The bishop of Rome, in whose potestas docendi your congregation [that is, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] participates, is bound to proclaim ceaselessly: “Dominus Iesus–Jesus is Lord.” The potestas docendi, in fact, entails obedience to the faith … [Origins 39/34, 4 Feb. 2010, p. 550]

The power to teach is a real power: when it is exercised by those who have it, something effective is done: truth is taught. But in order for teaching to be effective, it must be recognized and responded to with obedience. If it is not, it cannot perform its function. Teaching without an attentive and obedient audience is not teaching but monologue, in much the same way as the exercise of judicial or legislative power in a context where it is widely ignored or disobeyed is impotent. Obedience is not the only thing required of those who recognize the power to teach; but it is the first thing, the essential condition for everything else.

The church possesses the power to teach in matters of faith and morals. The power is exercised in various forms and with various levels of intensity, but it should always prompt, among Catholics, a delightedly ecstatic submissive response to a gift given. Just as the power to teach comes in intensities, so also does the act of submission: the fiercer the embrace, the more intense the response; but whatever the intensity, the gift and the response are always of the same fundamental kind. It is one of the great needs of the church in the present age to make clearer the nature of the relation between the potestas docendi and the oboedientia it calls for; and above all to show the beauty and fullness of the intellectual life when lived within the circle of the gift of teaching and the response of obedience and its incompleteness and imperfection when attempted without that circle.

Here are some resources for the study of this matter:

• Lumen Gentium §25, in which a distinction is made between the degree of assent required in response to the ordinary teaching of the bishops as praedicatores evangelii and  doctores authentici, on the one hand (such teaching is to be accepted religioso animi obsequio); and the degree of assent required to teaching given by the Pope definitivo actu, or by the bishops speaking in concord on matters of faith or morals, on the other (such teaching is to be accepted fidei obsequio).
• The International Theological Commission’s document “On the Interpretation of Dogmas,” issued in October 1989, in which some discriminations are made among kinds of teaching and degrees of assent (see, especially, §B.II.1, §B.II.3, and §B.III.3: the ITC notes, as well, that further clarification on these matters would be welcome).
• The Professio Fidei published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1989, which contains a brief statement as to the three principal grades or degrees of doctrine, and the kind of assent that should accompany each.
• The “Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian,” issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the Feast of the Ascension, 1990, especially §§16-17, §23, in which the threefold distinction mentioned in the Professio is taken up and developed slightly.
• The Apostolic Letter Ad Tuendam Fidem, issued motu proprio by John Paul II in May 1998, in which the Code of Canon Law was modified to accord with the 1989 Professio Fidei, and in which (§§1-3) there is further discussion of the threefold distinction.
• The “Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio Fidei,” issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in June 1998, in which is given the fullest (to date) exposition of the Professio’s threefold distinction.

A homily delivered at Goodson Chapel, Duke Divinity School on the Memorial of S. Thomas Aquinas, 28 January 2010. By Paul J. Griffiths, Warren Chair of Catholic Theology. [The service was the Office of Readings for 28 January 2010, slightly abbreviated—Psalms 89-90; Deuteronomy 30:1-20; excerpt from a sermon-conference on the Creed by Thomas Aquinas]

What we’re in the midst of doing here may not be a familiar form of worship to some of you, so first a few words by way of explanation. This particular rite is called the Office of Readings, and it is one part of the Liturgy of the Hours, also called the Divine Office, as revised by the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The Liturgy of the Hours, as its name suggests, is a set of rites whose purpose it is to sanctify the cycle of the day. A part of it is said when you get up, parts at various more-or-less set times through the day, and a part before sleep. This particular part can be said at any time of the day, and among the purposes of the Office of Readings is to encourage the people of God—that’s us—to attend prayerfully to longer passages of Scripture than is the case in other parts of the Liturgy of the Hours (you might have wondered when that reading from Deuteronomy was ever going to end). Another purpose is to offer readings not only from Scripture, but also from the Christian tradition. And so the Office of Readings typically includes something from one of the saints or doctors of the church, as is the case today.

