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Home , Romano Guardini, Sacred tradition

Preface The Word in Words and Images

Catholicism is “not a religion of the book.” It is instead a religion of the Word— himself, the of the Father in whom everything has been communicated to us and passed down in two forms. “ and Sacred Scripture,” the ’s tells us, “then, are bound closely together, and communicate one with the other. For both of them, flowing out from the same divine well-spring, come together in some fashion to form one thing, and move towards the same goal.” That goal is that the presence of Christ be made manifest in the life of the throughout history. This understanding, shared by our Orthodox brothers and sisters, is usually denied by our Protestant brothers and sisters, who generally deny that the Word is found in any medium except the written Scriptures. For them, Scripture is the only place to which one can turn to receive the message of the Word in a public, authoritative way. Catholics (and Orthodox, for that matter) are not forbidden from thinking there is something true about the traditionally Protestant take on Scripture. While the Protestant notion of Scripture as perspicuous, or clearly expressed and easy

logos 21:2 spring 2018 6 logos to understand, is not something that a can accept, the notion that all truth is indeed found in Scripture is quite easy to believe. Bl. ’s Essay on Development argued for the development of doctrine and the need for an infallible authority in part on the basis of the inchoate and seemingly incomplete nature of the of Christ as it is found in the . Where, for instance, does the Bible have an inspired table of contents that tells us which books are in it? Nevertheless, Newman indicated a belief that all truths might be found there. In fact, he seemed to think that the seeming incompleteness of the Bible was not caused by being incomplete, but by including all truth in an unsystematic, mysterious, and veiled fashion.

It is in point to notice also the structure and style of Scrip- ture, a structure so unsystematic and various, and a style so figurative and indirect, that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not. It cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our dili- gence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures. Of no doctrine whatever, which does not actually contradict what has been delivered, can it be peremptorily as- serted that it is not in Scripture; of no reader, whatever be his study of it, can it be said that he has mastered every doctrine which it contains.1

A 1984 commercial for Prego pasta sauce features an Italian- American father chastising his newlywed son for getting sauce from a jar. As he lists what ingredients must be there for a successful sauce—and marriage—the son repeats, “It’s in there.” After the son puts a spoonful of sauce into his mouth, the father exclaims, wide- eyed, “It’s in there!” So it is with Scripture. Those who approach with faith and openness will find that all the truths of the world, preface 7 though not obvious on the outside and not accessible simply by reading without the tradition and authority of the Church, are indeed “in there.” That is why the development of lay Catholics studying Scripture has been such a powerful one in the modern world. While many -era polemics about the Church’s denial of the ’s right to read the Scriptures in various time periods have been exaggerated, it is nonetheless true that in the last few centuries regular reading of Scripture has not always been emphasized in the whole of the . Newman himself complained of the lack of Catholic scripture study in an 1883 letter to Lord Emly, a friend and fellow convert:

Another great difficulty is the ignorance of our people in the Scriptures. It is to them a terra incognita. The especially excites no sentiment of love, reverence, devotion, or trust. They hear bold things said against it—or fragments of it detached from the context, and they have no associa- tions with it in their affections. It creates in them no distress or horror to hear it contemptuously treated as a “venerable book.” This is not the ’s doing for you recollect the Brief of Pius VI, prefixed to our Bible. In our ’ there is no reference to Scripture as a book given to us by God, inspired, a guide—and a comfort. One such reference is the exception—thus “We ought frequently to read good books, such as the Holy , the Lives of the and other spiritual work.”2

