Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

The following post will most likely interest very few people; but, well, it interests me. 

I have spent a great deal of time and energy studying the history of Christian and Catholic doctrine; and have even published a scholarly volume on the subject. There are a number of interesting facets or aspects of such a study: one, which is absolutely central to any serious contemporary Christian theology, may be called the theory of development, or more precisely theories of development, encompassing all the various attempts, from Antiquity to the present day, to understand theoretically the mix of continuity and change visible in Christian doctrine over time, its causes, and its results. These theories have spanned the entire range from naive to absurd to self-contradictory to insightful and back again; and to have a real theology, in any sense, it is necessary to operate on the basis of some such schema, if only implicitly: and to have a rational, explicit, truthful theology, it is necessary to have a rational, explicit, truthful theory of development.

However, that is not what I am going to be talking about in this post, at least not directly. Rather, what I have been trying to develop, based on my studies, here and elsewhere, is what I might call a theory of deformation, or perhaps (with a nod to Whip It) a theory of devolution.

This is, however, to put the matter somewhat dramatically, as well as somewhat polemically. The more basic truth is that Christianity as such, not to mention Catholicism, embodies a highly particular metaphysics, ethics, philosophy, ethics, history, and way of living, and that there are few, if any, things in human life that it does not in some way touch on or incorporate into its grand synthesis. 

For precisely this reason, however, Catholicism necessarily overlaps withareas of human life also dealt with by more human and secular and historical sciences and philosophies and cultures and politics. It not only covers the same ground as them, but frequently addresses the same concepts, even uses the same words. It typically does so, however, in very different ways, ways that are opaque, confusing, and often even offensive to many people, and which are therefore highly susceptible to being reinterpreted entirely in light of their more common usages.

To take only one instance, the use of the term nature in Catholic Christology necessarily overlaps to some limited extent with the uses made of this concept in science, philosophy, genetics, ethics, etc, of our own or indeed any historical society--but for all that, the concept of nature used in Catholic Christology is highly different than that used in any contemporary domain. To simply take the Christological sense of nature and insert into a discussion of, say, ecology would produce nonsense; while to take the contemporary ecological sense of nature and insert it into Christology might produce nonsense, but might also produce something a great deal more like a heresy.

This framing, however, is a bit more abstract than is necessary. I do not think, really, that most historical or contemporary heresies arise from mere confusion of the technical language of Catholicism with the technical language of contemporaneous science or philosophy. This has been, in the past, a common way of interpreting historical heresies; and it usually produces historiography (and heresiography) that is overly schematic and conceptually muddled. 

As a matter of fact, in most cases technical domains, so long as they remain technical and specific, remain to that extent open to broader domains of philosophy and metaphysics and theology, or more precisely subordinate to them in the sense that they deal with more particular matters that can and should and to an extent even must be integrated with broader domains: and to the extent this is true, engagements between technical domains and theology, so long as they are done skillfully, can produce positive fruit in both domains. 

Rather, what usually happens in regards to serious deformations of Catholic doctrine, I think, is quite a bit more subtle than this, and much harder to resolve simply with reference to mere definitions.

Most people do not study technical fields; but most people do live in societies, in communities, and in institutions. And these societies, communities, and institutions, explicitly or implicitly, run off of and embed and embody and incarnate particular views of the world, particular anthropologies, particular practical ethical goals and conceptions of the good. And it is these, in particular, that most directly and frequently clash with the overarching, holistic ethics and metaphysics of Catholicism; and which most frequently and impactfully lead to reinterpretations and deformations of Catholic belief and practice.

To take only one example, my scholarly book (AVAILABLE NOW!) focuses in part on the complex conceptual and practical clash between the implicit and explicit views of God, man, person, nature, equality, hierarchy, etc, found in the world of Late Imperial politics and Late Antique Christianity: and the various ways in which this led to radical reinterpretations of Imperial politics in terms of Christianity, and of Christianity in terms of Imperial politics. This is, of course, by no means a simplistic one-way affair, without ambiguity.

Still, if one accepts the basic framework above, it becomes clear that something like this has happened again and again in the history of the Catholic Church; and, considered soberly, to some degree must happen, in every age, place, institution, culture, and time. For, after all, the truth, even considered qua abstract and universal, must be concretely and particularly received and understood in every age, by every person: and for it to be understood, it must be related to existing stores of knowledge, culture, terminology, and so on. And if it is possible for this to be done well, in a way faithful to the essential meaning of Christian revelation, subordinating earthly knowledge to divine revelation, it is also possible, and intrinsically a great deal more likely, to be done badly.

