I happened to come across Belief or Nonbelief at the library, and as I am a reasonably big fan of Umberto Eco, who is one of the authors, I thought I would pick it up. These are translations of, well, dueling op-ed pieces, I guess you would call them, between Mr. Eco and Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, S.J., who was at the time Archbishop of Milan. In 1995, a Milanese newspaper decided to run a sort of dialogue between these two prominent local intellectuals. One would essay a question on a topic, the other would essay to answer it. In the process, they would make clear their very different world views, the “secularist” and the Prince of the Church.
The problem, for me, is that they don’t in fact have very different world views. Oh, Mr. Eco is not a believer, really, but he is scarcely anti-clerical, and it’s clear that the church he doesn’t follow is Cardinal Martini’s church. And the Archbishop is clearly a believer, but a rationalist, a Jesuit in fact, and it’s clear that the humanism he rejects is Mr. Eco’s humanism. In other words, they are talking each other’s language. Which, on one level, is nice, because it allows them to converse at a high level, respectfully, and with a great deal of understanding. On another level, though, it’s clear that neither particularly wants to persuade the other of anything, nor do they care, particularly, if the reader follows the other’s precepts. It’s so civil it avoids confrontation; there is no clash. Of course, the format, which does not allow a rebuttal, but which requires each answer to be followed by a change of subject, makes clash even less likely.
The thing I wanted to talk about, though, was a thing Mr. Eco said which struck me as rather stupid. Since Mr. Eco is not stupid, I rather wonder what he actually meant. He was reaffirming that he asked a doctrinal question out of curiosity, rather than challenge, saying that as a non-Catholic, he had no standing to challenge the doctrine. Here’s the quote:
“If you want to be Catholic, don’t get a divorce. If you want a divorce, become Protestant. You only have the right to protest if you are not Catholic and the Church wants to keep you from getting a divorce. I confess that homosexuals who want to be recognized by the Church and priests who want to get married exasperate me.”
Now, I understand that, as an outsider, I haven’t the right to demand the Church change its doctrine. However, what he appears to be saying is that even insiders don’t have that right. Further, and even more annoyingly, he appears to be saying that the Church is defined by, and is rightly defined by, their restrictions rather than their blessings. Do you want a church that sanctions divorce and also believes in transubstantiation? Do you want a church that treats women as equals and also believes in the priestly power to absolve sin after confession? Well, screw you. If you want a divorce, become a Protestant, and give up apostolic succession, the throne of St. Peter, and the pontifical guidance of the Bishop of Rome.
And, of course, Mr. Eco does not seem to think that people outside the church have any right to protest if Church dogma is actually hurting people, if, for instance, they counsel against condoms even if one’s spouse has AIDS. No, no, such ideas exasperate him.
Perhaps it’s just because I like the man that I can’t believe he means all that. I suspect, frankly, that he’s pulling the Cardinal’s leg (which, for all I know, has bells on). I suspect he’s getting a nasty little dig in there, leaving it for the reader to say wait a minute... and come to the conclusion I did: of course I have the standing, whoever I am, to object to the Church’s teachings, and of course the Church’s teaching are wrong on these topics (whichever they are for the individual reader), and of course nonbelief is better, if the choice is believing stupid shit like that. But perhaps that’s just what I would have preferred he say, or rather what I would have preferred he meant. There’s semiotics there, I’m sure.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
If I may venture a thought: there’s a notion that religions (and other ISVRs, I suppose) are static things, and you’re either in or out. (Is that Conservatism in a Nutshell?) I know that a prevailing attitude among students at my sectarian[*] alma mater was that if you wanted to dance on campus (or, you know, be pregnant or gay), you don’t have any standing to complain: you knew the rules and needn’t have enrolled in the first place.
Religions probably make the strongest claim in this regard, what with so many of them self-describing as The Ultimate Truth and all. In the instance you’re asking about, I’d say that of the religions descended from the original throne of St. Peter, the one that still retains said throne probably has the best claim to monolithic ideology. OTOH, it’s those Protestants who really push the “love it or leave it” sensibility, schisming every time they can’t agree on a fine point of theology. So I guess it’s a draw.
[*] as opposed to the school I started out at, which, though officially aligned with a sect, was somehow much less sectarian. Oh my head… why didn’t I go to Swarthmore?
I find this even more problematic with religions than with, say, colleges. As you say, a college could with some validity say ‘hey, you could get a Bachelor’s Degree some other place’. Since the last Bishop of Rome specifically said that there was no salvation outside the Church, your Best Outside Alternative is pretty much BURN IN HELL FOREVER. Cuts down on the sectarian stuff. It all comes down to sects in the end, doesn’t it?
Thanks,
-V.
Saying that “the rules are the rules” neatly avoids the problem of considering who makes the rules and why they have a right to make them, enabling the semiotician to study the function of signifying systems without losing sleep over the ethics of advertising.
