MetaCatholic

John Hobbins has a good, thoughtful and positive post on the new CDF Responses on the Church, which essentially re-iterates Dominus Iesus. The fuss in the press and elsewhere seems to revolve around this response:

“This Church, constituted and organised in this world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the Bishops in communion with him” ((Lumen Gentium 8.2)) … ‘subsistence’ means this perduring, historical continuity and the permanence of all the elements instituted by Christ in the Catholic Church, in which the Church of Christ is concretely found on this earth. … It is possible, according to Catholic doctrine, to affirm correctly that the Church of Christ is present and operative in the churches and ecclesial Communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church, on account of the elements of sanctification and truth that are present in them

Now I have to admit that I can’t see where anything has changed. Ever since Vatican II people have made many positive and frankly overblown comments about the change from “exists in” to “subsists in.” I have become convinced, however, at the risk of over-simplification, that the root of this problem of misreading Lumen Gentium comes from the way in which Protestants tend to be Platonist, and Catholics tend to be Aristotelian.

Continuing this oversimplification, Protestants ascribe the “one true Church” statement primarily to the invisible Church, and then show, in one way or another, how they might reflect or manifest that. They therefore pay less attention to the ways in which any specific body might be linked to other specific bodies, assuming that the links that matter belong to the invisible and spiritual realm. Protestant ecclesiology is naturally pneumatological and eschatological. Protestants can therefore be either promiscuously ecumenical, or indiscriminately fissiparous.

By contrast, as good Aristotelian Thomists, Catholics say that invisible forms make little sense without visible instantiations. The actual reality of a tangible, visible Church is a necessary precondition of believing in an invisible and spiritual one. Catholic ecclesiology is naturally christological and sacramental. Catholics can be correspondingly over-invested in history and institutional structure.

As an Anglican, I find myself in an uncomfortably confused church, that has never sorted out its ecclesiology properly, with the full sacramentally ordered structure of episcopal ordination and apostolic succession, and a generally Platonising belief in the invisible Church: hence Archbishop William Temple’s (possibly apocryphal) bon mot: “I believe in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, and regret that it nowhere exists” And hence perhaps the current confusion and tempest across the Anglican Communion.

For myself, I’m much more with the Catholic emphasis on the necessity of visibility, but recognise there are tensions to resolve here that the ecumenical movement, perhaps misled by the “subsists in” has failed to tackle seriously. The pneumatological and eschatological horizon of the invisible Church needs better integration in Catholic theology.

In the meantime, I am not bound to accept the Pope’s judgement on my Church, but I can see perfect logic and consistency with the tradition in his holding that view. Ursine creatures still defecate in the sylvan glades, and the pope is indeed still catholic.

The discussion generated by my recent post on the etymological fallacy generated a fair few comments (and became my most read post to date). I want to clarify some points from this discussion about words and meanings, for which in one sense this bit of T.S. Eliot says it all.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still¹

Words are not like bricks: fixed-size containers of clear sharply bounded meanings. Nor are the meanings of sentences constructed by simply placing these bricks together and adding up the meaning. They are more like wet sponges. As they are squeezed together, bits of the meaning get squeezed out be surrounding words in the sentence, and they can also absorb meaning from the words next door.

Dictionaries are in this sense misleading. Meanings 1, 2, 3 etc of a headword are not several separate bits of meaning, but aspects of a fuzzier and more fluid field, that depend on the ways in which words are conjoined in usage. Take this English example, all from real conversations:

1. “I’m not religious, I’m a Christian” (Where a point is being made about internal faith versus external observance)
2. “She wasn’t very religious, but always watched Songs of Praise and said her prayers at night” (She didn’t go to church)
3. “He’s a religious follower of Manchester United.” (He’s a football fan with poor taste in teams)
4. “He’s a diocesan priest, not a religious one.” (He doesn’t belong to a specific order such as the Dominicans in the RC Church)

There are commonalities and connections between these words and their usage. But equally clearly there’s no fixed meaning that can transfer from sentence to sentence like a building block.

We tend to know this instinctively about our own language. It’s very easy to get it wrong with a non-native language. I could parallel a similar diversity of meanings with examples from Scripture, containing, say, the word sarx, often translated flesh. Those accustomed to traditional biblical English will have picked up a fair few of those meanings because in biblical usage the English word has in significant part assimilated to the Greek word’s semantic domain. But that doesn’t stop others from trying to create a artificial package of meaning added together from diverse contexts, in what James Barr called “illegitimate totality transfer.”

And as I remarked before, etymology is a particularly tempting route to this, as people forget all the principles of usage that we know by osmosis for our own language, and start talking about the real meaning or the literal meaning. (The real meaning of nice is not ignorant.) There is, I would suggest, very rarely any such thing as a real meaning. Etymology has a certain place for neologisms, some metaphors and figures where the context indicates the metaphor or figure is live (puns or faux aetiologies, for example) and as a last resort for hapax legomena.

But in all other cases etymology is a very poor guide. Usage determines meaning.. Words will not stay still.

1. Four Quartets, Burnt Norton V lines 152-156 [↩]