And more interestingly, all this must happen here and now, and in the future: and must be, to some degree, predictable and understandable, even where said deformations are only implicit or only incipient. 

Here, then, is the ambitious and likely ludicrous "thought experiment" I wish to engage in this post: namely, to see if I can to some extent predict, to some extent extend, and to some extent make explicit the implicit deformations of core Catholic doctrines created by, or likely to be created by, our contemporary institutions and social systems. In so doing, I wish to be clear that I am using the term "heresy" only in a colloquial sense, as a helpful abstraction, and that I am in no way attempting to preempt Church authority, define a canonical crime, and/or accuse anyone of being a formal heretic deprived of divine grace and/or liable to ecclesiastical sanction. Similarly, in dealing with the below "heresies," I am in no way predicting, even theoretically, that anyone in particular will ever explicitly argue for the positions laid out below, let alone turn them into widespread theological or popular or religious movements. I am merely postulating that the following deformations of Catholic belief do exist or will exist, explicitly or implicitly, to vastly varying degrees, in the lives and thoughts and arguments of Catholics: and as such, will have, to vastly varying degrees, negative effects.

For my next blog post, most likely, I will be examining what I think are the emerging political principles likely to govern global and American politics over the next several decades. Before doing that, though, I wish to preserve the proper hierarchical order of things, and deal first with the higher domain of theology, before proceeding to lesser matters. 

Christology: Nature and the Supernatural 

The inspiration to write this post came from an interaction (respectful enough) on social media with a decently popular Catholic writer, at least initially over the difficult, and rather technical, question of the human knowledge of Christ. Said writer argued mostly in a priori terms drawn from thought experiments and contemporary experience, while I attempted to lay out what I saw as the most common consensus position within historical Catholic theology--not necessarily because I see this position as absolutely binding as because any discussion of the question that does not at least grasp this consensus will necessarily go nowhere. 

He, though, regarded this case as not only wrong, but as actually absurd, not even having to be addressed or refuted at any length. This was because, as he initially put it, it would imply that a scientist doing a brain scan on the infant Christ in the 1st century AD would find extreme, bizarre results, results falling nowhere within human statistical norms; and because this result would mean (1) that Christ's divinity would thus be a matter of science rather than faith, and (2) Christ would not really be human at all.

I found this argument somewhat puzzling, but as he explained further, it began to make sense to me, especially as I got him to lay out some of the more basic beliefs underlying this position. As he finally put it, for him the division between the natural and the supernatural was conceived of primarily in scientific or rather epistemological terms, based in turn on a kind of probabilistic or statistical verification and classification. Thus, what is natural is most basically what can be scientifically confirmed and validated through tests and experiments and similar means; while what is supernatural is what cannot be validated in this way, but only (or at least primarily) grasped through faith. Or, put another way, what is natural is what is susceptible to scientific testing and falls within scientifically confirmed and validated statistical norms, while what is supernatural is what is not susceptible to such testing or falls outside those norms.

Hence the major crisis caused to his faith by the ideas, commonplace if not normative at every period of Catholic theology since at least the 3rd century AD, that Christ possessed a developed human reason even as an infant and/or within the womb, that Christ from his conception saw the Beatific Vision, and that Christ throughout his life possessed the totality of factual (though not experiential) knowledge available to a merely human reason. There are any number of reasonable arguments against some or all of these positions, especially in the maximalist form I have put them; but what bothered my interlocutor was not really any of these things at all. It was, rather, the idea that (1) such knowledge would be in some way theoretically scientifically detectable and verifiable, through brain scans or IQ tests or the like, which in his view would mean that the supernatural itself was scientifically verifiable, which would fundamentally undo the divide between natural and supernatural as such; and (2) that a scientifically-examined Christ whose, say, neurological scans or IQ tests fell outside of scientific statistical norms would not be naturally human at all, or at least not naturally human enough.

Now, the basic truth is that the ideas of natural and supernatural, and therefore divine and human, found in my interlocutor's arguments are not only not the same as those found within historical Catholic theology; they are, rather, for the most part contradictory to those same ideas. Neither the Church Fathers nor the Scholastics nor indeed any particularly well-known historical heretics conceived of the divide between natural and supernatural as an epistemological gap between what can be empirically detected or "verified" using technical means and what cannot be; rather, they conceived of it as a fundamentally metaphysical gap, with some epistemological implications as regards to what can be conclusively demonstrated and/or fully comprehended using unaided human reason. 

