THE OTHER POPE

It is intriguing, in current Catholic Masses, to hear prayers for "le Pape François", and to see him everywhere referred to by his title AND his name. But that should remind us that there is, for the first time since the Avignon schism, another Pope, a "Pope emeritus", living in well-earned peace and quiet in a small ugly convent in the Vatican and occupied in prayer. Going through some old MSS on my computer I found this note I wrote on him at the time of his abdication, which I here repeat with pleasure and with deep affection for that saintly scholar.

BENEDICT XVI

Everyone remembers that he was known as ‘the Panzer Cardinal’, and almost everyone has been surprised at the Pope he turned out to be. This exquisitely sensitive man, with the spirit of a true scholar, met a turning-point in his life ca. 1968, when at his beloved University of Tübingen he saw fine scholars howled out of the classroom and physically molested for expressing facts and insights deemed politically incorrect by an army of ignorant and so-called progressive taliban. Having realised that certain ideologies, certain prejudices and certain ignorances are the enemies of reason as well as of true faith, he devoted the rest of his scholarly life until now to the convergence of those two human qualities, so often thought irreconcileable.

His famous “Regensburg address”, which the media and the “Arab street” – without, of course, bothering to read it -- interpreted as insulting Islam, was in fact a powerful meditation on the topic of reason and faith (which I read in German, translated into English, published on my old blog, and will now re-publish here). His short catecheses, given as mini-homilies in Rome, on the great minds of Christendom have now been published as Doctors of the Church, and may go some way to helping Christians close up the lamentable gulf that separates us from devout Jews and their knowledge of their faith’s great thinkers. And his three short books on Jesus – the life, the Passion, and the infancy narratives – are both distinguished and eminently readable.

As long as he has been Pope I, as a non-Catholic and a scholar, felt that here was a man I understood, respected, and liked. Yes, he was austere in his liturgical tastes, but there a lover of the Book of Common Prayer can follow him. Yes, he was strict in his traditional dogmas, and there we would differ. But I am as glad to differ as to agree with one whose mind I can not only respect but regard with admiration bordering on awe.

Moreover, there has been about him since he acceded to the Chair of Peter a kind of gentleness, a kindness, a sensitivity that many would not have expected. And this, I believe, comes from the fact that apart from being a scholar he is a man of prayer, genuinely and absolutely concerned with the things of the spirit and of the soul. It is this that seems to have allowed him to bring out the vulnerable young man he was, and to connect (in a way so very different from the ebullient John Paul II) with simple and humble people. When he speaks German it is a soft, intelligent, mostly kind murmur that reminds those of us whose childhood was marked by the Nazi bark, the Schnauze, of the German language’s other registers, of simple courtesy and of the poetry of deep feeling.

A religious boffin on French TV said that the negative side of his papacy would be remembered in his attempts to reconcile the Lefebvrists, which struck me as both one-sided and short-sighted. Few people care much about the Fraternity of Pius X; lovers of Latin liturgy feel a sneaking sympathy for them; and only those who dig a little deeper see the essential gloom of their grim and uncompromising nineteenth-century Catholicism. (I went to a Latin Mass in Venice where all was delicious until the elderly priest, biretta- and lace-clad, gave to the small elderly congregation a morose sermon on sexual purity.) The fact that one of their number was also a Holocaust denier just means that they have nuts just like all insitutions.

I suspect that in his heart of hearts Benedict XVI, like many devout Christians both Roman and other, is not a full-fledged enthusiast for Vatican II, its evangelical mateyness and its lamentable liturgical and aesthetic taste; but I am sure that he has also seen the way in which it has begun to renew the Church, to banish some of the gloom and doom, to make parishioners smile at one another during Mass, and to enthuse hundreds of thousands of young people to travel thousands of miles for the experience of the World Youth Days.

He is not a man easily understood by a 24/7 media culture (“What Made Benedict Conservative?” trumpeted an American journal, introducing its story with the words “according to the media . . .”). He is, I believe, private, profound, prayerful, bookish, and shy. His decision to abdicate is both innovative and personally courageous. He is now very frail, and eminently deserves to end his earthly life in the peace of a monastery. One can only hope that his successor will proclaim him, as he has been for many decades, a Doctor Ecclesiae, a Doctor of the Church.

UNCERTAINTY

After my previous post on “Schrödinger’s Cross,” a friend suggested, half in fun, that I should turn to Heisenberg and the Uncertainty Principle. This was a challenge not to be resisted, even for as un-mathematical a mind as mine. I’m not sure that it is possible to apply it in any way but vague, fuzzy and inaccurate analogy. But we can try.

    The Uncertainty Principle relates to atomic-sized situations because in normal life situations it is too tiny to observe. Things are simply too big, too massy and too slow (like an automobile moving along a road). But what about spiritual situations? Factors like Sin and Grace?

    Simply speaking, the Uncertainty Principle says that you cannot measure a particle's position and its momentum simultaneously: as you try to narrow down position, momentum gets fuzzier; as you try to narrow down momentum, position gets fuzzier. Moreover, the element may not have had a definite position before you started measuring it.

