deny creaturehood of any particular being, where ‘creaturehood’ means ‘having been brought into being ex nihilo by God’? To think that it is would be to make creaturehood essential to every being. To think that it is not would be to make creaturehood contingent to at least some beings. The latter view seems to me both false and incompatible with the grammar of the Christian faith, which understands each being as necessarily a creature. I was surprised, therefore, to find the view canvassed — though not, so far as I could tell, coherently so — by some Thomists at last weekend’s (13-15 November 2009) meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Society in New Orleans. The matter is important because (inter alia) on decision about it hinges the meaningfulness of talk about beings separated from talk about creatures.

The Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962) narrowly passed in the House yesterday (7 November 2009). Many things remain to be done before it or anything like it can become law — so many things that sclerosis is too mild a word for the absurdist nightmare of our legislative system (if this is democracy, why are we so eager to export it)?

But something has happened, and although no one could love the bill’s prose, there is a trace of beauty in what it promises. Tens of millions of those who live and work in the USA have, at the moment, nothing better than the desperate emergency-room visit when they are sick. They may have something better if something like this bill eventually becomes law — the possibility of regular visits to a doctor, of prenatal care, of treatment before an illness has reached the point of irreversibility, and so on.

Even the trace of such a vision (and there’s scarcely more than that in H.R. 3962) should make every Catholic rejoice. This is all the more so since the bill passed yesterday does include the Stupak-Ellsworth-Pitts-Kaptur-Dahlkemper-Lipinski-Smith Amendment aimed at preserving the status quo ante with respect to federal funding of abortion. This means (or may mean if it remains in place, which is far from guaranteed) that abortions will not be funded, either directly or indirectly, with federal funds, and that is good. Healthcare has nothing to do with the deliberate taking of life.

But the Act, as it now is, remains very imperfect from a Catholic (and indeed from any reasonable) point of view. I hope very much that as the legislative process winds wearily onward through the next month or two we — we Catholics, that is, and, perhaps even we Americans — can keep the two-point vision given below in mind. It’s a simple one, and although it won’t answer all particular questions, it will, if you let it, shape your imagination in such a way that you’ll be able to see what counts and what doesn’t, what this debate should be about and what it shouldn’t.

1. Healthcare is about health. The deliberate taking of life has nothing to do with it.
2. Healthcare is for everyone who needs it. It should be easily available to everyone who lives here. Other matters (immigration status, employment status, insurance coverage, capacity to pay) are a diversion.

In 2003, Carlos Eire, who holds a chair in history and religious studies at Yale and has written widely on early modern history and religion, published Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, a memoir of his early childhood in Cuba, which he left in 1962 at the age of eleven and to which he has not since returned. That memoir is intense and elegiac, saturated with the sensory and emotional memories of childhood. Eire is a man not only capable of remembering and writing about the smells and tastes and feelings of his childhood. He is also outraged by the fact that he must die, at least if that means he will then cease altogether to be; this outrage is among the central themes of his new book, A Very Brief History of Eternity. Perhaps these two are in some way connected? The texture and savor of my childhood are almost completely lost to me—it is a series of tableaus, static and unconnected, occupied by someone I don’t recognize—and at the same time I find the thought of my death quite appealing, something to be welcomed even if not sought. Eire is the mirror-image, suggesting that a certain view of childhood might go hand in hand with a particular view of death: the better you recall, or think you recall, a paradisial childhood, the more the approach of death will seem outrageous and frightening. Might this in turn suggest that dwelling on (imagining) a childhood in the garden is something better not done? There are cherubim with flaming swords who warn against that sort of thing.

I’ve visited and spoken at many Catholic and Protestant universities and colleges in the USA. A useful generalization: the Protestant institutions, especially the more evangelical ones, are likely to provide bad food, no wine, and excellent technology that works. The Catholic institutions, especially the more orthodox ones, are likely to provide good food, good wine, and technology that doesn’t work or that no one present knows how to make work. There are exceptions: this is a generalization, after all; but I think it a suggestive one.