Seeds of the Word: Finding God in the Culture

PREFACE

Just below the Parthenon and the Acropolis in Athens is a rocky outcropping called the Areopagus, which, in ancient times, functioned as a forum for the adjudication of legal disputes and the airing of philosophical opinions. To that place, some time around 55 AD, came a man who had been trained in both the Greek and the Jewish traditions and who had a novel message to share. The Apostle Paul commenced, not with the news itself, but rather with an observation about the religiosity on display in the city: You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious. For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed ‘To an Unknown God’ (Acts 17:23). Christians have long taken Paul’s strategy on the Areopagus as a model for the evangelization of culture. Before sowing the Word, one looks for semina verbi (seeds of the word) already present among the people one seeks to evangelize. The wager is that, once these are uncovered, the Word of Christ will not seem so strange or alien. In the best case, a nonbeliever might come to see that he had, in fact, been worshipping Christ all along, though under the guise of an Unknown God.

I have been actively involved in the work of evangelizing the culture for over ten years. Sometimes, I think it is necessary to challenge deep moral dysfunction in the culture directly. For example, in the face of an abortion-on-demand philosophy, which permits a mother to eliminate a baby in her womb simply because she doesn’t care for another child of that gender, one can and should only shout, No! However, especially in our relativistic postmodern framework, commencing with moral prohibitions is often an evangelical nonstarter. Therefore, I have tended to begin my work by presenting features of the high or low culture that, sometimes faintly and sometimes powerfully, echo the Gospel message. Monsignor. Robert Sokolowski, who taught me many years ago at Catholic University, shared an image that has long stayed in my mind. The integrated icon of Christian doctrine, he said, exploded at the time of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and its charred and distorted fragments have landed here and there, littering the contemporary cultural environment. Accordingly, we are not going to find, at least very often, the whole Catholic thing on beautiful display, but we are indeed going to find bits and pieces of it practically everywhere, provided we have the eyes to see.

If the evangelist exercises his analogical imagination, he can see images of Jesus in Superman, Spider-Man, and Andy Dufresne; he can sense the play between divine love and divine mercy in the strong arms of Rooster Cogburn; he can hear an echo of Augustine’s anthropology in the protagonist of Eat, Pray, Love; he can discern a powerful teaching on the danger of concupiscent desire in The Great Gatsby; he can sense a longing for the supernatural in The Exorcist and the Twilight series; he can pick up overtones of Jeremiah and Isaiah in Bob Dylan; he can hear the voice that spoke to Job out of the whirlwind in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man; and he can appreciate one of the most textured presentations of Christian soteriology in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino. Are any of these adequate presentations of the Word as such? Hardly. But are they all semina verbi, seeds of the Word?

Absolutely.

And thus can they, like the altar to the Unknown God in ancient Athens, provide a foundation for evangelization, a way in, a point of departure?

Emphatically yes.

The short pieces gathered in this collection represent one Catholic evangelist’s attempt to sow the seed of the Gospel in the contemporary culture. There is a journalistic and therefore somewhat ephemeral quality to these essays, since they deal with issues, films, books, and events of a very particular time. But I hope that they nevertheless convey something of the timeless truth of the Good News and that they, however inadequately, provide a model for how proclaimers of the Gospel might go about their work on the Areopagus.

IMAGO DEI:

GOD IN FILM

Kierkegaard, Woody Allen, and the Secret to Lasting Joy

THE GREAT NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHER Søren Kierkegaard spoke of three stages that one passes through on the way to spiritual maturity: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. During the aesthetic stage, a person is preoccupied with sensual pleasure, with the satisfaction of bodily desire. Food, drink, sex, comfort, and artistic beauty are the dominating concerns of this stage of life. The ordinary fellow drinking beer at the baseball game and the effete aristocrat sipping wine in his box at the opera are both fundamentally enjoying the aesthetic life in Kierkegaard’s sense. The pleasures of this stage are pure and intense, and this is why it is often difficult to move to the next level, the ethical.

At this second stage, one transcends the preoccupation with satisfying one’s own sensual desire and accepts the moral obligation that ties one in love to another person or institution. The young man who finally abandons his bachelor’s life and enters into marriage with all of its practical and moral responsibilities is passing from stage one to stage two, as is the soldier who lets go of superficial self-interest and dedicates himself to the service of his country.

But finally, says Kierkegaard, there is a dimension of spiritual attainment that lies beyond even the ethical. This is the religious. At this stage of life, a person falls in love with God, and this means that she falls unconditionally in love, since she has found the infinite object that alone corresponds to the infinite longing of her heart.

