Catholic Online Forum

I signed-on to this forum a couple of years back, made a few posts then, and have been absent for a long time. I am not a Catholic but as an un-official student of religion, and a writer (not professionally) I find that my core themes are essentially religious-spiritual-metaphysical. What this means is that my characters, and situations, are those of people dealing with the problem of existence. Obviously, in the West, the influence of the Catholic Church and Christianity is part-and-parcel of European history and our very selves at a most fundamental level. I find this very interesting and for this reason am interested in exploring the history of religious conceptions within Western thinking.

I find that oddly enough I am to some degree strung between a rather conservative pole and one of extreme liberality, or perhaps free-thinking is a better word. For example, I have been reading Gertrude von le Fort's 'The Eternal Woman' and understanding more about the Catholic sense of the feminine and female, the notion of 'caritas' and also Catholic personalism. Very interesting stuff. I find myself attracted to the sanity and also the security of a conservative outlook (for example toward women's roles, men's roles, the family etc.), and yet also apprehensive about rigidity of doctrine which in any case becomes increasingly out of step with Modernity and 'the way things are'.

I have also begun recently a Modern Library edition called The Wisdom of Catholicism which is a sampling of writing from the major figures informing Catholicism and the early church. I have read Bernanos and also Mauriac, fairly significant Catholic writers, but I am also a 'student' of Nietzsche and one who often wonders if our whole notion of God might need revision but who yet feels that a conservative social doctrine is a necessary and good thing.

In short: right in the middle of a group of problems seeming difficult of solution!

I am interested in seeing if there are persons here interested in sustained and intelligent conversation on a wide group of topics that interweave core Catholic---and existential---questions.

---Alex

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Alex Jacob


'La charité ou l'enfer'
---François Mauriac

Hello Alex and welcome to the COL. I am sure there are some who would engage in a conversation which would involve some of your ideas as long as the agenda did not enter into debate where assertions went against our faith and beliefs. To ask about Catholicism on this site out of natural curiosity is one thing, but to maintain views which are adverse to our religion will most likely be met with a strong censure from our moderators, for to quote Nietzsche "Was ist, ist".

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Pax et Bonum


Schultzz

Thanks! I don't use the word 'agenda' or think in those terms, per se. An 'agenda' implies something to impose and even worse a secret or unstated agenda indicates a certain bad faith. Still, I am aware that in any context of faithfulness---faith that is hard-won in a world of dissolving faith and faithlessness---that it is sometimes better, easier in any case, not to even broach the conversation. I assume that this forum as with many forums dealing with the religious theme attract persons with ulterior agendas who, consciously or unconsciously, wish to disrupt, argue, enter into polemics, etc. That is not at all my position or desire. And it is not even that I desire to 'ask about' Catholicism, because that can be gained reading a catechism and any number of different sources. I mentioned having read Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos whose value-systems I admire tremendously, indeed emulate. And yet they too in their essays and novels confront and answer the basic 'inquietudes' of Modernity: the corrosive present that, unless I am mistaken, we are all dealing with.

I did make take the decision to more formally begin here in the Introduction section. I am very much aware that some people and some schools of thinking might very well resist and not appreciate even the rather gentle inquisitive note in this and my previous post. So it is good to appear here and to linger here. I really DON'T have an agenda and it seems that my presence here is unwelcome or is viewed as counter the intentions and desire of the forum I will without any rancor cease to post. Out of respect for the forum-space.

And I might request, if for some reason my approach or ideas are too radical, that I be directed to other forums where such 'radicalism' is allowed or valued. In my view (but my background is philosophy) it is 'good' to invite questioning or difference of opinion or even view of an established doctrine and yet I am aware that there are some environments where that is not appropriate and not desired.

---Alex

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Alex Jacob


'La charité ou l'enfer'
---François Mauriac

Hi Alex,

I doubt (but may be wrong) that there is currently a very large core of people here with similar interests to yours who would participate in such discussions.

