Why I am … Catholic

This series is intended to celebrate the ways I have been influenced by various Christian traditions and movements. It involves a lot of ‘positive-positive’ polarities, things we often think of as opposites but are better served by being in creative tension with each other. Today’s post resolves two such polarities set up last week, being the Western counter-balance to the Eastern Christianity post, and the Christian counterpart to the Western Culture post. In keeping with the common terminology describing Western Christianity, then, today’s post is about why I am catholic.

As I mentioned last week, ‘catholic’ is one of those words with so many meanings as to make it unhelpful. There are three main definitions in use:

1. general theological word meaning ‘in accordance with the whole’
2. terminology used historically to refer to Western Christianity prior to the Protestantism Reformation
3. shorthand for the Roman Catholic Church

When I say I am Catholic, I mostly mean in the first sense. At its best, this means a faith united around its most ancient points of agreement and focus, and emerging theology done in conversation. Because, for my sensibilities at least, this value is better represented by the ethos and ecclesiology of the Christian East, however, that won’t be the focus of this post. Rather, today is all about the Western, Catholic, Christian tradition.

To put my cards on the table, this issue — preferring the East’s approaches to the West’s — is pretty pervasive for me. Generally speaking, the West’s major theological conversations and influences simply don’t resonate with me. This doesn’t meant they’re bad or wrong; I value diversity of thought for precisely this reason: Not every set of ideas or way of doing things is going to resonate with everyone equally! But it remains that I think the East’s take on ‘generational sin’ is far more compelling, consistent, Scriptural, and insightful than the West’s doctrine of ‘original sin’, which has not only shaped, but to a large extent determined the kinds of conversations the entire Western tradition were having. Similarly, Aristotle, with his focus on logic and categorization, is the last place I’d turn to when searching for a suitable approach to doing theology, so the whole program of medieval Catholic theology falls flat for me. And on and on it goes. For most questions of faith, the East just ‘works’ for me in a way the West does not. I say this not to denigrate the West, but for the sake of honesty.

But there is one major area in which I think the West has been able to have far better conversations than the East, and that’s the human person. And this will be the focus of the rest of this post.

Ironically, this strength of the West was first brought to my attention by the wonderful, twentieth-century, Eastern Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky. Lossky demonstrated how the particular way the Church Fathers used the Greek language to resolve the Trinitarian and Christological controversies robbed them of terminology to talk theologically about individual people, so that: “Under these conditions, it will be impossible for us to form a concept of the human person” (“The Theological Notion of the Human Person,” in In the Image and Likeness of God). Ordinarily I’d resist any such oversimplified take on the relationship between language and concept, but the longer I’ve sat with this, the more I see that — whether or not Lossky’s linguistic attribution is correct — the East really does seem to lack any real conversation about the human person. Humanity, yes; but, the person, no. The East ends up having a strong and beautiful Christian anthropology without being able to talk at all about people as individuals. This is a perilous situation reminiscent of the famous quip about loving humanity but hating people. (As an aside, I think in order to rectify this from within the Eastern Christian thought-world, it would make most sense to start with the theology of the icon.) The West does not seem to have had this problem. While the human person was never a major theological focus (the fact that this seems a huge hole in theology probably says as much about the individualism of our contemporary society as it does about the communalism of Medieval society), there certainly seems to be more room in the West for human personality to shine through. St. Augustine’s Confessions is a spiritual autobiography in which we really meet the man himself and the particular ways he wrestled with God. Similarly, whereas Eastern mysticism speaks almost exclusively of a universal experience of the Divine Light, Western mysticism is best known for its rich but idiosyncratic imagery: Bernard of Clairvaux’s water-in-wine, Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut, Hildegard von Bingen’s green-bearing fire, Teresa of Avila’s interior castle, John of the Cross’s Dark Night, and on and on.

We also see this in practices associated with Ignatian spirituality. The daily examen, for example, takes the ups and downs of a person’s emotional and psychological experience seriously as a major arena for Christian living. Ignatian discernment places individual desires front and centre in decision-making. And, its practice of Gospel contemplation allows room for the imagination in biblical interpretation. So, here we have a deeply personal approach to spirituality. It’s for this reason that Ignatian spirituality is the dominant way I have been influenced by the Western, Catholic Christian tradition. This influence has been pretty pervasive since it was through contemporary Ignatian thinkers that I was first exposed to approaches to psychology and philosophy that have had a big impact on me.

Of course, the Catholic tradition is now only one expression among many Western Christian traditions. So, tomorrow, I’ll turn to the value I see and celebrate in the Reformation.