From a simple intellectual viewpoint, the problem with “cafeteria Catholics” is that they don’t think in terms of a God of reason, in terms of a Creation which is a well-ordered multitude and unity of manifestations of divine reason. Of course, if they were to place their thoughts and feelings and behaviors in better order, they might choose a set of consistent doctrines which are not Christian.
From an intellectual viewpoint also simple, the problem with many traditionalist Catholics is that they don’t think in terms of a world in which new facts and knowledge emerge over time, forcing our understandings to develop over time in a “communal process” as the historian Carroll Quigley noted. They think the important truths about God’s work are already in their textbooks. Those traditionalist Catholics continue to place their full trust in their textbooks; how could we possibly come to a better understanding of Creation than what those dead guys left us? Because we now know they had wrong or incomplete ideas of life, matter, space and time, and mathematics? Phooey. Why would new knowledge of Creation affect our inherited understandings of Creation? Could it even be that new forms or properties of created being are emerging as God’s story advances or at least new forms are coming into view as human beings explore Creation more deeply and more widely? Nah!
As the so-called “cafeteria Catholics” prefer to adopt some modernist beliefs (or sometimes modern versions of ancient heresies) to mix with the Christian beliefs they like, so traditionalist Catholics prefer, for example, natural law doctrines which were developed prior to Darwin and Mendel and Golgi, to name just one early pioneer in each of evolutionary theory and genetics and neuroscience.
In a recent book I made available for free download, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, I used this quote as an epigraph:
Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man. [Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech given on 2008/06/07 to participants in the sixth European Symposium of University Professors, which was held in Rome from 2008/06/04 to 2008/06/07 on the theme: Broadening the Horizons of Reason. Prospects for Philosophy].
We need to develop what Pope Benedict XVI called “a more exact understanding of the nature of man,” a more exact understanding based upon the more exact knowledge of our age. That knowledge will include our traditional knowledge in a corrected and enriched form, also historical and literary knowledge and laboratory knowledge; it will be a framework of knowledge which will be Darwinistic and Thomistic and Shakespearean.
Note the name of that Pope Benedict’s talk was Broadening the Horizons of Reason. Prospects for Philosophy. See Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening the Horizons of Reason for my discussion of the talk, and note that Pope Benedict XVI, for all those who think of him as a crusty reactionary, has repeated called for a fresh engagement with the world—against the thought of most traditionalist Catholics and, in fact, most traditionalists of our age. He also has called for disciplined use of human reason in this engagement, and this is where he’s quite opposed to many who would be labeled “modernists”, including those who can be labeled “cafeteria Catholics.”
I’ll be providing a reference to an essay by a traditionalist Catholic who writes a short and insightful critique of “cafeteria Catholics.” Otherwise, I’ll concentrate on a critique of Catholics who consider themselves to be traditionalists, but achieve that state by freezing their minds into the shape of an understanding of Creation no longer valid. The first goes out enthusiastically to adopt modern ideas, most of which are at best questionable as is true of most new ideas in all ages of rapid change, and the second tries to stand in the intellectual ghetto of traditionalist Catholics while criticizing the untoward behavior of the undisciplined or paganistically disciplined modernists.
God’s story, which is this world, indeed—all of Creation, is dynamic. Entities and relationships evolve and develop. Surprises occur regularly—wouldn’t we expect God to have a richer and more powerful imagination than any of us or all of us together? Wouldn’t we expect that divine imagination to provide surprises beyond the expectations of Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas? Wouldn’t we expect such surprises for so long as men live in this mortal realm and explore it?
It’s not a world comfortable for those who wish to think in categorical terms, including terms of static relationships. It’s a world in which those with conservative tendencies, “I plead guilty,” will tend to stick with old ways even when there is a true need to move on to new ways not for the sake of progress but rather for the sake of new truths which are coming into view and also for the sake of the known truths which are deformed when we try to keep them in the forms allowed by our inherited words and concepts.