After all, human beings, they believed, certainly had observed and would continue to observe angels and saints and apparitions and miracles, including cognitive miracles of divine illumination and grace and wisdom; and nothing in principle prevented any or all of these things from being tested and examined and detected empirically. Indeed, Catholics have shown since the 1st century AD a remarkable dedication to forensically testing and recording evidence of miracles, divine appearances, and many other such things, ranging from 7th century miracle accounts from healing shrines all the way to the modern scientific committee at Lourdes. 

Hence, the idea that Christ, if examined by a scientist, might show some unusual human features would no more trouble them than the idea that Lazarus' death and resurrection might be verified by a doctor. Indeed, the idea of Christ's remarkableness or perfection precisely as and qua human has been central to Christology since the Gospel of Mark. That there has been, in mysticism, a concomitant emphasis on the "hiddenness" of Christ, particularly in his life prior to his ministry, is in no way contradictory; for the idea of Christ actively hiding himself from human perception in no way implies that a Christ captured and dissected by scientists would be merely ordinary.

In any case, hiddenness aside, nothing at all about this would for them make Christ not human or less human; and this reflects an even more fundamental gap between these ideas of nature and classically Catholic ones. Put simply, for ancient and Medieval thinkers, the concept of "humanity" or "human nature" was in no sense defined in statistical or normative ways, but according to an essentially teleological conception. A human being is a rational animal; and so anything that makes someone more rational also makes them more human. Indeed, the entire point of the common doctrine of Christ's human knowledge was to make him more human in precisely this teleological, normative sense. 

Even this perfect teleology came with limitations intrinsic to embodied reason, and to created as opposed to divine reason; and these limitations, in the best expositions, were acknowledged and explored as well, including the fundamental one of Christ's necessarily growing and developing experience and experiential knowledge of particular things and people and tasks. And likewise, by this conception, to be human, Christ must also be an animal, must have a natural body with all its implied limitations and teloses; and indeed, the concept of Christ as a perfect animal perfectly fulfilling the teloses of bodily nature is also found in theology for the same reason. 

Nowhere in these concepts, however, was any sense that Christ's, say, ability to perform problem-solving tasks, number of neurological connections, number of discrete remembered facts, etc, etc must fall within any particular statistical norms: because such things really had little or nothing to do with how ancient and Medieval theologians thought about human reason. To be human was to be a rational animal; and reason was the ability to grasp the truth as it was in itself. Hence, qua perfectly human (not as divine), Christ should grasp the truth in its totality as it was in itself to the greatest degree possible for a human being. All other considerations about cognition were not so much overlooked as strictly irrelevant. I doubt very much if anyone in the history of Catholic theology prior to the 20th century ever sat down and thought about how quickly Christ would solve puzzles or write code or solve equations or how he would do on an IQ test. 

When, however, I grasped my interlocutor's fundamental point, I grasped something I do not think I have ever fully grasped before: a real Christological heresy, whose basic terms one can see around us in many ways, though it is not so much, I think, the heresy of the future as of the past. 

It is strictly true that one could construct an entire Christology around this concept, a Christology that used all the same words as traditional Chalcedonian Christology, but which was entirely different in nearly every way. Christ is one person with two natures: that is, there is a Christ-nature that is fully scientifically verifiable as a human being like any other, falling within all accepted statistical norms, and appearing to the senses and experiences of all the people around him as in no way unusual or outside our normal experience of human beings; and then there is a "divinity" of Christ that is entirely transcendent, that is in no sensible or verifiable way implicated in or connected with that normal human Christ, that does things that no one can verify and so is grasped solely through "faith."

Properly understood, this is not so different from some historical heresies; it is a kind of radical Nestorianism or Gnosticism, one of many historical systems for which divine and human are simply antinomies, and so the two "parts" of Christ must be conceived of as contradictory to each other. That something close to this conception lies at the very heart of many 19th and 20th and even 21st century "human Christs" or "historical Christs" is in retrospect rather obvious: since virtually all of these conceptions have been precisely religious conceptions, posing a human nature of Christ entirely verifiable and understandable according to some technical science that is nonetheless treated as absolutely important due to an invisible, disconnected divinity somehow associated with it. 

I do not think, however, that this viewpoint on the natural and supernatural is precisely the Christological heresy of the future, though it is still with us in many forms, mostly in popular Christian and especially Evangelical forms. The idea of an "ordinary" human Christ that acts and thinks just like us and people we know, whose "humanity" is conceived of precisely as a lack of unusual features, and whose "divinity" is more or less a pietistic abstraction totally disconnected from any actual experience, is still, I think, more or less the consensus American Christian treatment of Christ, and has been for about the last one hundred and fifty years.

