The Invention of Papal History

I'm teaching an historiography course this semester and it is one of the most rewarding things I have done in a very long time. I have often mentioned on here and elsewhere my fascination with how histories are crafted and recrafted, not least by Eastern Christians in and after periods of conflict--whether during the Crusades or otherwise with the Catholic Church, or Islam, inter alia. The works of Vamik Volkan and others discussed on here have been very useful in that regard. So too are other psychoanalysts such Charles Strozier, Donald Spence, and Jeffrey Prager. 

One thing I learned decades ago thanks to historians such as the late Robert Taft, the Anglo-Canadian Margaret MacMillan, and David Reynolds of Cambridge is that one must always pay attention to how history is crafted, by whom, in which context, and with what goals in mind. I have written a little bit about this elsewhere. 

With regard to Catholic, and especially papal, history, the scrutiny must be even greater in my view. I had four uninterrupted and delightful hours with the doyen of Church historians in this country, John O'Malley, when we brought him to town for a lecture nearly a decade ago. We had great fun discussing the ways in which papal history is often tendentiously rendered--e.g., the crafting of approved popes and anti-popes in the Annuario Pontificio, a list which is quietly "updated" from time to time. 

All that is just a long-winded preface to a new book I'm looking forward to reading: The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform by Stefan Bauer (Cambridge UP, 2020), 288pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city's significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how historical writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualising the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530-1568), Stefan Bauer shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Crucial questions were, for example: How were the pontiffs elected? How many popes had been puppets of emperors? Could any of the past machinations, schisms, and disorder in the history of the Church be admitted to the reading public? Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of ideology and censorship placed on them. The Invention of Papal History sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.

Roman and Papal Iconophilia

Twenty years ago now, in his The Spirit of the Liturgy, then-Cardinal Ratzinger opined that Nicaea II's teachings against iconoclasm and in favour of a moderate icon veneration had never been received in either aspect in the Western Church to a satisfactory degree.

Then several years after that, Thomas Noble rather complicated this picture in his Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians.

I wonder if we won't have to continue revising our views of what the West did and did not receive, and did and did not do, in the ante- and post-Nicaean eras after reading a new book by Francesca Dell'Acqua, Iconophilia: Politics, Religion, Preaching, and the Use of Images in Rome, c.680 - 880 (Routledge, 2020), 444pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Between the late seventh and the mid-ninth centuries, a debate about sacred images – conventionally addressed as ‘Byzantine iconoclasm’ – engaged monks, emperors, and popes in the Mediterranean area and on the European continent. The importance of this debate cannot be overstated; it challenged the relation between image, text, and belief. A series of popes staunchly in favour of sacred images acted consistently during this period in displaying a remarkable iconophilia or ‘love for images’. Their multifaceted reaction involved not only council resolutions and diplomatic exchanges, but also public religious festivals, liturgy, preaching, and visual arts – the mass-media of the time. Embracing these tools, the popes especially promoted themes related to the Incarnation of God – which justified the production and veneration of sacred images – and extolled the role and the figure of the Virgin Mary.

Despite their profound influence over Byzantine and western cultures of later centuries, the political, theological, and artistic interactions between the East and the West during this period have not yet been investigated in studies combining textual and material evidence. By drawing evidence from texts and material culture – some of which have yet to be discussed against the background of the iconoclastic controversy – and by considering the role of oral exchange, Iconophilia assesses the impact of the debate on sacred images and of coeval theological controversies in Rome and central Italy.

By looking at intersecting textual, liturgical, and pictorial images which had at their core the Incarnate God and his human mother Mary, the book demonstrates that between c.680–880, by unremittingly maintaining the importance of the visual for nurturing beliefs and mediating personal and communal salvation, the popes ensured that the status of sacred images would remain unchallenged, at least until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.

Jansenism and Other Bogeymen

I've sent some questions for an interview to Shaun Blanchard, author of the new and utterly fascinating book The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform (Oxford University Press, 2019), 370pp. I will post that interview once I have it.

In reading the book preparatory to our interview, I could not put it down. It is cogently and crisply written and covers such wide swaths of Catholic history and so many controverted areas and ideas with great care and innumerable insights. At the same time, however, like all excellent history, it is aware of its limits, and sets forth what things cannot be covered in one volume but must await further treatment.

In the meantime, however, let me urge you to get this book at once, not least if you have any interest in any of the four main ideas in his title: Pistoia, Vatican II, Jansenism, and Catholic reform movements. There is a lot in here for those of us interested in ecclesiology, synodality, and the papacy as an agent of both reaction and reform. Ecumenism also shows up regularly, both in a Protestant direction but also with regard to Armenian Christians among others. There is also much here to consider when dealing with questions of Catholic historiography over the last two centuries and more. The book clearly takes the French annalist approach here, arguing that there is indeed a very longue durée from Pistoia to Vatican II in unexpected ways.

In addition the book will be an invaluable corrective for those--including some poor right-wing fantasist on Twitter imagining that his perch at some law school named after a dish of beets my mother used to make when I was a child--who feel entitled to tell the rest of us what Jansenism is and was while having no background in this complex history. Such creatures always put me in mind of this sketch of the boorish Jim Hacker complaining about "left-wing" corruption of education while revealing how little he had:

The Pope and the Professor in Paperback

I'm pleased to see a very affordable edition of a book I discussed in three parts is now available from Oxford University Press: The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age by Thomas Albert Howard (Oxford UP, 2019), 368pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Pope and the Professor tells the captivating story of the German Catholic theologian and historian Ignaz von Dollinger (1799-1890), who fiercely opposed the teaching of Papal Infallibility at the time of the First Vatican Council (1869-70), convened by Pope Pius IX (r. 1846-1878), among the most controversial popes in the history of the papacy. Dollinger's thought, his opposition to the Council, his high-profile excommunication in 1871, and the international sensation that this action caused offer a fascinating window into the intellectual and religious history of the nineteenth century. Thomas Albert Howard examines Dollinger's post-conciliar activities, including pioneering work in ecumenism and inspiring the "Old Catholic" movement in Central Europe. Set against the backdrop of Italian and German national unification, and the rise of anticlericalism and ultramontanism after the French Revolution, The Pope and the Professor is at once an endeavor of historical and theological inquiry. It provides nuanced historical contextualization of the events, topics, and personalities, while also raising abiding questions about the often fraught relationship between individual conscience and scholarly credentials, on the one hand, and church authority and tradition, on the other.

