Reading in progress: Chapter 1 & 2 of Unintended Reformation by Brad S. Gregory
Cracked egg on a plate: any hope for Humpty Dumpty?
Wow, this book is flying by! I attribute this to having read the book a few years back, but also to having a better sense of the figures and ideas. The one thing that accompanies me as I read is T. S. Eliot’s question in Choruses from “The Rock”: “Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?” This quote gave structure to Giussani’s historical lecture, Religious Awareness in Modern Man. I imagine two types of superficial reader of this book: 1. Catholics, who would see it as a confirmation of their position and therefore with no need to change anything, and 2. everybody else, who would see it as best as an account of how things came to be without any hope of resolving our current issues. I saw one review which said as much, but added that they were confident of not burned alive as a witch today. With the current in Gregory’s term, hyperpluralism, I have no such comfort. Since the publication in 2012, the tensions of our society have only intensified. At any rate, my focus in reading this is with Eliot’s first question: has the church failed mankind?
In Chapter 1, Excluding God, Gregory traces turn of the 20th century Max Weber’s ‘disenchantment of the world’ back to two Catholic clerics: John Duns Scotus and William of Occam. Scotus proposed a univocal metaphysics in which God was the highest being, the highest entity. And Occam’s dictate that one “ought not to multiply entities beyond necessity,” God as entity was excluded from participation in the world. These two ideas contradicted the traditional Christian teachings that God is not an entity at all, but the ground of being, totally transcendent of the world and that God had revealed Godself through the events of history, most especially through the Incarnation of Jesus. To simplify, this led to the idea that science and religion are incompatible.
Compounding this impression as to the incompatibility of faith and religion was the defensive position taken by the Catholic Church following the Reformation. As Gregory writes: “clerical leaders insistence on Aristotelian curricula in universities and seminaries, coupled with the Roman Index of Prohibited Books, hampered and hamstrung the relationship between the practice of the faith and the life of the mind” (52). To add my own thoughts here. If the Incarnation means that the realities of this world are meaningful and significant, the church took a long hiatus in looking at these. This is in contrast with the medieval age, when monasteries were the site of scientific breakthroughs. In discussing the role of miracles, Gregory shows that miracles are not ruled out by science, which only looks to material causes for explanations. To take evolution as an example: “evolutionary biology cannot extrapolate on scientific grounds from microcausal mechanisms of genetic mutation […] to evaluative judgments about the putative lack of meaning, order, and purpose in the evolutionary process as a whole” (66). This science threatens fundamentalist Christianity, with its emphasis on a divine entity as an explanatory hypothesis. Like Gregory, I have no quarrel with science, only with the scientism which makes affirmations which are not demonstrated empirically.
I found Chapter 2, Relativizing Doctrines, much more interesting than the arguments about God. This is an account of how the West moved from institutional (Catholic) Christianity to an unstable forum of conflicting ideas, not always contained by the power of the state. The principle of non-contradiction means that something cannot by true and false at the same time. As a personal aside, I would gesture toward the cries of “follow the science” and “do your own research” which became common in 2020 with the rise of COVID-19.
I will summarize the sequence of events:
First paradox of Catholicism before the reformation: “combined sharp limits on orthodoxy with a wide tolerance of diverse local beliefs and practices” (83, emphasis mine). This wide tolerance came to an end with the defensive counter-reformation and the rise of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
Second paradox was its “combination of long-standing, widely criticized shortcomings with unprecedented, thriving lay devotion and dedication” (84, emphasis mine). This was the age of confraternities, which also came to an end with the counter-reformation.
The Reformation rejected the church’s claim to the truth.
Scripture alone was the replacement for the Magisterium, or teaching office of the Catholic church, which caused great division among Protestants.
Next, it was hoped that interior illumination by the Holy Spirit would be a unifying principle, but this caused divisions to grow as well (This fideism would lead eventually to basing decisions on feelings).
New Revelations were the next attempt to resolve divisions. Private revelations are not unheard of in Catholicism, but subject to authority. This was an attempt to create authority from new revelations.
All of these attempts involved discursive reasoning as well, but all of these attempts increased disagreement.
This in turn led to reason alone based on an implicit Pyrrhonian skepticism, which is responsible for a whole line of enlightenment thinkers who each carved out their own version.
This leads to our current hyperpluralism, which affects everyone. For example, there are deep divisions in Catholicism, with both conservatives and liberals rejecting the Magisterium.
Gregory doesn’t mention it, but the Catholic Counter-Reformation was itself an attempt to solve this problem as well, changing the church and contributing to the divisions.
Reflecting on these two chapters, I see much in the Catholic church that was attractive before the reformation. Tolerance of diverse opinions within an orthodox core, a thriving lay Catholicism, not to mention the core faith in a transcendent God and the Incarnation of Jesus, whose presence continues with the Eucharist and other sacraments. I see that the Second Vatican Council was itself an attempt to recover from the Counter-Reformation, to help heal the divisions of Christianity, a division the church contributed to. Looking over the long history of solutions and their unintended consequences, I wonder if new solutions are really what we need now.