Today we heard from Thomas Aquinas, whose memorial day this is in the Catholic calendar. Thomas lived in the thirteenth century, and is regarded by the Catholic Church as both a saint, which is to say a man of exemplary holiness who is now singing the Sanctus before the face of the living God, and among the thirty-three doctores ecclesiae, which is to say a man whose writings are of enduring significance for the instruction of the church. Thomas is of significance for the entire body of Christ, too, not just for that part of it in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. Some of you will have studied this or that work by him in classes in this Divinity School; and it is both a pleasure and an honor for me, as a Catholic, to be able to stand in this beautiful chapel in a United Methodist seminary and speak to you as the Lord permits about someone whose life and thought are of such profound and exemplary significance for the universal church.

We heard today an extract from Thomas’ exposition, given late in his life, of the Apostles’ Creed. That exposition was probably given in a series of homilies to a local congregation, and so it lacks some of the formal technicality of his systematic works, for which we may perhaps be grateful. Today’s reading forms part of his analysis of the clauses from the Creed about the suffering and death of Jesus—specifically passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus, which is to say, ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.’ Thomas orders his exposition of this clause around the question, Why did Jesus suffer for us? He divides his answer into two parts. First, Jesus’ suffering served as a remedium or curative remedy for sin; and second his passion serves as an example which, as Thomas says, “completely suffices to fashion our lives … because the cross exemplifies every virtue.” The reading we just heard was largely limited to the second of these topics, that is, the cross as exemplary of virtue, as providing a template for us as Jesus’ disciples who wish to model our lives on his. Our reading did not include Thomas’ treatment of how it is that the cross remedies our sinful condition. About that he has a lot to say, and I don’t want you to get the impression that he thinks the cross of merely exemplary significance. Very far from it. But life is short and homilies even shorter (even if it doesn’t always seem so), so I won’t be speaking with you today about the metaphysics and soteriology of the cross (ah, what it is to preach in a place where I can be fairly sure that you will understand those words), so I won’t say anything more about the remedial significance of the cross.

I will instead be speaking with you about the cross as exemplary, as, indeed, the exemplification of every virtue. Savor those words and that thought for a moment—roll them around your mind’s tongue and let their sharp savor excite your intellectual palate. The cross exemplifies every virtue; the cross exemplifies every virtue; and yet again, the cross exemplifies every virtue. If you take nothing else away from this morning’s homily, I hope you might at least take that gleaming little aphorism: the cross exemplifies every virtue. Thomas really does mean this: if you attend to the cross, as the culmination of the earthly life of Jesus and as the prelude to his heavenly life, you will find in it the image of every virtue, every habit of being you need to live a Christian life. A book popular a decade or so ago was called Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Well, no; but Thomas does encourage us to think that everything we need to know can be learned by gazing at the cross and permitting it to transfix us, to pierce us through, and to fix us in the bloody, suffering image of our Lord and savior. The cross, if you take it seriously and look at it long enough will start to look back at you. And in Catholic churches it’s hard to avoid looking at the cross; every one of them has images of the stations of the cross around the walls; and my home parish, S. Thomas More in Chapel Hill, has a giant crucifix suspended from the ceiling right in front of the sanctuary; and the body on the cross is not pretty. Looking at the cross, seriously and repeatedly, will begin to crucify you. That is because it is not something passive before your gaze, but rather something actively transfixing and transfiguring; and that, in turn, is because the living Lord was crucified on it, and his passion is at the very crux of the cosmos. The cross exemplifies every virtue, yes—but it does more than that: it is itself the very archetype of the virtues, the sublimity of all virtue, that in which all virtues subsist and participate.