John O'Malley on Vatican I

When it's published at Catholic World Report, I'll post a link to my review of John O'Malley's superlative new study, Vatican I: the Council and the Making of an Ultramontane Church (Harvard University Press, 2018). (Here's a link to my review there of John Quinn's last book on the same council.) In the meantime, let me most warmly recommend it to you.

Like O'Malley's previous books, especially on Trent and Vatican II, this one is superb. It treats a wide-ranging history of the one council in the West to give more trouble to Eastern Christians than any other. The First Vatican Council's treatment of papal pretensions to universal jurisdiction remain a considerable ecumenical problem, though my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy proposed one way around that.

In this endless season of sexual depravity and episcopal malfeasance, cowardice, and cover-up, O'Malley's new book will also be of great interest to Catholics looking to reform the Church. Perhaps the most encouraging feature of the long and wide-ranging history O'Malley tells is how much of the modern papacy is a creation (often not directly intended, but without doubt intentionally exploited by the papacy) of diverse populist movements. If populism made the pope into this international celebrity of endless volubility and catastrophic incompetence, then there is hope that what populism has wrought, populism can remove through relentless and ruthless demands for reform. Vive l'Eglise libre!

The Three Most Interesting Parts of Late Medieval History

For those interested in late-medieval history, this new book, just released from Amsterdam University Press, captures three of the most interesting phenomena of that period: Papacy, Crusade, and Christian-Muslim Relations, ed. Jessalynn Bird (AUP, 2018), 276pp.

About this book we are told the following by the publisher (which gives further inside glimpses here):

This book examines the role of the papacy and the crusade in the religious life of the late twelfth through late thirteenth centuries and beyond. Throughout the book, the contributors ask several important questions. Was Innocent III more theologian than lawyer-pope and how did his personal experience of earlier crusade campaigns inform his own vigorous promotion of the crusades? How did the outlook and policy of Honorius III differ from that of Innocent III in crucial areas including the promotion of multiple crusades (including the Fifth Crusade and the crusade of William of Montferrat) and how were both pope’s mindsets manifested in writings associated with them? What kind of men did Honorius III and Innocent III select to promote their plans for reform and crusade? How did the laity make their own mark on the crusade through participation in the peace movements which were so crucial to the stability in Europe essential for enabling crusaders to fulfill their vows abroad and through joining in the liturgical processions and prayers deemed essential for divine favor at home and abroad? Further essays explore the commemoration of crusade campaigns through the deliberate construction of physical and literary paths of remembrance. Yet while the enemy was often constructed in a deliberately polarizing fashion, did confessional differences really determine the way in which Latin crusaders and their descendants interacted with the Muslim world or did a more pragmatic position of ‘rough tolerance’ shape mundane activities including trade agreements and treaties?

Papal Power

I have of course had a long-standing interest in the question of papal power, having written a book about it in light of Orthodox ecclesiology and ecumenism.

Not long ago I gave extended discussion to these themes in the context of Steven Ogden's book The Church, Authority, and Foucault: Imagining the Church as an Open Space of Freedom.

And this interest is not mine alone, as my interview last year with Cyril Hovorun about his fascinating and important new book, The Structures of the Church, also shows. 

So I rather expected to be able to think further about these vital and perpetually controverted issues when the publisher sent me a copy of Paul Collins' new book, Absolute Power: How the Pope Became the Most Influential Man in the World (Public Affairs, 2018), 384pp. The author is an ex-priest in Australia. 

Whatever this book is, it is not a serious work of ecclesiology or anything else--"high journalism" perhaps, but not theology, still less any kind of sophisticated analysis. It's not badly written, but its tendentiousness is relentless. It never treats the question of power in any serious way; indeed the theme gets lost until the last 3-4 pages when a few comments are hastily cobbled together, saying nothing that others have not said for decades. 

Thus the book really is is just another history of the papacy, recreated in the image and likeness of a particular type of Catholic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. You won't be led terribly astray from the standard narrative, though if you want something with far more sober and sophisticated scholarly analysis then I see no reason here to deviate from my long-standing belief that Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners is the best one-volume history of the papacy.

As a story of the papacy, Collins's book is entirely standard and wholly unoriginal for this genre: the papacy is one long continuous power-grab by self-aggrandizing men. In the modern period, all the predictable villains come out--expecially the Piuses (IX-XII), and John Paul II--until, of course, the magical hero Francis emerges, at which point the book supplies its own Greek chorus, half of which offers adulation and hymn-singing to and about this man while the other half is chanting psalms of imprecation against his enemies, among whom are to be found any critics of Amoris Laetitia (or really anything else besides):

 "What is really happening here is a battle for the heart and soul of Catholicism. The sheer decency and openness of  Francis have restored the fortunes and reputation of the papacy in the wider world after the overbearing John Paul and the maladroit Benedict" (302).

Pope Pius IX and the Emergence of Modernity

In three parts last fall, I discussed at length a fascinating book, T.A. Howard's magnificent study: The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford UP, 2017), 312pp.

That pope, who ruled for so long and in often reactionary and ruinous ways, has come in for sustained controversy recently in the pages of First Things and elsewhere. Now he will be subject to yet more critical examination in a book set for release next month: The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe by David I. Kertzer (Random House, 2018), 512pp.

About this book the publisher, a bit breathlessly, tells us the following:

The Pulitzer-winning author of The Pope and Mussolini takes on a pivotal, untold story: the bloody revolution that spelled the end of the papacy as a political power and signaled the birth of modern Europe.

The longest-reigning pope, Pope Pius IX, also oversaw one of the greatest periods of tumult and transition in Church history. When Pius IX was elected in 1846, the pope was still a king as well as a spiritual leader, and the people of the Papal States sang his praises, hopeful that he would reform the famously corrupt system of "priestly rule" over which his much unloved predecessor, Gregory XVI, had presided. At first, Pius IX tried to please his subjects, replacing priests with laymen in government and even granting the people a constitution. But, as the revolutionary spirit of 1848 swept through Europe, the pope found he could not both please his subjects and defend the rights of the church. The resulting drama--involving a colorful cast of characters, from Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his rabble-rousing cousin Charles Bonaparte, to Garibaldi, Tocqueville, and Metternich--was one of treachery, double-dealing, and international power politics. By its end, the Papacy--and Europe--was transformed.

Ultramontanism and Vatican I

The relative neglect of Vatican I by modern anglophone scholars has long amazed me--though the fact this council is so overwhelmingly outnumbered by books on Vatican II surprises nobody. Nevertheless, Vatican I remains the most revolutionary council in modern history in many ways. Apart from Margaret O'Gara's 1988 book Triumph in Defeat: Infallibility, Vatican I, and the French Minority Bishops, and more recently Richard Costigan's important The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: a Study in the Background of Vatican I, one finds very few serious studies (in English at least) on this most problematic of councils.

