What is a Hermeneutic of Suspicion, and Why Does It Matter?

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 15 October 2015 . To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

What The Heck Is Hermeneutics?  

Back in my undergraduate days my college roommate took a class called "Hermeneutics". Not surprisingly, I couldn't help but ask, "What exactly is hermeneutics?" He explained that the word comes from the Greek verb ἑρμηνεύω (hermeneuo), "to interpret", and is related to the name of the god Hermes, bringer and interpreter of dreams. Hermeneutics, then, means interpretation, and when we speak of a hermeneutic we mean an interpretive framework through which we evaluate raw information. Even if we have never seen the term before, we all know the concept: if we say that someone "sees the world through rose colored glasses" we mean that they interpret reality through a hermeneutic of optimism, and a person who is always "under a dark cloud" employs a hermeneutic of pessimism. If we wish to use a more sophisticated example, we might say that someone resorts to a Marxist hermeneutic if they see everything through the lens of class struggle.

Hermes the Interpreter

    For most of us it seems a pretty esoteric word, and even if it's a part of our working vocabulary, it's probably not included in our everyday vocabulary.  Nonetheless, it's a handy term to have.  For instance, it gave Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) a very clear and precise way of summing up the the foundational error of both the "Spirit of Vatican II" progressives and the Lefebvrist ultra-traditionalists: both camps interpret the Second Vatican Council through a "hermeneutic of rupture", when the council should more properly be viewed through a "hermeneutic of continuity".  In other words, both groups operate with the assumption that Vatican II is a decisive break with the previous nineteen centuries of Catholic Tradition, the only difference being one group thinks that's a good thing, the other decidedly not.  Ratzinger was proposing that instead we should interpret the council with and through that Tradition.

The Hermeneutic of Suspicion

     A similar problem, one that can be found not only among die-hard progressives and rad trads, but also among many people who consider themselves "faithful Catholics, but . . ." (and in fact it's a temptation for all of us), is the "Hermeneutic of Suspicion". In other words, the default position that for any issue on which the Church takes a stance contrary to my preconceived ideas, political loyalties, the prevailing popular wisdom, or whatever else, She must convince me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my position is wrong and that her position is right.  This hermeneutic of suspicion is most conspicuously at play in the massive dissent from the traditional Catholic teaching on sexuality and family (which is not limited, by the way, to those who consider themselves "progressive").

    Am I saying that to be a good Catholic we need to stop thinking for ourselves, or "mindlessly" go along with the Church, as anti-Catholics are fond of telling us?  Not at all.   But nobody thinks and decides in a vacuum, we all need some basis for interpreting our world; "give me a place to stand", said Archimedes, "and I will move the world".  Being Catholic has always meant that we stand on the moral and metaphysical framework provided by Christ 's Church, and the Gospel as understood by that Church, not by the conventional wisdom or the prejudices of the cultural elite.

The Pillar and Foundation of Truth

    This demand that the Church must exhaustively prove to my satisfaction any teaching that does not correspond to my preferences before I believe seems to me to be the exact opposite of what has been normative throughout the history of the Church for those who consider themselves faithful Catholics.  St. Paul refers to “the church of the living God” as “the pillar and foundation of truth” (1 Tim. 3:15), and in another place he makes explicit where the believer is to stand in case of conflict between the Truth of God and the conventional wisdom:

           Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool so as to become wise.  For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God, for it is written: "He catches the wise in their own ruses," and again: "The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain."  (1 Cor. 3:18-20)

It was understood in the early Church, as well, where the authority to make final and binding decisions lay.  St. Augustine once said:

For already two councils on this question have been sent to the apostolic see; and replies have also come from there.  The cause is finished [causa finita est]; would that the error might be sometime finished also! (Sermon 131:10)

The expression causa finita est  comes from the practice of law; the modern expression that most closely corresponds is “case closed!”  To Augustine it seems a given that the replies from Rome have ended the discussion.