Things, however, have changed a great deal since the 19th century; or even since the (Gen X) Catholic influencer in question was young. Verifiable facts and statistical norms are more and more giving way to a far stranger view of reality. To some extent from the beginning, from Francis Bacon onwards, but to an ever-increasing degree throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, science has been treated precisely as what creates things that no one understands, technological and mass-media powers and illusions that are worshiped precisely as unknowable and incalculable and in that sense quasi-divine. 

In our present-day society, this is leading to a situation where people increasingly lack any sense of "nature" or the "natural" as such: where no gap exists between the natural and the artificial, the illusory and the true, the personal and the impersonal, the divine and the human, since everything falls within the realm of mass-media technical power and symbolic exchange. Rather, our theories and practical ways of life are increasingly focused around (1) binary symbols, pure relations between exchangeable or opposed objects without meaning or content outside themselves, and (2) various forms of extrinsic force used to exchange or oppose such objects against each other in and by means of human persons.

If we postulate a Chalcedonian Christology reimagined in these terms, we get something very strange indeed: something that is, however, I think recognizable in the world around us. Christ is one person with two natures, but this is to say that he is merely a set of symbols, of aesthetics, existing within the much broader world of symbols and symbolic exchanges in our culture. Conceptions of Christ qua human increasingly are conceived of in terms of debates over what kind of human he is, or even what kind of God he is: is he a softboy? A body-builder? A vengeful God supporting and embodying my vengeance? A powerful God supporting and embodying my power? A tolerant and humane God supporting and embodying my tolerance? Black? White? Conservative? Liberal? Hot?

Christ's "divinity" is thus conceived of more and more, I think, as a mere function or attribute of his humanity in this sense, of his iconography and image and symbolic associations. In the present day, we do not worship metaphysical entities, or concepts, or even particular objects or people: we worship symbols and brands. To be divine is therefore to be iconic, to be powerful, to be influential, to be an effectively and frequently opposable and exchangeable. Hence, we see Christ as divine to the extent that we find his actual symbolic images and associations compelling or iconic, things to be emulated and traded and used and pitted against other objects: and we pose, quite naturally, different Christs against each other. The "conservative Christ" tells us to buy guns and drink beer and vote for Trump; the "liberal Christ" tells us to respect LGBTQ+ individuals and listen to NPR and vote for Kamala. And so on and so forth.

When laid out in this way, it becomes clear that these two heresies, past and future, are to a large extent simply two sides of the same coin. To make the supernatural as such the unknowable and unverifiable, accessible to only a fideistic faith, is as much as to render it nonexistent, at least for any practical purposes: if nothing "supernatural" in the sense of "outside the scientific norm" need enter into Christ considered as a human being, then nothing "supernatural" in this sense need ever enter into human life at all. Whether one renders the supernatural and the divine practically nonexistent through an exaggerated concern for the integrity of "ordinary" humanity or by means of an exaggerated (and poorly-formulated) sense of its absolute transcendence makes little difference. 

Yet once the supernatural has been rendered effectively nonexistent, and the natural has been rendered the merely "ordinary" and verifiable and statistically normative, then necessarily everything in the natural that eludes statistical norms and scientific verifications--which are, in the final balance, not matters of human knowledge so much as human control--begins to appear as supernatural.  Hence the exaggerated transcendentalism immediately becomes an exaggerated immanentism, ascribing supernatural and divine qualities to anything even partially transcendent or out of the ordinary in human life. The ordinary Christ, who cannot be allowed to even mildly surprise any scientist, is superseded by many "extraordinary" people and things much more effective at surprising and confounding us. As I recently argued, modernity as such is defined by the creation and worshiping of precisely this sort of immanent transcendent.

Another thing that connects both of the two "heresies" discussed above together, though, is that both of them lack any real concept of "person." This is fair enough: since the concept of person, I am convinced, is to a large extent a Christian invention. Yet without a concept of person as a rational entity therefore defined by particularity and relation, it is impossible to make sense of any traditional Christological or Trinitarian doctrine. What unites Christ as a single person in traditional conceptions is that, fundamentally and constitutionally and intimately personally, the human Christ relates to God as the eternal Son; and the eternal Son relates to God as the created human Christ. This is made possible, however, because there is a relationship between humanity and divinity, between natural and supernatural, that is not merely one of function or opposition, and that allows the human relation to be incorporated into the divine relation, as part to whole, as means to end, as imminent to transcendent.