That gap, however, is soon to be happily filled by two books from very important and respected authors who are no strangers to the topic at all. The first comes from John Quinn, the retired Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco who, ten years ago now, authored a very useful and challenging book, The Reform of the Papacy: the Costly Call to Christian Unity.

Quinn returns to the topic in a new book, just released: Revered and Reviled: A Reexamination of Vatican Council I (Crossroad, 2017),128pp. I've just received it in the mail this month and, it being a short book covering much familiar territory, read it in a day. I will have more to say about it on here later.

About this newest book of his, the publisher tells us:

Revered and Reviled explores the ways that Vatican Council I influenced the important issues of papal primacy and the infallible teaching magisterium of the Pope. The book clarifies and corrects many misunderstood concepts and conclusions about the first Council. Although this is, first and foremost, a church history, it is written with the educated lay reader in mind. Vatican Council I laid the groundwork for critical issues relating to the Pope's power, especially the subjects of papal primacy and infallibility. The Council's conclusion remain important today, as Pope Francis looks toward synodality as the way of the Catholic Church. In essence, Revered and Reviled is hugely important because it is the first book to correct long-held misconceptions that have guided the philosophical position of the Catholic church for the last 145 years. With broad distribution, it should impact Catholic scholars, theologians and the faithful around the world.

The second book to treat Vatican I will be appearing from Harvard University Press next May, authored by the well-known and widely respected Jesuit historian John O'Malley:Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church.

O'Malley's book is greatly to be welcomed. We brought him to the University of Saint Francis about five years ago, and I had the happy task of picking him up from the airport in Indianapolis. I volunteered to do this so that I could have two uninterrupted hours with him talking about the papacy (about which I have had a few things to say), time which was greatly enjoyable and edifying, not least for our discussion of how 1940s Vatican bureaucrats cleaned up the columns of "anti-popes" in the Annuario Pontificio, which should surprise nobody who has read Francis Oakley's deeply disturbing book The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870.

O'Malley, a widely published and respected historian, has written books on, inter alia, the councils of Trent and Vatican II, both of which are fascinating.

And now, in the midst of heated debates over papal authority under Francis, we have his newest book forthcoming, about which the publisher tells us:

The enduring influence of the Catholic Church has many sources—its spiritual and intellectual appeal, missionary achievements, wealth, diplomatic effectiveness, and stable hierarchy. But in the first half of the nineteenth century, the foundations upon which the church had rested for centuries were shaken. In the eyes of many thoughtful people, liberalism in the guise of liberty, equality, and fraternity was the quintessence of the evils that shook those foundations. At the Vatican Council of 1869–1870, the church made a dramatic effort to set things right by defining the doctrine of papal infallibility.

In Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, John W. O’Malley draws us into the bitter controversies over papal infallibility that at one point seemed destined to rend the church in two. Archbishop Henry Manning was the principal driving force for the definition, and Lord Acton was his brilliant counterpart on the other side. But they shrink in significance alongside Pope Pius IX, whose zeal for the definition was so notable that it raised questions about the very legitimacy of the council. Entering the fray were politicians such as Gladstone and Bismarck. The growing tension in the council played out within the larger drama of the seizure of the Papal States by Italian forces and its seemingly inevitable consequence, the conquest of Rome itself.

Largely as a result of the council and its aftermath, the Catholic Church became more pope-centered than ever before. In the terminology of the period, it became ultramontane.

The Pope and the Professor (III)

As I noted in the previous post, this fascinating and deeply learned book acutely portrays the tensions of 19th-century Catholicism, not just between its titular figures of Pope Pius IX and Ignaz von Dollinger, but between academic history and theological dogma, between the German academic context and that of a Roman bishop squeezed in and about to lose his Papal States once and for all, and finally between different notions of papal authority, jurisdiction, and infallibility. On this latter point, many familiar characters show up, not least Cardinal Manning and John Henry Newman (whose life is told in Ker's magisterial biography). Finally, this book contains a good bit of history of relations between Orthodox and Catholics, who, under Dollinger's leadership, were already discussing issues--filioque, papal authority--that would have to await another century and more before being taken up again.

When we left off last, The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age had set up for us the central tension in the book and in the life of its titular characters: infallibility and Vatican I are undeniably products of their time, a ferocious reaction to the European revolutions of 1848 and before, a deliberate and crude poke in the eye of the French and Italians who had so harried (even to the point of kidnapping) previous popes and who now were in essence colluding in the campaign to unify the Italian peninsula and thereby deprive popes of their dubiously acquired, and appallingly run, territories once and for all. At the same time, however, it does not seem possible--all the ultramontanist machinations notwithstanding--that the decree of Vatican I, which led to Dollinger's excommunication, could have been pulled off had it not enjoyed earlier support from people, including theologians, who were not coming at the dogma like reactionaries ready to ram a hot poker through Italian politicians and the imperialists of the French Second Empire.

There was, in other words, something of a theological case, flawed and problematic though it was, that could be made for infallibility and jurisdiction going back well before the 19th century, as Brian Tierney was among the first to discuss decades ago.

Dollinger thought that case complete nonsense. In writings under a nom de plume and then more boldly under his own name, he argued that the notion of infallibility "represented a novum, 'altogether unknown in the Church for many centuries'" (137). It was a position from which he was never to budge for the rest of his life. Dollinger's problem, in short, was that any definition would result in the "'triumph of dogma over history'" (143).

Less diplomatically, he would denounce the doctrine as "moonshine based on 'forgeries and fictions'" and this doctrine would prove a "'millstone'" around the neck of the Church, an idea in the 21st century it is hard to disbelieve. And like all flawed heroes in the heat of battle, Dollinger would undermine himself by fatal overreach in some of his rhetorical claims, causing sympathetic near-allies to withdraw, and leaving him more isolated, especially when he indulged in such controversies as attacking the Council of Florence as not being really ecumenical, and therefore inadmissible as evidence of earlier widespread belief in infallibility and jurisdiction, as the Infallibilists were attempting to argue.

All councils have extra-conciliar and blatantly political factors that loom large, and Vatican I is no different, as Howard so skillfully makes clear. Consider just one brief bit of chronology:

18 July 1870: the final vote on Pastor Aeternus, with 533 voting placet and 2 voting non placet; the other fathers having left to avoid voting against the decree. (At its convocation the bishops numbered some 700.)

19 July 1870: the Franco-Prussian War broke out, causing Napoleon III to withdraw his troops from Italy, leading to the final collapse of the Papal States and the realization of the project of Italian unification.

