Inventing Catholic Tradition
Griffiths, Paul J. & Tilley, Terrence W.
PRACTICING CATHOLICS Inventing Catholic Tradition TerrenceW.Tilley orbisBooks $24, 200 pp* Paul J. Griffiths_________ Terrence Tilley's main purpose in this book is to develop and defend...
...But then it's also perfectly coherent to understand the Catholic tradition descriptively as Tilley does, and yet at the same time to see it as unfolding toward a final goal...
...37 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...Second, he thinks that understanding a tradition as a malleable set of practices extended over time permits solution of some conceptual difficulties that are hard to handle within the tradition-as-invarianMradita view...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...Tilley is usually careful to say that constructivist theories of practice—theories that emphasize the contingency and malleability of the rule-governed practices that make up a tradition—don't entail antirealism...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...He was built like a defensive end, shirtless except for a sweatstained leather vest, intricately tattooed, and evidently hallucinating under the influence of the nearly empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Tequila which an unprincipled bartender had surrendered to him much earlier...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...This means that you can perfectly well think what Tilley thinks about what the Catholic tradition is, and also think that becoming a skilled practitioner of it provides access to the way things are...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...Paying primary or exclusive attention to the tradita, thinks Tilley, will lead to thinking that the important thing about traditions is what they hand down (creedal confessions, scriptural texts, ritual actions, institutional arrangements, and so on) and not the practices by which these things are handed down...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...He may have been trying to provoke us by denouncing the most revered of all motorcycle brands in a sort of biker's version of epater le bourgeois, but what31...
...The book provides a thorough, useful, and suggestive application to the Catholic case of the best recent thought on what traditions are and how they work, and for that reason alone it ought to be widely read...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...Suppose we ask: Is the rule-ordered set of saint-making practices that (on Tilley's view) constitutes the Catholic tradition founded on an authoritative gift external to itself...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...My brother and I had begun to agree upon a discreet, or even panicked exit when the drunken biker disgorged, among other things, the rest of his thought: "Harleys suck...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...Tilley's answer is no, and in saying this he means that we have no access to God's founding gift other than in and through the practices of the tradition...
...WE BRAKE FOR GOD Riders for Cod The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang Rich Remsberg Afterword by Colleen McDannett University of Illinois Press, $34,95, 263 pp...
...Tilley rejects developmentalist views because, he says, we have no practiceindependent place from which to make or give content to such an assertion, which means (I think he thinks) that we don't and can't know where the tradition is going, and so we'd better not claim that if s going anywhere...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...Chief among these is the fact that a formally unvarying traditum (a creedal confession whose words remain the same, for instance) will inevitably change in meaning as the context for its use changes...
...PRACTICING CATHOLICS Inventing Catholic Tradition TerrenceW.Tilley orbisBooks $24, 200 pp* Paul J. Griffiths_________ Terrence Tilley's main purpose in this book is to develop and defend a general theory of tradition, a theory intended to capture, descriptively, what traditions are like and how they work...
...Thinking about tradition as a set of practices by which things are handed over suggests that knowing a tradition is a learned and rule-ordered skill, a matter of knowing how rather than knowing that...
...he bellowed, and, to our considerable relief, passed out on the laminated tabletop...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...His secondary purpose is to apply this theory to the Catholic tradition, and in so doing to show how a good theory of tradition might be used to find a way through some of the intractable disagreements that divide Catholics at the moment...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...REV...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...Full confidence in his own method should have led Tilley to an acknowledgment that the practices that constitute the Catholic tradition are fundamentally and essentially exocentric and ideologically selftranscending...
...REV...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...Tilley's opponents include not only those who'd like to think of the Catholic tradition's identity as given by the invariance of its tradita (we might call them crass invariance theorists), but also those who like to think of its identity as provided in large part by its telos, the goal at which it aims...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...Paul J. Griffiths is director of the Catholic studies program at the University of Illinois, Chicago...
...This makes incoherent the conservative traditionalist's desire to preserve the identity of the tradition by maintaining the formal invariance of what it hands on: such an attempt won't and can't work...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...It comes to the surface at various points in the book, but most dearly when Tilley discusses authority...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...First, he thinks it is a more satisfactory description of how traditions (religious, linguistic, artistic, and so on) actually work: one becomes a good Catholic principally by learning the complex skill of behaving and thinking like one, not by taking possession of some unalterable items of information or some fixed patterns of behavior...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...There are, however, some problems, among which I'll note two...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...It will also often lead to thinking that in order for the tradition to maintain its identity, it must keep the things it hands down the same...
...This is an understanding that focuses attention upon traditio, the act of handing something (or things) on or over to someone else, rather than upon tradita, the things handed on...
...But they also think that these prac36 tices are going somewhere, which is why they like metaphors of development (flowering, unfolding, blooming, and so on...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...But it is also (descriptively) true that among the more important practices of the Catholic tradition is constant reference to an authority external to itself, and that this practice does conceptual and practical work of a kind systematically occluded by Tilley's book...
...Maybe I will...
...And this is so...
...There is a second and deeper problem...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...Tilley prefers the tradition-as-skilledpractice position for two main reasons...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...But even by Tilley's own theoretical standards, this is not a proper criticism of developmentalism...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...A traditional person, in this reading, is a skilled player: she knows how to go on playing that game, as the philosopher Wittgenstein (whose influence is everywhere in Tilley's book) would say...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...he roared at us several times, as the other customers continued nonchalantly to converse...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...Of course, there may be other pressing reasons to work at preserving the tradita unchanged...
...Tilley's account of the Catholic tradition ignores or mutes these central aspects of the grammar of the faith, and as a result it is importantly inadequate in spite of its other great virtues...
...Or, if you prefer that in English, they point their practitioners away from themselves and are aimed toward a final goal that will make them irrelevant...
...God will hear you...
...Michael O. Garvey tie summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of beers in a local biker bar, I became uncomfortably aware that a conspicuously enraged patron at a nearby table was demanding our attention...
...It remains unclear (in an otherwise very clear book) why this option is to be rejected...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...These people, the developmentalists (John Henry Newman among them), are mostly happy to do as Tilley does, which is to think of the Catholic tradition as constituted by a complex set of practices extended through time...
...Marvin, S.D...
...About all this Tilley is correct, and his analysis of recent work on tradition by philosophers, historians, theologians, and scholars of religion is accurate and perspicacious, if not exactly novel...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...Harleys...
...The upshot of Tilley's fine book accords with this celebration: the reader's gaze is displaced from the Catholic tradition's constant struggle to develop practices that point away from themselves and itself, and is turned inward to precisely those practices and their practitioners...
...Even as a meta-traditional account of tradition, this will not quite do...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...This in turn may lead to the kind of traditionalism whose main concern is with invariance: verbal invariance in confessional formulae, perhaps, or gestural invariance in liturgical performance, and it will suggest that the traditional person is a knowledgeable (rather than a skilled) person, one who is in possession of what the tradition hands on...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...but maintaining the identity of the tradition can't coherently be thought important among them...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...It is no accident that the penultimate paragraph of the book quotes with approval one of Marty Haugen's liturgical songs, in which what is celebrated is not God but the worshipping congregation...
...A tradition, claims Tilley, is best understood as a complex set of enduring (but not changeless) practices...
...It was easy to accede...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