           More than a thousand years later St. Ignatius of Loyola is even more explicit in the Spiritual Exercises when he lists the rules “to have the true sentiment which we ought to have in the Church Militant”:  

Pope Paul III and St. Ignatius Loyola

To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit see which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls. Because by the same Spirit and our Lord Who gave the ten Commandments, our holy Mother the Church is directed and governed.

                          

    St. Ignatius is not urging that Catholics leave their brain behind when they enter the Church: notice that he does not refer simply to white, but "the white which I see".  In other words, when it comes to fundamental categories (i.e., right and wrong), we need to trust the Church's judgment over our own, because she has been promised the guidance of the Holy Spirit, while we, as individuals, have not.

Every Man A Pope

    It really could not be any other way.  If we make ourselves the ultimate arbiters of truth instead of deferring to the Church, then the individual believer becomes, in effect, infallible, his or her own little Pope, the result of which could only be thousands upon thousands of little schisms; any sort of real communion becomes impossible.  In fact, that is exactly what we see among our separated brethren in the Protestant communities, whose separate denominations are now said to number in the thousands, a mere five hundred years after Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg.

    In the end, faith itself becomes an impossibility, if there is no Truth greater than my own personal "truth".  And if I’m the supreme judge, why do I need a church to teach me anything? For that matter, what use is religion at all, or a Divine Savior, if it’s up to me to determine whether there’s any sin from which to save me? Isn’t that the logical end-point of the Hermeneutic of Suspicion?  Just myself, closed in upon myself. That’s an awfully cold, lonely way to spend eternity; it brings to mind what St. Paul says: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24).  Paul, of course, knows the answer: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25).  Only Christ can save me from myself, I myself who “do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want” (Romans 7:19).  This same Christ has given His Church the power to bind and loose (Matthew 18:18); who am I, or any of us, to be its judge?

A Tale of Two Sundays: God's Love is Universal

This Throwback Thursday post was first published on Sept 5th 2015

The Universal Church

The Martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch

   The word “catholic”, meaning “universal” (from greek κατά, “according to” and ὅλος, “the whole”) has been associated with the Christian Church almost from the beginning.  It’s first surviving written appearance is in the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred in the year 107 A.D., less than eighty years after the death of Christ.  The matter-of-fact way in which he uses the term suggests that it was already familiar to his readers.  In chapter 8 of his letter to the Smyrnaeans, for instance, he says:

Let that celebration of the Eucharist be considered valid which is held under the bishop or anyone to whom he has committed it. Where the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.

The term initially was meant to identify the Church, along with all the doctrines and practices, that was authoritative for all Christians, as opposed to heresy, from the Greek αἵρεσις, “a choosing”.  A heretic was someone who chose only certain things from the Universal Church, while rejecting others, thus cutting himself off from the ecclesial body and the tradition established by Jesus Christ himself and handed on by his Apostles.

    We can also say that the Church is "catholic" in other senses as well.  It is “universal” in that it embraces the entire history of Christianity, for instance: not only the experiences of our forebears contained in Holy Scripture and the generations of believers since the Bible was codified, but also those believers themselves, who still participate in the life of the Church as members of the Church Suffering in Purgatory and the Church Triumphant in Heaven.

   The primary place in which those of us alive here on Earth (in the Church Militant) experience the catholicity of the Church is in the Holy Eucharist, where we are all joined to our One Lord by partaking in His Body and Blood (hence the term “Communion”).  I have suggested previously [here] that the use of Latin in the Western Church reinforced, in a very effective, concrete way, the reality of that communion, but it is the Mass itself (and really Christ through the Mass, particularly in the Eucharist) that unites us.  Whether we attend the Extraordinary form in Latin or the Ordinary form in any language you could name, we are participating in the One Sacrifice of Calvary, and also in the liturgy that unfolds eternally before the throne of God in Heaven.  I had a beautiful reminder of how the Mass can embody the catholicity of the Church over the past two Sundays, when I and my family celebrated the Eucharist away from our home parish.

