The coldness of clarity, the warmth of love
Komonchak, Joseph A.
THE COLDNESS OF CLARITY, joseph a komonchak THE WARMTH OF LOVE THE MEASURE OF JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY lthough it is now twenty-five years since the death of John Courtney Murray, it is a measure...
...Murray continued to work on what he always thought was the central issue, however—the relation of religion with the public order...
...All high intelligence is somehow cold, with the coldness of perfect clarity...
...Roman suspicions remained, however...
...Soon after Murray returned to the United States in 1936, he attempted to do his part...
...When the latter fear proved powerful enough to lead to the growth of what he called a "new Nativism," visible in such organizations as Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Murray turned to the work for which he became most famous, a rethinking of Catholic teaching on church and state and religious freedom...
...All high intelligence has a warming quality...
...When he became editor of the new Jesuit journal, Theological Studies, REV...
...But one can likewise feel in this dialogue what is, paradoxically, the second quality of our Lord's intelligence—its warmth...
...Commonweal 14 August 1992:11...
...articles and books discuss the interpretation of his work...
...For a few weeks he contributed "The Word" columm in which America offers its readers meditations on the Scriptures...
...In this display of how "high intelligence works—with facts and principles," Murray saw the model for the exercise of the Christian intellect...
...Its supreme effort is so to state the truth that men may not only see it but love it and have their hearts warmed by it...
...give God what is God's...
...Today we are striving to realize that world...
...First, one can feel its coldness...
...JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK is a professor of theology in the Department of Religion and Religious Education at The Catholic-University of America, Washington, DC...
...In 1953, when his views began to be echoed in Europe, Murray was publicly criticized by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, whose Holy Office in 1954 took a series of measures that were to lead to Murray's forced withdrawal from that controversial arena...
...The two qualities are felt in almost everything Murray wrote...
...God never had such need of intellect in his service...
...Today they call what Murray tried to do "public theology," a phrase I do not believe was in circulation in his day...
...In the 1960s several of his most important contributions to this effort were gathered and published in his best-known book, We Hold These Truths (1960), an event which earned him a cover story in Time magazine...
...and rival claims are being made to the inheritance of his mantle...
...One of these columns contains a reflection on the scene in which Jesus responds to a challenge by asking for a Roman coin which he uses to insist on the distinction between what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God—the teaching which was the basis for the revolution effected by Christianity in relations between the sacred and the secular...
...THE COLDNESS OF CLARITY, joseph a komonchak THE WARMTH OF LOVE THE MEASURE OF JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY lthough it is now twenty-five years since the death of John Courtney Murray, it is a measure of his greatness as a theologian that today, when no one reads his contemporaries , for much more than historical reasons, Murray's works are still in print, with more publications still to come...
...He proposed a new vision of a theology for the layman that aimed at training a Catholic elite whose faith and life would be directed toward the redemption of society and culture...
...It moves through clean air, in the lofty regions of cold fact and clear principle, where the heat of anger, scorn, or suspicion are powerless to alter that which is...
...All its power stands in the service of love...
...In still unpublished lectures to both Catholic and interfaith audiences he outlined an effort at cultural and social reconstruction based on the central Christian dogmas of the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the redemptive Cross of Christ...
...He tried to find in the natural-law tradition a common ground on which believers could cooperate in the struggle against a secularization of American culture...
...but when touched by intelligence they come to life and have the warm, pulsing blood of life in them...
...Those were the days when Pope Pius XI was inspiring the laity to undertake various forms of Catholic Action to restore "the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ," when Jacques Maritain was proposing a new Christendom, when Christopher Dawson was publishing his great works on the relationship between religion and culture, when Teilhard de Chardin was trying to reconcile Christian faith and modern science, when Henri de Lubac was exploring the social aspects of dogma in his book Catholicism, when Marie-Dominique Chenu was urging a mission of the church to the working class, and when Yves Congar was outlining Catholic principles for ecumenical conversation and cooperation...
...The coldness of perfect clarity," "cold fact and clear principle," represented an ideal for which he strove in his own work and for the absence of which in other people's work he had little patience...
...In the fact of Caesar's image on the coin and in the appeal to principle, "the cold intelligence of Christ deals with the issue, and paralyzes all reply...