20 September 1870: Victor Emmanuel's Italian troops breached the walls of Rome at Porta Pia, and the city was now to become the capital of a new nation-state. From here until after the Lateran Accords of 1929, all popes considered themselves "prisoners" and would not leave the Vatican. Rather than quietly, let alone gracefully, accept this, Pius IX redoubled his rhetoric about the temporal states being necessary for the preservation of the Church's spiritual power, an argument I confess to finding absurd. He promoted, and allowed others to promote, a new cult around his person as though he were a proto-martyr about to be sacrificed at any moment. It is not an edifying spectacle to behold. If ever we needed a re-reading of Freud's Future of an Illusion about infantilizing father-figures and neurotic transferences, this is it.

The pressure on the Papal States in the late 1860s, and their impending demise, provoked in Pius and his courtiers and defenders a skillful counter-propaganda campaign that portrayed the pope as a harried, persecuted fellow, a "prisoner of the Vatican." This was enormously influential in arousing sympathy for the pope, and that sympathy softened up a lot of people to the claims of infallibility and jurisdiction that were being bandied about, giving the pro-infallibility crowd an initial advantage the minority found hard to overcome. Rather than directly and openly resist the move for a definition, which would seem in bad taste and unsympathetic to the pope, the minority adopted what Howard suggests was a strategic mistake: that of arguing that the time for a definition was "inopportune." The problem here, says Howard, is that "it appeared to cede the high ground of theological principle to the Infallibilists" (140). It was a mistake they would never recover from.

In the end, a "moderate" form of infallibility and jurisdiction was accepted by the council, the more "maximalist" position having been curtailed in part by the efforts of the minority, whose day, Margaret O'Gara first argued, would come at the Second Vatican Council. But this was still a bridge too far for Dollinger, who refused to knuckle under to pressure from his German bishop and was therefore excommunicated, a devastating blow to him which would never be lifted.

In addition to rejecting the ideas on historical grounds, Dollinger was, Eastern Christians will want to note, an early proto-ecumenist, who spent a lot of time organizing conferences with Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox in an attempt to heal the divisions of the Church. These conferences, held in Bonn, involved Orthodox participants from St. Petersburg, from the University of Athens, Romania, Syria, and elsewhere in the Orthodox and Anglican worlds. They discussed such issues as the filioque, noting in one of their decree that the filioque (so well treated in The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy by A. Edward Siecienski, whom I interviewed here) was inserted via an "illegal" method and that the whole Church, East and West, should consider removing it.

Echoing words of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, words which I have myself made much use of in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, Dollinger argued that "'the great stumbling block and real hindrance to any understanding in the eyes of the Easterners...is the papacy, in the form which it has assumed'" (194).

These conferences were discussing issues that would then fade for nearly a century until the modern Orthodox-Catholic dialogue would take them up again, coming in some cases to a near-identical position as that of the Bonn conferences Dollinger organized and led. But as with us now, so with them then: hyper-Orthodox converts began to derail matters. In this case, "the joker in the pack," as Howard aptly names him, is some pest called Julian Joseph Overbeck who veered from Anglicanism into Lutheranism, then ordination as a Catholic priest who attempted to confect a marriage, after which he left and became an Orthodox layman in the Russian Church. He ginned up a letter-writing campaign to Orthodox hierarchs to derail the Bonn efforts, and to proclaim that Orthodoxy was the one true faith, all others hopeless heretics with whom no congress should be had. La plus ça change...

In the end, Dollinger died disappointed all around: by the decree of Vatican I, by his resulting excommunication, and by the failure of the Bonn conferences to resolve Christian division.

But did he die a failure? Howard ends by raising "a delicate question for Catholics today: to what degree was this excommunicated scholar an intellectual architect, or at least a significant harbinger, of the Second Vatican Council"? To which I would add another question: to what degree do we still need to learn from Dollinger about conflicts in the Church over papal authority, conflicts never so much in evidence after 1870 as they are today?

Concluded.

The Pope and the Professor (II)

As I noted here, this new book, The Pope and the Professor:Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age, is a splendid and deeply fascinating one both on its own merits but also as a useful text to consider amidst ongoing challenges to and about papal authority in this Franciscan era.

Howard begins from the premise that the "modern age" really begins with the very long 19th century, a century he and others see as running from 1789 to 1914, that is from the Bastille in France to the trenches of France and Flanders during the Great War. This was a period marked, inter alia, by the return of "religion" after many were predicting its demise, not least because of the massively bloody and utterly shattering attack on the Catholic Church unleashed by the French Revolution.

Those predicting secularization during this period because of the collapse of Catholic life and faith gave short shrift to examining actual Catholic practices, then and since. And thus much history of the period is written from a perspective that presupposes the good of ongoing secularization and consequently does not bother to inquire into the details of Catholic debates. This is one of the tasks Howard sets out for himself, remedying the lack of detailed examination of how Catholics themselves actually viewed the world of this long century, and whether they were united in either pro-secularization narratives, or narratives of reaction and revanchism. He attempts to take Catholic arguments seriously on their own terms, refusing to dismiss theological claims merely because they are theological. In so doing he has written an immeasurably stronger book.

It is, in fact, on debates about history, historiography, and "historical mindedness" that so much of this story turns. Much of the conflict between Ignaz von Döllinger, on the one hand, and Pope Pius IX (and his erstwhile court and followers) on the other comes down to the relationship between theology and history and the relativizing the latter was thought to do of the truth-claims of the former. Any such relativizing was heavily disdained by the papal court and hangers-on. Döllinger, by contrast, refused to see how historical evidence could be treated so disdainfully and dismissively, and stood by it (or at least his perception of it) even when it resulted in his excommunication.

Virtually alone of all the controversial Catholic figures of the long 19th century, Döllinger remains excommunicated and unrehabilitated. It is the burden--but only one of several--of Howard's book to examine why this is so, and to show us the uncomfortable challenges of conscience and authority that the German scholar's life still poses for Catholics today. These challenges are especially brought to the fore in chapter 3, treating the immediate ante-conciliar period as well as the First Vatican Council itself and its immediate aftermath. Döllinger refused to submit to its decree on papal primacy and infallibility, and was as a result excommunicated. He refused because as an historian he saw--quite rightly--that the evidence for anyone believing in papal jurisdiction and infallibility as was debated in 1869-70 was virtually non-existent for the entire first millennium and most of the second. He refused, moreover, because he was an ecumenist avant la lettre, and saw that infallibility and universal jurisdiction were not just impossible to ground historically but impossible to justify ecumenically.