The cross exemplifies every virtue. What Thomas is talking about is living crosswise, the title I chose for this homily. Living crosswise is not a phrase Thomas uses, and I don’t know where it comes from. It came to me from who-knows-where on Monday afternoon as the appropriate title for these words. It’s an elegant phrase, packed with meaning, and for that reason alone very unlikely to be original with me. Originality is not to be sought in preaching, and if sought almost never found. But ‘living crosswise’ does, nevertheless, beautifully sum up what Thomas is after in his treatment of the cross as exemplifying every virtue. Living crosswise means living in accord with the cross’s wisdom, being formed by that wisdom in conformity with the one who died on it. But it also means living transverse to, across, at an angle oblique to, the ordinary direction of things. The virtues of the world do not press us toward martyrdom as the highest form of death; that death is not glamorous, and its willing embrace is a form of wisdom counter to—crosswise to—that valued by the world. Living crosswise, then, is living according to virtues unlikely to be recognized as such by the pagans. Such living, as though the cross really does exemplify every virtue—remember, that’s the phrase to take away with you today, a phrase to hold on to in times of darkness and difficulty (and aren’t they all?), a phrase to breathe in and breathe out so that it fills your lungs and aerates your blood, bringing with it the Spirit’s inspiration—the cross exemplifies every virtue—the cross exemplifies every virtue—living crosswise, then, in this way, commits you to something difficult and dangerous and likely to make you an object of mockery.

This is evident in the list of virtues Thomas provides in the reading we heard just now. He treats, briefly, love, patience, humility, obedience, and despising earthly things. These are not the virtues of the masters of the universe; they are those of the servants of the Lord, and they are difficult virtues, ones whose cultivation is wrenching. At least, this is true for me, and I suspect also for most of you. Let me take the most wrenching one of all as an instance, the one about which Thomas says the least in the passage we heard this morning—I mean obedience. It is deep in me not to want to be obedient to anyone. I am, according to my own twisted self-understanding, someone who knows better than almost everyone else what should be done and how; that means I don’t take direction well—I am happier giving it than getting it. Even so far as attending to the Lord goes, I am likely to listen and respond only to what I find accords with my own excessively elevated self-esteem. Submissive listening and rapid, active response to what I hear does not come easily—that, by the way, is English understatement for ‘I find it almost impossible to do.’ What, then, is obedience, and how does the cross exemplify it? I’ll conclude with some remarks about that as an instance, itself an exemplification, of our theme that the cross exemplifies every virtue.

‘Obedience’ means, etymologically, attentive and responsive listening to what someone else has to say to you. You hear, you understand, you act: that’s obedience. The most familiar examples are military—as the centurion who asks Jesus to heal his beloved slave says, “I say to this one ‘go’ and he goes, to that one ‘come’ and he comes, and to my slave ‘do this’ and he does it” (Luke 7:8). Thomas’ example, in the few words he gives to obedience in our reading, is from Romans (5:18), where Adam’s disobedience to the Lord’s command is contrasted with Jesus’ obedience to the demand of the cross. Scripture makes it clear that the cross was not what Jesus wanted (Luke 22:41); when he prays before the arrest and trial he asks that the chalice of suffering and blood be taken from him, but at the same time expresses his obedience to whatever the Lord wants of him. And of course the bloody chalice is not taken from him, and he is obedient to it, drinking every last drop. This is Thomas’ instance of the exemplification of the virtue of obedience by the cross.

What is this to me and to you? How can permitting the cross to transfigure and transfix us conform us to the obedience Jesus exhibited? How can we become more obedient than we are? A better question, I think, is, How can we identify the voices we should obey? This is a better question, because the question is not whether we will be obedient or not, but only to whom or to what. In fact, each of us is necessarily and inevitably like the centurion’s soldiers: we obey voices whose words we take to be authoritative without fully understanding what those voices order us to do. We are, that is to say, constituted as human beings to be obedient, to listen to vices we do not fully understand and respond to their order to jump by asking not whether we should, but only how high. In my own case, the voice I jump and dance to is most often that of my ambition and my closely linked desire to be liked or, worse, admired. I don’t say this to be maudlin, or to bare my soul before you. I say it to give you something to chew on, an instance that is not an abstraction. With it in mind you might be able more easily to think about which voices you are obedient to, whose orders you jump to. There will be such voices, voices to whose orders you are enslaved. This is a feature of being human: we cannot but be obedient in this sense, and to try to be autonomous, to relinquish obedience altogether by becoming captains of our souls and masters of our fate, is to try to do something that cannot be done. The attempt to do it issues inevitably in the deepest slavery imaginable, which is that to your own unacknowledged and occluded vices. What the cross permits is the gradual crucifixion of all authorities, all voices of command, other than that of the Lord. It shows us, graphically and bloodily, what it means to be obedient to that voice, the voice of the living God, to make that the one we jump and dance to as David jumped and danced before the Ark of the Covenant on the way to Jerusalem.