In both the above systems, there is no such natural relationship between divine and human, and so Christ cannot be divine in any particularly meaningful sense. There is merely the statistically ordinary human being, or the iconically extraordinary human being, who is worshiped as God in a way that cannot help but being idolatrous and perverse, and hence encourage idolatry and perversity in all aspects of human life. 

Trinitarian Theology: Symbols and Enmities

I don't think there is nearly as much to say about Trinitarian heresy in the modern day: for the very simple reason that nearly very few people in the present day is intellectual or metaphysical enough to have a Trinitarian heresy. I have, on this blog, dealt with what I see as the theological errors of some contemporary academic theologians: errors that, properly understood, are very closely related to the above 19th and 20th century concepts that define the supernatural epistemologically, as what is essentially and definitionally unverifiable and hence unknowable,  In such systems, there is a tendency to see divinity as such, or at least the divine essence, as a mere black hole of unknowability, whatever is obscure and incommunicable and can only be assented to by blind, irrational faith, rather than (in the traditional Trinitarian sense) as the most communicable and eternally and fully communicated thing, the very archetype of communication and comprehension as such.

Once again, however, this is more the Trinitarian heresy of the past than of the future; except to the degree to which academic philosophy and theology have a genuine influence on public and popular life, which is to say, thankfully, exceedingly little. But once again, this viewpoint is in many ways the necessary grounding for more innovative, and generally more implicit, views of divinity.

As discussed above, when we look at what contemporary society worships, what it values, and therefore what it has a tendency to associate or identify with the divine, we increasingly see a fixation on (1) images and symbols and language and (2) extrinsic power. 

These might appear rather opposite fixations, since presumably symbols can only persuade internally, whereas extrinsic power compels externally. More correctly, however, the sense of "symbol" or "image" in our society is precisely the linguistic equivalent of the extrinsic power valued politically and socially and scientifically. 

An "image" or "symbol" in our civilizational advertising-pornography complex is precisely what compels action apart from rational consideration and choice--so that we are seduced or tricked or even compelled more than persuaded to buy the product. Indeed, taken in its purity, a symbol in this sense, as a purely relational, exchangeable, oppositional object apart from all meaning or content, is something that can only be related to in a non-rational way, never communicated and received internally as a form which the mind grasps and so becomes, always taken or imposed externally as an unrelated object, a thing that cannot be understood and believed, but only submitted to. 

Likewise, the forms of political direction and violence valued by our society are precisely those forms--from brute physical force to drone warfare to economic manipulation to mass systemic planning to conspiracies--that compel people to take action apart from rational consideration and choice, apart from any true communication or receiving of meaning or truth or goodness or value. Indeed, in the present day, it is impossible to draw an absolute distinction between these two modes, as Donald Trump and most other leaders on the forefront of politics govern as much through symbols and advertising as by any more traditional political means.

In our emerging political theology, visible in many regimes around the world, God has for the most part been invoked merely as the legitimating force behind these exercises of power and force: sanctifying, as it were, both the symbols and the action. The God invoked by these comparisons, however, is deliberately vague. 

Insofar as a more properly theological heresy of the Godhead emerges from this, however, we would expect it be one that to a greater degree identifies God with these forms of extrinsic and symbolic power, and even identifies these in some ways with his inner life and his Trinitarian relations.

This could be done, theoretically speaking, in many different ways; ways that I think are increasingly common among American Catholics. Divine revelation has already been reimagined very thoroughly by many so-called "traditionalists" not as a proper act of communication of true, transcendent knowledge through temporal signs and means, but as a mere imposition of a set of fixed, absolute images or forms or symbols that must be held to and enforce and maintained statically with complete disregard for what they communicate and for whether they in fact communicate anything. 

Likewise, God's more basic relationship with the world, and with individual human beings, is frequently imagined and portrayed by Christians, especially by certain American Calvinists and people on the Internet, as a mere extrinsic relationship of violence and dominance, compelling people to do things and not do things with complete disregard for any actual teloses or purposes or goods either of human beings or of God. 

Many of these perspectives are mostly inchoate, even if frequently repeated and applied--but they are quite capable of being put in convincing and rationally-worked-out ways.

What this perspective might look like applied to the inner life of God and the Trinitarian relationships is slightly harder to say, since very few contemporary Christians attempt to understand the Trinity or discuss it. In principle, however, there is nothing preventing an actual return to a pseudo-Arian position where the relations of Father and Son are imagined as one-sided obedience and/or brute force dominance and/or communication of mere symbols rather than the true divine essence; and my understanding that such Arian or pseudo-Arian ideas are increasingly prevalent both among Evangelical theologians and, much more impactfully, among Pentecostal groups throughout the world. 