When we learn of God’s work as Creator by way of studying genes or the fossil record or the background radiation of the universe, we Christians can call that “natural revelation,” if our faith and courage is strong enough; in any case, we can speak of “empirical exploration and knowledge-gathering”. For all practical purposes, all humanistic studies also fall into this category of natural revelations, though we often see those revelations wrongly.
Empirical knowledge can be very certain but can also have a large component of speculation—see my freely downloadable book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, for more discussion of human knowledge within the context of a unified Christian understanding of Creation. Putting aside those details for my current purposes, I claim there are a variety of Christian knowledge claims covering, for example, human being. To understand ourselves in a more exact way, as Pope Benedict XVI called for, we need to deal with Biblical revelations, a small stock of revelations coming to Christian communities over the previous 2,000 years; we also need to consider the entirety of natural revelation in its best and most plausible form. We need to acknowledge all that we have learned about man from empirical studies in the fields of history and literature and certainly biology, genetic and evolutionary studies and more. We also need to learn from physics because we are made of and for the created realms made from the matter studied by such as quantum physicists and the spacetime studied by gravitational theorists. As I’ll claim repeatedly: the world of the resurrected, heaven if you wish, will be a completed and perfected version of this world and not something entirely different.
Essentially, we need to understand life, the universe, and everything to understand the smallest part of Creation. In particular, and as I noted above, we need to understand all in order to understand human nature—however incomplete and imperfect that understanding might be.
A recent essay spotlighted one of the problems inflicted upon and caused by modern Catholics, but it’s been a problem for any group devoted to a well-defined core of beliefs. That essay, On Faith and Cafeteria Catholicism by David G. Bonagura, Jr., claims:
Cafeteria Catholicism is one such myth [as discussed by St Paul in 2 Tim], a product of an age that has made the individual the ultimate magisterium, especially of beliefs and morals. Teachers of this brand of relativism are easily found wherever we look; there are even quite a few within the Church.
Because of the prevalence of this way of thinking, many “cafeteria Catholics” are unaware that this stance is intrinsically self-centered and contrary to the nature of faith. For at its root cafeteria Catholicism strikes at the heart of Christ, his teachings, and the Church that he founded as the means of imparting his grace to us.
If cafeteria Catholics are too individualistic, a trait I’ve often criticized in modern men of the West, traditionalist Catholics tend to stay together and repeat the well-established ways of understanding Creation which came to them from parents and pastors and teachers.
Bonagura goes on to tell us:
Cafeteria Catholicism, therefore, rejects the unity of faith, the oneness of divine truth, and the fullness of God’s revelation. Faith is a free response to the loving God who calls us into a relationship with him. Cafeteria Catholicism seeks to dictate to God the terms of the relationship: I will believe these things about you, God, but first I declare some of your truths and laws null and void in my life.
True enough though I’d say that traditonalistic Catholics tend to say to God, “Please don’t confuse us with new knowledge of what human beings are and what space and time and matter are. What our grandparents heard you saying is good enough for us.” This doesn’t really mean that they will always reject, say, new insights from genetics that might lead to a new cure for a terrible brain disease. It is to say they refuse to build a new understanding of man the moral creature in which his origins lie in the natural world rather than a mythical garden, in which man’s sinful state is a result of an apish creature being offered a true friendship with God rather than a result of an act of rebellion by a couple created in that friendship.
Bonagura dealt well with the “cafeteria Catholics.” Is he one of those who shy away from our responsibility to enrich and correct our knowledge of even the most absolute truths? Is he one of those who think that our world so well described in some of its important aspects by Einstein and Heisenberg and Darwin is nevertheless bound by understandings consistent with a different sort of world? I don’t know. Certainly, in 25 years of frustrating, and increasingly rare, contacts with Catholic intellectuals, I’ve no reason to believe there are many traditionalists who have the proper, guarded sort of openmindedness as opposed to being closedminded dwellers of the Catholic intellectual ghetto.