The obedience of Jesus, Thomas reminds us, brought justification into the world, and did so by means of the cross. Your obedience, and mine as we cultivate it by permitting the cross—which, remember, exemplifies every virtue—to transfix and transfigure us, cannot do that; Jesus’ obedience alone could do that. But the cultivation of obedience made possible by the contemplation of the cross, and the body on it, can, and will if you let it, conform you more closely to the paradigmatically obedient one, the one whose cross it is we contemplate. Those who enter the religious life in the sense of taking lifelong vows as members of a religious order, typically take three such vows, of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. Thomas reminds us elsewhere in his work—specifically in article three of question 104 of the Secunda secundae of the Summa Theologiae—that while obedience is not the greatest of the virtues (that is love), it is the greatest of the moral virtues because by means of it our wills are reconfigured for the sake of the Lord, and our wills are that by means of which we make use of all other goods. To reconfigure your will, then, is to reconfigure the morally most significant part of yourself. That’s why obedience is the most difficult of the three vows, the three evangelical counsels. Poverty is not usually much of a problem; celibacy, at a certain stage of life, may be rather more of one; but obedience is always the real difficulty. It is close to impossible. Obedience reconfigures the will in a fundamental way; the cross exemplifies all virtues; and therefore attentiveness to the cross will, if you permit it, make you obedient to Jesus by transfiguring and reconfiguring your will. That in turn means listening to the Lord’s voice rather than your own, an active listening that will, progressively, crucify your own. That is what it means to live crosswise, according to the wisdom of the cross and transverse to that of the world. We, as Christians, are an ecstatic people in the strict and proper sense that we live outside ourselves, in the light of the Lord; that is why it is good to learn obedience to that light by gazing at the cross upon which it was crucified.

Given this construal, natural desires may be distinguished from artificial ones. One way to do this is by appeal to spontaneity: a desire is natural rather than artificial, it might be said, to the extent that it occurs spontaneously, without anyone other than the one who has it having to do anything to bring it about, to make it operative. There are few occurrent human desires natural in this sense. This can be seen by the following thought-experiment: imagine a newborn given the nourishment it needs to survive, but otherwise kept from contact with other human beings. The child is, perhaps, fed by intravenous drip in a comfortable crib in a sterile environment, and its bodily wastes efficiently and gently removed by machine. What we know of human development strongly suggests that such a child will soon die no matter how efficiently its need for food and drink is met, and no matter how carefully protected from illness it is: we appear to need physical contact with and nurture by other human beings in order to grow and flourish. This need we share, by and large, with other mammals. If it is not met we will ordinarily die; and if we do not die, we will be stunted in all kinds of ways. About the only occurrent desire such a child will have is that for food: the sucking reflex is immediately present in most newborns, and there is no reason to doubt that it would also be in our machine-treated baby. All other desires will remain inchoate: that for the mother’s flesh and smell and touch will never be identifiable as such because the mother will never be present; that for the human face and its expression will never be actualized because there will be no human faces; and so, ad infinitum, for the language-appetite, the desire for sexual intimacy with other human beings, and the desire for the Lord.