A lot of your reading interests sound quite similar to mine. Many of my favourite authors have an existentialist bent (Camus, Sartre, Marcel, the author of Ecclesiastes, etc.)

Have you also delved into Simone Weil and/or Gabriel Marcel?

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squirt
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Jamais le mal n’aura le dernier mot. La foi et l’amour déplacent les montagnes de la haine.
- Marguerite (Maggy) Barankitse

Thanks for your note, Squirt. As it turns out, I first logged on here in 2008! How time flies when you're having fun, eh? I looked over some of my previous posts from that time and I think they fit in nicely with the intention of the forum. I think Shultz may have (with some reason) been influenced by the reference to Nietzsche! But, at least I was told so, there is a priest-educator in the department of philosophy at the Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia---I live not far from Cali) who, according to a friend, is a practicing Catholic (obvious, he's a priest) who is also a Nietzschean. I had intended to go and speak with him but never did.

In actual point of fact my reading of Nietzsche has oddly enough strengthened my relationship to the core/essence of the Christian traditions. I have not read Weil or Marcel but Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry is on my list. One of my favorite books of late is Amos Wilder's Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination. My personal sense is that our language is so symbol-ridden but that often the language-symbols have lost their force, or the spirit has gone out of them.

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Alex Jacob


'La charité ou l'enfer'
---François Mauriac

Alex,

Welcome back to COL. It is nice to have you again. Look forward to more of your posts, which like the last time was respectful and interesting.

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Ian DC
Blessed Ever Virgin Mary -- Sanctuary and resting-place of the Blessed Trinity where God dwells in greater and more divine splendour than anywhere else in the universe

Hi Alex,

The only Nietzche I've read is "Beyond Good and Evil", and that was quite a while ago.

I'm a rank amateur when it comes to philosophy. Mostly I enjoy exploring the ways in which others view the world.

The Wilder book sounds quite interesting. Right now, I'm reading a bit of Edith Stein ... she has a partially phenomenological bent. And for really weird skepticism stuff, I love Santayana. A very interesting man on a personal level, too ... living on the 'verge' of Catholicism (as did Simone Weil).

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squirt
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Jamais le mal n’aura le dernier mot. La foi et l’amour déplacent les montagnes de la haine.
- Marguerite (Maggy) Barankitse

Thank you, Ian.

Squirt, here is an excerpt from Wilder's (Thornton Wilder's brother BTW) 'Theopoetic'.

My plea for a theopoetic means doing more justice to the role of the symbol and prerational in the way we deal with experience. We should recognize that human nature and human societies are more deeply motivated by images and fabulations than by ideas. This is where power lies and the future is shaped.

This plea therefor means according a greater role to the imagination in all aspects of the religious life. But 'imagination' here should not be taken in an insipid sense. Imagination is a necessary component of all profound knowing and celebration; all remembering, realizing, and anticipating; all faith, hope, and love. When imagination fails doctrines become ossified, witness and proclamation wooden, doxologies and litanies empty, consolations hollow, and ethics legalistic.

It is at the level of imagination that any full engagement with life takes place. It is not enough for the church to be on guard against the Philistine in the world. Philistinism invades Christianity from within wherever the creative and mythopoetic dimension of faith is forfeited. When this happens doctrine becomes a caricature of itself. Then that which once gave life begins to lull and finally to suffocate us.

---Amos Wilder, 'Theopoetic', 1976 Fortress Press

The book is only 100 pages long but is dense with all sorts of levels of analysis relevant to preservation of faith (and meaning) and ways and means to communicate faith (and meaning).

It seems to me that we are subjects or victims of an image-world, as distinct from an idea-world, where people and 'forces' (people meeting in committee) subject us to assaults of imagery that simply by-pass the our rational defenses. It is a rather scary thought. We absorb 'meaning' and are impacted by meaning communicated through images, on an imaginal level.

And at the same time we 'handle' and communicate, essentially, symbolic content to other people and it is likely that if we reach someone with a positive, constructive or liberating message, it is less with the specific words but with the force of the image and the emotion that propels it.