Yeah, but usually Mr. Eco is sharper than that. I know you and the semioticians have a little thing going, but from the essays I’ve read (and the lecture I went to, which was fun) I don’t think this one is in the habit of pretending that rules or signs exist a priori or don’t smell of struggle. Or was I overestimating him?
I mean, I’m sure you could take him, you and your hermeneutical buddies, that’s not the question. The question is whether he’s deliberately being disingenuous, and whether I’ve spelled disingenuous correctly.
Thanks,
-V.
Well, you know Eco and his work better than I do, so I would defer to your judgment about how much he scents the smell of struggle in signification.
Irony is so tricky to spot, especially in translation and out of context, so maybe he is being ingeniously deliberatly ingenuous here, and we just can’t tell. Maybe he’s just impatient with the whole mess of organized religion and people’s investment in it.
But it’s my phenomenological buddies who could take the semioticians, not my hermeneutical buddies. The semioticians and the hermeneutes don’t really have that much of a beef, anyway.
Saying that “the rules are the rules” neatly avoids the problem of considering who makes the rules and why they have a right to make them […]
Isn’t this precisely the stance of the Bishop of Rome (and, more generally, the theistic position)? “We don’t make the rules, folks, we just enforce them among our community — at least until you die, when you get to BURN IN HELL FOREVER[*]. Totally out of our hands.”
It doesn’t seem necessary to attribute either stupidity or disengenousness to Eco, here. He’s granting one of the Church’s positions in the context of a friendly debate, laying out an area that he’s not going to challenge in which his opponent may stand. In your (and my) opinion, that area reflects badly on the Church, but it’s entirely consistent with Eco’s position that he would suggest that people leave the Church rather than stay and be denied.
I think it’s cold-hearted of Eco to phrase it as exasperation. However, I confess that I’m a bit exasperated by the Log Cabin Republicans, who I think have better long-term odds of formal recognition than gay Catholics.
[*]Your HELL may vary.
(I don’t even try to spell the dis*mumble*uous word.)
You know, I wrote phenomenology, and then I thought that wasn’t right, and I did TSOR and came up with hermeneutics. Fuh.
And Dan P, doesn’t your representation of Mr. Eco’s position come awfully close to B.R.’s “repulsive” “foolish, well-meaning people may go to Hell simply by inattention to their relationship with God, but so what? We’re okay”. I suppose in this case it’s we may go to Hell, but why should you care? Isn’t that repulsive, too?
Thanks,
-V.
Well, it would be repulsive if Eco thought that non-Catholics (such as himself) were going to hell. Does he? I thought the point was that he doesn’t.
Actually, no: if Eco believed that everyone is judged in the afterlife according to the official tenets of the faith to which they belonged (c.f. Lewis, C. S., The Last Battle), then he would be making the repulsive statement.
Your second proposed repulsive statement is trickier to unpack. If I have a Hell and you have a Hell and they are different Hells, then the extent to which we struggle to convert each other until we die is a measure of how much we care for each other. But if I have a Hell and you don’t, are you required to care whatsobit about its particulars?
Assuming, of course, that either of us have any say over who gets into my Hell, which is what you seem to be hoping might result from Eco’s argument with the Archbishop. If you want to argue that the Church is creating a little snippet of Hell on earth and that Eco should be opposed to that, well, sure, and I think he agreed with you on that with his statement about the Church forcing things on non-members.
I disagree with Eco that the Church should be a take-it-or-leave-it thing, but that means that I think it shouldn’t be the Church, definitionally.
I wrote:
Saying that “the rules are the rules” neatly avoids the problem of considering who makes the rules and why they have a right to make them […]
Dan P wrote:
Isn’t this precisely the stance of the Bishop of Rome (and, more generally, the theistic position)? “We don’t make the rules, folks, we just enforce them among our community — at least until you die, when you get to BURN IN HELL FOREVER[*]. Totally out of our hands.”
I wouldn’t want to speak for the Bishop of Rome on such matters . . . However, I think it’s an overgeneralization to describe this stance as the “theistic position.” There are at least two strands of thought about this in western Christianity alone that differ significantly from this position, and I would expect that among the world’s theistic religions, there are other significantly different positions as well.
1) Some Protestant traditions affirm the foundational importance of individual conscience in such matters.
2) Quakers (at least in the unprogrammed Meeting tradition) go further than that. Accepting that divine revelation to human persons in worship is an ongoing process, they conclude that there is no final, unchanging set of rules laid down for a Church to enforce. They regard the Bible, for example, as _A_ word of God rather than _THE_ word of God. Practicing religion in this tradition thus becomes not the following of a set of prescribed rules but an effort to discern and to follow ongoing divine guidance. A “the rules are the rules” church admits the possibility of divine guidance but always assumes that such guidance must stay within the bounds of the rules, and that (implicitly, I infer) the rules are finally crucial for salvation and such. Now, the authority of tradition in Catholic theology qualifies the “the rules are the rules” position within that Church, but only at a high conceptual level: for the individual believer, the rules are still the rules, even if the Church might be the authoritative interpreter of the rules, under divine guidance. Quaker practice (and, I would guess, the practice of other theistic traditions) places its priority on the search for divine guidance by the individual worshipper within a shared discipline of communal worship.