The other challenge which Döllinger refused to look away from was that of the motives behind the conciliar definition, a problem I have myself addressed elsewhere. As Howard notes, "to understand how the teaching on infallibility came bursting to the forefront of theological conversations in the late 1860s, one must take into consideration the severe threat that the papacy experienced by forces of Italian unification" (118)--to say nothing of earlier, but still potent, threats from the French Second Empire and the various European revolutions of 1848. In the face of all these threats, "infallibility became not only the desired instrument of a counter-offensive, but also simply the right and proper theological thing to do" (119).

At the same time, however, one must not be so reductive and simplistic as to see this decree as solely the result of and reaction to external threats. As Howard goes on very rightly to insist, "papal infallibility, it merits reiterating, could hardly have succeeded if it did not enjoy broad international support from the lay faithful."  One must, therefore, resist the temptation to see "that infallibility was...cooked up by ultramontane polemicists of the Pope in a time of political crisis; it possessed much deeper sanction in the Catholic intellectual tradition" (122).

Continues. 

The Pope and the Professor (I)

T.A. Howard's newest book is a magnificent study: The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford UP, 2017), 312pp.

I'm about half-way through it, and will have more to say about it later. But it is church history at its best: sustained focus on two key figures--Döllinger and Pius IX--through whom much larger issues are sifted and assessed, not least the massive problems of the Papal States, European revolutions of 1848, and of course the First Vatican Council. In all these areas and more, the book is a fascinating study into the longstanding problem of the relationship between history and theology.

Students of the papacy, of ecclesiology more generally, and of 19th-century intellectual history will not want to miss this book.

The Popes and Monarchical Marriages

The current debate in the Catholic Church about marriage, made much murkier by that needlessly sprawling and carelessly prolix mess of a document known as Amoris Laetetia (which proves, yet again, that committees should not write documents, and that the writing of short documents and books requires far greater self-discipline than longer ones), could well benefit from a hefty dose of history such as that supplied in David d'Avray's book, first published in 2015, and released earlier this year in paperback: Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage 860-1600 (Cambridge UP, 2017), 370pp.

About this study the publisher tells us:

This analysis of royal marriage cases across seven centuries explains how and how far popes controlled royal entry into and exits from their marriages. In the period between c.860 and 1600, the personal lives of kings became the business of the papacy. d'Avray explores the rationale for papal involvement in royal marriages and uses them to analyse the structure of church-state relations. The marital problems of the Carolingian Lothar II, of English kings - John, Henry III, and Henry VIII - and other monarchs, especially Spanish and French, up to Henri IV of France and La Reine Margot, have their place in this exploration of how canon law came to constrain pragmatic political manoeuvring within a system increasingly rationalised from the mid-thirteenth century on. Using documents presented in the author's Dissolving Royal Marriages, the argument brings out hidden connections between legal formality, annulments, and dispensations, at the highest social level.

Doctrine and Dissent in Late Antiquity

Ten years ago now, in an early book to advance the recognition that papal relations to the Christian East are much more complicated than apologists and polemicists on either side have recognized, Andrew Ekonomou, in Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes: Eastern Influences on Rome and the Papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias, A.D. 590-752 drew our attention to prominent Byzantine figures working closely with popes of Rome to combat, e.g., monotheletism.

Since then, other authors, including George Demacopolous and Susan Wessel inter alia, have also helped us appreciate the complexity of papal relations both in the Western Church and between her and the East.

Later this year, a forthcoming paperback version of a book first published in 2013 from the University of California Press will advance and further explore this terrain, focusing on three important ascetic-monastic figures well known in the East: Phil Booth, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (2017), 416 pages.

As the publisher tells us:

This book focuses on the attempts of three ascetics—John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Maximus Confessor—to determine the Church’s power and place during a period of profound crisis, as the eastern Roman empire suffered serious reversals in the face of Persian and then Islamic expansion. By asserting visions which reconciled long-standing intellectual tensions between asceticism and Church, these authors established the framework for their subsequent emergence as Constantinople's most vociferous religious critics, their alliance with the Roman popes, and their radical rejection of imperial interference in matters of the faith. Situated within the broader religious currents of the fourth to seventh centuries, this book throws new light on the nature not only of the holy man in late antiquity, but also of the Byzantine Orthodoxy that would emerge in the Middle Ages, and which is still central to the churches of Greece and Eastern Europe.

We are also given the table of contents:

Preface
Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Toward the Sacramental Saint
Ascetics and the Eucharist before Chalcedon
Cyril of Scythopolis and the Second Origenist Crisis
Mystics and Liturgists
Hagiography and the Eucharist after Chalcedon

2. Sophronius and the Miracles
Impresario of the Saints
Medicine and Miracle
Narratives of Redemption
The Miracles in Comparative Perspective

3. Moschus and the Meadow
The Fall of Jerusalem
Moschus from Alexandria to Rome
Ascetics and the City
Chalcedon and the Eucharist

4. Maximus and the Mystagogy
Maximus, Monk of Palestine
The Return of the Cross
The Mystagogy

5. The Making of the Monenergist Crisis
The Origins of Monenergism
The Heraclian Unions
Sophronius the Dissident

6. Jerusalem and Rome at the Dawn of the Caliphate
Sophronius the Patriarch
Jerusalem from Roman to Islamic Rule
The Year of the Four Emperors
From Operations to Wills
Maximus and the Popes

7. Rebellion and Retribution
Maximus from Africa to Rome
The Roman-Palestinian Alliance
Rebellion and Trial
Maximus in Exile

Conclusion
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

Reading Dreher with Schmemann and MacIntyre (and thus Marx)

After having written something in 2015 about Rod Dreher's project of marketing MacIntyre's concluding (and regretted) peroration to After Virtue, I decided to not bother with the "Benedict option" any more pending the release of the book, which is now upon us.

In the meantime I had hoped the nascent book might deal with serious issues in a way that Dreher's journalistic jottings up to 2015 had not manifested--not least in its relentlessly tendentious treatment of one paragraph of MacIntyre while neglecting many more important essays and books of his, not the least of which is Secularization and Moral Change.