For the religious person, even the objects of deepest ethical commitment—family, country, business, etc.—fall into a secondary position. When Thomas More said on the scaffold, I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first, he gave evidence that he had passed from the ethical to the religious stage of life. This famous account of the stages on life’s way came to my mind as I was watching Woody Allen’s film Vicky, Christina, Barcelona. Like most of Allen’s movies, this one concentrates on the mores and behaviors of the cultural elite: wealthy business executives, artists, poets, and writers. Vicky and Christina are two young New Yorkers who have resolved to spend a couple of summer months in Barcelona. While enjoying a late meal at an elegant restaurant, they are propositioned by Juan Antonio, an infinitely charming painter, who invites the women to join him for a romantic weekend. Despite Vicky’s initial hesitation, they accept. Juan Antonio is a consummate bon vivant, and he introduces Vicky and Christina to the pleasures of the Spanish good life: the best restaurants, vistas, art galleries, music, etc. And then, of course, he seduces both of them. In order not to spoil the movie for you (and to keep a PG rating for this article), suffice it to say that they become involved in a love triangle—and eventually quadrangle. None of the lovers is capable of a stable commitment, and all make appeal continually to the shortness of life, the importance of enjoying the moment, and the restrictions of conventional morality.

What they all do—to varying degrees—is to reduce sexual relationship to the level of good food and music and art; something that satisfies at the aesthetic level. And what makes this reduction possible is precisely the disappearance of religion. All of the players in this film move in the world of the sophisticated European high culture; an arena from which God has been rather summarily ejected. Kierkegaard thought that the three stages are ordered to one another in such a way that the highest gives stability and purpose to the other two. When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.

This film is a vivid presentation of precisely this declension. And the end result of this collapse is deep unhappiness. What struck me throughout Woody Allen’s film was just this: how unhappy, restless, and bored every single character is. So it goes when souls that are ordered to God are bereft of God.

There is, however, a sign of hope. As in so many of Allen’s movies—Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors come to mind—religion, especially Catholicism, haunts the scene. At the very commencement of their weekend together, Juan Antonio showed the two young women the sculpture that, in his own words, inspired him the most. It was a medieval depiction of the crucified Jesus. It’s as though even this postmodern bohemian, this thoroughly secularized sophisticate, realizes in his bones that his life will not hold together unless and until he can fall in love unconditionally. The joy that none of them finds can be had only when they order their aesthetic and ethical lives to the divine love made manifest in that cross of Jesus.

Angels, Demons, and Modern Fantasies about Catholicism

AS I WAS COMING TO THE END of Ron Howard’s movie, Angels and Demons, I felt like shouting out to the screen, No, no, you’ve got it precisely backward! The central theme of the film, based on Dan Brown’s thriller of the same name, is the battle between science and Catholicism. It appears as though an ancient rationalist society, the Illuminati, which had been persecuted by the Church in centuries past, is back for revenge. They’ve kidnapped four cardinals and placed a devastating explosive device under St. Peter’s and they’re threatening to obliterate the Vatican as a conclave gathers to elect a new pope. To the rescue comes Professor Robert Langdon, a cool agnostic from Harvard, who helps to unravel the mystery after he’s given access to the archives to which the Vatican had heretofore denied him access (presumably for his mischief in The Da Vinci Code!). As the plot unfolds, and Langdon cleverly uncovers the sinister plot of the scientists, one is tempted to say, Well, for once the bad guys are the rationalists and the victims are the faithful. Ah, but not so fast (spoiler alert). In fact, we discover the whole thing has been concocted by the evil camerlengo, an ultimate Vatican insider, who has revived the old tale of the Illuminati and organized the wicked scheme in order to create a scapegoat against which he could engage in heroic struggle and so engineer his own election as pope! (I swear I’m not making this up.)

Without going into any more of the goofy twists and turns of the story, can you see what prompted my cri de coeur about getting it backward? In point of fact, it is not Catholicism that feels the need constantly to revive the struggle between science and the faith, but rather secular modernity—and Ron Howard’s movie itself is exhibit A. There is a stubbornly enduring myth that the modern world—especially in its scientific expression—emerged out of a terrible struggle with backward-looking Catholicism. And thus many avatars of modernity feel the need on a regular basis to bring out the Catholic Church as a scapegoat and punching bag, as if to reenact the founding myth. Of course, the central act in this drama is the story of Galileo’s persecution at the hands of the ignorant and vindictive Church, and so Brown and Howard bring the great Renaissance scientist front and center: Langdon is almost suffocated by wicked Vaticanisti while he diligently researches in the Galileo archive, and at the end of the film, a grateful cardinal rewards the intrepid scientist with a long-hidden text of the master. Well.

