The end of Catholicism, Part III: The provisional path to mystery
Greeley, Andrew M.
I I I I I I I I I THE END OF CATHOLICISM~ PART III The provisional path to mystery I I i I ii I i ii i i i I ANDREW M. GREELEY merely to display monumental ignorance of what is being done by...
...Theology is not so much wrong or erroneous as self-deluding, illusory, systemically and unconsciously distorted...
...Both labor tentatively and cautiously...
...Has Professor Sheehan ever seen a quark...
...Both work through symbols, both use stories to describe what is experienced in the dark -- whether they be stories of Mary or the risen Jesus or of quarks and quasars and quanta and "weak forces" and "strong forces...
...I erred in my interpretations of his position, or in my arguments with his position, he should have argued back and shown where my errors lie...
...Hence their unconscious self-delusion...
...A body does get around...
...What they need instead, Sheehan claims, is a hermeneutic of radical suspicion upon that tradition...
...It is a nice turn of phrase perhaps, 0 . . . either the phdosophers of cogmUon or the social scientists of based doubtless on a textbook summary of James's pragcognition accept his position...
...Einstein knew the theory of relativity was true before any experiment sustained it...
...Here we ain't been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee...
...Watson and Crick), postulating the Jol~anine community (pace Commonweal: 530 Raymond Brown) do~s~icg Lady Wisdom" (ada Roland Murphy), or seeing Mary ns the sacrament of the womanliness of God, one uses these criteria (according to Polanyi often "tacitly" and long before the scientific experimentation which "proves" the insight...
...Perhaps the Johanine community was more integrated into the rest of the Jesus movement than I realized, perhaps Lady Wisdom also reflects a folk religion consort of Yahweh, perhaps the Resurrection stories have more historical basis than I thought (To question the detailed historical accuracy of the Resurrection stories, by the way, is not to deny the historicity of the Resurrection, a distinction which seems to escaPe Professor Sheehan), perhaps there is not enough liberating passion in my Mary Myth...
...In so doing I will also remains whether Sheehan understands the work done in the describe in a sketchy outline how a whole literature on human philosophy of knowing (by Ricoeur and Polanyi, for example) knowing approaches the problem, not perhaps explicitly under and in the social science of knowing (by Chomsky and Geertz, James's aegis, but nonetheless in the same broad perspective...
...both are plagued with doubts and uncertainties because faith and doubt are not merely attributes of religious knowing but of all human knowing...
...New Pluralism in Theology and The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (both Crossroad Books...
...So the first question for both of us to consider is: how can we converse critically about these differences across such a fundamental chasm separating our attitudes...
...among social scientists who are interested in the subject...
...It is not merely the way I know, as Professor Sheehan contends, it is the way these scholars say they and indeed everyone knows...
...for example...
...The quantum "myth" in the mystery of science is analogous to the Resurrection story and the Mary "myth" in matters of ultimate mystery: both provide charts, requiring major leaps of faith, through the dark and dazzling mysteries "out there...
...This model fitting is anything but an optimistic exercise, despite Professor Sheehan...
...Finally -- one must say it candidly -- for all the stir the article in the New York Review of Books created and for all Professor Sheehan's unquestioned forensic skills, his ignorance of th~ disciplines around which he flits, strongly suggests that he does not know what he is talking about...
...Like Oakland, there is ultimately no there there...
...It is a luminous, congruent, and fruitful story, a useful story, a "good" story, in Professor Sheehan'S words...
...Professor Sheehan may dismiss this approach with patronizing ridicule if he wishes, but in so doing he merely displays his own sad and rather shabby ignorance...
...Let me tic, a rotarian optimist, a Hegelian, a modernist and a Unitar- add the assertion that while the religionist cannot constrain the ian, (all this constitutes cheap, patronizing smoke screen...
...Is it a "true" story...
...According to James there are three criteria for acceptance of Indeed the major axis of debate is not whether we know by a truth -- luminosity, congruence, and fruitfulness...
...The issue is not whether I am afraid of losing something Let me attempt to summarize briefly and in my own words valuable or whether I write "little tracts" or whether I am James's criteria of truth which he established long before guilty of charming simplicities, or whether l'm a pious aguos- Professor Sheehan's oversimplifications were written...
...The point in all of this is that at the most general level, science and religion are similar methods of probing and groping through the dark in search of more luminous, congruent, and fruitful ways of understanding mystery and charting a path through it...
...James and about the current rediscovery of James...
...Professor Sheehan seems to be embarrassed by the possibility that he ,will be caught in the pious miivet~ of faith...