That’s more than anyone wanted to hear about Quakers, probably, but I had to qualify the idea that theistic religion necessarily implies a “the rules are the rules” attitude towards doctrine.
It’s a good point, and I’ll add that theism doesn’t have to be salvific at all, and that certainly ancient Judaism does not appear to have had any substantial interest in the afterlife, either the BURNING IN HELL part or the other.
On Dan’s more substantial response to my comment, though, I think he’s right. If Eco doesn’t believe in Hell, and I think he doesn’t, then in some sense it’s all one to him whether people are Catholic or Protestant or anything else. To go back to the quote, though, he’s not saying ‘If you want a divorce and don’t believe in hell, become a Protestant’, which of course wouldn’t make much sense because Protestants on the whole do believe in hell. He’s not even saying ‘if you want a divorce and don’t believe that the Bishop of Rome is correct about his Church being the only way to salvation, become a Protestant.’ He is, in effect, saying ‘if you want a divorce, go to Hell’. So although I misrepresented him above, I don’t think it’s far from … You may go to Hell, but why should you care? Which, I suppose, makes sense for somebody who doesn’t believe in Hell at all, but it can scarcely be persuasive to somebody who does, as we can assume the Catholic who wants a divorce does.
Thanks,
-V.
Chris Cobb wrote:
I think it’s an overgeneralization to describe this stance as the “theistic position.”
That’s a fair cop. I do wonder to what extent those examples (especially the first, which is my natal tradition) are simply claiming ignorance of the totality of the rules while still dodging responsibility for those rules. I honestly wonder, I don’t “wonder.”
Vardibidian wrote:
…which is what I hoped to cover with “Your HELL may vary.” Divine punishment in this world qualifies just as much as in the next. Not to be too cute about it, but where’s there’s rules, there’s gots ta be consequences, or else what’s the rule, really?
However, I think you’re very right, here:
So, is he saying anything worse than what the Catholic Church says on this question? Why are we evaluating him for repulsiveness and not the Archbishop?
If belief that only Catholics may avoid hell and belief that divorce is divinely forbidden are both official tenets of the Catholic Church, why is denying one intrinsically less persuasive to a Catholic than denying the other? This question is only half-rhetorical — there’s an answer there, but it’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax that I don’t have the time to deal with at the moment. Besides, I’m sure anyone else who comments at this excellent Tohu Bohu will say it better.
On a tangential note: Somewhere around ten or fifteen years ago, I held a position fairly similar (at least superficially) to what Eco appears to be saying (if taken at face value).
I don’t know whether this is at all relevant to what Eco actually intended to convey. But the gist of my position at the time was something like this (see below before responding to this):
“The Pope is the human source of authority in the Catholic Church. He even officially speaks for God sometimes. What he says defines what the Catholic church is. Therefore, how can it make sense for someone to consider themselves a Catholic while disagreeing with the Pope?”
These days, having talked with some Catholics and learned a little more about Catholicism, I have a somewhat more nuanced view; I can see that someone might believe some of the tenets of the Catholic church, or might like some aspects of Catholic ritual, and therefore might (as you note) not have any other viable options; the Catholic church might, in some sense, be the least-bad match (among the available churches) with a person’s beliefs and needs.
I think maybe what it comes down is the question of the Pope’s authority. He doesn’t speak ex cathedra all the time, but if you believe him to be guided by God, and if you believe that he was put into his position through the work of Cardinals guided by God, and if he sets policy and doctrine for the Church (I’m not sure to what extent he does), then it still seems a little bit odd to me to try to convince the Church to change. I can certainly think of various theologically consistent positions that would allow one to try to change the Church from within — but it seems to me (and I may still just be misunderstanding Catholicism here) that there are also theologically consistent positions from which it doesn’t make sense to try to do that.
Does that make any sense?
Why are we evaluating [Mr. Eco] for repulsiveness and not the Archbishop?
Because I like Mr. Eco. For all that the Prince was at one time (in fact at the time this book was written) the best combination of liberality and papability, I have nothing vested his honesty, his rigor or his character. I probably will never again read anything he wrote. Whereas I have read Mr. Eco’s work and liked it, and allowed myself to be influenced by it.
There’s much more to say, about the Quakers and the Catholics and Garry Wills and rules and rules, but I’ve got to put some time in on my lines. Sorry to neglect, and I hope to respond later.
Thanks,
-V.