More subtly, it is perfectly possible, I think, to accept many of the basic orthodox confessions while reimagining the communication of divinity in the Trinity as a communication merely of a binary symbol or extrinsic power. It is perfectly possible to conceive of divinity merely as power over other persons and/or the universe and/or an indefinite field of possibility, and so to believe in the co-equality of the Trinity not as a shared communion of being and love, but merely as a united power parceled out between and among different individuals. 

Carl Schmitt in the mid-20th century went so far as to posit a kind of eternal enmity between the persons of the Trinity based, so far as I can grasp it, precisely on this idea of divinity as power and its communication within the persons of the Trinity as thus necessarily implying a kind of opposition or rivalry. Or, put more precisely, insofar as power in itself is an indefinite concept, implying some definite act or goal or function, and insofar as different definite acts or functions of power are inherently opposed to one another, and insofar as different acts or functions are ascribed to the different persons of the Trinity (whether eternally, in terms of the Trinitarian relations, or temporally, in terms of salvific or creating acts), and insofar as a true equality of power is ascribed to the persons of the Trinity, then there must be an eternal and irreconcilable enmity between the persons of the Trinity. 

While Schmitt's construction is eccentric, I think that his reasoning has been and continues to be widely shared, in less academic ways, by modern Christians prone to seeing inherent opposition or even conflict between God the Father as Creator and God the Son as Redeemer, or between God the Father as Judge and God the Son as Savior, or between the God of the Old Testament and the New. Such oppositions, I would argue, are at the very core of many historical and contemporary Protestant treatments of substitutionary atonement and forensic justification, atonement not the demonstration and fulfillment of the love of a united deity, but the confrontation of a divided one at enmity with itself, the Son giving the Father a convenient object to vent his unjust violence, the Son finding a dishonest loophole in the Father's merciless logic. To the extent that power becomes the definition of deity, such oppositions are, I think, to a real degree unavoidable.

There is a paradox here, though, since both extrinsic power and symbols in the contemporary sense are, considered properly, more relation than substance: in this approximating divine persons more than the divine essence. For this reason, a view of divinity as power is much more compatible with Arian schemas of dominance and command within the Godhead than with orthodox concepts of equality; and, indeed, Schmitt showed a great deal more attraction to Arian theologians such as Eusebius of Caesarea than to the strictly orthodox. There are, however, other ways to approximate this concept.

Thus, as I have discussed elsewhere, an academic-theology acquaintance argued that the Trinitarian relations acted as a linguistic self-definition of God, the means by which an essentially ungraspable divine essence was given a symbolic shape capable of being grasped linguistically. This is in itself a rather clever solution to the problem, as it allows the Godhead to be identified with extrinsic symbols in the modern sense without impinging on the divine essence at all. Still, such a self-definition in terms of nothing, however, is in no sense an act of communication, and is in no sense whatsoever identical to or compatible with traditional Catholic Trinitarian doctrine, which hinges precisely on the fullness of being and therefore of content contained in the divine essence and communicated in the Trinitarian relations. 

Less academically, we can see in contemporary Christianity an increasing visual focus on the mere symbols of divinity, the doves and robes and ethereal women and chapel veils and past architectural styles, particularly in the pseudo-worlds of online traditionalism and AI religious art. These visual programs do not embody the proper sense of iconodoulism, the creation and honoring of images depicting and representing and so communicating and making present real persons, but the sense of signs existing merely as signs of themselves, with an increasing disregard for any communicated reality whatsoever. 

Likewise, in more popular discourse on Catholicism, we see an increasing deployment of the semantic content of Catholicism, its terminology and structures, merely as symbols in the contemporary sense, as relational objects to be deployed for or against other relational objects ad nauseam, with little or any attempt to grasp or apply their content. Google ordo amoris!

Ecclesiology: Anti-Evangelization, Anti-Hierarchy

While I have already touched on some of the relevant principles above, I think it important as well to try to see the likely impacts of all of the above on modern concepts of ecclesiology, or the nature of the Church in heaven and on earth.

Some of these implications, I think, are fairly obvious, and more and more and more visible around us with each day. The view of the supernatural and natural as opposed epistemological categories only ever distantly brought into conjunction leads quite naturally to an ecclesiology of lay experts passing on verified scientific and statistical truths on mundane matters, or, in other words, the predominant Liberal Catholicism of the past century. 

