Rites and spontaneity

An old re-post from Maggie's Farm about civil and religious marriage, and more broadly about sacraments and religious dissension, reminded me of the always-reliable views of C.S. Lewis on the ages-old squabbling over high- and low-church traditions, channeling Old Scratch:
“I think I warned you before that if your patient can’t be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don’t mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is, the better. And it isn’t the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say “mass” and those who say “holy communion” when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker’s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas’ in any form which would hold water for five minutes.
And all the purely indifferent things – candles and clothes and whatnot – are an admirable ground for our activities. We have quite removed from men’s minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials – namely, that the human without scruples should always give in to the human with scruples.
You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the “low” churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his “high” brother should be moved to irreverence, and the “high” one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his “low” brother into idolatry. And so it would have been but for our ceaseless labour. Without that, the variety of usage within the Church of England might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility.”
Yesterday was my dear husband's birthday. Since 1963, he's had to share his birthday with the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It turns out it's also the anniversary of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Martin Luther. I have been reading a biography of Luther at Project Gutenberg lately and have been surprised to find that his personality so often gave way to an almost hysterical vituperation, equating Catholic adherence to various doctrines and rites as the worst sort of devil-worship.  (What kind of man thinks that celibacy is inherently evil?  And what was with the obsession with calling his enemies pigs and donkeys?)

In Luther's time people were ready to fight to the death over distinctions that make little or no sense to me today. As Lewis notes, from the Devil's point of view, the more lukewarm I am on points of real doctrine the better, and I no doubt have a lot to learn from people for whom the questions of eternity were daily matters of life and death. Nevertheless, I'm not sorry to be able to regard with indifference quarrels over the precise meaning of sacraments. I have never noticed that questions of this sort much occupied Jesus's thinking. My impression is that He thought sacraments were beside the point except as they brought our devoted attention back to what was always important, which was God.  Nevertheless, I am probably more easily tempted to irreverence than idolatry, so a sect like Episcopalianism, with its emphasis on rites, is a good one for me.

Gutenberg has been full in recent months of works furiously condemning the Reformation. It's a perspective that is fairly unfamiliar to me, so I am reading about it with interest. The common theme is that Protestants (and pseudo-Protestants like Episcopalians) erred in believing we could turn loose hundreds of millions of Christians to decide for themselves what the Bible means and what God wants from us. How, they wondered, will anyone know what to believe if no one can agree on an authoritative source?  I acknowledge the danger of sectarianism, but I'm unable to see how reposing our faith in a single infallible human interpreter helps matters.  As a people, as a body of worshippers, we're always going to have to confront the problems of dissension and error.  Nevertheless, again, because of my strong tendency to contrariness, disobedience, and iconoclasm, it's probably just as well for me to be connected to some kind of apostolic tradition, to keep me somewhat in the straight and narrow.

I always come back to the Sadducees and the Pharisees.  The Sadducees got the rap for a mindless adherence to ritual, as if they were performing magic tricks to force God's hand.  The Pharisees at least understood that our hearts have got to be in the right place, but they were still far too hung up on legalism and formality.  Christ blew all that away, not by abolishing forms but by refusing to be distracted by them into trivialities.  He was forever responding to picky demands to rule in favor of this or that technical rule with parables showing why both rules completely missed the point.  Even with this example, we spent next two thousand years fighting out the question of form over substance.  I don't think we can be all about substance; most of us need form as a reminder and a discipline.  But with form always comes the temptation to obsess on the dead container instead of the living Content.

5 comments:

Grim said...

What kind of man thinks that celibacy is inherently evil?

I can grasp an argument for this -- it's a variation of the natural law argument I often give. Indeed, it sounds reasonable in a way: if masturbation is a serious sin because it leads us astray by leading us to malfunction instead of natural function, celibacy would seem to be a sin on the same terms.

But of course celibacy can be a sacrifice, and as long as you are sacrificing for the right reasons, that can be sacred (indeed, that's what the word 'sacrifice' means).

Christ blew all that away, not by abolishing forms but by refusing to be distracted by them into trivialities.

So did Ibn Arabi, and indeed all the great mystic thinkers. That's just the mystical point: the forms are of crucial importance, but only just because they lead you into conflict (and therefore contact) with the substance. And the substance is God.

Good post, Tex.

MikeD said...

In Luther's time people were ready to fight to the death over distinctions that make little or no sense to me today. As Lewis notes, from the Devil's point of view, the more lukewarm I am on points of real doctrine the better, and I no doubt have a lot to learn from people for whom the questions of eternity were daily matters of life and death. Nevertheless, I'm not sorry to be able to regard with indifference quarrels over the precise meaning of sacraments.