The answers to our problems are not always to be found in what we have nor in what lies behind us. Our understanding of stuff and relationships and space and time have changed. For example, too many Christians act upon the Platonic and Neoplatonic understanding of stuff and respond strongly in favor of Einstein in his famous debate with Niels Bohr where he decided that quantum physics must be `incomplete’ if not outright wrong. He had no scientific ground to stand upon but he seemed to be supporting a common-sense view of reality in his claim that things had an existence well-defined by their own substance. In fact, Einstein was defending a mainstream view of Platonists and Neoplatonists, once at odds with Thomistic existentialist views and what might be called the relationalism of the school of St John the Apostle. From a Christian viewpoint Niels Bohr had the far better position.
That school of St John taught, openly in their contributions to the Bible, that relationships create and shape things. The world and each entity in it exists because God first loved it. We can help to shape or reshape ourselves and others by proper relationships, ultimately of love. We can misshape by hate and lust and greed. The strangeness of quantum physics is largely due to the ways in which substance is created and then shaped by relationships defined by Heisenberg and Schrodinger and by St John long before them.
See Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a short and very preliminary discussion of the issue; I’ve discussed the issue repeatedly over the past seven or so years as my understanding of created being has grown richer and more complex—see A Modern View of Creation: Making Peace with Empirical Reality for a sampling of essays on created being or Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings from 2006 to 2012 for a large collection of most of my essays published on my weblogs and organized by various parts including Making Peace with Empirical Reality. The essay about the debate between Einstein and Bohr is included in the part titled Love and Stuff.
The traditional Christian understandings of Creation need to be updated as was noted by Etienne Gilson and Flannery O’Connor as well as by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). Those understandings need to be enriched and even complexified. Augustine of Hippo did this with respect to both the understanding of human history and also of the psychology of the human animal. Aquinas took on the issue of being and of the relationship between philosophy and theology. If he had lived long enough to have turned to what seems his true calling, Pascal might well have produced a better understanding of abstract being through his mathematical explorations. John Henry Newman expanded the already rich Augustinian understanding of history and tried to teach our deaf selves that when we continue to speak even the greatest truths in terms of older words and concepts, we can weaken those truths or even turn them into falsehoods.
Some might think it a shame but God didn’t pay attention to their desire for simplicity. Many aspects of the world are described by way of complex equations and by the complex developments of simple equations. Many aspects of human being have been shaped by the needs of our ancestors to respond, in ways originally described by Darwin the biologist, to a world changing in ways seen quite vaguely by Darwin the geologist.
We prefer simplicity and we prefer the comfortable and well-organized ideas we were taught by the textbooks of our youths. So it is that thinkers defend both the truths and the speculations which have come down through the many traditions of mankind, including the Catholic traditions and the earlier traditions which were used by the Fathers of the Church. They defend by using arguments and exhortations drawn from the powerful works of Augustine and Aquinas, John of the Cross and Francis de Sales, without realizing fully that those arguments and exhortations were developed within understandings of Creation no longer fully plausible, though still plausible in light of a proper historical analysis. The correction of prior understandings can be seen in the development of the Christian mind over the centuries. In fact, Augustine’s understandings of many specific matters were corrected or enriched or simply set in a new overall understanding of Creation by Aquinas. Surprisingly, most traditionalist Catholics know history well enough to know that many of the great thinkers of Christianity, including Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, were attacked by the traditionalists of their own ages for being heretics but don’t seem to have learned a certain humility from seeing what happens to the work of even the greatest of thinkers. We build monuments to the prophets of past centuries even as we persecute our own prophets—though modern institutions seem to prefer to persecute by simply ignoring any prophets, serious thinkers who have moved away from the herd in response to what interests or bothers them in God’s Creation. (Aquinas is said to have understood prophecy to be a process of coming into a certain alignment with God’s thoughts rather than a process of listening to dictation from the Almighty; in any case, that’s how I understand prophecy.)