    As you try to narrow down your measurement of Sin’s position, what happens? Possibilities:

         1.     you end up with Law, as in Mosaic/Rabbinic, Sharia, or Christian Puritan. You apply ‘Sin’ to more and more specific little actions (eating pork, shellfish, having more than 3 wives, turning on a light switch – or reading Elmore Leonard -- on the Sabbath).

         2.     If and as you do so, your vision of Sin’s momentum, its mass x velocity, gets fuzzier. You cannot measure both at the same time.

         3.     If your vision of Sin’s momentum gets fuzzier, you are in danger. Sin’s direction may not be at all times clear, but it has one constant: away from God. If you are deep in the minutiæ of its position, you are vulnerable to its momentum which may carry you surprisingly far from God in a surprisingly short time.

    Now let’s see what happens if instead you try to narrow down your measurement of Sin’s momentum.

Possibilities:

         1.     you get too interested in, & therefore too close to, its mass/velocity and you simply get sucked into its black hole.

         2.     even if not, your vision of its position gets fuzzier, and specific actions are harder and harder to characterise as Sin. You cannot measure both at the same time.

         3.     This is particularly true of your vision of their (the actions’) consequences. These are not what makes Sin Sin, but they are as it were indications of its (and your) future position.

    This makes a certain amount of sense, so far. Now let’s try it with something other than Sin. How about the Trinity? One’s first reaction would be to say that there are simply not enough data for measurement. However, that hasn’t stopped generations of theologians from trying. It’s now an unfashionable topic for investigation, but that shouldn’t deter us.

    Let us see what happens when we try to narrow down our measurement of the Trinity’s position.
Possibilities:

         1.     Externally, its position is in Heaven. But the more we try to narrow down the position of Heaven, the fuzzier our measurement of gets of its momentum, i.e. its impact on our soul. You end up counting angels on pinheads instead of responding to Glory.

         2.     Internally, the Three Persons relate to one another. But the more we try to narrow down our measurement of that relation as position – to measure the exact role of each Person, for instance – the fuzzier gets our measurement of its momentum. We will not, as one Church Father did, get tears in our eyes merely thinking of the Trinity.

    On the other hand, we might try to narrow down our measurement of the Trinity’s momentum.

Possibilities:

         1.     Paralysis: physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. The mass x velocity of the Trinity are so immense, so awe-inspiring – and the immensity and the awe it inspires are not collateral elements to be eliminated by the observer, but part of the Trinity’s very essence – that as we get closer to trying to measure it, we are overwhelmed entirely.

         2.     Our measurement of its position, whether external or internal, gets fuzzier. Internally, we may lose sight altogether of the difference between the Three Persons and confuse them or, worse, conflate them. We may lose interest in, and respect for, any sort of systematic theology. Externally, we may end up thinking that Heaven (and/or, by extension, Hell) is everywhere, or nowhere. “Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it,” said Mephistopheles. (Who, of course, lies.)

    What all this seems to show me is that yes, it’s an analogy in this context, and can never be precise, even with the limited precision of the UP in mathematics and quantum physics. But as an analogy it can be very valuable. Which in turn raises the question of the value of analogy in any intellectual endeavour. Paracelsian medicine upheld the ancient theory that nature was composed of meaningful and intentional signatures, which man must learn to read and interpret. (Walnuts were good for the brain.) Subsequent science has demoted analogy in favour of cause and effect. But in the intellectual endeavour that is theology – not just professional theology but the theology that is the necessary intellectual part of every believer’s faith – the signature concept may well still hold: an analogy may lead us to a valuable insight, in which case the analogy forms one term of a relationship. And there is every likelihood of that relationship’s being intentional.

THE JOY OF THOUGHT

Today is the Feast of St Anselm of Canterbury, the first to offer an ontological proof of the existence of God. What I found particularly pleasing was that this proof, so far from being an outmoded relic of medieval primitivity, was picked up and elaborated by one of the 20th century's greatest mathematicians, Kurt Gödel. As a Bear of Very Little Brain, I have never been any good at either philosophy or mathematics -- to my great regret, since I understand just enough to glimpse the extraordinary beauty that expert practitioners find in both. However, in the explanation given here, I think I can just follow it, and find it deeply pleasing.

I have cited Benedict XVI a number of times in this blog. I'm an Anglican, not a Roman, Catholic, but Benedict has always impressed me greatly by the quality of his thought and by the fact that he has always directed that thought to the relation of faith and reason in our time -- a problem far more important than the interminable arguments about sexuality and reproduction that seem to obsess churches these days. St Anselm might well be adopted as the patron saint of such endeavours.

In the little daily publication I subscribe to, Prions en Eglise, the admirable Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau recently wrote that in this Eastertide where we read Acts and the Gospel of John, we might fruitfully ponder the language we use to one another as Christians. What, she said, do we talk about among ourselves? What, in other words, do we use our minds on? I once frequented a small charismatic community of considerable devotion and spirituality; but I left them, saying to their leader that they seemed to regard God as having created every part of them except their intelligence.

In Spenser's Faerie Queene the Red Cross Knight, stumbling Patron of Holiness, in mortal combat with the serpent Error, is urged by Una, his companion, to "add faith unto your force!" We might suitably adapt this as an injunction to add thought unto our faith, at the highest level we can manage.