Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

Why was he a Catholic?  Because he believed that the Church's teachings are true; and because the Church, in his view, stood above and apart from the present age, which he called the age of the "theorist-consumer."  In his view, the present age has no use for anything that cannot be bought and sold or theorized about.  So the present age has no use for Christian faith.  But the believer, he thought, should count this as an advantage, and see the present age as preferable to "Christendom," when the churches prospered. "In the old Christendom," he explained, "everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it.  But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony: which is to say, open to signs."  From Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, p. 460.

That encapsulates the point of my "Cultural Identity" posts (here and here). Catholicism in the U.S., like Judaism, had been until recently countercultural, if we understand the mainstream culture to be defined by the tension in values between Calvinism on hand and rationalist modernism on the other, both swimming in a sea of materialist consumerism. The Catholic world I grew up in is in most respects the one that Percy entered into in the 1940s, had very little to do with those three cultural frames, but that Catholicism no longer exists. After the Second Vatican Council, Catholics stopped living in their own countercultural world and started living in Calvinist/Modernist/Consumerist America.

In pre-Reformation Europe, Christendom was the sea in which everyone swam, and the Catholic Church was identified with it and with European high culture the way Hinduism is identified with Indian culture. But that's a relationship it lost permanently after the Reformation, and the Catholic Church finally acknowledged that during the Council. Aggiornamento needed to happen, but it was the beginning of the end, much like perestroika was the beginning of the end for Soviet Russia.

I think that there are a lot of interesting parallels between Russia after perestroika and the Catholic Church after aggiornamento. Aggiornamento wasn't the cause of the Church's decline, but simply an acknowledgment that the real world in which most people live and the Church had lost touch. So the Church opened up to the world and in doing so lost its identity.  And now Catholic reactionaries are back in the driver's seat trying to get it back. Russia is now entering the stage of reaction similar to the reaction against the council which was engineered by these Catholic "restorationists", the current Pope being one of its more vigorous proponents. The Catholic restorationists think they can restore the church's relevance by reattaining the pre-council status quo ante. It's a futile, misguided project, as all reactionary projects are, and they cause more harm than good, but the world goes on, and any Catholic with a lick of sense looks the other way, but with confidence that if the hierarchy hasn't killed the Church by now it's not likely to.

The Catholic Church in America is no longer taken seriously because it is no longer a societal force. It could only be that when it had a base, and it lost that base as ethnic Catholics moved out of their urban neighborhoods and ghettos and melted into the American suburbs and ex-urbs. The extra-ghetto Church out in America was just one choice among many, and in some places had more vitality than others, but that had more to do with individual priests, nuns, and laity creating something at the local level that was Real, not because of what the bishops and other higher ups effected. There were exceptional bishops here and there, particularly in Latin America, but in the eighties, the Vatican did its best to suppress them, whether in Latin America or here in Seattle.  And the appointment of new bishops has mainly been that of those who will carry the Vatican's water.

But a of people in my generation either left the Church because they no longer saw any reason to stay, or they stuck with a Church often silly in its pandering attempts to make itself relevant. It didn't stand above the culture as a sign of contradiction, but pandered to the people in the pews who were being absorbed into the broader culture  defined by Calvinism on the one hand, and rationalist modernism on the other, both swimming in a sea of materialist consumerism.

As such the Catholic Church as an institutional presence hardly matters anymore. From the modern rationalist side, It seems a dinosaur that managed to survive extinction, and somehow wobbles and wheezes in an environment that can't quite kill it, but in which it cannot prosper. From the Calvinist side, idiots like Hagee still see it as the whore of Babylon, when in fact all it aspires to be now is an ordinary friend and neighbor. Catholics in general, and certainly the conservative episcopacy that replaced the liberal group in the decade or so following the Council, do not have any desire to be a sign of contradiction, to exist as something apart, as a robust countercultural challenge--except when it comes to abortion. I think the Church is right about that, but it doesn't matter that it is, because it has hardly any credibility or moral authority, even among Catholics, and its concerns about abortion are as easily dismissed as its concerns about the American invasion of Iraq.

Its recent financial and sexual scandals have made it appear as its worst stereotype.  A fairly big deal has been made about the latter, not because it's surprising but because it confirms the broader culture's suspicions about the Church. Celibacy is no longer capable of presenting itself to the larger society as a countercultural sign, because rightly or wrongly, the larger society has come to see it as a breeding ground for sexual perversion. In its official form the Church has become for the broader culture almost as big a joke in this country as the Church represented by the Fallwels, Robertsons, and Dobsons. For many Americans there is no difference in the way they think of the fundamentalist crazies and the Catholics. Why should they? The most media prominent Catholic on the American scene is the crazy Catholic League President, Bill Donahue.

