Michael Novak's confession:

...Consider the way in which insight proceeds from an inquiring mind, the way a concept proceeds from an insight, the way love and joy proceed from a verified insight...

...Novak speaks of the fact that the Council of Nicaea used philosophical sources which were not derived from scripture...

...There are moments of it here, but only moments...

...In commenting on the banality of modern church music, Novak writes, "The old hymns to Mary used to recall, at least, that she had seven swords through her heart...

...Novak also raises some important questions about liberation theology, the need for an appreciation of the Catholic intellectual tradition which preceded Vatican II, the banality of our liturgy, and many other issues...

...Good points are begun, but before they can be developed they fall into rhetoric, peevishness, and vague complaining...

...Although he considers the first part of the book the more important, it is more uneven and less satisfying than the shorter second section, where Novak is straightforwardly on the attack...

...He really should be careful, because this invites comparisons of Novak's prose to Chesterton's and, in a deflected sort of way, to Newman's...

...When he deals with them fairly and well, he offers the beginning of a conservative (or neolib-eral, if you will) critique of current church fashion...

...He is not very good at understanding that a similar sympathy for others and for points of view which vary from his own might be as essential a part of the fullness of Christian vision as the narrow, but not unfruitful position he starts to stake out here, one which he calls "neoliberal Catholicism...

...Genuine knowledge is an attempt to gain humble realism...

...Novak says that Confession of a Catholic contains "my Orthodoxy, not quite my Apologia Pro Vita Sua...

...To the modem idealist, reconciliation seems like surrender...

...This is true of Michael Novak, whose new book Confession of a Catholic (Harper & Row, $12.95) is offered "to clear the decks...

...It may be interesting to think of oneself as part of a faithful remnant, but if this book were to be discovered by a future archaeologist with no other record of the time, he would have no way of knowing that most major Catholic theologians are not Marxist or even Marxist sympathizers, or that with the exception of the nuclear issue and the Catholic attitude towards capitalism (which has always been qualifiedly negative) most bishops would probably agree with Mr...

...At any rate, this definition of gnosticism is broader than the church's...

...The book is divided into two sections, the first a reflection on the articles of the Nicene Creed, the second a criticism of the post-Vatican II Catholic church...

...Novak about most of the topics covered here, or that the reigning pope is one of the most conservative popes the church has had since Pius IX...

...Ethical activity and doctrinal orthodoxy are only the beginning of Christian life, not its goal...

...but to claim goodness so broadly for human institutions is not necessarily Catholic orthodoxy...

...I would deplore, however, any attempt to turn this legitimate separation into a separation of church from society or into a privatization of religion that would divorce our faith and hope from public concerns and crucial moral questions that face us all as citizens...

...Other aspects of gnostic thought were more or less acceptable and were even echoed in the teaching of some church fathers, who referred to "Christian gnosis" and who, like the gnostics, believed that the goal of Christian life is the thorough transformation of the human being...

...Throughout the book Novak contrasts his own variety of Catholicism with what he calls "gnosticism," something which is at work in feminism, the peace movement, and socialism...

...The addition of the words "and the Son" came from Charlemagne's theologians and was inserted by the West into the creed, unilaterally, long after Nicaea, an insertion which became a point of doctrinal friction between the Eastern and Western churches...

...I am not arguing here that multinationals, parties, or any other structures are necessarily evil things...

...The genuine, humble truth-seekers are plainly meant to be Novak and his anti-gnostic friends (more on this in a minute), but little is really pinned down with any concrete example...

...One would expect the first to be a quiet, meditative work, more philosophical than polemical in tone, and the second to deal directly in controversy...

...One can't imagine either Chesterton or Newman coming up with a sentence like "As if with a cathode light, the media are suffused with rebellion...

...The Fathers of Nicaea spoke of "The Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father...

...it takes the millions of lives of Christians to reflect the fullness of God's presence in humanity...

