BOOKS
Dulles, Avery & Zeik, Michael & Chandler, David P.
Infallibility: The Crossroads of Doctrine PETER CHIRICO, S.S. Sheed Andrews and McMeel, $20 [372 pp.] AVERY DULLES In recent years there has been a flood of historical and...
...If everyone is "seetkingly .ha,ppy, '' as the radio often asserts, why are they also silent...
...he dismisses Cambodian na.fional.ists of the 1930s as "Cochinchinese...
...This deveolpment, he argues, is made possible and necessary by the new consciousness that universal meanings have not previously been disentangled from the culturally limited understandings and expressions in which they have been imbedded...
...At the same time, he recoils from phrases like "the dormant energy of the C~.mbodian peasant .masses," from the idea that happiness can be rationed and im,posed, from l~he killings that followed the war, especially near Battambang, and from the intellectualism af Cam~bodia's social engineers...
...The sources are insufficient for a balanced picture, but they are all that anTone outside the country can use...
...Still, I accept Chirico's position that any Christian dogma must have, at least potentially, a universal saving significance...
...Chirico is of course aware that other authors, such as Rahner and Lindbeck, have drawn the opposite conclusion from the same premises...
...Highly abstract in style, it makes considerable demands on the reader's attention and analytic powers--but this is a price well worth paying for a work that promises to make a significant theological advance...
...The new regime does not share Father Ponchaud's fondness for the Cambodian people...
...In American Power and the New Mandarins, Noam Chomsky argued persuasively that American social "scientists," on the fringes of the Vietnamese war, used Vietna~h as a testingground for egregious theories of counter-insurgency and "nation-building...
...Geach rejects this explanation, insisting, for example, that while God cannot lie, there is no logical impossibility in His doing so...
...Such meanings can be brought to formulation by any member of the church who achieves the requisite conditions, but the official formulation for all Christians remains the task of the pope and the bishops...
...Thus the notion of reception, prominent in Orthodox theology, has a legitimate and important place in the doctrine of infallibility...
...As I understand it, the Chirico theory may be summarized somewhat as follows...
...Father Ponehaud is a little too generous to Sihanouk, but he has no use for the corrupt and comatose Lon Nol regime, or for U.S...
...The ,population, thinking the war was over, was overjoyed, but the newcomers seemed on the edge of exhaustion, lost, complete strangers to the gaiety of the population...
...To ascertain that a given formulation expresses a dogmatic meaning requires a process of discernment by the whole church...
...By influencing the consciousness of Christians the risen Lord enables them to discern new meanings in the patrimony of faith...
...It was Thomas who pointed out that it is more precise to say that God can do all that is possible...
...Either he was writing for other professors of logic, or he failed to give a sufficient number of concrete examples to elucidate his argument for the lay reader...
...This lacuna is admirably filled by the present work, outstanding for its depth, thoroughness, and consistency...
...Partly because Father Ponchaud has been scrt~pulous with his sources, and struggles so hard to be fair, Cambodia: Year Zero will be difficult to surpass, although a chill 'hangs over it, like the silence that hangs over Cam.bodia today...
...But that our understanding of this doctrine is confined to the "perverse will of Adam," as propagated in "his undying germ-plasm," I would, as a man of my time, deny most emphatically...
...it operates no postal service, publishes only an official newspaper whose contents overlap the radio broadcasts, and allows very few people into the country...
...In any case, the measure of certainty is not proportional to abstractness or even to universal significance...
...The risen Jesus is universally present to creation and is recognized as such by the church...
...children have been set against their parents...
...I personally believe that his basic theory can withstand that test, though I have reservations about several emphases in his presentation...
...The language has been ,ironed out to remove hierarchical Overtones...
...There are cases, I would contend, in which we can be certain about particular facts known to us personally or through convergent testimony (as Newman demonstrates so brilliantly in his Grammar o/Assent...
...But to say there are roots for the revolution in Cambodia's past is not to excuse the mercilessness with which ,the .revolution has been carried out...
...Chirico's epistemology and metaphysics are heavily influenced by Bernard Lonergan, from whom he borrows key terms and concepts such as "differentiation of consciousness," "higher viewpoints," and "transcultur4 August 1978:504 al meanings...