Dreher did not read Secularization and Moral Change, and we know this from the potted history he gives us as when, e.g., he insouciantly claims that "the loss of the Christian religion is why the West has been fragmenting for some time now, a process that is accelerating" (22).  MacIntyre--who is as much an intellectual historian as he is moral philosopher--writing in 1967, having laid out in this book (as well as other places--e.g., A Short History of Ethics) abundant historical evidence for his thesis, argued forcefully that “the view that moral and social change is consequent upon the decline of religion is false, and the view therefore that such change could be arrested or could have been arrested by halting the decline of religion is also false. I have argued instead that the causes of moral and social change have lain in the same urbanization and industrialization that produce secularization” (p. 58; my emphasis). While Dreher nods his head towards the Industrial Revolution, he never really takes MacIntyre seriously and investigates the role of urbanization and industrialization. Nor, worse, does he do the only sensible thing and pursue a critical analysis of the role of economics beyond the dominant neoliberal paradigm. We shall return to this problem presently.

Though I have every sympathy with Dreher's evidently sincere desire to see Christianity flourish everywhere possible, I regret to say that Dreher's book offers little that is new and fresh to assist with such a task. It is, rather, wreathed about with the stale air of apocalypticism on the cheap. In reading Dreher I was ineluctably drawn back to a passage from the great Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann's Journals: "In the Bible, there is space and air.  In Byzantium the air is always stuffy, always heavy, static, petrified."

In fact, several passages from Schmemann came back to mind in reading Dreher, whose book fixates on same-sex marriage and gender issues to an unhealthy and unhelpful degree. None seems more acute or appropriate than this one: In March 1976 during Lent, Schmemann wrote: "Students' confessions. Always sex. I am beginning to think that this sin is useful; otherwise they would consider themselves saintly and plunge into guruism." Dreher's entire project reeks of guruism.

It is, of course, the nature of gurus that they must convince you of their epistemological superiority, as it were: they know things that you cannot possibly know, or know as fully as the guru. And one of the things the guru knows is just how bad things are, and how badly you need his advice, his counsel and wisdom, his program and, especially, his merchandise to get you out of the deplorable state of affairs you are otherwise condemned to inhabit.

That is the most objectionable feature of Dreher's book: its profiteering on the back of despondency and determinism as manifested in several such claims as "the wave cannot be stopped, only ridden." Or when he counsels Christians to build an "ark" instead of fighting "unwinnable political battles" (12). Or when he flatly insists that "the new order is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived with" (18).

These claims are theologically objectionable insofar as he presumes to know that nothing can be changed, and thus there is no room for the virtue of hope.

These claims are objectionable also on historical grounds, for while Christianity has dwindled and even died off in parts of the world at different points of history (see the history of the Assyrian Church of the East for the clearest example of this), such a process is by no means inevitable or, as Dreher suggests, entirely out of our control. Such a process, moreover, forgets the surprising ways in which the Church can rebound precisely when, in worldly eyes, she seems to be at her weakest.

Those who are more literate in Catholic history than Dreher is can tell you that as recently as 1978 the Catholic Church was increasingly being written off by journalists like Dreher as having suffered mortal blows coming out of the 1960s (with the Sexual Revolution that Dreher tediously bores on about: "History's Most Revolutionary Revolution" [201]) and in the aftermath of the chaotic Second Vatican Council, which sapped the Church's energy and focus from within at precisely the moment she was also beset from without by seemingly inexorable political forces--communism, consumerism, etc. But along came the whirlwind from Poland to upend all expectations of decline, and to sow seeds of dramatic new birth, not least in Eastern Europe, but also elsewhere in the Church through new programs, communities, and movements. Many problems remain, to be sure, but it is undeniable that John Paul II gave new dynamism to the Church at a moment when some pundits were pessimistically predicting inexorable decline and doom, as Dreher is now doing with a grandly (if very superficially) ecumenical sweep that includes Protestants and Orthodox (whose own resurgence in the post-Soviet period, after far worse, and much more genuine, "persecution" than anything faced by Christians in America today, is ignored by Dreher).

At the turn of the 19th century, similar prognostications of decline and demise were made by many as the Church in the West was being clobbered in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and the rise of modern nation-states, including Italy, whose formation would deprive the Church of the Papal States which were thought--wrongly, as we now see, and as Pope Leo XIII [r. 1878-1903] himself quickly came to see--as being essential to the mission of the Church. But it was under Leo especially that the Church--and especially the papacy--found a new focus and dynamism and emerged into the twentieth century on an upward trajectory, aided in no small part by money gained as compensation from Italy for loss of the Papal States and as part of the Lateran Treaty process.

In the middle of the 16th century, in the heat of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the plight of the Church again looked dire to many, and even what ultimately proved to be the great reforming Council of Trent was, for some of the time, a very close-run thing that nearly fell apart. But ultimately Trent proved to be a success, and the Church was again on the move with new orders like the Jesuits and new dynamism that recovered much of what she had lost, and opened up new avenues, taking on new nations and continuing to grow globally.

Going back further still to the rise of the mendicant orders, the Church in the age of Dominic and Francis was, as is well known, thought by those giants, and many others, to be in a massive state of disrepair and dissolution, perhaps fatally so. But responding, so he believed, to the Lord's call to "repair my Church," the poverello of Assisi launched a reformation that is still going on more than 800 years after his death, as the Sisters who sponsor and run my own University of Saint Francis daily, cheerfully attest.

Knowing even just a little bit of this history must surely give one pause and reason to question Dreher's firm determination that Christianity in North America and Western Europe is finished, a judgment from which he seemingly permits no dissent. Examining Christian history all the way back to the beginning helps one to see that the Church has always been in a cycle of decline and rebirth, rising in some places at some times while sinking in others.

There are other serious problems with Dreher's recounting of history, not least his retailing of the discredited notion of "wars of religion" and his indifference--which nobody who takes MacIntyre seriously could ever justify--around the founding of the modern nation-state.

But arguably the most egregious flaw with Dreher's historical section (ch.2) is its attempt to describe the history of the Enlightenment without even mentioning, let alone having read, MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, a book MacIntyre himself said was necessitated by what After Virtue didn't accomplish, left out, or needed to be further developed or changed. The convenient neglect of such a crucial if dense book reveals once and for all that Dreher's read of MacIntyre is entirely selective and tendentious.

Dreher's lack of familiarity not just with Catholic and broader philosophical history, but also with Catholic life in this country (and others) in any serious detail is really telling--apart, that is, from his boutique examples in Italy, Oklahoma, Maryland, etc. For there are plenty of Catholics I know who have been doing the things he has packaged together, and been doing them without fanfare for decades. There are, moreover, many Catholics emerging today--especially among the much-feared and much-derided "millennials"--who have a deep grasp of the faith and a deeper desire to live it. I see them every semester in my classes, and they give me a modest degree of hope.