...Genuine knowledge commonly expresses itself as reconciliation and quiet determination...

...Novak is at his worst when he is on the attack, and at his best when he is most reflective...

...There is a footnote following the reference to privatized religion...

...I was intrigued: I had met, at last, someone who was precisely my opposite, doctri-nally, and it is rare to find something so neat and symmetrical as a precise opposite...

...Kierkegaard may not have known how great a relief such faith would be to those who believe that God is to be found in the bored faces in the pews around him, in the dreadful sermons endured without end, in the silly romanticism of secular sentiments paraded as Christian faith...

...more frequently Novak relies on a caricature of the beliefs which diverge from his own...

...Who is this meant to describe...

...In reflecting on masculine language applied to God Novak is careful, if not persuasive at all times, and some of what he has to say is genuinely provocative...

...The Manichean nature of Reagan's claim that the Soviet Union is the source of all evil in the modern world is more gnostic than anything to be found on the left, short of Shining Path's mad reading of reality...

...I was sure the symmetry would have continued, if pursued...

...The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son...

...The carelessness is a shame, because when Novak is good he is very good...

...He points out that each such accounting will be different from all the others...

...For example, he offers a careful and conservative defense of his dissent from the papal teaching on birth control...

...To a certain extent this is true: the family, for example, has something essentially fleshy about it and is good...

...There is rarely an attributed statement...

...Novak does admit that gnosticism, as defined by Voegelin, can also operate in the sort of anti-Communism which is common in Latin America, but he hurries by this insight, perhaps because other right-wing targets might present themselves and the enemy, after all, is the left...

...JOHN GARVEY writes a regular column for Commonweal...

...Shouldn't that be "in the pews around them...

...There are, scattered throughout the book, illuminating insights into the movement of faith, and the painful depths of self-knowledge...

...there are good asides on marriage, and good things about the communal nature of Catholicism: "For Kierkegaard the true hero of religion is without support, a lonely knight of faith, noble in his solitariness, who leaps into the darkness in the heroic splendor of isolation...

...The problem is, they didn't offer it...

...The way Novak uses it, one must believe not only that creation is good but also that human institutions are good...

...He goes on for several paragraphs, expanding the idea that Nicaea's bishops did something significant when they offered us this definition...

...I know what he is trying to say here, I think, but he doesn't say it...

...But the first part of the book, though it does indeed contain reflective writing, some of it quite good, is every bit as polemical as the second...

...The clarity was beguiling, and I was sorry when our conversation ended...

...Ordinary liberal and conservative labels don't apply very neatly to people who try to think with any deep care about their faith...

...Sometimes it is not clear that Novak distinguishes much moral difference between social democrats and the Pol Pot regime...

...The statement cited by Novak is, "As an American bishop, I deeply respect our nation's tradition of the separation of church and state...

...A final complaint: conservative thinkers over the years have grown so used to feeling embattled that they can't get out of the habit...

...A public person owes his readers as much...

...Novak is good at revealing this uniqueness in his own thought and its development...

...It is easier to accuse your opponents of self-righteousness than it is to deal in detail with their ideas...

...The lonely hero in isolation has it easy...

...This carelessness is typical of the book, especially in its most polemical moments...

...And it must be remembered that historically the church condemned gnosticism for two primary reasons: one was that gnosticism rejected the goodness of creation...

...No particular example is cited...

...the other was its belief that particular knowledge and insight saves us, and not God's mercy and love...

...I am arguing that to call an existing structure evil is not necessarily gnostic in a Christian sense...

...Novak or an editor must have caught this, because pages later there is a parenthetical aside to the effect that the filioque was a medieval Western addition to the creed...

...Confession of a Catholic shows signs of having been written and edited on the run...

...Instead, Novak opens with an attack on those who "desire the Catholic church to be a 'peace church.' They wish the church to be 'prophetic.' They wish it to conduct itself like a sect, excommunicating those who do not share its 'principles of peace.' " Who are these people...