Those of us like Percy who remain Catholic in this time when the Church as Institution does not prosper do so because the institution is simply the house management, and that what matters is the sacramental drama that it enacts.  The Church as Sacrament is the Church of the Real, and it is one of those signs one finds at the periphery of the broader culture, not at its center. For the Church of the Real is almost always a sign of contradiction to what one takes for the real at the center.

The Church of the Real does not seek the prosperity sought by those at the center. The prosperity to which the Sacramental Church points is an upside down version of the prosperity the center. This prosperity is found in the places the people striving toward the center do not want to look--in barn mangers, in bleak deserts, on blood-soaked crucifixes, and in empty tombs and barren wombs. The Church as Sacrament is always a sign of contradiction to what is important for those at the center who take for granted that sex, power, and money are the primary driving forces that make humans human. That's why the monks left the center for the wilderness and took vows of celibacy, obedience, and poverty.  They wanted to make as dramatic a statement as possible that the logic of their lives living according to the sacramental logic was the upside down version of living in the center.

Elie quotes Dorothy Day, who somewhere said that the saint is the one who lives his life in a way that would make no sense if God did not exist. The logic of faith, is therefore, the obverse of what makes sense in the broader culture. What is rich is poor, and what is poor is rich. What is fullness in the one is emptiness in the other. The proud shall be humbled, the meek exalted. What is powerful in the world is weakness in the eyes of the Church, or should be. If the Church as Institution truly understood this and organized itself according to this logic, it would not look at all the way it does. And its spiritual authority and credibility would increase a hundredfold. The world longs for such a Church.

In these times the Church's future lies instead with those who live the faith at the periphery, in the wilderness. It prospers where it is a prophetic sign of contradiction. And the people who have discovered the Church there know and revere what it teaches.  But that teaching is not a heavy-handed pedagogy.  Rather it's as if it were a reminder of what one already knew. It's anamnesis. That's the nature of a Church that is primarily Sign and Sacrament. It invites those in who seek what it celebrates, to remember what they already know.

That's Percy's point about the wayfarer looking for signs. Alienation from the Real was Percy's great theme in both his fiction and nonfiction. The trick, he seems to be suggesting, is to find a way of living that rejects the tension between Calvinism and rationalist modernity and that looks upon the sea of consumer materialism as a wilderness to be wandered in looking for signs. Percy accepts that our fundamental condition is one of alienation from God and from one's Self, and that the cure lies in the recovery of the connection between the two. That is a profoundly countercultural idea, but it is a traditional one. The Church is most at the service of the world where it provides a space and the resources for people who seek to effect that reintegration.

Elie recounts that one of the surprising things found in Thomas Merton's diaries was his rage after having read a letter from a priest who said that his faith and his ability to sustain his priesthood had depended on Merton's faith. Merton was enraged because he felt the man was living parasitically, refusing to discover what he must discover for himself and do the work that he must do for himself. But isn't this exactly what faith means for so many?  Isn't this precisely what the churches have depended on: that the faithful, because of the dearth of their own faith live from the faith of the saints? It's one thing to lean on one another in times when we are weak, but we cannot live off of one another. We cannot lose ourselves by looking to embed ourselves in another--even God. God doesn't want us to be embedded in Him. That kind of religiosity is nostalgia for the womb. He wants to be in communion with us; he wants us standing on our own two feet, looking upon him face to face. We have to develop into substantive enough Selves in order to have such an encounter and not be ontologically vaporized.

Others are there to give us a hand or a needed kick in the ass, but not there to live our lives for us. And maybe that's why the Church as institution has had to wither so that the people might learn to walk on their own. An embedded Christianity is an immature Christianity in which the believer remains an undeveloped Self. This is, of course, what the Reformation was supposed to be about--to enable Christianity to come of age. To bring freedom, finally, from the domineering, always hovering, smother Mother Church--and to a certain it extent was. But the reformed churches became in their own way the servants of culture rather than its conscience, and they also have lost any culture-wide moral authority or legitimacy.

So now the People of God live in the desert, whether they know it or not, and it is there, as during the early days of the Desert Fathers, where it's more likely that they will find signs of the Real. That, at least, is what I think Percy means.  We will find signs of that which we long for most deeply where they are least publicly recognized or culturally legitimated. 

Comments

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

Explain more about living off the faith of saints. I sense Merton viewed it as a crutch and/or cop-out, a weak and hollow display.

Yet, the Saints have always been models for us to follow.

Please say more about how to separate the healthy from the not-so-spiritually healthy in terms of following the Saints and living on the strength of those who have gone before us, modeling Christianity in human flesh.

Thanks, as always. Great to have a Catholic post... it's been a good while.