The thought-experiment shows, I think decisively, that almost all our occurrent desires are artificial in the sense given. That is, they are not spontaneous: they require the intentional actions of human agents other than ourselves in order that they occur. We are, in this sense, more like the house in the subdivision than the tree in the wild wood: food and drink and sunshine won’t suffice; our desires have the artificing of others among the necessary conditions for their occurrence. Notice that saying this is compatible with saying that we are naturally—non-artificially, spontaneously—disposed to have many desires, including that for the Lord. But being disposed to have a desire is very different from having it, in much the same way as your automobile’s having the capacity to be driven down the road is different from its being driven down the road. In a world without drivers your car will go nowhere, no matter its mechanical excellence. So also for our desire-dispositions: without artifice, they will not occur. If, then, to call a desire natural is to say that it is not artificial, that it does not have the work of other human agents among the necessary conditions for its occurrence, the proper conclusion to draw is that there are almost no natural desires, and that desire for the Lord is certainly not among them. We are, so far as occurrent desires go, beings who eagerly await the work on us of others like ourselves; without that work, we remain, so far as desires go, all potency and no act. The same is not true, for instance, of snakes: most of them can come to maturity with all the occurrent desires proper to snakes, without the work of other snakes. It is especially characteristic of humans naturally to have almost no occurrent desires; and this, perhaps, is one trace of the imago dei in us.

What I’ve just been saying about the distinction between natural and artificial desires should direct our attention away from claims in the order of being—claims, that is, about what we are—and toward claims in what I’ll call the order of formation—claims, that is, about how it is that we become desirous of anything at all, about how our appetites are formed. If all or almost all our occurrent desires are artificial, then we need to attend closely to the artificing by which they become occurrent, or, if you prefer, the artificing by which they are moved from potency to act. This artificing can best be summed up in the portmanteau-word catechesis: we are catechized into our active desires, and because of our inchoateness as desirers, we can be catechized into almost anything.

This perhaps seems obvious. It certainly seems obvious to me. But it can easily be forgotten, and its importance needs to be underscored in order to discourage ourselves from talking in ways that suggest its falsehood. The effective absence in us of non-artificial desires means that calling some desires natural in the order of being, as when we distinguish natural from unnatural or abnormal desires, has almost no implications for how we should think about our desires as natural-opposed-to-artificial. That is: we can coherently hold together the following two claims: first, that there are many desires natural to us, in the sense that they are not unnatural, which is to say appropriate to our nature, and that these include the desire for the Lord; and second, that we have no occurrent natural desires, and certainly not the desire for the Lord, absent the artifice of catechesis. (The distinction between natural and supernatural desires lies transverse to this matched pair of claims; exploration of it would require another discussion.) Claims in the order of being, like the first in this matched pair, have in this case, as is usual, not much to do with claims in the order of formation, like the second in this matched pair. It is not uncommon to hear, or at least for me to imagine that I hear, Catholics, and perhaps especially Thomists, speaking and writing in ways that ignore this important and fundamental distinction. Just as normative claims about what is natural to us in the realm of desire have few implications for which desires are common or rare for us, so claims about which desires are proper to us have little or nothing to do with claims about how any desires, whether natural or unnatural, become active in us.

A further and final point on the grammar of the natural/artificial distinction, this one rather more speculative. It is that the degree and kind of catechesis needed to make a natural (in the sense of normatively appropriate to the kind of being we are) desire occurrent for any particular human being or group of such is very likely the same as the degree and kind of catechesis needed to make an unnatural (in the sense of normatively inappropriate to the kind of being we are) desire occurrent. That is, less technically, we don’t need more instruction to have desires we ought not to have than we do to have desires we ought. You’ll need to work just as hard to activate desire for the Lord in someone as you will to activate desire for world-domination. It’s no harder to become a Nazi than a Christian. Our deep inchoateness as desirers is what makes this true. If it is true, then expectations that it should be otherwise will be disappointed. Catechizing children into love for the Lord may in some ways be harder than catechizing them into desire to dominate and injure their peers. Much depends here upon ambient cultural factors; but in any case, if the point is true, or approximately so, it should make the Church attend even more closely than she does to the importance of catechesis.