I recall attending Mass for the first time as an adult interested in Catholicism and experiencing shock that almost all of the liturgy was a series of biblical passages or allusions strung together into a dramatic action. As it so happened, the young woman with whom I attended that liturgy was annoyed at my constantly poking her throughout with 8 logos comments like, “That’s from Malachi!” and “Did you hear that little bit from Revelation?” Her experience as a cradle Catholic was that the Mass was the Mass. My experience was that of a very strange, very good book coming to life off the pages—and the author and key character walking and talking in front of me. To one who had been assigned in childhood the reading and memorization of Scripture passages both by my Sunday school teachers and my parents, the Mass was a revelation. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that though she had been to Mass countless times in her life, she had much less curiosity and excitement about what was going on in this supernatural pageant. I had read and even memorized parts of the Script. Now I discovered that the Play was indeed the thing. As I got to know more Catholics, I discovered that knowledge of Scripture was indeed uncommon for the run-of-the-mill Catholic. This fact is not unconnected in my mind with the weakness of the Catholic Church in the early twenty- first century. “Ignorance of Scripture,” said St. , “is ignorance of Christ.” The patterns of Catholics in England in the 1880s are still found in the United States and elsewhere in the 2010s. And yet where the Church is alive and dynamic there is indeed a love of Scripture—and, it must be noted, a love of the liturgy in which Scripture now comes alive with the force that I experienced so long ago. The signs of such a change are everywhere, including the various series of biblical commentaries and other volumes on Scripture that have been published by a variety of academic and popular Catholic publishers. Or the practice of asking Catholics to contribute to volumes and series on Scripture put out by Protestant publishers. Or the growing practice of leading Bible study groups, a staple of Protestant life but historically less common in my experience. Or the various versions of the that include many more mysteries drawn from the than the traditional fifteen (now twenty since St. John Paul II’s promotion of the Luminous mysteries in 2002). Or the interest in praying the Divine Office. preface 9 What is common among all these different movements is the sense that active Catholics are finding that familiarity with Scripture is not just a “Protestant thing.” It is firmly Catholic to spend time, as Evangelicals say, “in the Word” as He is found in Scripture. One recent volume of reflection on Scripture comes from Elizabeth M. Kelly, the managing editor of Logos. Contributors and subscribers to this journal have often commented that what they love about it is that our articles have a greater accessibility and a greater literary feel to them. This is due in no small part to having a managing editor who has published six popular books on Catholic themes that manage to put deep subjects into prose that is often sparkling. She knows how to polish and smooth writing that has too much of the (some would say oxymoronic) academic style about it. Her 2007 book, May Crowning, Mass, and Merton: 50 Reasons I Love Being Catholic, won the Catholic Press Association’s award for best popular presentation of the faith; my guess is that her newest book, Jesus Approaches, will probably garner at least one award.3 Midwest Book Review’s treatment of the book ends this way: “An erudite study that is exceptionally inspiring and biblically grounded, Jesus Approaches is an extraordinary and highly recommended addition to church and seminary Christian Studies collections. It should be noted for the personal reading lists of clergy and all members of the Christian Community.”4 There is a great deal of erudition in the book, but it is not of the sort that calls attention to itself. Borrowings from the likes of , Romano Guardini, St. , St. John Paul II, and St. Teresa of Kolkatta all show how Scripture serves as a window into the heart of a God who wants to bring us into his own joyful heart. Subtitled What Contemporary Women Can Learn About Healing, Freedom & Joy from the Women of the , Liz’s book is aimed at women, but it should have a wide readership among men, too. No doubt some of the more lyrical passages will not be to every man’s (or woman’s) taste. And certainly her treatment of the topics of abortion, motherhood, and the single life are geared 10 logos toward the experiences of women, but for most of the topics there is certainly an application to men, either directly or by virtue of the fact that men are better when they understand a little bit more about the struggles in women’s lives. There are also in Liz’s writing a forthrightness and simplicity that would be called in an earlier age “manly.” These traits do not come from study or even writerly skill but from listening to the stories of women (she is also an experienced spiritual director), personal suffering, and, more importantly, a great love and openness to grace. Her eight chapters, each covering a character or a type of female figure from the Gospels, all manage to weave an imaginative Ignatian-type meditation on various texts with stories from her own and other women’s lives, and come up with conclusions that are not themselves unexpected but are presented in a fresh way. In her chapter titled “Woman With a Wound,” Liz writes of the onset of MS some years ago and the fear and sadness its symptoms caused her, while yet conveying something of healing to her in bringing home the Pauline message of divine strength through weakness: “I miss feeling well. I miss being fit and trim and strong. But I have such a clear sense that if my life does anything good, if I accomplish anything redeeming, anything of eternal value, it is not by my effort or talent or positivity but by the sheer pleasure of my good and gracious Lord.”5 What is intriguing, however, is the palpable sense that degenerative nerve disorders are nothing compared to what needs to be healed on the level of the spirit. And the treatment for that, though more effective than anything currently on the market for MS, has an utterly unpleasant but necessary side effect: “Receiving forgiveness requires a kind of death on my part. It is a thorough acceptance of my sin and the damage it has wrought. It is the flattening of my pride, my vanity. It brings that sin I probably hate the most in myself into the light, where the delusion that says, ‘At least I’m not as bad as so-and-so’ is smashed.”6 There is much more like the above in this book. And thank preface 11 God. There is a desperate need out there for guides to the land of “concealed wonders and choice treasures” that Newman desired the Catholic faithful to find. The Amazon customer reviews of the book—all five-star as I write this—make clear that this is what many Catholic readers value most about it. One woman writes, “I loved the exercises at the back of each chapter. Sadly, I do not readily access scripture so this was an accessible way to guide me through.” Another writes “Especially for those who maybe are afraid to open their , this is an easy way to begin to encounter Christ as the Living Word.” If Catholics are now rediscovering the Logos in the words of Scripture, there is also now a movement afoot to rediscover an earlier tradition of sacred art in the form of the icon. While all too often in the Western Church, images have simply been taken as simply handy props or aides-de-memoire for the unlettered masses at Mass, there is a longer and venerable tradition still adhered to in the eastern Church of seeing them as analogous to Scripture. Paragraph 1160 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that “Christian expresses in images the same Gospel message that Scripture communicates by words. Image and word illuminate each other.” Paragraph 1162 declares, “the contemplation of sacred icons, united with meditation on the Word of God and the singing of liturgical hymns, enters into the harmony of the signs of celebration so that the mystery celebrated is imprinted in the heart’s memory and is then expressed in the new life of the faithful.” Just as knowledge of Scripture helps one enter into the liturgical mystery and let it be imprinted on the life, so too does the beauty of the image. And yet while the Christian East has maintained a certain of rules governing what is appropriate for sacred art, the West has been, well, to use technical theological language, somewhat more loosey-goosey. While the flexibility of what might be appropriate has certainly yielded some remarkable pieces of art (think Van Eyck’s Ghent ), it has also yielded a history of submission to the 12 logos saccharine forms of popular religious art (including the notorious felt banners of the 1970s) and the severity of high abstraction in various religious houses. The results of both have often been as humorous as have the architectural trends. Thomas Day recounted the weirdness of the “royal seat” for liturgical celebrants, noting that in a few cases “one can almost imagine Ming the Merciless slouching on this throne and commanding, ‘Bring Flash Gordon to me!’”7 This see-saw between the inhuman and the cartoonish has led many people back again to the questions of whether there should be some clear-cut rules on what an icon is. St. John Paul II said many times that the Church has to learn again to breathe with both lungs, the Eastern and Western. And in his writings before becoming pope, Joseph Ratzinger observed that the fundamental of the icon as found in the Eastern tradition should be normative for the Church as a whole. This is what inspired Nick Markell, a Minnesota iconographer who has been painting—or writing, as the term has it—icons for thirty-two years.8 Some years ago when I began teaching Catholic Studies 201, a course on Catholic spiritual paths and practices, I knew I wanted to introduce students not only to philosophical and theological approaches to art and faith, but I wanted them to encounter real art and artists. A friend put me in touch with Nick, who had created the icon of “Holy Thomas” for the University of St. Thomas’s 125th anniversary, noting that he was not just an artist. He could talk about the artistic techniques and the theological realities behind icons. And indeed he can. He has spoken to my classes every time I have taught this course. This past fall we met him at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, where he spoke to us amid an exhibit of more than 150 of the icons he has written over his career. Titled “Windows to Heaven: A Visual Hymn of Praise,” the exhibit was up for most of November and included a November 12 reception and lecture by Nick in which he talked about his understanding of what he had been doing. preface 13 While many might think of iconographers as they think of icons, somewhat forbidding and serious, Nick’s talk was filled with both a good humor—it takes ten years to become an iconographer, fifteen if you were an artist first—and lots of insight into what it is that makes icons different and fascinating. Dividing painters into those who paint what they know (think the trees on a landscape in one of Raphael’s paintings) and those who paint what they see (think Monet’s rendition of bluish grey, dark brown, or fiery red haystacks, depending on the time of day he was painting), Nick proposed that the icon painter paints “what he believes.” “What flows from me with ease and enthusiasm are words that proclaim iconography to be not so much a portrait of humanity, but of divinity. Not so much a representation of idealism, or timelessness, or even the fleeting moment of impressions, which come and go and can never again be accessed. Rather, an icon is an image of , where every earthly moment has meaning in eternity.”9

