Catholics and Puritans
Catholics and Puritans
I am a
catholic who lives in a society of puritans. By this I mean absolutely nothing confessional or religious but refer
to two fundamental mindsets. North American culture overwhelmingly embodies a
puritan mindset making catholicity a somewhat lonely stance. One is forever
trying to explain to puritans things that to catholics seem utterly basic. This
is only tangentially connected to the religious and cultural movements of the
17th Century we label puritan and is not meant in any way to
minimize their historic importance or profound intrinsic interest. In fact,
looking at the past in this kind of censorious way is a hallmark of puritanism
as I here define it. To mark this distinction, I will use lower case throughout
for catholic and puritan as states of mind and upper case when I refer to
historic Catholicism or Puritanism. At any rate many confessional Catholics are
utter puritans and many confessional Protestants are true blue catholics. There
is no more staunchly Protestant author than Hegel yet he is clearly a catholic.[1]
Plus, many, indeed almost all atheists (of the ideological variety) are
puritans. In fact, I think there is no position aligned with puritanism more
completely and comprehensively than atheism. Some of what I mean may be
encompassed by Arnold’s distinction between Hellenists and Phillistines. I know
no catholic who is not to some degree a Hellenist at heart (though you might
object that some Hellenes were puritans!). Many puritans wear their contempt
for ‘culture’ on their sleeve but it is important to point out that many,
indeed most writers and academics in North America bring a puritan mindset to
the pursuits of ‘higher culture’. I don’t dislike or condemn puritans though I
will say a couple of hard things about them. If there are two mindsets that are
properly basic and inexpungable then they clearly need to get along and a
society rich in one but poor in the other is probably unbalanced. So let me say
a few words about catholics and puritans that will articulate their nature for
those who perhaps have never even noted their existence.
As puritans
are the majority they probably do not know they exist. They do not conceive
themselves as one pair in an eternal dyad but as the norm from which deviancy
is defined. So puritans, let me introduce you to yourselves and please remember
that my purpose is not polemic (catholics are not in fact polemicists at heart;
that is a puritan thing!) or to deny you your rightful place in the order of
things. It’s just that puritans in North America quite understandably think
that everyone else is a puritan too and have never considered that there might
be some other mode of existence. If you come to understand yourself as a
puritan you may revel in that identity. Alternatively, you may decide that deep
down you have been a repressed catholic all along and now see a new way forward
in life. Either way you gain in self-awareness.
What then is a puritan? Well the
simplest thing to say is that a puritan is an either/ or person though this
takes some teasing out as the modes of it are subtler than this simplistic tag
would indicate. What the puritan actually seeks is ‘distance’ between a. and b.
and he or she is reflexively hostile to the basic truth understood by all
catholics that we are in fact the other no matter how the other is defined. The
catholic believes in universal sin (whether as a theological proposition or a
secular attitude) while the puritan believes the pure shall inherit the earth.
There are two worlds for the puritan who stakes all on a logic of
difference: A is constituted as a univocal
referent by the exclusion of B.[2] The
puritan would NOT be receptive to what the catholic openly admits which is that
within every catholic lurks a puritan and vice versa. He is, to himself at
least, washed in the blood of the lamb but this belief would have no reality
for him if there were not others who were unwashed. In fact, the puritan
constitutes himself with reference to the non-puritan by whom I do not mean the
catholic but the reprobate. This holds for both religious puritans who are
literally washed in the blood of the lamb and secular puritans who wash themselves in metaphoric blood often by
political, social or aesthetic stances. Thus, for the puritan there are sheep
and goats and some ritual, or set of gestures or phrases by which they effect
the needed separation: by which they wash themselves
from the taint of the other.