That we are creatures of inchoate desire has been strongly affirmed by the Catholic tradition, and this is easiest to see in its embrace of the idea of habit as centrally important to an understanding of human action. Habits are acquired by repetition over time, which is also to say that their acquisition has a narrative arc and that such acquisition requires extended and repeated catechesis. To come to have a habit of being (and recall that the term habitus is linked etymologically to the verb habere) requires time, and this is as true for a habit that includes occurrent desire for the Lord as for a habit that includes knowing when to genuflect in church. Almost all our desires are habituated in this sense, which is to say that almost none is spontaneous: artificiality and habituatedness are inseparable. This is not true, or at least much less true, for nonhuman animals: a vastly higher proportion of their occurrent desires are not habitual in this sense than is the case for us. It is a corollary of the tradition’s emphasis on the importance of habit that our natural desires require catechesis in order to become operative as elements within a habit of being.

I suggested in my last that something’s being natural in the order of being has not much to do with its being natural in the order of knowing. I suggested, too, that there is equally little by way of intimacy between naturalness in the order of being and naturalness in the order of seeming: that what is the case about you or about the world need have little to do with how the world or yourself seem to you.

An instance: you may seem to yourself to be generous and yet be miserly; you may judge yourself open-handed and yet be tight. Another instance: you may seem to yourself to be captain of your soul and master of your fate and yet be a creature, radically dependent for all you have and are upon unmerited gift; you may judge yourself autonomous and yet be a beggar.

Let’s now attend to the order of catechesis or formation: by this I mean the causal nexus that produces in you your occurrent or dispositional seemings and judgments. (A seeming or judgment is occurrent if it’s active in you at the moment; it’s dispositional if it’s inactive but would become so were the circumstances to be appropriate. A pianist is always one dispositionally but only sometimes one occurrently.) Almost everything depends upon this: the world does not seem like anything to you until you have been catechized; you make no occurrent judgments about it until you have been catechized. From catechesis — hearing, learning — flows everything else. It is a remarkable (biological, genetic, natural-in-the-order-of-being) feature of humans that we require catechesis for almost everything, and that we can be catechized into almost anything.

Empirical investigation is relevant here, more so than a priori philosophizing. The range of dispositional and occurrent seemings and judgments possible for us can be determined best by studying those that actually occur. And I think it uncontroversial to say that a very wide range of such does occur. The world can seem to us like a gift of the benevolent Lord; or it can seem to us like a theater of naked power. We can seem to ourselves like dependent creatures or like aspiringly divine despots. We can judge other human beings as objects there for us to torture, or as images of the Lord there as gifts to be loved. And so, infinitely, on.

It follows at once that introspection is useless for discovering your nature, as, too, is looking at the world. There is no luminosity there, nothing about the world or yourself that coerces you into being right about them. What’s needed is good catechesis: and just as much of it will be needed to come to right conclusions about your nature — who and what you are — as to come to wrong conclusions about the same. That you are what you are — human, creaturely, adeodatus – provides you with no tendency to be right or to see rightly.

Argumentative appeals to the natural, therefore, have no persuasive purchase. To present them as if they did, or even as if they should, is to perform a contradiction. This is because the offering of such argument is itself catechetical while occluding that condition from those at whom it is directed — and, all too often, from those who offer it. To think otherwise is to have succumbed to the confusion of the true with the luminously true, as those who composed the Declaration of Independence did in judging that the truths they proclaimed were not only true but self-evidently so. What I’ve written in this post and my last does not perform this contradiction. That is because it is aware of its own catechetical function, understanding itself to lure by display rather than to coerce by knockdown argument.

How do we Catholic thinkers perform when we speak of the natural? Sometimes, I fear, we are confused, and lapse into a sub-Christian mode of discourse by appealing to what is natural in the order of being as if such appeals ought carry conviction even to those whose catechesis has gone badly. Instances and comment to follow.