The standard of the icon is not the representation of the natural or even the ideal human being, but the glorified human being. And the glorified human being, the , is not there to draw attention to himself, but to God. The saint, like the icon, is beautiful because of a light that shines from a source more powerful than natural beauty. That source is the Word of God, revealing himself as through a window. We are meant to look through that window and see Christ. And yet if we do not know the written word, many of the symbolic keys to the icons will be opaque to us. And if we do not know the iconographic tradition, Scripture often stays as an abstract word and is not imprinted in our hearts in the same way. Catholic flourishing depends on a healthy culture of love of the Word in Scripture and the Word in images. Elizabeth Kelly and Nicholas Markell are leading the way. * * * Scripture and icons are not meant to be perspicuous or immediately available to all because they are part of the wooing of humanity by 14 logos God. And wooing involves the creation of a dramatic and indeed erotic tension—revelation (unveiling) and concealment. Adam Glover returns to our pages with “Latens Deitas: Eros, Divine Hiddenness, and the Language of Poetry.” Glover looks at how the commentary tradition has treated the Song of Songs, “with special attention to the way in which that tradition regularly stages the relationship between bride and bridegroom as an erotic interplay of concealment and disclosure.” He uses this tradition as a jump-off to reflection on how language itself, and in particular allegorical language, is meant not to reveal all mysteries but to produce desire. And he closes with an examination of the seventeenth-century Spanish “prince of Eucharistic poetry,” José de Valdivielso, whose poems “Mixed Verse of the Bride and Bridegroom on the Most Holy ,” “Romance of the Soul Sick with Love and Absence,” and “Lyric to the Most Holy Sacrament” Glover has provided in translation. Anthony M. Wachs brings us another reflection on the concealment of divine beauty in the works of Canadian novelist Michael D. O’Brien. “Apocalyptic Rhetoric in the Literature of Michael D. O’Brien” argues that the “end-times” situations of many of O’Brien’s novels are not nearly as important to their apocalyptic character as is the thickly detailed accounts of their characters and situations. For true revelation or unveiling—the Greek meaning of apokalypsis—is about human persons.