Dreher goes on and on about "moralistic therapeutic deism" (never taking seriously some of the criticism of that claim and its research, which I have myself heard from other Catholic sociologists), but the Catholics I see in my classes are, with each passing year, farther and farther removed from that. He also makes much of the previous pope's comments about the "dictatorship of relativism," but with all due respect to Ratzinger, and again following MacIntyre (see his essay "Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues, and Goods," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 [1992]: 3-19), my classroom experience has made it clear to me that nobody is ever really a relativist. When I have taught ethics and moral theology to students, disabusing students of a lazy relativism is an easy job by asking them to tell me how they live their lives when faced with significant moral choices.

I have now taught for almost 20 years in three countries at a number of Catholic institutions at both the high-school and university level. With each passing year my students seem, quietly and imperfectly, but firmly and hopefully, to be growing in the strength and depth of their faith. I find, therefore, Dreher's narrative of unrelenting decline to be extremely selective in its evidence, and plainly to ignore plenty of evidence I have myself seen first-hand.

So are my examples correct, and Dreher's wrong? Do my anecdotes trump his? I would not for a moment claim that. In fact, for a moment, let us suppose, that Dreher is more right than wrong about our particular moment in North American and West-European Christian history. Let us suppose Christianity is largely on life support, and may soon die out almost entirely. What is to be done? The answer he proposes to this is of course the "Benedict option."

But what kind of solution is this? Here remedy and disease seem almost indistinguishable, and here a deeper appreciation of MacIntyre could, perhaps, have rescued Dreher's project at the moment of its conception. For Dreher's project seems ab initio to have fallen into the very pit MacIntyre predicted not in After Virtue but in a 1979 essay "Theology, Ethics, and the Ethics of Medicine and Health Care: Comments on Papers by Novak, Mouw, Roach, Cahill, and Hartt" in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 4 (4): 435-443. There MacIntyre recognized the dangers of "the peculiarly deep secularization of our pluralist culture," which

offers traps to the theologians into which they continually fall. A culture of systematic unbelief would provide a relatively unambiguous context for theological utterance, while a pluralist culture offers an atmosphere of tolerant absorption through which the theologian is diminished and patronized and in which the theologian too often responds either by an anxious accommodation to the culture or by an equally adaptive reaction against it.

Dreher is clearly in the latter category, offering a reactionary take on this moment in our history. Like too many reactionaries he is a member of the bourgeoisie, proof of which can be seen in the very notion of a Benedict option, which can be dismissed as both harmless and irrelevant precisely because it has failed to offer us--as MacIntyre continues later in the same essay--"a theological critique of secular morality and culture," including, of course, the economics of late capitalism.

The "Benedict option," then, seems to participate too much in the fatalistic neoliberal economics of the culture it claims to resist. Dreher's whole project seems an example of the "normal nihilism" Stanley Hauerwas, himself hugely influenced by MacIntyre of course (but here, instead, drawing on James Edwards) describes thus:

Laid out before one are whole lives that one can, if one has the necessary credit line, freely choose to inhabit: devout Christian; high-tech yuppie; Down East guide; great white hunter. This striking transformation of life into lifestyle, the way in which the tools, garments, and attitudes specific to particular times and places become commodities to be marketed to anonymous and rootless consumers.

The whole "Benedict option" smacks of just such a "transformation of life into lifestyle," and its uses and abuses of Benedict have turned that great saint into a commodity to be marketed to "anonymous and rootless [Christian] consumers," alas.

In this regard, all those commentators worried about the political implications and applications of Dreher's proposal have nothing to worry about: he is simply not radical enough, for his proposal--to borrow Pickstock's language about the dreamy reforms of Vatican II--manifests "an entirely more sinister conservatism" that fails "to challenge those structures of the modern secular world that are wholly inimical to liturgical purpose."

Far from challenging, let alone overthrowing, those structures, Dreher beats an unseemly and hasty retreat from them and says the idea of anybody challenging them is pointless. Worse, Dreher sneers that those who still want to challenge the structures of the modern secular world are deluded. Those who do not read the signs as he does are dismissed as "the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right" or as out of touch as "White Russians" after the Revolution (12). But assertions do not arguments make, and such derisive dismissals as these merely underscore Dreher's very flimsy and intellectually fragile plaidoyer for a particular program that will appeal to people most like Dreher--middle-class American Christians.

But gurus have no greater insight into the future than anyone else. Indeed, gurus are especially to be put rather severely to the question (to use a MacIntyrean formula) precisely insofar as they try to see and say how things are and how they are going to turn out. Let us invent a law here--call it Merited Commensurability: the more adamant someone is in saying that such and such is bound to happen, the more we ought to greet such claims with the strongest skepticism.

I rather wish Dreher had a deeper recognition of the contingencies of culture and unpredictability of human events. At one point he edges up to such a recognition, saying "History is a poem, not a syllogism" (23) but he has no sooner delivered himself of that single line then he races back to what the psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has called a narrative of "chosen trauma" in which the West is in inexorable decline, and persecution of Christians is coming in fast and thick as far as the eye can see. (Dreher's treatment of Freud [pp. 42-43] turns the latter into the usual sort of grotesque one would expect from those who have never read primary sources. Dreher reads everything through Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud.)

Dreher's overheated narrative of trauma and decline could have benefited from a hefty dose of modesty and restraint at the urge to predict the future. Here I rather wish he had some of the modesty as manifested, e.g., in Churchill's eloquent eulogy for Neville Chamberlain delivered in the mother of Parliaments in late 1940 after his predecessor's death:

At the lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values.

Dreher's "scale of values" inclines toward recommending such things ("options" indeed!) as deeper prayer and more frequent fasting, these being unobjectionable--indeed noble--in themselves.

But when they are packaged together with still further options enjoined upon others, and when especially they are read, as they only can be read, in light of his regular gastronomic ejaculations on his blog about oysters and mustards, or, now, the bourbon cocktail invented by a friend and called the "Benedict option," I could not help but think of another work of MacIntyre's that Dreher seems never to have read, viz., Marxism and Christianity. There MacIntyre says of the Tractarians and the "ascetic disciplines" (weekly communion, intense local community life, regular fasting, auricular confession, and other devotions practiced in ritually resplendent churches) which they commended to everyone that these disciplines "were of a kind possible only to a leisured class."

Like most members of the leisure class, Dreher evidences little interest in the social environment flourishing on a wide scale, preferring only that it do so for the small communities he advocates, and, of course, for himself. Though Dreher commendably says at one point, "love the community but don't idolize it" (137), the rest of his book is precisely such near-idolatry. Here again one can only note that a deeper, more sophisticated engagement with MacIntyre would have saved Dreher from such fatuities.