To the people of that time, it wasn't just a matter of life and death, it was a matter of eternal damnation. Quite literally, it wasn't a question of "well, he just believes differently than me, no biggie", it was "he has fallen victim to heresy/iconoclasm and thus is damned, if I don't somehow stop him, the Devil wins." This is a big deal to these people. It would be one thing if they assumed each soul lives in a vacuum and had no impact on their life/soul by being redeemed or damned, but they literally thought of the material world as a battlefield in the war between God and Satan. Someone who was not on your side (which CLEARLY is God's side, else why would you be on it?) was at best an unwitting agent of evil, and at worst an active advocate for the Enemy.

I know it is somewhat unimaginable today, but people took ritual and doctrine MUCH more seriously than we can relate to. I will point you to to the all but civil war in Russia during the mid-1600's where the Old Believers fought with the Reformers leading to the Raskol or "Schism" in the Russian Orthodox Church. One of the crucial changes was whether you crossed yourself with two fingers (Traditional) or three fingers (Reform). And I am not even slightly joking. People killed each other over this stuff. Because it wasn't about "they believe differently", it was about "they're putting God's victory over the Devil in jeopardy."

Texan99 said...

That's really what I meant by "life or death." These distinctions--so arcane by today's standards--were seen as central to the survival of one's soul. I applaud how seriously they took a distinction that might really have that effect, but where I part ways is in thinking that the particular form of the baptism rite, for instance, was an example of such a distinction. I'm more inclined to see people whose great moral cusp, leading to eternal life or death, was the decision whether or not to burn someone who dissented from their liturgy.

But it's true, of course, that it's easy to say so today, when so few people really believe that there's such a thing as salvation, and those of us who do believe in salvation nevertheless tend to take such a universalist view of things that we assume things will work out one way or another in the long run no matter how badly someone screws up. That's a great way to increase tolerance, but a dangerous climate for the morals that matter.

C.S. Lewis used to say that we quit burning witches, not because we got more tolerant, but because we quit believing in witches. If we literally thought there were people among us who could sicken or kill our children with a spell, I'm not sure we'd be any less inclined than any Salem citizen to burn the witches at a stake. I don't think people in one era are genuinely more kindly than those of another; they just have different ideas about what's unforgivable.

MikeD said...

Well, part of it is also the awareness of exactly how large the world actually is. I mean, right now, while you and I can't properly process how very large a figure 6-7 billion people really is, we have the knowledge that there are more people who do not believe as we do than there are that do not. But when you're living in 17th century Russia, while you might have some vague awareness that in distant lands there might be Tartars, Muslims and Western Europeans who believe differently, they're so far away they may as well be on the moon. And therefor the "threat" they present to your salvation (and ultimately God's victory over the devil) is so remote as to be nonsensical. For all intents, those people really don't exist. But the guy down the street does. And in our minds, that makes him a threat we can deal with directly.

But our grasp now of just how vast the world truly is makes it laughable to think that what the guy down the street believes could make a difference one way or the other. Weighed against the beliefs of one billion Muslims, what is the consequence of one guy down the street? We don't believe that God's victory over the Devil (literal or metaphorical depending on your personal beliefs) can possibly be put into jeopardy by that guy down the street crossing himself with two or three fingers.

Ymar Sakar said...

In Luther's time people were ready to fight to the death over distinctions that make little or no sense to me today.

I guess it doesn't really matter if the Pope was writing get out of hell free scripts for people who paid enough money back then.

Nevertheless, I'm not sorry to be able to regard with indifference quarrels over the precise meaning of sacraments.

Theology is required. The precise meaning of what the 1st and 2nd amendments mean, makes as much difference to some people. It is a minor thing, after all, except in cases where it isn't minor.

I have never noticed that questions of this sort much occupied Jesus's thinking.

No, Christ was more in favor of talking about using the legions of angel to back him up or flipping over the table of merchants that were using the wrong scales.

The common theme is that Protestants (and pseudo-Protestants like Episcopalians) erred in believing we could turn loose hundreds of millions of Christians to decide for themselves what the Bible means and what God wants from us. How, they wondered, will anyone know what to believe if no one can agree on an authoritative source?

Leftism is a Christian heresy after all, so they may have a point. But only one.

I acknowledge the danger of sectarianism, but I'm unable to see how reposing our faith in a single infallible human interpreter helps matters.

It's about hierarchy. Dealing with problems in the hierarchy is easier when there is a recognized leader, like the Pope. Dealing with 5000 tribal leaders is like Iraq. Difficult.