...nor is he a timid man...
...p. xii...
...After xeading Cambodia: Year Zero, I share Father ~Ponchaud's pessimism about the future, especially in the short run...
...Indeed, they were the only ones not to rejoice...
...Original Sin, as far as I am concerned, is one of the most intelligible (even "demonstrable'D religious doctrines in this, the century of Hitler, Stalin, Hiroshima, etc., etc...
...he is certainly not "illogical...
...Even after attentively reading the whole work, the reviewer unpacks this definition at considerable risk...
...They would say that since the church has become conscious of the culturally limited character of all formulations, the leadership should generally be content to address specific situations, speaking in a prophetic rather than dogmatic style...
...Third, Chirico believes that the present time demands and favors the articulation of universal meanings, infallibly grasped...
...Cambodian officials, traveling abroad, speak of the successes of the revolution, ,but unbelievers are not allowed to see them...
...333, cf...
...He cannot create a "square circle," which would be a non-thing, a contradiction...
...Generally speaking, the church is .more effectively united by shared symbolism and lived communion than by dogmatic definitions...
...Second, I am puzzled by Chirico's tendency to identify certainty and permanence with universality, as though the particular and the concrete were necessarily tentative and dubious...
...We seem to have made very little progress with this question since the thirteenth century...
...The net effect is a reinterpretation of papal and conciliar infallibility not unlike that proposed by other contemporary Catholic theologians, including Karl Rahner...
...First, Chirico repeatedly asserts that tradition is superior to Scripture since the interpreter is in a better position to judge the meaning of the text than the author...
...If the peasants were content, where do the cadres come from...
...and the reader must ask why, if God is Truth, there is not an immediate logical impossibility in His lying...
...and life has become a war, in Father Ponchaud's words, "against nature, against one's enemies, and against oneself...
...But where he disagrees with Thomas (I, Q. 25, Art...
...He spends no time explaining or defending his example...
...Unless the church is to be torn apart by the pluralism of cultures, Chirico maintains, Christians must find ways in which to express the unity of their faith...
...Because of the inevitable tensions between the divine meaning and the human understanding and between the human understanding and the verbal formulation, the multiplication of dogmas often serves to divide rather than to unite the Christian community and to burden inordinately the task of Christian mission...
...Like any new theory, Chirico's will have to be subjected to severe theological scrutiny...
...Cambodia: Year Zero FRANCOIS PONCHAUD Nancy Amphoux, Trans...
...policy" toward Cambodia in 1970-1975...
...Sheed Andrews and McMeel, $20 [372 pp.] AVERY DULLES In recent years there has been a flood of historical and controversial writing on infallibility, both pro and con, but we have lacked a serious and doctrinal development...
...Although the universal episcopate, and the pope as its representative head, are endowed with a special charism for achieving such formulations, the charism does not operate in an automatic, mechanical way...
...Democratic K, ampuchea keeps all but 4 August 1978:506 its officials from traveling abroad...
...While raising these questions, I wish to emphasize my thorough agreement with the main argument of this book and my appreciation of the contribution it makes to questions still under discussion...
...If indeed the country is in the process of being reborn, the ,Nice extracted from its people--by Lon Nol, the Americans, and the revolutionary organization~has been murderously high...
...By overlooking the people, he argues, they have lost the revolution...
...To indicate the approach and style one may quote Chirico's own definition of infallibility: "The recurring generic process by which the church, because of the universal nature of the witnessed saving reality which dogmatic statements express, can come to a certitude in the understanding of that reality that is equal to the certitude that a person has of his or her own existence" (p...
...To this he adds: "It should be clear that the living magisterium is necessarily of greater importance than Scripture and the subsequent documents of the tradition" (p...
...Tbo book, which is by no means an ignoble effort, leaves the question (as we might expect) perennial and intractable...
...Thomas) with some crucial distinctions between being almighty and "being able to do everything...
...But if on this point Geach seems simply in error, his logical constructions in other parts of the book were, admittedly, too complicated for me to follow...
...While he is obviously aware that the actual operation of the magisterium falls far short of the ideal, his idealized presentation could seem remote from the experience of many Christians today...