Apocalypses are about people and the choices they make dur- ing times of trial, which is why O’Brien’s books contain such detailed descriptions of his characters. . . . Without these de- tailed and intricate descriptions of the characters, it would be difficult to see and understand the immolation at the heart of the seemingly small choices made by persons. For this reason, his novels are often, as O’Brien readily admits, slow moving, but patience given to the novels is rewarded, for it is within these hidden sacrifices that beauty is ultimately revealed in his books. preface 15 O’Brien depicts saints, the true living icons of Christ, who are willing to obey God when all seems hopeless. “The ‘saints’ in O’Brien’s works are icons not because they are all called to a martyrdom in which they are literally tortured and killed for their faith, but rather their ‘witness’ is a self-sacrificial martyrdom in which one dies to self by freely offering their will to that of God’s.” Whether every art movement is appropriate for the sanctuary is a different question than whether it has something in it responding to truth and goodness in the form of some kind of beauty. was what the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus called a “Thomist of the Strict Observance,” one who believed that the Angelic Doctor’s hardware could run any software. And so he was always on the qui vive for how surrealism, cubism, and all the rest of the twentieth-century trends in the art world could be related to the Christian intellectual tradition. Brett David Potter in “Creative Intuition after Beauty: Jacques Maritain’s of Art in the Contemporary Context” argues that “Maritain’s grounding in manifests itself in a philosophical model of art which, far from being lost in the clouds, is practical, empirical, and (perhaps most importantly) intrinsically adaptable to varying contexts.” How practical? Potter explores ways in which Maritain’s understanding of “creative intuition” can be used to tease out meaning, even if at times in a negative or sidelong way, even from the post-Warhol art world. “Maritain’s understanding of artistic subjectivity also enables us as viewers of art to look inwards for a connaturality between our own innate senses of beauty, truth and goodness and the transcendent end for which we (in Garcìa-Rivera’s words) ‘hunger.’ To the extent that contemporary art spurs us on in this reflective activity, it seems there will be new avenues for theology and art which creatively appropriate Maritain’s categories.” Creative appropriation of new categories and topics is what Romanus Cessario is up to in “Creation as a Norm for Moral Action.” While many observers were more interested in Pope 16 logos Francis’s political and prudential pontifications in the Laudato Si, what all too often went by the wayside were the theological sections in which readers would find that actions to protect “human ecology” would have to be grounded in a more “profound reality,” namely “the relationship between human life and the moral law, which is inscribed in our nature and is necessary for the creation of a more dignified environment.” Francis’s words reaffirm the traditional teaching on the in a new context of environmental awareness. Cessario argues that Thomistic tradition, particularly the Laval or River Forest school of Thomism, offers rich resources to those who wish to follow Francis’s lead in the face of many theological challenges asserting that natural law reasoning only gives us an abstract view of morality.