There is a
deeper aspect to be noted here and that is that the puritan has a well- defined
notion of time. Time is constituted by a radical break of some kind, an
apocalyptic moment of rupture that effects the separation of a. and b. in
mundane terms. The paradigm case of this the United States which was founded by
a decisive break with the past that marked the boundary between freedom and
oppression, between superstition and knowledge, between the pursuit of
happiness and resignation in the face of misery. This is why the United States
is through and through a puritan nation in both its progressive and
‘conservative’ forms (it is the narcissism of minor differences when opposed
iterations of puritanism clash!). Canada of course was only partly puritan in
its founding but of course immersed as
we are the American ‘noosphere’ we share their fundamental attitude to the
world. It would be a remarkable thing if one day Canada became a catholic
nation but I’m not holding out hope. At any rate the American, being a puritan,
regards history the way Joyce does: as a nightmare from which he would awaken.
There is after and before and if I am after I need to purge and cleanse myself
of what has gone before. [3]
One way I can do this, the easiest
way, is to adopt a know nothing approach. I can simply will myself ignorant of
anything before my own lifetime. Some people are reflective however and need to
take some kind of stance towards the
last 3 million years. For the puritan this stance is one of investigation in
the juridical sense. The past is investigated for its crimes and its latent
corruption exposed to the light.[4] The
basic purpose of this is exculpatory, in fact, it is at its worst a form of
cheap grace. By practicing a hermeneutic of suspicion the puritan is elevated
and purged. By his impassioned denunciation of his ancestors he is washed of
the stench of finitude and failure far more than by humbling himself and
personally changing his behavior. He puts himself
here and the past there though of
course this is fatally ambiguous. If his ancestors were NOT soaked in crime how
could his virtue, his radical innocence, manifest itself? What is his ‘here’ if
there is no ‘there’? How do we attain
apocalypse if there is no fall? A further problem with the secular puritan is
guilt; given that there is no sacrifice for sin, no real blood of the lamb where does the secular puritan put his
guilt? One particular manifestation of this problem is so called white
fragility; the process by which progressive white puritan ‘allies’ deal with
their racial anxiety by offloading emotional labor on their unfortunate black
or Hispanic friends. There is barely concealed passive aggression in this
badgering behavior and one almost prefers the less subtle and hence less
insidious stance of the simple white racist who stupidly and stubbornly asserts
his innocence because he, of course, has black friends. [5]
And here we get to the nub of the
issue, the point of which the catholic and the puritan divide. The catholic
holds the doctrine of universal sin
while the puritan holds the doctrine of universal taint. These are not at all the same however superficially they may
resemble each other. According to the first doctrine the world is struggling,
though tragically failing, to actualize the good. What is more every single one
of us is implicated in this common struggle and no one stands above or outside
of it and no one individual can be cleansed or purified by his own effort or
purged by his own violent will. The theologians used to call this ‘solidarity
in sin’ which is a fancy way of saying there but for the grace of God go I. A
catholic named Leonard Cohen put it this way: “I do not know if the world has
lied. I have lied. I do not know if the world has conspired against love. I
have conspired against love.” No puritan can utter these lines honestly: he
might honor them with his lips but not with his heart. The puritan begins with
the proposition that the world has lied and in the face of the huge lie that is
the world his own white lies are small potatoes. The catholic though begins
with the notion that the world’s lie is also the lie in his own heart and that
his own struggle to discern and actively will the good is the world’s struggle as
well. To cite a concrete example where
this dichotomy plays out: the catholic would see the modern world emerging out
antiquity and the middle ages where the puritan insists that (usually in the
form of the French or American revolutions) the modern world has replaced them by means of a heroic act
of overcoming: an apocalypse in which heaven and earth have rolled away and the
new order of the ages has been inaugurated. It is surprising on this point to
find Marx rather catholic on the whole though his disciples were among the
worst ever puritans (god spare us from EVER having disciples!).