While this Liberal Catholicism is at least relatively in decline, however, the treatment of Christianity and Catholicism as symbolic identities, defined as such not in themselves, by their positive content, but principally or even wholly by means of their symbolic opposition to other identities or groupings, is, I think, not only on the rise but increasingly primary for very, very many American Christians. By this understanding, to be Christian is primarily defined as not being [symbolic identity] or being against [symbolic identity], rather than as being or believing or doing anything at all in a positive sense. 

This is, of course, perverse in a double sense, since it not only makes the ontologically primary thing, the true and good in itself, dependent on or even secondary to evil and falsehood, that which is ontologically mere privation, nothing at all--it also has the secondary effect of entirely denying the basic communicative core of the Catholic Faith. 

As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, at the center of Catholic idea of the Church is an idea of divine revelation imagined precisely as communication, as a positive truth delivered from God through human beings to other human beings. Hence, to be Christian is most basically to be a means of communication, with one's whole being and all one's acts directed at and ordered towards making known a truth that transcends you, and which you therefore do not fully grasp or control, to people who do not know it. In other words, the truth qua truth is communicated through people qua Christian to other people precisely qua non-Christian.

To define Christianity, then, by opposition to the merely static, binary identity of those who are not Christian or believe or act contrary to Christian truth, is to entirely reverse this basic communicative telos of the Faith. Instead of being that which is characteristically communicated to, and is thus teleologically directed at, each and every human person (whether nominally Christian or non-Christian) precisely insofar as they are ignorant of the truth and therefore non-Christian, the truth is made a mere symbol, a binary entity defining itself by means of those who do not grasp it. In other words, Christianity, far from a universal truth naturally aimed at making all people Christian, is something that intrinsically needs people to not be Christian. 

This basic stance is far from theoretical, but highly practical and already incarnate in many persons. Put in functional and communicative terms, it is precisely the opposite of evangelization. Theoretically, this stance could, and occasionally does still, lead to at least theoretical attempts to use various forms of purely extrinsic force, violence and symbolic propaganda and social bullying, to make other people submit to the truth and become Catholic. More commonly, it leads to the active attempt to antagonize others and frame them as entirely other to the truth and define truth in opposition to them and prevent them from grasping the truth even incidentally and drive them as far from said truth as possible, all for better and clearer self-definition. One can, at this precise moment, see this operation going on nearly everywhere on social media. 

Put in ethical terms, in terms of virtues and habits, it has already produced, I think, a distinctive mindset and even kind of person: a person who is made nervous and insecure and doubtful and unstable in his faith by anyone symbolically opposed to him in any way agreeing with him or sharing anything in common with him, a person who to make himself feel better, to make himself feel secure in his identity, believing and faithful in his faith, nay, to make himself feel more Christian, has to antagonize others or at least theoretically and symbolically and in his own head pitch his beliefs against others.

This rising and even reigning heresy has already proved itself, I believe, an anti-clerical and anti-hierarchical one, even more than the reigning epistemological viewpoint of the past. 

Of course, for those who hold that the natural is in itself what is verified and the supernatural is what is unverified, the existence of a hierarchy of persons whose very status is based on their right and ability to authoritatively communicate transcendent reality and apply it to the things of this world is an intrinsic, almost obscene offense. I have, personally, and on many occasions, seen the primal rage of soi-disant lay experts in the face of clerics attempting to assert the practical existence of the supernatural and, worse, try to apply it in any way to any area of verified and verifiable natural reality. Ultimately, in practical life, the contest between these viewpoints has been less a matter of abstract thought and more a matter of two competing priesthoods: a supernatural priesthood capable of enacting sacraments and communicating the divine through the human and the supernatural through the natural pitted against a priesthood whose sole right to verify and test and establish the statistical truth and norms within the complete epistemological realm of nature can never be challenged under any circumstances.

Still, even theoretically, this quasi-Nestorianism can to a degree tolerate a supernatural hierarchy and supernatural authority so long as it remains separate, impersonal, abstract, never applied, with no consequences for ordinary and verifiable existence, and does not meddle in the domains of the experts. Indeed, this attitude, originating among so-called "liberal Catholics," is in the present day also ardently asserted by many "conservative" and "traditionalist" Catholics for whom the role of the Catholic hierarchy is no more and less than the mere verbal repetition of purely abstract truths about God and ethics, with no right or authority to prudentially apply them to actual concrete human existence, a realm where lay theologians and economists and politicians and ethicists reign supreme. 

Such a viewpoint, as I have emphasized, is totally incompatible with Catholicism in both theory and practice; but for all that, it is still less absolutely opposed to the Catholic Church and Catholic hierarchy than the emerging heresies of symbols and power. After all, Liberal Catholics have managed, in many cases, to remain in the Church and work with clerics; and even contemporary conservative Catholics frequently manage to tolerate the Pope publishing encyclicals and holding synods and teaching magisterially.