At The VA Hospital

Togus VA Medical Center, Augusta, ME

    The first Mass was was at a Veterans Administration hospital, where every Sunday volunteers from the Knights of Columbus, along with their families, take turns bringing wheelchair-bound veterans to the Eucharistic celebration.  The veterans seemed to appreciate our company, and it was a very moving experience for us.  The Liturgy itself was inspirational as well, in spite of the unadorned, institutional blue cinder block walls of the non-denominational chapel.  There was only one tangible external detail, aside from the priest’s vestments, to remind us of the transcendent nature of what we were doing: father placed a crucifix in front of him on the altar, on which he fixed his gaze as he offered the Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Pope Benedict has recommended this practice in response to the criticism that the Mass versus populum (facing the people) gives the impression that priest and congregation are addressing each other, rather than together directing our prayers to God.  This is the first time, at least that I can recall, that I’ve seen a priest adopting Papa Benedetto’s simple expedient for orienting ourselves toward our Our Lord with this arrangement. The Gospel reading on this particular Sunday was the Bread of Life Discourse from John Chapter 6, and Father spoke eloquently on the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  While he didn’t deal explicitly with our surroundings, our gratitude for God’s gift of his own body to us was all the more powerful for the testimony of the severely disabled men worshipping with us, who had also sacrificed their bodies for others.

At The College

The Chapel at Thomas More College

    This past weekend we attended a very different Mass at Thomas More College in Merrimack, New Hampshire.  It was a beautiful celebration of the Ordinary form, simple and understated but still incorporating many traditional details that brought to mind the timelessness of the Eucharistic Liturgy, and which helped to redirect our attention from ourselves to our Lord: celebration ad orientem, some of the prayers in Latin, an altar server holding a patten under the chin while we knelt for communion, etc. (for a fuller discussion, see my post here on a previous Mass, which was the same in most particulars).  On this occasion, the second reading was from the letter of James:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this:

to care for orphans and widows in their affliction

and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

And Father accordingly spoke in his homily of the need for us to live out our faith, and particularly our obligation to make the love of Christ a reality in our lives.

God Is Love

The Crucifixion by Marco Palmezzano

    There is an interesting symmetry here: in the first Mass, with few external signs of the transcendent, and which many of us were attending for the purpose of “caring for” (as the Apostle James says) the hospital patients, the Gospel and the homily invited us to look beyond the here and now to Jesus Christ. In the second mass, where much loving attention was devoted to the external details that emphasize the reverence due to the Real Presence of the Second Person of the Trinity, we were asked to direct ourselves to the material needs of the less fortunate among us.  

    The common thread is love: Christ’s love in offering himself for us, our love for him as expressed in the reverence of our worship, and our love for each other as manifested in our care for others.  The Beloved Disciple tells us that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8), and Jesus himself says:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35)

Piety and Charity, then, aren’t opposites, or even separate: in fact, for followers of Jesus Christ they are inseparable, two sides of the same coin.  And we encounter them in every Mass, wherever it is offered, and whatever it looks like.  God’s Love is universal.

Darmok and Jalod Ad Orientem

Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra

 I recently re-published a post called “Star Trek, Secularism, and Christian Faith”. It had originally been posted on my first blog, Principium et Finis, where it garnered more page views than anything else on the blog – more than anything else I’ve ever published online, in fact.  There seems to be something about imaginative stories like Star Trek (and similar things) that captures our attention, and has done so since our far-distant ancestors gathered around campfires to hear story-tellers recount the communal tales that defined them as a people.

     In my earlier post I was somewhat critical of the creators of the television science-fiction franchise on the grounds that they didn’t really understand the nature of Faith, which was supposed to be a major theme in episode I was discussing.  They are on much firmer ground, however, in the episode called “Darmok”, from the fourth season of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Not only that, I think that this particular story throws an interesting light on some current issues in the Catholic Church.

      In “Darmok” the (mostly human) crew of the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race called the Tamarians, with whom humans have previously had several frustratingly unsuccessful attempts at communication.  It seems that the Earthling’s Universal Translators (ah, the wonders of science fiction!) are able to discover the meaning of the Tamarians’ words, but can’t figure out how the words combine to express meaning.  What is one to make, for instance, of utterances such as “Shaka, when the walls fell”, or “The river Tamarc, in winter”? The aliens seem to be talking in metaphors and allusions drawn from stories known to them and to nobody else.