The doctrine of universal taint is
the antithesis of this. According to this doctrine the world is simply being
itself and not struggling to actualize anything. It IS always already actual;
actual evil! The slaughter bench of history, the war of each against all IS the
nature of the world actualized. The world is constituted by a taint that is
systemic perhaps even ontological. To express the good, which is other than the
world, the puritan must denounce and criticize because there is no other path
to the good in mundane terms. The good can only be attained in a moment of
passionate negation of what is. The
good can only be achieved in a moment of apocalyptic fervor that achieves
purity of heart by separation and exclusion. Here in fact is where my whimsical
choice of religious terms becomes apt for in spite of all those who claim we
live in ‘post Christian’ world catholicity and puritanism are two founding
theologies and two founding myths. People get very confused by thinking that
religion has something to do with going to church. We may live in a post confessional world but we do not live in
a post religious one and in fact we live in the most religious indeed most Christian
world ever as I once heard Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich assert to an
astonished CBC host. I would say then we have two myths and if I were to give
them real not whimsical titles I would say they are the Christian myth and the
gnostic myth with the latter absolutely in the ascendant as Harold Bloom
predicted in his book American Religion.
Or I would say this were it not for one fatal ambiguity, the Gnostic myth is
the Christian myth in one of its iterations.
This of course means that we must
resist a univocal referent when speaking of those myths though discourse
requires, indeed enforces, a certain separation when we speak of them. Even the
most righteous puritan has his moments of secret compromise with the world (how
many of them get caught with their pants down!) and no catholic can live in the
reality community without drawing sharp binaries at some point.[6]
Nor are many people pure examples of one or the other. If I did not have a
puritan streak, I would not be struggling to identify and overcome it! Anyone who wishes to see these two stances at
war within one soul may read the works of William Blake. As I said above any
catholic must on his own principles admit the puritan within: the enemy is the
other but he is also us. Yeats said that the artist makes art out of an
argument with himself and this may be even more true of the philosopher. This
no doubt why I have gone on about the puritan while not really defining, except
by implied negation, what a catholic is. To rectify this, I will take my cue
from Voltaire. In his novel Candide
we meet Baron Pococurrente: a wealthy gentleman with a magnificent library of
books and musical scores. The good Baron is a man of taste and standards and
eager to display his appreciation of art and beauty by despising nearly every
book and score in his collection! His appreciation of ‘beauty’ encompasses a
few books of Homer, scraps of Virgil and so on with all the rest condemned to
perdition.[7] His
tastes are too stringent, he feeling for beauty too exalted to be satisfied by
any worldly realization of it. In short, the world of art and culture is a
trash heap, a midden pile which can never reflect back true refinement or taste
except in rare flashes. This is aesthetic puritanism in a nutshell: all art is
bad if it cannot be shown decisively and convincingly to be good. This is not
just a snooty aristocratic attitude either. Top 40 radio repeats the same songs
endlessly because, to be frank, most people aren’t interested in the vast
majority of music which is jarring or unpleasant or tedious to them. Pop music
repeats the same formulas and sentiments because most people like very few
things. Because of this incessant recycling there are probably people who have
never enjoyed more than 3 or 4 songs in their entire lives. Thus, where the
catholic is voracious the puritan operates on a principle of hyper-selectivity
and indeed regards the catholic as mired in bad or immature taste accompanied
by lack of rigorous moral discernment.
If we are catholics however (in the
matter of art and indeed of life) we operate on the assumption that everything
is good that has not been decisively and convincingly been shown to be bad. Another
way of putting this is that the imperfections of art and life are redeemable
and indeed actively on the path to redemption. Form is always already realizing
itself in matter and always already manifesting beauty in some realization or
other. Even the humblest folk or pop song is instantiating some order, some
symmetry and variety and if an educated taste cannot see this that is because
it has passed beyond these simpler manifestations of beauty and order to ones
more complex such that its aesthetic reactions cannot be triggered strongly or
at all by what it has so transcended and what has become over familiar and dull
in its original form. Still, the march
of catholic taste only adds it does not leave behind though it may transform
what it has received or, to use the fancy term, sublated it. It keeps what is positive in the ‘childish things’ it
has put away and re-inscribes them in more developed forms. To use a moral
example, as the catholic opens herself to the other she does not denigrate or
turn her nose up at the same. To the catholic it is not a gain to appreciate b.
if it means sacrificing a. but appreciation must develop inclusively outward
even at the risk of sentimentalism or lapses of taste and judgement. Dare to be
wrong might be a good catholic motto.