I am by no means convinced that such a rapproachment will be possible with those who hold to an essentially antagonistic, symbolic view of the Faith: whose incompatibility with the existence of a human hierarchy can be shown in several different ways. 

First, the human hierarchical principle of the Church makes particular human beings act as the sign and means of communication and unity precisely by their particularity. Insofar as the Pope is, say, an Argentinean, with many specific characteristics of Argentineans, he helps communicate the Faith to Argentineans and those who understand or appreciate Argentineans: insofar as the Pope is an old man, he helps to communicate to the old and those who love them; and so and so forth through a thousand attributes and associations. 

However, particular human beings, as the Internet and politics have proven, make very, very poor symbols: since they are, after all, social and political beings defined by love and communication, and do not usually stand in fixed, static, and irreconcilable conflict with other human beings or symbols. It is possible, of course, to take a human being and turn him into a symbol in this sense, especially via the means provided by the Internet and mass-media more generally: erase any personal specificities and particularities, erase any beliefs or message whatsoever, turn his image and face and voice and pictures into symbols and banners of opposition to others, and turn him at least functionally into someone who merely does and says and exists against one's enemies, or, in other words, turn him into Donald Trump. It is much more difficult, however, to do this with Catholic clerics for many reasons, including the very practical operations of the global human clerical networks of the Church, which cannot run off the Internet or in opposition to any particular localized ideology or group.

More fundamentally, however, the basic Catholic sense of hierarchy, embodied in Dionysius the Areopagite and many other places, is based entirely around the communication of transcendent truth through personal relations. The Catholic Church, as I have argued, can be conceived of as a kind of chain of communication whereby what is communicated is not finally able to be encompassed in any determinate set of words, but only fully communicated transcendentally through persons and acts. Yet all symbolic heresies by their very nature posit the truth as not transcendent, but merely a set of symbols or extrinsic powers. 

Such symbols in no sense require a hierarchy of persons; after all, anyone with an Internet connection can tell someone else to google ordo amoris or use any other set of Catholic words treated as symbols to antagonize others or establish one's own identity or even use force to extrinsically compel other people to submit to Catholic symbols. 

If there is not in fact a truly transcendent truth aimed at being universally communicated to all, then there is no need for a hierarchy of persons to transmit and teach this truth authoritatively, based on their concrete, sacramental relationship to the source of this truth, to people in different times and places and cultures. If there is no such transcendent truth, there is no need for concrete, particular persons to communicate it concretely and particularly and sacramentally. If there is no such transcendent truth, there is no need for sacraments and sacramentals to be enacted or embodied by such persons. If there is no such transcendent truth, there is no need for the Church; people on the Internet will suffice.

The radical anti-hierarchical principle of such a stance is, rather, understated by the above. For, properly thought out, the existence of a Church hierarchy is not only not necessary, but, precisely qua hierarchy and qua authoritative and qua person and qua concrete and qua universal, rather always and everywhere an obstacle to the proper communication of the single symbolic-binary truth. Indeed, the very existence of Christ himself, imagined not as a statistical, verified abstraction of ordinary humanity loosely associated with unverifiable transcendence, but as a real, concrete, extraordinary, and surprising human and divine person, is in and of itself an affront to God, the truth, and the Catholic Faith. After all, if all that is needed is someone to communicate certain oppositional symbols in their purity, then everything that complicates such symbols, including all authoritative teaching and all prudential direction and all human characteristics and indeed all indications of transcendence, and indeed reality itself, is a threat. 

Hence, naturally, the Pope and the clergy and Christ himself are, not merely accidentally but essentially, incompatible with such viewpoints. The Catholic Faith is not the Incarnate Godhead; it is just posting. 

This last, ecclesiological heresy is the only one of these that I think is in any sense merely academic or merely in the past or merely in the future: it is real, and present, and growing. 

This is, as I have tried inchoately to show above, less a matter of theoretical beliefs or constructions as of practical habit-forming action, values embedded in and embodied by institutions and ways of life and technologies and sociabilities and politics. It can thus only be countered, in the final balance, by other concrete, habit-forming actions: in other words, the Christian struggle against vice and for virtue, in prayer and obedience and ascesis. This is, I think, the great struggle imposed on every American Catholic today.

Still, hopefully hearing some theoretical nonsense may be helpful in some way in eliciting and encouraging such virtues, or, at least, in helping people avoid these vices. I hope so.