Thomist natural law theory does not leave the Christian be- liever with a heartless code of moral conduct dictated by an impersonal God of ethical probity. Aquinas understood very well that the final imprint of divine grace on the moral life leads to the Blessed . Francis has now invited us to a contemplation of creation that will enrich the teachings of his immediate predecessors. He offers us a way of entering deeply into the mystery that God has inscribed in the order of nature and elevated in the order of grace.

Finally, in our Reconsiderations feature, Romano Guardini’s “Thoughts on the Problem of the Film” shows us a thinker who was prophetic about a world of screens: “He who frequently views filmed landscapes is no longer capable of observing real landscapes on trips to the country. He who is accustomed to seeing newsreels- racing, prize-fighting, famous personalities, public functions, accidents, fashion illustrations, animals on exhibition, and so on— flashing before him in rapid succession in provocative contrasts and accompanied by reportorial gibberish, tends to ‘see’ real faces and objects and events just as if they were fleeting film impressions.” preface 17 And yet films bring us a wider world: “One of the most promising possibilities—for better or for worse—which has been opened to us by technical ability is the capacity to enter a much wider field of life and experience; indeed we must enter it. . . . Perhaps the film is a form that can give the artist room to carry out this task.” David N. Foote argues in “Romano Guardini and the Problem of Vision,” that this need to see both the limitations in a given cultural form and the possibilities, is the essential task of the Christian in every era. We know that

God has so ordered the world, that in participating with God in the redemption of creation, man becomes an agent in his own as well. . . . Herein lies the problem of film; to see this historically contingent confluence of aesthetic and technological forms as it is, and to maintain ourselves in ac- cordance with its possibilities. Those who have eyes to see will recognize in these possibilities God’s providential love at work, transforming Creation through the human agency of culture, so that He might be all in all.

Editor David Paul Deavel

Notes

1 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (6th edition) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 71. 2 John Henry Newman, Letters and Diaries, 31 vols., ed. Charles Stephen Dessain et al., vol. 30 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973–77), 201. 3 Elizabeth M. Kelly, May Crowning, Mass, and Merton: 50 Reasons Why I Love Being Catho- lic (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007), and Jesus Approaches: What Contemporary Women Can Learn About Healing, Freedom & Joy from the Women of the New Testament (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2017). 4 http://www.midwestbookreview.com/wbw/dec_17.htm#ChristianStudies. 5 Kelly, Jesus Approaches, 77–78. 6 Ibid., 80. 18 logos

7 Thomas Day, Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo? The Loss of Soul in (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 111. 8 To find out more about Nick’s work, see his website: https://www.markellstudios .com/. 9 I quote from the manuscript of his lecture, which Nick kindly sent to me.