Many centuries ago, some coherent views of the `geography’ of Creation were developed according to the best available thoughts of human traditions and one of those views provided the settings for Dante’s great poems, Inferno and Purgatory and Paradise. Why is it that no one in the mainstream, certainly not in the traditionalist communities, has bothered to produce a new understanding given all that we know about our mortal world and all that could be extrapolated about the world of the resurrected? More strongly still: Why is it that no one in the mainstream, certainly not in the traditionalist communities, has bothered to produce a new understanding, as did Dante in his day, given all that we know that is wrong in the old understandings of even the most concrete and directly perceptible forms of created being. It is those old understandings which once provided concepts used in our discussions of heaven and earth and hell, of the `location’ of God. We have no corresponding new understandings, only a desire to stick to some grand understandings of Creation without being able to actually discuss any matters outside of the secularized interests of our overly politicized age. If your noblest goal is to be respectable or regain respectability in the public squares of a paganized world, if you don’t think it necessary to talk of Creation and salvation in your ideas of politics and law and economics, then you’ve become the enemy you think to be fighting.
A little thought will lead to the fear that young Christians listen to vague, handwaving talk of heaven and pay attention to the more disciplined efforts their elders make in the more important matters of politics and technological development and financial matters. Those children learn about the hard facts being gathered by scientists and space-explorers and quickly learn who has hard-edged, verifiable facts. They see medical miracles based upon the principles of genetics and sometimes evolutionary biology and learn man is a natural creature.
We and those children need a story which will make good Christian sense of all this and provide a setting for valid elements of traditional thought and maybe for some thoughts we’ll pass on as parts of a new tradition. Heaven is only mentioned and never described or at least intelligently discussed as part of the same Creation as this world. Dante provided a brilliant artistic view of the Medieval understanding of hell and purgatory and heaven by simply taking advantage of the thoughts of scholastics who had dared to challenge the traditions they had inherited. We have turned heaven into a ghostly sort of region, a land of fairy-tales. We realize at some level the old ways of talking about Heaven are wrong and yet we make no efforts to produce new ways; we retreat into ghettos and seem to hope that God will just act as we wish and stop surprising us.
True it is that mortal men can never speak with certainty of heaven but true it also is that we have a duty to speak with the most plausible speculations, allowing for the hints in the Bible and for the chaotic materials and relationships of this world. The Catholic principle is that grace completes and perfects nature rather than destroying or replacing it. This means that we can speak, we are duty-bound to speak, as heaven as being a completed and perfected version of this world. We are also bound to speak in terms of our best knowledge, our best empirical understandings, of this world and its mortal creatures. See What are the Thermodynamic Properties of Heaven? for an early, somewhat playful, and somewhat unreliable discussion of one aspect of this issue.
When it comes to our Christian beliefs, we are lazy and prefer the understandings or stories built up in past centuries by men with greater faith and far greater courage than we have. If we are child-like, it is in the way of a barbarian child bereft of a higher imagination. For a somewhat more detailed discussion of these issues, see an essay I published in January of 2013, Alas, the World isn’t So Simple which includes a reference to an earlier essay, Taking the Fresh Fruits and Giving God the Leftovers. That earlier essay was something of a discussion of Emily Dickinson’s poem:
Faith is a fine invention For gentlemen who see, But microscopes are prudent In an emergency!
I suspect Emily Dickinson saw the problem from a slightly skewed viewpoint but she did see clearly there was a serious problem. That problem, in my terms, is that the things which you look at through a microscope are natural revelations, manifestations of certain thoughts of God. However hard it might be to think of E. Coli bacteria as being good—the work of God, they are part of this world, part of a world which works in both utilitarian terms and in Christian terms when we consider this world as a story of the evolution and development of the mortal components of the Body of Christ. Those bacteria, along with galaxies and black-holes and neutrinos, aren’t just accidents in a world in which God placed us. They are part of us, part of the stuff from which we are shaped. God could have created an infinity of worlds in which much of this would have been different, but those worlds wouldn’t have contained creatures which are us.
If you wish, you can consider the natural world which includes not only saints but also volcanoes and rattlesnakes as being some sort of commentary upon the Sermon on the Mount. As you think through this claim, remember the sacramental principle in its empirical form: grace completes and perfects nature rather than destroying or replacing it.
Cafeteria Catholics and Ghetto Catholics | ChristianBookBarn.com
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