...For all its coldness, intelligence does not leave men chilled, but glowing, ardent to pursue a new, inspiring vision...
...When the Methodist Bishop, G. Bromley Oxnam, gave a rambling anti-Catholic address, Murray noted that while Oxnam "rightly suggests that we 'state our views in Christian love,' a valid additional suggestion would be that we state our views with equally Christian lucidity...
...Jesus asked for a coin to establish a fact and he called into play a principle: "Give Caesar what is Caesar's...
...He died in a New York taxicab on August 16, 1967...
...urray stood out among his fellow theologians by his ability to think and to write—there is no mistaking his unique voice...
...What most interested Murray in the scene, however, was not the distinction itself, important as it was for his lifelong project, but the display of the qualities of the "luminous intelligence" which Jesus turned on the "murky stupidity" of his challengers...
...His consciousness of the crisis was first awakened as he did doctoral studies in Rome in the mid-1930s, when the long-term effects of World War I, the Great Depression, and the rise of rival totalitarianisms that would lead Europe to its second great cataclysm seemed irrefutable proof of the inability of secularized liberalism to construct a decent human city...
...More than anything, we need intelligences with the warmth and coldness of Christ's, with his grasp of fact and principle...
...He had little patience with those who thought complex questions could be solved by easy syllogisms, whether they were based on Catholic or on secularist dogmas...
...but anyone who has read even a little of Murray's work will wonder whether he was not also unconsciously painting a self-portrait when he described the two qualities of Christ's mind exemplified in the dialogue over Caesar's coin...
...For a brief period Murray was associated with the Jesuit journal, America, a journalistic activity for which, mistakenly, I think, he did not feel well equipped...
...The scene, he concluded, offered "a new and heart-warming vision—the vision of a free and ordered world, in which a man could be both citizen and Christian, and interiorly at peace, because there would be no conflict between Caesar's orders and the demands of God...
...not only was he not invited to participate in the preparation of Vatican Council II, but the preparatory theological commission chaired by Ottaviani issued a document on church and state that would have repudiated Murray's views...
...He spoke rather of the need to address "the spiritual crisis in the temporal order...
...Murray had to defend these efforts, on the one hand, against Catholics who feared the danger of indifferentism more than the threat of secularism and, on the other, against Protestants put off by their fears of a Catholic desire for cultural and political hegemony...
...Two years later he had the rare privilege of seeing the views on religious freedom for which he had had to retire in silence confirmed in the council's Declaration on Religious Freedom...
...If we are still striving to realize a world in which we can peacefully be both Christians and citizens, in good part we owe it to the example John Courtney Murray gave of how to place an intellect in the service of God and the church...
...Murray's conviction that the roots of the crisis were spiritual and that Christ and the church were necessary to resolve it was nourished by his encounter with European Catholic thinkers...
...That same year Cardinal Francis Spellman, who had quietly supported him in his trials, secured his nomination as a conciliar expert...
...The facts with which it deals are in themselves cold, and the principles it formulates may seem bloodless...
...During the three years he was given in which to employ a recovered authority, Murray continued to address issues of public significance, devoting one of his last essays, in the midst of controversy over the Vietnam War, to the question of selective conscientious objection...
...He was "disinvited," as he put it, to the council's first session, and was still suspect enough that as late as 1963 he was refused permission to lecture at The Catholic University of America...
...At its very heart is the warmth of a love of truth...
...It is not clouded by the steaming mists of passions...
...But the cold clarity of Murray's writings perhaps not so paradoxically derived from a passion: "the warmth of a love of truth," an effort "to state the truth that men may not only see it but love it and have their hearts warmed by it...
...Beginning in 1948, a series of historical and systematic essays argued that the American solution to the problem of church and state was both a legitimate embodiment of Catholic principle and a political experiment quite distinct in its assumptions and provisions from the ideological liberalism condemned by nineteenth-century popes...
...16.14 August 1992 he organized a series of articles urging what was then called "in-terreligious cooperation" so that the task of postwar reconstruction would not be abandoned to secularists...
...To a broad sense of history and a keen analytical mind he could add, if he thought it necessary, intimidating rhetorical and polemical skills...
Vol. 119 • August 1992 • No. 14