A first distinction: to call something natural in the order of being is distinct from calling it natural in the order of knowing. Instance: to claim that it is natural to humans to desire God (or to know that the principle of noncontradiction obtains) is distinct from saying that it is natural to humans to know these things about themselves. You can, I suppose, coherently (though not accurately) deny that it is natural to yourself to desire God (or to know that the principle of noncontradiction obtains), even if it is true that it belongs to your nature to do the one and know the other. Not much follows here, as is usual, from claims in the order of being to claims in the order of knowing. You ought, then, to be wary of assumptions that these two orders are intimate. When you come across argument-patterns such as, it follows from that fact that p is true of you that you know that p is true of you, walk the other way: fast.

A second distinction: to call something natural in the order of being is distinct from calling it natural in the order of seeming (that is, the phenomenal order, to which phenomenology attends). Its being natural to you to be a creature, brought into being and sustained in being by the Lord, has nothing to do with what it seems to you that you are. What it seems to you that you are need have nothing (much) to do with what you are: this is because catechesis is the principal cause forming (informing) the order of seeming, and it can proceed in close embrace with what you are, or at a radical distance from it.

More distinctions to follow, deo volente. The importance of making them lies in the frequent argumentative misuse, by Catholics and others, of appeals to the natural.

Trevor’s new-ish (summer 2009) novel Love and Summer is an almost-perfect model of restrained, elegant, and very dense prose. That’s not to say his prose is hard to understand: it’s crystalline. It is to say that much is packed into it, and that if you read it attentively (and it will hardly let you do anything else) you’ll often have to pause to absorb the vistas that opened by a phrase. It’s a romance in which there are many loves, all unhappy if Hollywood or Disney provide your standard of what counts as a happy love, but each providing a vignette of what human love is and must be if the Christian account of things is right. That is, riven by its own excess, so intense that it cannot satisfy itself. The principal love story is that between Ellie and Florian, she an orphan raised by nuns, he the offspring of decayed Irish gentry. They’re in Ireland, perhaps mid-twentieth-century: it hardly matters when. Ellie is married to a man who accidentally killed his first wife and child; Florian is a creature of romantic memories (an Italian cousin) and literary hopes (stories in the head). They meet, they love, they part, neither able to fulfill the other’s hopes. The same, with variations, is true of the other lovers: the woman who was abandoned by her first and only lover; the man hopelessly in love with an imagined past; the reality of the lovers and their beloveds visible, palimpsest-like, through their hopes and imaginations. Everything is suggested, nothing made explicit: Trevor makes you work, but it is lovely work, sweetly intense, the work of entering an imagined world which is this one, sublimed.

For contrast, Vollmann’s 2005 novel Europe Central. Where Trevor values compression and suggestion, Vollmann prefers to leave nothing unsaid. Europe Central is probably something over 400,000 words long, and it is far from his longest book (that honor may belong to the recent Imperial, which I’ve not yet read). The book is about the European continent during the twentieth century, and especially about the Russo-German war of 1941-45; or, it is about totalitarianism, Stalinist and Nazi; or, it is about Shostakovich, the principal Russian character in the book; or, it is about violence and despair; or, all of these. Vollmann’s interests have long led him to write about our proclivities for excess in our mistreatment of other human beings, and the big canvas and high intensity of the place and time he treats provide an ideal focus. Almost every character in the book really existed, but Vollmann’s depiction of them is not what would be recognized as factual by a scholar-biographer. He’s after something more interesting than that, something very like what Tolstoy was after in War & Peace: the truth of war, hatred, fear, violence, and large-scale slaughter. He does it in prose that is, to my taste, considerably over-heated; and in that respect he is more like Augustine (in De civitate dei) than like Tolstoy. But he too achieves something quite remarkable, which is to get you, if you read him in the kind of half-bludgeoned trance he seems to want to put you into, to enter and understand the world lived in by mass-murderers and racists, of collaborators with evil, of those who come to see evil as good, of those who resist evil by inner migration, and of those who think they do but really don’t. And above all, he shows what the movement of steel and fire and bullets and gas and bombs forward and back across Europe between 1914 and 1945 was (or might have been) like, and in showing that he provides a figure of the fallen world, which is ours, and neither are we out of it.