In dozens of places, MacIntyre has offered repeated demonstrations of, and arguments against, what he calls the "communitarian mistake" which is premised upon "a further mistake...that there is anything good about local community as such" because those "communities are always open to corruption by narrowness, by complacency, by prejudice against outsiders and by a whole range of other deformities, including those that arise from a cult of local community" (Dependent Rational Animals, 142; my emphasis). To avoid such problems and deformities, local communities must engage in many things, including "a rejection of the economic goals of advanced capitalism" (Ibid., 145). Dreher seems totally uninterested in any such rejection.

It is more than a little amazing that Dreher seems to lack self-awareness of how such advanced capitalism makes his peripatetic blogging life possible, but makes many of his proposals impossible for too many other people, who must pick up and move far from family and community merely to survive economically. Here we must include his praise of "stability" (65-67), his advocacy that one must "live close to other members of your community" (129-34), his insistence that public schools be abandoned and people should home-school their kids (165-66), and his impertinent demand that "church can't just be the place you go on Sundays--it must become the center of your life" (131). Try recommending any one of these things, never mind all of them (and still others he recommends) to the people working three jobs just to pay rent and forced to relocate every few years when jobs disappear.

Incidentally, those Tractarians recommending such ascetic disciplines as Dreher does, and those practicing them, did not always have an easy time of it in the Church of England of the late 19th century. There was considerable opposition to many of these proposals, as John Shelton Reid's fascinating book Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism showed. In the end, the "ritualists" and Tractarians, when they did not decamp for Rome, were reduced to a Dreher style of pleading merely for the right to be left alone pursuing their "option" for what Cardinal Manning came caustically to call "private judgment in gorgeous raiment, wrought about with divers colours."

Newman, of course, came to loathe private judgment. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua and then especially in his famous Biglietto speech, he denounced private judgment as just another species of liberalism. Newman, acutely aware of the contingencies of history, especially Christian history, and loathe to make the sorts of facile prognostications that Dreher does, ended that speech in Rome after being given a red hat by Leo XIII with this apt reminder:

Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now. ... Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God.

Dreher is not content to stand still and see the salvation of God. His busybody guruism seeking to safeguard "orthodox Christianity" is, as MacIntyre suggested decades ago, a typical reaction of the leisure class that often has the greatest tendency to fixate (as Kate Daloz has recently shown in fascinating detail) on simplicity, intentional community, and various forms of voluntary self-denial--whether in monasteries or pseudo-monastic communities. It is the leisure class especially among converts to Orthodoxy (in what Amy Slagle has aptly called the The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to Orthodox Christianity) who most often seem to fetishize monasteries, who have the time and money to obsess over "monasticism" and "tradition" in psychologically suspect ways, running after their "spiritual fathers" for permission to pee or clip their toenails on Fridays in Lent.

Dreher, of course, is not made of such stern fanaticism, and, curiously but revealingly, his gaze falls primarily upon Catholic and Protestant communities in preference to, e.g., Mt. Athos (which is to his credit given some of the hysterical nonsense that sometimes issues from the so-called holy mountain). Nevertheless, one must challenge this desire to play at being a monk or a quasi-monastic, and one must regard any and all calls for "new forms of community" with a great deal of skepticism until and unless they engage in--as MacIntyre says--“rethinking even further some well-established notions of freedom of expression and of toleration. But about how to do this constructively in defence of the rational politics of local community no one has yet known what to say. Nor do I.”

Absent such serious rational thought, and attendant safeguards, one can only be cautious and reluctant to pursue such a life, much as would-be monks rightly were before their tonsure. I am told by a liturgist of impeccable scholarship that some recensions of the Byzantine rite of monastic tonsure saw the hegumen or abbot toss the scissors away three times when presented with them by the would-be monk, who would then have to scramble across the floor to retrieve them repeatedly, each time being reminded of the seriousness of the state of life he was about to enter and the real risks he would run thereby.

Because of those risks, it is imperative, then, that one must repeatedly and ruthlessly interrogate any romanticism about monastic or community life in any form, for they are fraught with conflicts and problems, not the least of which is a tendency toward escapism and subtle forms of self-promotion--and not-so-subtle forms of control and manipulation or outright sexual abuse. Returning once again to Dreher's fellow Orthodox Alexander Schmemann (the relative neglect of serious engagement with Orthodox sources in this book must be read as a marketing strategy to appeal to the vastly more numerous Catholics and Protestants in this country), we see that Schmemann has already offered us severe warnings about these temptations in a bracing and acid passage from January 1981:

More and more often it seems to me that revising the monasticism that everybody so ecstatically talks about–or at least trying to revive it–can be done only by liquidating first of all the monastic institution itself, i.e. the whole vaudeville of klobuks, cowls, stylization, etc. If I were a staretz–an elder–I would tell a candidate for monasticism roughly the following:

–get a job, if possible the simplest one, without creativity (for example as a cashier in a bank);

–while working, pray and seek inner peace; do not get angry; do not think of yourself (rights, fairness, etc.). Accept everyone (coworkers, clients) as someone sent to you; pray for them;

–after paying for a modest apartment and groceries, give your money to the poor; to individuals rather than foundations;

–always go to the same church and there try to be a real helper, not by lecturing about spiritual life or icons, not by teaching but with a “dust rag” (cf. St Seraphim of Sarov)....

–do not thrust yourself and your service on anyone; do not be sad that your talents are not being used; be helpful; serve where needed and not where you think you are needed;

–read and learn as much as you can; do not read only monastic literature, but broadly...;

–be always simple, light, joyous. Do not teach. Avoid like the plague any “spiritual” conversations and any religious or churchly idle talk. 

Real monastics, whether Benedictine or otherwise, know that the course of wisdom is to be found not in talking "church talk" or promoting "options" but in listening and serving everyone without drawing attention to oneself. Real monastics who have done that include another of Dreher's fellow Orthodox nowhere in evidence in his book: Mother Maria Skobtsova, who made wartime Paris her "monastery" without walls, serving the suffering she encountered there, including the Jews service to whom and protection of whom cost Maria her life in the gas chamber of Ravensbrück. She would later be canonized by the Orthodox church not just for this sacrifice of her life but also for her monastic service in and for the city of Paris--not atop some mountain somewhere or in an inaccessible cloister.

What Skobtsova was living was something later described by another Franco-Russian Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, as "interiorized monasticism" which is lived anywhere and everywhere for the life of the world.

Precisely insofar as it is interiorized, such a monastic spirit it is silent, reflecting, as Thomas Merton once said succinctly, the entire wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers, thus: "Shut up, and go to your cell!"

May we all do so.