Though these facts are well known, it appears that they bear repeating. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were early advocates of Aristotelian science; Copernicus, the popularizer of the heliocentric understanding of the solar system, was a priest; Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics and a chief forerunner of Darwin, was a monk; many of the founders of modern science—Newton, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz—were devoutly religious men; the formulator of the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins was a priest. Perhaps most importantly, the modern physical sciences emerged precisely in the context of a Christian culture, where the belief in creation and hence in universal intelligibility was taken for granted. And today, the supposedly sinister and anti-scientific Vatican sponsors a number of observatories and supports societies at its pontifical universities devoted to dialogue with the sciences at the very highest levels. In fact, in November 2014, Jesuit brother and Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno became the first clergyman to be awarded the prestigious Carl Sagan Medal for outstanding communication by an active planetary scientist to the general public.

Despite the tragedy of the Galileo incident, prompted by the ignorance and in some cases ill will of certain churchmen at the time, Catholicism is not the enemy of science and feels absolutely no compulsion to define itself over against science as though the two are locked in a kind of zero-sum game. It is a longstanding conviction of the Church that since God is one and since all truth comes from God, there can finally be no conflict between the truths of revelation and the truths discoverable through the exercise of human reason. And so the Church rejoices in whatever the empirical sciences uncover and expects no conflict between those discoveries and its own faith, rightly interpreted.

What I found particularly galling about Angels and Demons is that Robert Langdon not only solves the mystery but also effectively protects the Church from itself. This, of course, is the modern fantasy in full: science emerged from Catholicism after a terrible battle but still has the graciousness and magnanimity to offer its help to its benighted and defeated rival. Ugh! Truth be told, the wound caused by the Galileo incident is being constantly picked open, not by the Vatican, but by representatives of secular modernity; the battle between religion and science is now pretty much a shadowboxing affair, radical secularism shaking its fists at a phantom.

Watch Angels and Demons if you like a thriller or you enjoy computer-generated images of the Vatican, but please don’t be taken in by its underlying philosophy.

The Stoning of Soraya M. and the Figure of Christ

I FIRST BECAME ACQUAINTED with the barbarism of certain aspects of Sharia law through an article published a few years ago in The New Yorker magazine. The author detailed how, in many Middle Eastern countries, Muslim men use the prescriptions in the traditional Islamic legal code to terrorize, brutalize, and in extreme cases, kill women who, they claim, have committed sexual offenses. He specified that some of the victims are put to death by their own brothers and fathers! I remember being appalled by this article, but I confess that its impact was short-lived.

It came roaring back to me the other night when I saw the devastatingly powerful film The Stoning of Soraya M. The movie is based on the true story of a young woman who lived in a small Iranian village during the years just following the Khomeini revolution of 1979. Soraya was caught in a dreadful situation: her husband, who beat her regularly and cheated on her, wanted to put her away and marry another woman. When Soraya refused to grant him the divorce, her husband conspired with the mullah of the village, the mayor, and several other men to accuse her of adultery, though she was utterly innocent of the charge. When the accusation became public, Soraya raised her voice in protest, but her complaint carried no legal weight, and the council of the village, composed exclusively of men, condemned her, in accordance with Sharia law, to death by stoning. The depiction of Soraya’s execution is overwhelming. She is buried to her waist and her hands tied behind her back. The first stones are thrown by her own father and by her two pre-adolescent sons. Next, her husband attacks her and then all of the men of the town rain stones upon her, as they chant Allahu akhbar (God is great).

Now I realize how dangerous and delicate it is to raise a matter such as this. It is extremely easy to fall into the trap of tsk-tsking and tut-tutting at the objectionable practices of another religion without admitting to the outrages of one’s own. I fully admit that the Judeo-Christian tradition is anything but blameless. The most casual glance at the book of Leviticus discloses that ancient Israel certainly accepted a legal code that sanctioned lethal violence—burning and stoning—for various offenses. And I humbly confess that Christians, over the centuries, have done terrible things in the name of Christ: the burning of witches, the torturing of heretics, the slaughter of non-Christians, etc. Nevertheless, the events described in The Stoning of Soraya M. are not from ancient history; they took place a few decades ago. And the imposition of Sharia law is a lively issue in a number of countries today. So what do we do with a movie such as this?