...Is the church wrong to insert itself into public debate on issues as diverse as slavery, abortion, or the rights of workers...

...To the humble seeker after truth, reconciliation is a start along the way of sound and solid progress...

...We need that sort of thinking, particularly those of us most inclined to disagree with it...

...Does Novak really disagree with this...

...There may indeed be such people in the peace movement, but they are hardly the majority...

...But when the phrase ' 'human institutions'' is allowed to cover too much territory, when one must say that because the family and multinational corporations are institutions they are therefore good, so that to call a multinational evil is to be gnostic - this is going much farther than Christian orthodoxy ever did...

...It contains, among other good things, a very sensitive treatment of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism...

...It refers to Bishop Roger Mahoney's March 12, 1982 Commonweal article, "The Catholic Conscience and Nuclear War...

...He is like a man with a grievance he simply can't forget, who begins every topic of conversation reasonably, with charm, grace, wit, and intelligence...

...Novak, public man that he is, can't stay away from the fray for long...

...Where he does attribute, the attribution is sometimes not guilty of saying what Novak claims it does...

...I want an account of my faith, written in the presence of God, which can be sized up by myself and others...

...but this has the effect of being tacked on, after a point has been made about Nicaea's genius in declaring what it did not, in fact, declare...

...But when are men or women praised simply as men, or women...

...Of course he doesn't disagree with what Mahoney actually said, only with the more totalitarian sentiment in the sentence which uses Mahoney's quote as its mooring, though unfairly...

...Here, as in the writing of James Hitchcock, there is almost an assumption that the church has been delivered into the hands of the barbarians, and that the left is in control not only of the church but of the major institutions of society as well...

...The most outrageous examples of liberal Catholic thought are taken from the Catholic charismatic writer Ralph Martin, who is not himself very careful about sources...

...We arrive, then," he writes, "at the analogy chosen by Nicaea...

...he was at the same time an ardent defender of the doctrine of papal infallibility...

...Some of the definition does indeed work for various left-wing attitudes, but it is on the whole too broad...

...One notes that such intellectuals seldom praise women as women, but only those who hold the proper opinions: not Margaret Thatcher, or Jeane Kirkpatrick, or Phyllis Schlafly...

...His books include Saints for Confused Times (Thomas More Press...

...One of the sins of developed societies, we are told, is that they 'privatize' religion, and one of the virtues of political revolutions of the socialist type is that they once again reinstate 'social' life...

...Novak says that "the Catholic spirit does not hold that this world or its institutions are depraved...

...Country music has more sadness in it than much parish hymnody today...

...There are repetitions - we are told more than once how appropriate it is that Sebastian is the patron saint of writers - and in the otherwise careful chapter on the Holy Spirit there is an important historical problem...

...The gnostic tag is borrowed from Eric Voegelin, and although it is used liberally throughout the book its meaning is defined only on page 195, very close to the end...

...at other times he is more generous...

...Never mind...

...then at a certain point his jaw is set, his fists clench, he gets a wild look in his eye and returns to the old wound until, passion spent, he clears his throat and relaxes into reason once again...

...With Reagan in the White House and John Paul II in the Vatican, it is hard to find the pose of the conservative as the embattled keeper of a dying flame a credible one.ying flame a credible one...

...the point is decent enough...

...To point to the extreme is no more fair than it would be to charge that all conservative Catholics are Fatima cultists or closet members of Opus Dei...

...Trees, sexuality, families, animals, and stars are part of the created order in a way which armies, political parties, and ideologies are not...

...This was simply a development of the language to be found in the gospel of John...

...For example, a sensitive chapter on the Holy Spirit is followed a few chapters later by what might have been an equally perceptive meditation on the catholicity of the church...

...Idealistic knowledge commonly expresses itself as rage...

...Then there is this sort of generalization: "Idealistic knowledge is an attempt to become superior to the human race...

...I have mentioned the chapter on the Holy Spirit...