Both Vollmann’s and Trevor’s characters dream as humans do, wanting what they cannot have, conjuring phantasms, and acting as if they were real. Their world, like ours, is one of violence and disappointment beyond the measure of reason, a place of the inevitable excess of these horrors, at least until Christ should come again. But each of these writers, in very different ways, shows also that there is more in the world than that, even if there is always that. There is also the beauty of the world, never erased, not even in the gas chambers, the torture pits, and the loneliness of abandonment. Christ’s blood streams in the firmament, even for those, like Faustus who have sold their souls to an imagination of Christ’s absence.

This decision is not exactly surprising. The UK is several steps further along the road of deploying civil and criminal law to constrain the free exercise of religion than is the US; and there is a long and distressing history of anti-semitism there, especially active at the moment on the British left, that makes a decision like this with respect to Jews easier than it might be with respect to Catholics or Muslims. But even if not surprising, the decision is dramatic: it shows very clearly, elegantly even, that liberal democracies are normative systems whose self-understanding requires them to tell religious people how to interpret their own doctrine and discipline. The British judiciary has now told Orthodox Jews in the UK that they may not decide for themselves who is a Jew: the courts will do it for them. (The British legislature, to its credit, opposed this decision.)

Catholics should care about this for at least two reasons. The first is that we are more intimate with the people of Israel than with any other community: without them we cannot exist, and their interests are more nearly ours than are those of any pagan state. The second is that this UK court decision shows clearly the tendency of pagan states (and the USA is one every bit as much as the UK) to arrogate to themselves the right to interpret the doctrine and discipline of the churches, and to use the law to enforce those interpretations when they conflict with those the churches offer.

Catholics of course have no business offering opinions about who is a Jew. We do, however, have a duty publicly to oppose pagan states when they require that Jewish judgments about that matter be subordinated to their own.

As the good and defensible options vanish from the table, often so quickly that it seems they were never there, the intensity of discussion about the form and shape and texture of what is in principle indefensibly bad increases. That is democracy as it ordinarily functions.

Perhaps some things will be mildly better after the reform. Perhaps more Americans will find the help they need in healing their sick bodies than do now. And if that turns out to be so, it should be celebrated. But any such celebration should be laced with tears: we will have made things worse as well as better (if better at all), and we will have done so because we cannot, collectively, see clearly,  a lack of clarity to which democracy as practiced here in this bloodsoaked land has made and is making direct contributions. Sackcloth & ashes & fasting & lament are all that is left to the Church. Contributing to public debate has done, for the Church, as much as it usually does, which is nothing at all.

For the most part, though, the text restates with care and accuracy, for an American audience, the Catholic understanding of marriage, in language more appropriate to the lecture hall or the presbytery than to the bedroom or the kitchen table. The Song of Songs, surely the best scriptural work on one of the fundamental reasons why people get married — that they are intoxicated with one another and want nothing more than the deepest intimacy with one another they can imagine or hope for — is quoted in only one paragraph. Wouldn’t a passionate meditation on the Song have been a good place to begin?

One thing the text does make clear is the deep difference between a Catholic understanding of marriage and that enshrined in American civil law. That difference is now so deep as to be almost unbridgeable. For Catholics (or at least for Catholic doctrine), marriage is sacrament and gift, participatory in Christ’s intimacy with the Church, and a proper foreshadowing of the intimacy with which we shall one day know and be known by the Lord. For American civil law, marriage is a form of contract, and one with the interesting property of being dissolvable at the will of either signatory. (Most contracts aren’t like that: try telling your bank that you’d like unilaterally to dissolve your mortgage contract.) Given such a difference, to use the same word, ‘marriage’, for both is simple equivocation. Such usage sows confusion on all sides. Imagine how confusing things would get if we thought that in advocating changes in the rules of what the Americans call ‘football’ we would have an effect on the rules of what the English call ‘football.’ The current debate about civil marriage law and ecclesial practice in the US is just about that confusing. It’s time for all sides to acknowledge this, and thereby to dissolve most of the apparent disagreements about who should get married and under what circumstances.