...In Chirico's treatment I especially welcome the emphasis on the intrinsic power of revealed truth to manifest and validate itself to the faithful, both individually and collectively...
...This too must be said: he equates Christian orthodoxy with the most literal understanding of the dogma of Original Sin...
...To do so, he inter,~iewed hundreds o~ refugees (his Cambodian is fluent), monitored the broadcasts of Radio Phnom Perth, and used statements of Cambodian officials traveling abroad as well as evidence ~om foreigners who have visited the country...
...He admits that in April, 1975 he wished the revolutionaries well...
...I should point out, however, that part of this pessimism flows from what may ,be a misrea6ing, on his part, of conditions .in pre-revolutionary Cambodia...
...MICHAEL ZEIK 4 August 1978:508...
...or is it since the book of Job...
...These meanings come to expression in various ways corresponding to the culturally conditioned languages and thought-forms of different epochs and regions...
...The leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, acording to Father Ponchaud, are doing the same thing now in the name of social justice, putting theories into action without estimating r cost...
...IN BRIEF PROVIDENCE AND EVIL, by Peter Geach, Cambridge Univ., $9.50, [153 pp.] This book deals with one of the perennial, most intractable problems in theology: given the world as we know it, how can God be both good and allpowerful...
...Personally I welcome Chirico's insistence that dogmatic formulations, even though culturally conditioned, can be the bearers of truly universal meanings, but I would add a note of caution which he too might not reject...
...Like many French writers, too, he idealizes the colonial regime, which he sees as partnership rather than domination...
...3), I would say he falls short of him...
...While the dogmatic formulation does not draw its infallibility from its acceptance by the church, it cannot be recognized as infallible without such acceptance...
...For him this means that the magisterium must increasingly move from a prophetic manner of speaking, which addresses particular situations, to a strictly dogmatic and universal mode of speech...
...Professor Geach, who lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, and teaches logic at Leeds, begins (as does St...
...Only two events in the pastmthe construction of Angkor (c.800-1200 AD) and thedefeat of the Americans are singled out for praise...
...The mere claim that a pope or council is uttering a universal Christian meaning does not establish that that claim is warranted...
...And that, as I said before, is a not ignoble effort which lea~ves an intractable question intractable...
...219...
...ud witnessed an extraordinary sight: Small groups of young Khmers, scarcely fifteen years of age at the most, dressed completely in black, avearing Chinese-style peaked caps and "Ho Chi Minh" rul~ber sandals, festooned w~' Chinese . . . grenades and antitank charges . . . entered the city, silently, from all sides...
...This emphasis on the intrinsic aspects of infallibility permits Chirico to avoid excessive preoccupation with the juridical criteria so prominent in many commentaries on Vatican I's definition...
...ke President Nixon, who called Americans "the children of the family," the revolutionary orgarfization (angkar) is contemptuous of the way Cambodia used to be governed, and the way Cambodians used to think...
...The final phase of the war, the liberation of Cambodia from its past, had begun...
...Chirico reinterprets Commonweal: 505 the conditions of an infallible papal statement in ontic, rather than juridical, categories...
...Holt, Rinehart, $8.95 [256 pp.] DAVID P. CHANDLER In Phnom Peah, early on the morning of April 17, 1975, Father Poncha...
...Geach is not stupid...
...Given his fundamentalism and a clear mind, you get the kind of book this is...
...After many such tentative formulations, certain universal meanings can be perceived as pervasive and as constitutive of the church's unity in all times and places...
...Anyone who wants to speak knowledgeably about infallibility in contemporary Catholic theology must read and carefully ponder this important volume...
...These dogmatic meanings, reflecting the differentiations of human consciousness brought about by the risen Christ, express universal salvific truth and are therefore normative for all Christians...
...Chirico is perhaps here reacting excessively against the current trend among Catholics to accept the older Protestant view that Scripture alone is the final norm of Christian doctrine...
...This summary by no means does justice to the depth and complexity of Chirico's exposition, but it may perhaps serve to suggest the general shape of his argument...
...Father Ponchaud, who lived in Cambodia from 1965 until a month or so after liberation, has written a conscientious, grief-stricken account of life in C.amboctia in 19751976...
Vol. 105 • August 1978 • No. 15