...There is, I agree, a difference between a hermeneutic informed by basic trust in a tradition, and one informed by basic suspicion...
...His books may be investigating...
...Are they all "true...
...Lena, as quoted in William Faulkner's Light in August O NE WAY to respond to criticism is to change the subject...
...But it is worth noting that they are different...
...He is not interested, it seems, in arguments that there are "levels" of discourse which function in the "liberal consensus" he chose to interpret...
...Yes of course, but provisionally and tentatively true, subject to revision and modification as I (whoever the I may be) continue in my relentless enterprise of model fitting...
...This is an entirely legitimate question to theology...
...Or a "weak force...
...The issue his data are the only way of knowing...
...Such leaps of faith cover the landscape of the history of science from ether to Einstein's resolute refusal to admit the possibility of a unified field theory and current scholars' equally resolute determination to find one...
...T HE UN-PIOUS agnostic like Professor Sheehan and the fundamentalist (perhaps waving the hammer of the "Magisterium") want more than provisional truth...
...I challenge those who wish to embrace Professor Sheehan's position -- on the grounds perhaps that it is "purer" as one "correspondent suggests -- to explore the fields I have cited and decide for themselves whether his statement of alternatives is accurate or adequate...
...He does not understand the social science of knowing, he does not understand the philosophers of science such as Polanyi and Ricoeur, he does not understand how those who work on the leading edge of both disciplines now realize that all forms of knowing, science and religion equally included, struggle to understandreality through a model fitting process which requires both faith and skepticism...
...If Sheehan thinks...
...To ridicule the model fitting paradigm is when followed through the confusing morass of mysteries ~ ~ which impinge on consciousness...
...That interest, as his recent reply makes clear, is in the question of whether theology itself -- all theology (especially the "modem," "liberal" kind) -- is not unconsciously selfdeluding...
...Sheehan is not the first to suggest that any theology as theology is ideological...
...What his original article claimed, and what I responded to, is this: there is a liberal consensus in modern Catholic exegesis and theology, and that consensus has brought Catholic theology to the "limits" of its own language...
...One finally despairs of diaioguing with Professor Sheehan's 5 October 1984:531 slippery rhetoric, his glib, shallow agnostic arguments, and his contemptuous, "with it" innuendoes...
...They may "tinker," but they are not truly suspicious...
...He does not comprehend how much faith of one sort or another is required in every act of knowing, including an act seemingly of the purest science, and how much faith he must engage in every day if he is to get out of bed and walk down the street...
...both make leaps of faith...
...His interest lies elsewhere...
...That's why, despite all their use of critical methods, theologians can only be reformers, "tinkerers" polishing the brass on the Titanic as it heads for Commonweal: 532...
...Can Sheehan not comprehend that they are "not bad" stories in a similar sense as are the Resurrection stories or "nice myths" like my Mary Myth...
...I disputed that claim...
...I think the above is a fair, if simple and overly popular, summary of how the Jamesian criteria or Jamesian-like criteria are applied by a considerable number of social scientists, philosophers of science, and physical and biological scientists (not necessarily in every case referring to James...
...Does it live up to Professor Sheehan's agnostic demands for clear, rational, undebatable proof...
...More is not given in the human condition...
...Is he unaware of the literature which argues that all human knowing requires myths, symbols, and stories...
...tion of the rigid alternatives of fundamentalism or agnosti- 3) The "rotarian optimism" jab at William James (through eism, is a fair statement of the present situation...
...The questions he now raises are more important and more interesting than the ones posed in his original article...
...I I I I III THE END OF CATHOLICISM, PART Iii DAVID TRACY To trust or suspect I I "My, my...
...He does not understand the liberal consensus in theology...
...In his response, Sheehan is now strangely silent on the "liberal consensus" he earlier forged...
...That's why "liberals" can only be "brilliant conservatives...
...Perhaps the woman is not the one I think she is...
...The theoretical physicist would not understand why it had to...
...Catholic theology is now at the point' 'where one can ask what its teachings have to offer that cannot be found outside the scope of its own experience and discourse...
...it is scientist to accept his data, neither can the scientist claim that frantic and intellectually dishonest name calling...
...A contributor to many journals, he is the author of Blessed Rage for Order...
...Nor am I the first theologian to try to reflect on that charge...
...Why does it have to be any more...
...Modern Catholic theologians, we both agree, employ a hermeneutic of retrieval informed principally by an attitude of fundamental trust in the tradition...
...In the midst of rationalism there is faith...