Wilder's book is filled with statements like:

The redemptive operations of God can be most cogently conveyed not by unreal heavenly scenarios but by mundane similitudes and challenges, by aphorisms and paradoxes that shock our assumptions and transform our outlook.
...

Before the message, the vision; before the sermon, the hymn; before the prose, the poem. The discursive categories of theology as well as the traditional images of sermon and prayer require a 'theopoetic'.

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Alex Jacob


'La charité ou l'enfer'
---François Mauriac

Alex,

Maybe you could start a thread about "theopoetics" in the speculation section?

The roles of 'rational thought' and 'poetic (and visual and musical) imagery' in how we process and try to manipulate the world around us could make for some very interesting discussions (that probably won't get noticed in the introduction section).

I can't guarantee that I'll have the time to participate much as it's a very busy time at work, but I'd try to chime in once in a while.

I quick look at the local library website indicates that Amos Wilder was also a poet ... not surprising.

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squirt
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Jamais le mal n’aura le dernier mot. La foi et l’amour déplacent les montagnes de la haine.
- Marguerite (Maggy) Barankitse

Alex:

Chris here, and welcome (back) to the Forum

I'm curious; if you're not Catholic, what animates you to think there is something useful in her archives, so to speak?

Maybe you could start a thread in one of the fora; are you a non-Catholic Christian or a non-Christian, may I ask?

chris

Hello there Chris. To refer to those 'archives' is to refer to our 'Occidental Selves' in a pretty substantial sense. The Mediterranean culture that makes up the material of those archives (Judea, Rome, Greece and the melding pot of Alexandria) is 'what we are'. The way I see things is that in essential senses the Western self is a Christian and Catholic self. That is how I interpret Body of Christ: it is the essential, visible and invisible, spiritual body in which we exist. In my way of seeing things, that will include those even who deny their core unity.

I tend to relate myself to a given 'spiritual system' and to see any one of them as a sort of language. If you learn to grasp the symbols, the language, and if you can see and feel the meaning of the symbols and if they mean something to you, you are on the inside of that 'language' system. There is a great deal within Catholic liturgy and symbolism which speaks to me.

I just don't know how to answer that question! In a sense it would depend who asked it. Because, by what I wrote above, the answer would be 'yes', but then in another sense 'no'.

I will examine those fora to see where I might enter in to conversation.

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Alex Jacob


'La charité ou l'enfer'
---François Mauriac

On that last part, that seemed to me (while undergoing my journey from Lutheran to Catholic) to be the difference between a 'parish' and a 'congregation'. I was part of a Catholic parish even if i wasn't a Catholic. I like that; the congregational model seems now (to me) too much like a club with membership rules - and a good way to avoid neighbors you don't happen to like associating with.



Well, hello there, Joseph Campbell But i'm half kidding. That seems a mere assertion: that religions and their 'symbols' (you're including creeds, rites, all that?) are like languages is to say (1) religions are human conventions merely and (2) while one language may be better than others, most will 'do the job' equally well. This analogy needs proving.

[btw, i added a word to the quote above, because i *think* that's what you meant: you're not bound to one spiritual system in particular, but you see them all as useful to you: like a kid in a perfectly multi-lingual home has no particular native language.]

An example: 'strawberry' and 'framboise' within their languages do much the same thing (i'll get the same thing, roughly enough, if i order 'strawberries, please' in an american restaurant and 'Framboises, si vous plait' [sp] in a French one. But 'Yahweh' and 'Moloch', while two names for a supreme god (one Hebrew, the other Phoenician) have very different and incompatible properties. 'Oh Yahweh, come to me' and 'O Moloch, show yourself', if followed through, would bring very different things to my presence. And one would be wonderful (if 'awful' in the old English sense) and the other would be horrible. God demands his disciples love one another; Moloch demands death to your enemies, and regularly demands the sacrifice of first-born sons to be placated. So the analogy of religions with languages seems fails pretty spectacularly.

cheers,

chris kirk