I am convinced that, though Christians rarely have lived up to it, there is an ideal at the heart of the Gospel that represents a permanent challenge to the travesty of justice on display in the story of Soraya. As the film came to its bloody climax, I found myself haunted by the story told in the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel of the woman caught in adultery. Many of the dynamics of the Soraya narrative are evident in this account: a woman accused of a sexual offense, the formation of an angry mob, the sanctioning of violence through religious authority, the thrill that comes through scapegoating. But then there is the decisive difference. When the religious leaders of the mob—thirsty for blood and confirmed in their self-righteousness—inquire of Jesus what he would recommend, the young rabbi bends down and writes on the ground. Then he stands up and says, Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her (Jn 8:7). This devastating one-liner causes the elders to drop their stones and prompts the crowd to dissipate like a summer cloud. Jesus doesn’t sanction scapegoating violence; he interrupts it. He demonstrates that God stands, not on the side of victimizers, but of victims. And this divine solidarity with victims comes to its richest expression when Jesus becomes himself an innocent victim of a religiously-sanctioned scapegoating mob.

The French philosopher René Girard has argued that all dysfunctional human societies—from coffee klatches to nation states—are predicated upon the scapegoating mechanism, that is to say, the tendency to find someone or some group to blame. In its shared hatred, the group finds a satisfying, though ultimately unstable, unity. One of my colleagues at Mundelein Seminary has summed up Girard’s insight as follows: Wherever two or three are gathered, look for victims. Girard identified the first revelation (unveiling, revelatio) of Christianity as precisely this uncovering and de-legitimizing of the scapegoating mechanism, and the second as the manifestation of the God who is friend to the victim.

What particularly gripped me as the movie came to its conclusion was this: Soraya, devout Muslim and innocent victim of mob violence, lying dead in a pool of her own blood, is one of the most powerful Christ figures in recent cinema.

District 9 and the Biblical Attitude Toward the Other

I JUST SAW A REMARKABLE FILM called District 9. It’s an exciting, science-fiction adventure movie, but it is much more than that. In fact, it explores, with great perceptiveness, a problem that has preoccupied modern philosophers from Hegel to Levinas, the puzzle of how to relate to the other.

District 9 sets up the question in the most dramatic way possible, for its plot centers around the relationship between human beings and aliens from outer space who have stumbled their way onto planet earth. As the film gets underway, we learn that in the 1980s a great interstellar spacecraft appeared and hovered over Johannesburg, South Africa. When the craft was boarded, hundreds of thousands of weak and malnourished aliens were discovered. These creatures, resembling a cross between insects and apes, were herded into a great concentration camp near the city, where they were allowed to live in squalor and neglect for twenty some years. In time, the citizens of Johannesburg came to find the aliens annoying and dangerous, and the central narrative of the movie commences with the attempt to shut down the camp and relocate the prawns to a site far removed from the city.

Placed in charge of the relocation operation is Wikus van de Merwe, an agreeable, harmless cog in the state machine. While searching for weapons in the hovel of one of the aliens, Wikus comes across a mysterious cylinder. When he examines it, a black fluid sprays out onto his face, and in a matter of hours, he is desperately ill. He is taken to the hospital, and the doctors who examine him are flabbergasted to discover that his forearm has morphed into the appendage of an alien. Almost immediately, the state officials reduce the suffering man to an object, resolving to dissect him and experiment on him. Wikus manages a miraculous escape, but he is ruthlessly hunted down throughout the film. I promise not to give away much more of the plot. I’ll add only this: as his transformation progresses, Wikus becomes an ally of the prawns and they come to respect him and to protect him from his persecutors.

With this sketch of the story in mind, I should like to return now to the two philosophers I mentioned at the outset. The nineteenth century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught that much of human history can be understood as the working out of what he called the master/slave relationship. Typically, people in power—politically, culturally, militarily—find a weaker, more vulnerable other whom they then proceed to manipulate, dominate, exclude, and scapegoat. Masters need slaves and slaves, Hegel saw, in their own way need masters, each group conditioning the other in a dysfunctional manner. Masters don’t try to understand slaves (think of the dominant Greeks who characterized any foreigners as barbarians, since all they said was bar-bar); instead, they use them. Furthermore, almost all of history is told from the standpoint of the masters, and mastery is the state to which all sane people aspire.

Emmanuel Levinas, a twentieth-century Jewish philosopher whose family was killed in the Holocaust, reminded us how the Bible consistently undermines this master/slave dynamic, since it recounts history from the standpoint of the other, the outsider, the oppressed. Levinas argued that Biblical ethics commences, not with philosophical abstractions about the good life, but with the challenging face of the suffering other. The prophets of Israel consistently remind the people that since they too were once slaves in Egypt, they must be compassionate toward the alien,