Data and Troi explain Tamarian Language

     Jean-Luc Picard, the Enterprise’s captain (played by British actor Patrick Stuart) experiences the same frustration as his predecessors in his attempts to communicate with the commander of a Tamarian ship, a frustration clearly shared by his alien counterpart.  Finally, the Tamarian captain holds up two daggers and declares “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”, at which both he and Picard are transported (more sci-fi wizardry) down to the surface of a planet below.  Picard soon learns that the captain is not challenging him to a duel as he at first supposes, but what he does intend, or what he means by his insistent repetition of “Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra!” remains a mystery.

     Finally, after the two captains together encounter a deadly creature (which mortally wounds Picard’s Tamarian counterpart), Picard puts the puzzle together.  Darmok and Jalod were two heroes, perhaps rivals or enemies, who together fought a beast on an island called Tanagra, and formed a bond of friendship.  The alien captain had hoped that, by putting himself and Picard in a similar situation, they might likewise achieve through shared experience what they couldn't find through mere words.  Picard then comforts his dying counterpart by recounting to him the ancient epic of Gil-Gamesh.

We Are Formed by Experience

    The Tamarians, as are all the aliens in Star Trek, are humans in disguise.  In this particular story the creators of the television show have put their finger on something that goes to the very heart of what it is to be human: we are formed by our experiences, not only as individuals but as peoples.  The “aliens” they have created here view the world only through the lens of the stories that have been passed down about the history of their people, and in their everyday experiences they consciously relive the experiences of their forebears. Their only way to communicate abstractions is through the concrete: people, places, and events.

Picard tells Tamarians about death of their captain

    Now, we Earth-dwellers may not look very much like them at first.  We have a wealth of language that communicates abstractions and ideas.  We are however, more Tamarian than we appear at first glance.  Notice how easily, for example, the name of the Nazi’s hand-picked Norwegian puppet Vidkun Quisling has become the common noun “quisling”, a synonym for “traitor” . . . or how easily we use a metaphorical term such as “puppet”, as I did just now. Often,  we quickly forget that the expressions we are using are metaphors at all.  I remember, for instance during the 1992 presidential campaign when former (and present) California governor Jerry Brown was asked about the “anointed front-runner” Bill Clinton.  Brown asked whether he was running for president, or running for pope. Some allusions are even more deeply buried: how many people even know when they use the word “mentor” they are alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Athena, in the guise of a wise old man named Mentor, accompanies Odysseus’s son Telemachus to guide him (or, to speak metaphorically, “show him the ropes”).  

It's a Mystery to Me

    There’s even more going on here than the use of language.  The Tamarian captain understands that actions, experiences, can communicate in ways that words cannot (a point I also discuss in a post I republished this week, “Christ, or Anti-Christ? Art & the Power of Imagination”), which is of course true of human beings as much as it is of the fictional “Children of Tamar”.  This is a large part of why so many religions rely on ritual and formal rites: the actions communicate to us much more deeply than mere words, because we are actually living out what they want to convey.  The true meaning of the term “mystery” (from the Greek μυστήριον) in fact, is not something unknowable, but something that can only be known experientially. Traditional Christianity tells us that God uses these mysteries as a means not only of imparting His Grace, but of revealing himself to us. Once we understand that, we can more easily see why μυστήριον translates into Latin as sacramentum, because sacraments involve not only knowing or thinking, but acting.

The Mystery of the Eucharist

     Most religions rely, to some degree or other, on mystery.  At the very core of Christianity we find the Profoundest Mystery, the Supreme Sacrament: The Infinite God become Man in order to experience our humanity, and to invite us, in turn, to share in His Divinity.  We live out this mystery concretely when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist which is, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, the summit and source of the Christian life.  While Catholic Christianity includes countless lesser ways of living out spiritual realities as well, including the other Sacraments, sacramentals, devotions, and so on, the Eucharist, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in which we receive it, is the most important thing we do.

