Beyond Naive Belief, by Paul E Dinter:
O'Brien, Dennis
LET THE THUNDER ROLL BEYOND NAIVE BELIEF The Bible and Adult Catholic Faith Paul E. Dinter Crossroad, $29.95,348 pp. Dennis O'Brien Paul Dinter spent fifteen years as Catholic chaplain at...
...the professoriat a deliberated doubt on all absolutist claims...
...One can learn from the "hermeneutic of suspicion" but still affirm a faith, albeit with, as he says, a "whispered 'no'" for each dogmatic proclamation...
...More serious, I think, is that Dinter's larger argument never quite reaches what I would call the lived "density" of religious belief...
...Melville describes the trajectory: "Through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence's doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting on manhood's pondering repose of If...
...Adolescence is the great crisis of maturity and it is not always traversed...
...But the time comes when these emotional reassurances falter before fact...
...As recently as Humani generis (1950) it was claimed that the first eleven books of Genesis were historical record...
...While I agree with the need to re-integrate a kind of childhood naivete into adult maturity, I could not detect in Dinter whether Christian symbolism had some special capacity to accomplish this...
...But can we find the necessary religious thunder in such a hunch...
...Dinter reflects on both skepticisms and finds a common connection...
...In this context, infallibility may be a muffled echo of distant thunder...
...In the first place, they don't read the Bible correctly...
...Faculty may be no better...
...I would raise two fundamental questions, however: one regarding the argument, the second with the character of the conclusion...
...I wonder whether Dinter's account of cultural history does not commit the same error as his curial nemesis: passing off myth as fact...
...He resymbolizes the two infallible Marian dogmas of recent memory, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, rejecting any proven or necessary relation to "fact" and reordering their importance down Vatican II's "hierarchy of Christian truths...
...Freud's own psychoanalysis of history is highly dubious...
...While Catholic biblical scholarship has now caught up with the nineteenth century and so on, the curia has not...
...it is always traversed with travail...
...Human culture begins with the emotional childhood of the race expressed in the great mythic stories (Gilgamesh, Homer, the Bible...
...Despite important disclaimers about details, some version of the Freudian trajectory is persuasive about individual development...
...The mother is not so much describing how the world is-she knows travail-she is promising protection, offering fundamental reassurance beyond life's obvious and inevitable failures...
...the faculty pursues the Enlightenment's rebellion against the historical childhood of human culture...
...But faith is beyond hunches, a trust beyond "truths...
...Without that promise underlying all the dismaying facts, emotional maturity may be impossible...
...First one believes in a promise, then one may puzzle how it could possibly be fulfilled...
...This causes...overreactions: ideological identification, peer group overidentifica-tion...
...the loss of an early certainty about self and world and the new-found freedom...[and] is exhilarating and frightening at the same time...
...Does the skeptic of the nursery whisper "no...
...Dinter regards both the adolescent and the rationalist university tutor as cases of "arrested development" One needs to move through the common doom and disbelief, from childhood naivete to the "second naivete" in which our emotional foundation is recovered in adult form...
...If you say you promise, you have fully done the deed whatever odd reservations rattle in the brain...
...The famous "second naivete" might be thought of like a second marriage...
...Powerful mythic structures continue to be purveyed as putative fact...
...Promises are by nature "dense" to the reality that they create...
...The Enlightenment brings critical rationality to bear on biblical tales and moves to "disbelief and manhood's pondering repose of If...
...Characteristically, Sartre's atheism sees existence as "too much," a nauseating overflow...
...My own view is that the truths of religion are derivatives of a wholly different "language game" which, for brevity's sake, one might call the "game of promises...
...In a weak moment, Dinter says, "Postcritical belief acts on the hunch that creation is a more comprehensive reality that is not yet fully manifest...
...One of the strengths or scandals of Christianity is investing the historical "density" of Jesus with the trappings of mythopoetic theology...
...s" beyond all "No's...
...A mother consoles a child in a thunderstorm: "Everything is all right...
...But Melville may be closer to the mature religious stance when he recognizes the need to "Speak your 'No' with thunder...
...While it certainly is true that a second naivete cannot have the consoling immediacy of first naivete' ("...nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendor in the grass...
...The romantic illusions of youth are tempered by realism, yet the second promise contains no "whispered 'no.'" Promising to be loving and true with the first or second (or however many) vows flies in the face of sober empiricism and the divorce statistics...
...Religious faith and its accompanying "dogmas" exist primarily within the logic of promises...
...the loss of self in mass movements or musical subcultures, and, tragically, the compulsion to avoid it all through suicide...
...Look at it this way...
...Dinter explains the common doom of adolescent skepticism via Freud's analysis of the course of human maturation...
...Dinter summarizes: "[T]he developing adolescent' s inner struggle relates to...
...Dinter rejects Vatican I's doctrine of infallibility as narcissistic fabrication...
...Faith in Jesus, given his history and story, offers a "Yes" beyond all "No's...
...Neither the rebellious adolescent nor the rationalist professor can accept childhood tales as sensible or salvific...
...But promises are not promises at all with a whispered "no...
...But, of course, everything does not turn out to be exactly, or always, or largely "all right" The nursery lesson is unlearned...
...To that end, Dinter judges the current posture of the official church in Rome counterproductive-well, disastrous would be more accurate...
...Rome not only muddles the message, it mistakes the method...
...The discussion of adolescence and the problems of traditional faith is perceptive and valuable...
...The university community is most likely to be dominated by two different brands of skepticism: amateur and professional...
...Sexual awakening in adolescence propels the individual out of naive emotional bonding toward independence...
...The fulfillment remains a mystery to simple fact and converts dogmatic "truths" into symbols, myths...
...As a consequence, freshmen are a tough congregation for a traditional gospel...
...Lux et Veritas and all that...
...By the same token, however, mustn't faith speak its "Yes" with some sort of "thunder...
...saints see existence as "glory...
...Individuals and historical human culture begin life with "mythopoetic" beliefs which become the emotional foundation of later life...
...So it goes-and so have collegiate congregations gone: out the door...
...I am sympathetic with the direction of Dinter's argument...
...My uneasiness about the historical account of academic rationality is reinforced by queasiness about Dinter's final position...
...Dennis O'Brien Paul Dinter spent fifteen years as Catholic chaplain at Columbia University...
...it is much less plausible in regard to great cultural movements...
...It is indeed a mark of "rationality" and good theology to utter dogmatic proclamations with a "whispered 'no.'" The Eucharist is the Body of Christ-but not exactly...
...The adolescent student population expresses a sort of reflex rebelliousness against authority...
...Why believe implausible promises...
...From the standpoint of the scientific advance of truth, faith may be just a hunch...
...Beyond Naive Belief is best appreciated as a reflection on preaching to college congregations: Sacred Scripture for Skeptics...
...The childhood-to-adulthood mythology of history is itself an Enlightenment fiction and I am as distrustful of it in Dinter as in Diderot...
...The mother says to the frightened child, "Everything will be all right...
...Religious utterance, positive or negative, is essentially "dense" or "thunderous" in that it is commensurate with the density of individual existence...
...The adolescent is in rebellion against the naive emotional ties of childhood...
...If one writes from memories of a university chaplaincy, there will be a great temptation to struggle with the "truth" claims of religion because Truth is what is emblazoned on the university seal...
...Dinter's characterization of the end-state may be too infected with the academic setting in which he preached for so many years...
...Having delineated a Freudian course for individual growth (or lack thereof), Dinter makes bold to apply a similar analysis to cultural history...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 5