...The mind, model fitting but whether some of our models are innate he says, accepts as provisionally true an insight which il(Chomsky argues that not only the deep structures of grammar lumines the phenomena around it, that fits with the other things which he has studied are innate but so too perhaps are other the person knows to be true, and proves an effective guide models for knowing...
...But such suspicion, he insists, theologians do not, and, perhaps temperamentally, cannot allow...
...Anyone wishsocial science of cognition if he wishes...
...2) To fail to see in Ricoeur's second miivet~ and Polanyi's Backed into the corner by David Tracy's charge that he tacit knowing a devastating assault on his scientific rationalism has not accurately read the "liberal" consensus and by is to understand nothing at all about the work of these men and my comment that both social science and the philosophy of nothing at all about the philosophical and theological discusscience create a vast middle ground between fundamentalism sions occasioned by their work...
...Perhaps someone will find a better model than the double helix...
...Nonetheless my brief ing to read a definitive refutation of Professor Sheehan's summary is an accurate description of the state of the question flummery should consult the last part of The Varieties...
...He has not...
...Whether one is determining another's include American Catholics: A Social Portrait, The Making of the appropriateness as a lover, discovering the double helix (as did Popes, and several best-selling works of fiction...
...Criticism is geared to pursuing the truth by examining rival claims and eliminating all possible conscious errors...
...correct my first impression that he is serenely innocent of (I justify this excursus on the grounds that James's criteria understanding these fields, are to be found in The Varieties, his social science book par 1) Professor Sheehan may belittle my competence in the excellence, and not in his philosophical works...
...He does not reply to this but matism that Professor Sheehan read somewhere, but in scoring asserts once again as proven that which remains to be proven a rhetorical point, Sheehan makes himself look pathetic, once - - namely that we must choose between scientific rationalism again demonstrating an insouciant innocence, this time about (perhaps as pious agnostics) and blind fundamentalism...
...As Polanyi observes in a passage which Professor Sheehan apparently forgot, the role of the experiment is to prove what the scientist already knows is true...
...I deny that me) is acutely embarrassing...
...The quantum theory is a "story" too, an intriguing, complex, fascinating story which organizes the data and provides the explorer of mystery with guidance and direction...
...Of course not...
...Or a quantum...
...There is nothing in his reply which leads me to Need I say to Professor Sheehan that James was not a believer...
...Are they not extremely useful models (for the present at any rate) for organizing and charting a course through baffling mystery...
...I I uninterested now in discussing what theologians actually do when they do theology...
...Is it not enough that the quantum theory be good and useful and hence provisionally true...
...Start with The Varieties...
...He has elected, instead, to unmask what he feels is a radical ideology unconsciously pervading all modern theology...
...It is cautious, tentative, open ended, flexible, suspicious, ready to change and refine, pragmatic (you should excuse the expression), skeptical...
...Not only is Professor Sheehan and agnosticism, he changes the subject, begs the question, serenely innocent Of the state of the question in my discipline, and engages in name calling, he seems also blithely unaware of the state of the question in The subject, as far as I'm concerned is whether his postula- his own discipline...
...With considerable Irish charm, Thomas Sheehan does exactly that in his response to my criticisms of his article in The New York Review of Books...
...In all such tentative acceptance of truth there is a leap of faith because the nature of the reality is such that consent is never forced, not even in science...
...I I I I I I I I I THE END OF CATHOLICISM~ PART III The provisional path to mystery I I i I ii I i ii i i i I ANDREW M. GREELEY merely to display monumental ignorance of what is being done by serious scholars in a field that is pertinent for his argument...
...FATHER ANDREW M. GREELEY, currenttya professor of sociology at These criteria apply to all forms of knowing, but are adthe University of Arizona, is Senior Study Director of the National justed for the different kinds of phen6mena which the person Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago...
...Both religion and science cautiously and pragmatically fit models (in a way not unlike a detective in a mystery story which is probably one of the reasons mystery stories are so popular...
...Has anyone ever seen them...
...In fact, Thomas Sheehan seems I I I FATHER DAVID TRACY is a member of the Committee on Ideas and Methods and a professor of theology at the University of Chicago...
...in the midst of faith there is the skepticism which demands continued testing and retesting of the models of faith -- continued pilgrimages, in Ricoeur's terms, from the first to the second naivetC The so-called scientific method (the scientific rationalism of which Professor Sheehan is so proud) is merely part of the application of the third criterion: Does the model lead to successful experiments which are designed to test it as a road map of reality...
...p ROFESSOR Sheehan is a smooth and clever debater...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 17