Turning Toward The Lord

    It can be helpful, I think, to bear these considerations in mind when we look at the suggestion recently made by Cardinal Sarah, currently head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments , that priests start re-introducing the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem, “toward the rising sun”, which is to say facing the altar rather than the congregation.  The Cardinal made the suggestion in a talk delivered at a liturgical conference in London this past summer (full text here).   Cardinal Sarah asked his fellow shepherds in the episcopy to support him in this matter, saying:

I very humbly and fraternally would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers united in the one same act of adoration.

Implicit in the part of the quote I have italicized above is the idea that what we do, and what the priest does, during the Mass is a part of the message.

Ad Orientem: facing The Lord Together

    I first came across a similar suggestion in regard to ad orientem worship some years ago in an article by Fr. Joseph Fessio called “The Mass of Vatican II”. In his essay Fr. Fessio explains what the documents of Vatican II actually say about the Mass; for instance, that it should remain mostly in Latin, and that Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place in liturgical services", and various other directives that appear not to have much influenced the post-conciliar revision of the liturgy. Fr. Fessio points out that one thing that was done does not appear, anywhere, in the Council’s documents, just as it had never been part of the tradition of the Church over the previous 18 centuries: turning the priest at Mass around to face the congregation, rather than having him face the altar, the liturgical East, along with the people he is leading in prayer.  In defending the traditional practice Fr. Fessio more explicitly makes some of the same points that Cardinal Sarah does in his London talk:

It's true that when the priest faces the people for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there may be a sense of greater unity as a community. But there is also a danger of the priest being the performer and you being the spectator - precisely what the Council did not want: priest performers and congregational spectators. But there is something more problematic. You can see it, perhaps, by contrasting Mass facing the people with Mass facing East or facing the Lord. I don't say Mass "with my back to the people" anymore than Patton went through Germany with his "back to the soldiers." Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don't sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.

The Medium is the Message

    Marshall McLuhan famously said of television that “the medium is the message”.  The same can be said of all media, including sacred media.  How we celebrate the Mass sends a message.  The symbolic “message” of the ad orientem Mass is clear: that all of us together, priest and people, are making an offering to God; we all face our Lord together.  When priest and people face each other, who is offering what to whom? The message seems to be that we are there to see each other, not to turn to Our Lord. The little cartoon to the left (which, I confess, I stole from Fr. Z’s blog) gives a good illustration of the problem. Cardinal Sarah himself recently made the same point in a talk delivered to the bishops of Sri Lanka,

In recent decades in some countries the Sacred Liturgy has become too anthropocentric; man not Almighty God has often become its focus.

But that’s not how it’s supposed to be.  Instead,

In every Catholic liturgy, the Church, made up of both minister and faithful, gives her complete focus – body, heart and mind – to God who is the centre of our lives and the origin of every blessing and grace.

    That’s the beauty of the traditional ad orientem celebration of the Mass: we don’t merely read or hear but experience ourselves the Truth that God is the center of our lives, and our in our worship we all turn to Him together.

It's Greek to Me

    Which brings me to my one real quibble with “Darmok”. In the final scene of the episode we see Captain Picard reading a book when his first officer, Commander Riker, enters the room.  Riker looks at the book curiously, and says, “Greek, sir?” (did I mention that Captain Picard is quite a Renaissance man? Starship captain, student of Latin and Greek, etc.), which leads to this exchange:

PICARD: Oh, the Homeric Hymns. One of the root metaphors of our own culture.

RIKER: For the next time we encounter the Tamarians?

PICARD: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. The Tamarian was willing to risk all of us just for the hope of communication, connection. Now the door is open between our peoples. That commitment meant more to him than his own life. Thank you, Number One.

Now, the Homeric Hymns is not a bad place to start, as far as it goes, but if Picard really wants to get at the “root” of what it is to be human, I have a better suggestion for him, one that starts out like this:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος.

In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God (John 1:1)