The lifeblood of Christianity

Before I get started, I have to ask for prayers for Madeleine McCann, the toddler abducted in Portugal. Every parent knows that brief flash of horror when you lose sight of your child in a crowd when you've turned away for a few seconds. I can't imagine the torture of losing them for good. Please pray also for this Orange County family, who lost their three children when a big rig hit their minivan while they were stopped in traffic on the freeway.

In view of these sorts of things happening lately and work consuming a lot of what is normally free time, I have been spending what moments I have left with the kids. I have a finely balanced system for timing my writing in between work and kids that is probably best described as "controlled avalanche," and this usually produces some things worth saying as ideas mulling around the subconscious gradually crystallize into some expressible form. Getting them down is an essential process, because otherwise, I will be juggling them mentally until I get something written down, and that becomes progressively more stressful as time goes on. But sometimes I get SO busy that there aren't even enough spaces in the schedule to fill in the snowmass with good quality powder. And rather than subjecting people to a river of slush, I prefer to spend time on responses to other people's ideas, which I can draft more quickly. The good thing about doing that is that such discussions have a habit of overflowing into new ideas for writing, as they have recently (see my comments on this thread over at Michael Liccione's blog). That means it's just about time to shake the slopes and see what comes down.

That idea of "overflowing" is itself part of the theme I'd like to establish. Just like the case of writing itself, creativity can't result from confined systems. There has to be an overflow from experience, and by "overflow" I mean the pressure that reality exerts on one's thinking to keep it active and responsive. That pressure is real, and the attempt to confine that pressure is ultimately futile. The only question is whether your conceptual outlook is sufficiently flexible to adapt to new experiences; otherwise, it will just break. I strongly believe that Christianity is the only mode of life capable of actually responding to reality in this way, not fleeing from contact with reality (which intellectually impressive systems like Hellenism, Hinduism, and Buddhism often do) nor trying to hold together the pieces of a machine that is obviously broken. The entire history of Christianity, East and West, testifies to a tenacious grip on reality where other conceptual frameworks have lost it. Christianity clings to reality even at its most awful, which makes it the only true consolation in the worst of circumstances (and it is hard to imagine worse than the ones with which I introduced this post).

The most startling testimony to how important confrontation with reality is to Christianity is the fact that Christianity itself breaks under the pressure of reality when it loses this adaptability, as one can see in Evangelicalism (see also my comments here) and in the anti-Western Orthodoxy Drew Johnson, Michael Sullivan, and I confronted over on Michael Liccione's blog. The temptation for Christianity is always toward Gnosticism, the ultimate escapism, but this is also intellectual suicide. Speculative theology, using the mind to apply theology to reality, has always been the lifeblood that keeps Christianity from Gnosticism, and it remains so today. This is the fundamental truth recognized in Pope Leo XII's Aeterni Patris, which acknowledged St. Thomas Aquinas's paradigmatic role in preserving this ancient method of the Fathers. The problem with Gnosticism wasn't speculative theology per se, but this ungrounded speculative theology detached from reality. And I'd like to think that even outsiders to the apostolic churches, like Gagdad Bob and the Maverick Philosopher, are nonetheless drinking from the true fount of divine wisdom in their resistance to such unreal philosophies.

Anyway, the point is that this mental, speculative engagement is part of what keeps the blood flowing in the Christian community. If the faith is starved of its ability to seek understanding, the organism dies. The faith may have been once delivered to the saints, but if its modern-day adherents are simply curators for the faith, which they experience but do not change, then what is being preserved is not the apostolic faith. Life requires overflow, and overflow manifests itself in the creation of dogma. That is how Catholicism shows itself to be the Church; it continues to announce dogma in continuation with the same process. Christian churches that cut off speculative creation of dogma are ceasing the process that gave them life, and eventually, they die because of it.

UPDATE -- In line with the theme of this post, see this comment I wrote at Sacramentum Vitae.