Maverick Philosopher

William Giraldi in Commonweal:

Because I want nothing to do with hocus-pocus, because dogma and decrees are closed to real contest, and because corporations make me glum (the Vatican is, among other things, a corporation), Catholicism is for me a literary affair: drama, poetry, myth, tradition. Homilies and hymnals, liturgies and sermons done right, the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo: these are literature no less than The Iliad is.

One problem with cleaving to the aesthetics of Catholicism while dumping the metaphysics is that, post-Vatican II, there is not much to cleave to: the pageantry and liturgy have devolved in the direction of the insipid and ugly. There is no need to rehearse the litany of complaints.  But that is not the main problem.  

Even as a boy, I never believed in an Iron Age Hebrew deity who gives a damn about our mammalian plight. When Orwell, writing about Waugh, remarked that one really can’t be Catholic and grown-up at the same time, he was getting at the wild implausibility at the hub of Christianity. But “God” and “Christ” are, above all, terms of poetry, of allegory and metaphor and myth. Flannery O’Connor once famously snapped at Mary McCarthy when McCarthy said that the Eucharist is only a symbol: “Well, if it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.” Reluctant as I normally am to dissent from O’Connor, I have to side with McCarthy there. Religion not only traffics in symbols, it survives by them, and to mistake the figurative for the factual or allegory for history is to mistake much indeed. But mouthy unbelievers who find, say, Original Sin barbaric and absurd are missing the point on purpose: whatever else it is, Original Sin is most potently a metaphor for the inherent psychological wackiness of our kind, all those pesky hormonal urges that make us batty. Of course we are born blighted: evolution by natural selection is a malfunctioning process. Never mind your soul: just look at all those problems with your teeth, your back, your knees.

Giraldi makes it clear that he is an atheist. In this respect he is on the side of the "mouthy unbelievers." But he thinks that the latter deliberately (!?) miss the point of the doctrine of Original Sin.  But how could that doctrine have any point if there is no God? Sin, by definition, is an offense against God; if there is no God, then there is no sin either, and, a fortiori, no Original Sin.  The Doctrine has a point only if man, a creature made in the image and likeness of God, offended God and lost his prelapsarian right relation to God. Otherwise the Doctrine refers to nothing real.  The Doctrine refers to something real only if (i) God exists as the supreme moral authority of the universe, (ii) man exists as a spiritual being possessing free will and thus not as a mere animal, and (iii) man freely rejects divine moral authority in a doomed quest to become like God.

It is difficult to see how 'Original Sin' could be plausibly taken to be a metaphor for a blighted human condition brought about by evolution gone wrong.  The blight Giraldi mentions consists in factual defects in our mammalian constitution: teeth subject to rot, hormones prone to run riot, etc.  Now while the Doctrine as interpreted by many theologians does imply a certain fallenness in nature herself, the main point of it is moral and thus normative, not factual.   Man is morally messed up, not merely messed up in his empirical psychology and in his knees and joints. He is intellectually defective to boot, living as he does in deep ignorance of God, himself, and the ultimate why and wherefore.  This deep ignorance is a spiritual condition, not one explainable in terms of neurons and hormones.

Note also that it make no sense to speak of evolution by natural selection as MALfunctioning, when interpreted in the light of metaphysical naturalism, to which mast Girladi nails his colors. Evolution is just a natural process driven by natural selection operating upon random variations. No providential Intelligence directs it, and no internal teleology animates it.  To say that evolution malfunctioned in the case of h. sapiens presupposes a normative point of view external to it which is incompatible with a hard-nosed naturalism.

Another reason why Original-Sin-as-metaphor is at best a very bad metaphor is that the Fall stands at the beginning of human history or at a time just before human history.  Our mammalian miseries, however, come not at the start of evolution but near the end.

Catholicism as a literary affair? Why bother? 

In any case, what seems really to interest Giraldi judging by the Commonweal piece are not so much the aesthetics of the rites, rituals, prayers and such of Catholicism, watered-down as they have become, but the aesthetic values of the products of Catholic writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O'Connor.