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

Alienation is all the ways we don't live our own lives. That isn't to say that he alone lives his life authentically who lives it in isolation without being helped or influenced by others. We owe a lot to friends, family, teachers from whom we learn about so many things.

But the point is that our acculturation, if it is healthy, is not some mold into which we are poured, it is rather a trellis on which we grow. There's a difference, to use the example from the post, between living one's life as Thomas Merton lived his (as if he were a mold into which one would pour himself) and being receptive to what radiates authentically from Merton's life (or person striving to be real) like sunshine, awakens, or energizes, or nourishes what is real in our our self.

I have never liked the idea that others provide a model for us, like a "role model." The word "model' is too close to mold. The people who have been most valuable in my life are those like whom I have not turned out to be at all. But there was something about their lives that made me aware of something about myself that I hadn't known before.

Sometimes they pointed out or appreciated something I was unaware of in myself or didn't value much. Sometimes it was my noticing something about them--virtues like courage or kindness that surprised me and made me ask myself if I would be capable of such a such a thing.

I did not want to "be" these people; rather I wanted to realize in myself the virtues that they had already realized for themselves. Their having realized it for themselves made me aware of the possibility of realizing it for myself. It was no longer abstract, but real; no longer theory or a head trip, but incarnate.

Elie's book is interesting because it traces the lives of the four most interesting American Catholics of the 20th Century. What made them interesting was their fierce individuality, which at the same time lived in tension with the Catholic tradition. The one I feel closest to in temperament is Percy, my guess is that Dorothy Day is the one closest to you. Discovering Percy was huge for me because I found someone who independently of my life lived with the same questions and sense of the strangeness of the world that I did. I have learned a lot from him, but I see him as a kindred spirit--one among many--not a role model. I think that Merton would have welcomed anyone who approached him as a kindred spirit, but not as a role model.

[Matt Zemek]

Would it follow, then, Jack, that we seem to be a nation that wants role models, and therefore tries to imitate whole lifestyles instead of focusing on the values themselves and incorporating them into our own unique life journeys.

Perhaps that's the kind of slant you're referring to when you talk about the deficiencies of the "role model" concept/framework?

PS--I wonder how many Americans would understand the points you made in the post and in your reply to my first comment. I'm sure that distinction would be lost on a number of people.

[Jack Whelan]

I think the key to the distinction lies in the difference between on the one hand saying I don't know who I am and how to live, so I'll pick somebody to imitate and live as if I am him or her--and on the other, striving to live one's own life on one's own terms but in an interdependent relationship with others who are real enough themselves to awaken in us that which is most real.

[Rudy]

According to Girard (and probably others) we are all imitating others. The crucial point is to pick a role model like Jesus, someone who lives for others. Just imitating our neighbors leads us into rivalry.

While I'm an ex-Catholic, I'd say I'd pick Day. Percy always struck me as one of the reactionary anti-Vatican II types; am I being unfair? I haven't read any Percy since the early 1980's.

[Rob Melly]

Rudy,

I am reluctant to make this point, being that I have no familiarity with Girard, but there seems to be something fundamentally missing from his thesis if our imitation is the sum and whole of our lives. Namely, there is no agent of change in the world. If were are constituted by our imitation of what we see others doing, this would seem to build a sort of closed circuit of imitation. If the exit from this circle is to imitate 'those who live for others' it must be admitted that: 1) these persons are much more frequently encountered and much more mundane than Jesus and 2) that these persons serve as the sort of non-imitating benchmarks around which we should center our imitating lives. However, if this is so, then there can be non-imitating persons and it doesn't seem too hard to imagine that there are non-imitating persons who's last concern is the good of others. The claim swiftly becomes moral and not descriptive from here.
In any case, the thesis you ascribe to Girard seems to be a rather simplified characterization of human affairs.

[Jack Whelan]

Well said, Rob. A good part of who we are is determined by our acculturation, but freedom is essentially always a response to grace which is the x-factor that by definition penetrates from outside the various social constructions humans have created down through the centuries.

It is important for our development that we assimilate/imitate the good habits of good people who influence us in childhood, but it is more important that we meet and be inspired by people who themselves have lived lives freely in response to grace. When we meet such people, our best response to them is not imitation. Such encounters are themselves moments of grace that awaken in us deeper capacities for the exercise of our own freedom. If we are not made more free by such an encounter, we have had the experience but missed the meaning.

[Rudy]

Rob,

It does sound circular the way I put it. Girard puts the emphasis on imitating the desires of other people; and he doesn't say this is a bad thing, just the way any social animal works. The social tension comes in the rivalry that follows. He suggests that the search for a scapegoat to blame, in order to bring (false) unity back, is behind much of human evil.

Clearly this isn't the entire story, though if you read it as the the story of envy, covetousness, etc. it's a pretty big part of the human story.