Of course by speaking this way I am
revealing my own bias. The puritan can rightly object that universal tolerance
and appreciation is a chimaera and catholic taste blander and milkier than it
is challenging or bracing. To cite Simone Weil (who was a puritanical catholic
or perhaps a catholic puritan) the catholic does not see the infinite distance
between necessity and the good. On this let me conclude. I read quite a bit of
Simone Weil as a young fellow and was deeply impressed by her writing. I am
still quite close to her books and essays, indeed I often teach them but it was
clear to me that I could not accept her position nor the puritanism of her
attitude for instance, her sweeping and to me undiscriminating rejection of
European Latinity in favor of Greek and Sanskrit. Like the Catholic Dante I
have always been a disciple of the catholic Virgil, an author important to me
but condescendingly dismissed by Weil. In fact, and here I conclude, Virgil is
not liked by puritans. I was told by one that he was a ‘poet of empire’ and
other puritans find analogous categories to dismiss him. Virgil is the
touchstone of a catholic taste which I think I must have dimly sensed when I
struggled through the Aeneid as a
child and mastered some of its intricacies as a young adult. Virgil is the
first major artist and thinker to conceive and powerfully depict a universal
human society in which fundamental human goods could be comprehensively
satisfied. The ‘empire’ as imagined by Virgil is a community in which all that is
valuable and true in human experience finds it place and its freedom for
expression (whether it be Carthaginian, Trojan or Latin). No literal empire has
ever come close to being this least of all the Roman one. The empire of letters
too is one where negation and exclusion have held sway and to its detriment
still do. Still, I agree with Blake that it is the task of poetry to see beyond
the given and to open to us possibilities that go beyond the usual dull round
of existence. What Virgil dimly intuited in fact is what Blake calls ‘the city
of Golgonooza’ punning on Golgotha and the Greek word ‘nous’ or mind: the city
of human art and thought in which no truly human moment is lost to time. Blake
usually had no time for the classics (or at least pretended he didn’t) but here
he seems to me quite Virgilian. For good
or ill that is my stance too and I can, alas, do no other.
[1]
The best ever critique of puritanism is the chapter ‘Virtue and the Course of
the World” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Mind. I take this chapter to be a charter document for catholics. An
equally great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was a puritan. To see the relativity
of these historic categories I note that the Puritan Jonathan Edwards was, like
Milton in at least some of his moods, a catholic author (in spite of his famous
sermon!). By contrast the Catholic Pascal was a hyper-puritan. At any rate the ne plus ultra of puritanism, witch
hunting, was indulged liberally by all Christian confessions and indeed has its
secular equivalents today as with the satanic ritual abuse panic and other
child abuse scares of the 1990s where children were coached into recounting
tales of molestation which were not even physically possible. I sometimes
wonder whether these panics are some defense mechanism against confronting the
actual abuse with which our society seems to be rife. On this point though let
me note that orphanages, residential schools, elite private schools, border
camps, poorhouses, workhouses, asylums, prisons, reform schools and ‘laundries’
all present the puritan at his or her most miserable and cruel. By whatever
dynamic (and I don’t fully understand it myself) institutions devoted to
paternalistic care become nightmares of abuse as the ‘objects’ of such care are
quickly turned into ‘objects’ in the moral sense. They become symbols of
disorder and evil, even ontic evil, on whom all the fear, guilt and anxiety of
their keepers (and supposed caregivers) are projected. All the cruelties in the
world are visited on such ‘objects of concern’ not in spite of their lack of
autonomy but precisely because of it. As objects of care they are not persons.
All I conclude from this is that one should never give a puritan unfettered
power over a child or a criminal though alas it is the exercise of such power
that reveals who is a puritan and who is not. I have one final thing to note
for my readers who are confessional Catholics: a friend of mind once told me
that popular Catholicism, like most popular religion, is inherently Manichean.
I don’t know if he was correct or not in this assessment but since the Reformation
at least the puritan ‘consciousness of evil which must be projected onto the
other or morally deviant’ has been an utter plague in our communion. Rituals of
cruelty do not belong in a church that has a ritual of penance and
reconciliation but there they are in countless institutions runs by nuns and
brothers whose actions embody not agape but
the deeper, darker more primitive stance of child sacrifice and blood ritual, all performed by people who thought themselves exemplary modern Christians and
by the way, as Jung warns us, it is people who are, in their own minds, ‘clean,
modern and rational’ who are the easiest prey for such impulses.
[2] It
is highly ironic that Derrida, who along with Plato and Hegel rejects such a
logic, has been appropriated in North America almost exclusively by puritans.
Such is the power of the puritan mind that it can immediately and uncritically
appropriate an opposed logic and not even notice what it has done. This reflects
the irony that we who reject unsophisticated binary thinking can form a group
that excludes the benighted people who do not showing that the puritan stance
can be a near inevitability unless it is constantly identified and called in
question. Even catholics like myself can sometimes be too sniffy about
puritans!
[3]
Like capitalism puritanism can absorb any and all opposition into its own
categories. There are people, I suspect, who are sexually transgressive in speech and
action NOT because their desires prompt them but because they feel they OUGHT
to. They are waging a cultural war on ‘shame’ and act not from real inclination
but from principle. This is surely the acme of the puritan spirit. The catholic
understands that a certain amount of shame and guilt is actually a sauce to
pleasure, something all decadents recognize but no puritans. At any rate the
puritan needs evil as much as anyone for without it he has no identity. This is
why, existentially speaking, the puritan can never take yes for an answer and
why, for every taint discovered and removed, he must discover another one,
deeper and more insidious.
[4]
I refer to this insofar as it is a mere reflex or stylistic tic. A conscious puritan aware of the pitfalls
of puritanism can certainly
investigate the crimes and oppressions of the past insofar as they play into a
specific injustice in the present that the puritan seeks to rectify and if the
puritan is willing to leave it at that he and I have no quarrel. I think
however that much puritan discourse is in fact self-exculpatory in the way I
have described.
[5]
What of course the progressive AND right wing puritan really need is the
scapegoat, a single figure or institution like Israel, The Catholic Church,
Islam, the banks, the lying press or what have you that embodies the evil of
the world in a distinct and external form from which the puritan
can dissociate and thus cleanse himself of taint. To cite one example, the
puritan (though he can never admit this to himself) experiences pleasure and
relief when churches, say, are rocked by sex scandals. Nothing is so pervasive
in our capitalist societies as sexual exploitation especially of minors which
is done on a grotesque scale by sex traffickers, pornographers, the fashion
industry and myriad others. The puritan cannot really be NOT aware of this if
he turns on the television or looks at an ad and has internalized consciousness of this evil. The puritan
can never exclude this consciousness from his thoughts hence his scrupulosity
and nagging guilt and his need for a scapegoat. It is not us, it is not me,
it’s the Catholics, the Boy Scouts, it’s Hockey Canada! Of course it has never
occurred to the puritan even once that this could be his motive or that his
outrage has a libidinal edge to it and I have hitherto spared his feelings by
never pointing this out to a single living puritan. In fact, I think it is
probably useless to try to convince a puritan that something so base and
primitive as the scapegoating mechanism could infect his pure thoughts and
noble heart and this is because puritanism itself is constituted by the
occlusion of such knowledge. By the way before anyone objects let me state that
there are, no doubt, many genuine evils associated with the institutions
mentioned above (paranoids may well, per
accidens, be genuinely persecuted). That however is irrelevant to their
function as scapegoats or to the libidinal charge their ‘evils’ generate in the
puritan. This charge may sometimes take a pornographic expression; generations
of good Protestant puritans fed their erotic imaginations by reading up (with
great disapproval!) on the ‘evil and corruption’ of convents and monasteries.
The ‘Maria Monk’ phenomenon is the best known example of this but I myself have
seen the Anti-Catholic comics of Jack Chick and can recommend them to any young
Christian wishing to fantasize about BDSM. If you have any doubt about this, I
recommend you google the word ‘nunsploitation’: an entire genre of pornography
the puritan is free to enjoy because it consists of ‘true stories’ that expose
‘real corruption’. AND, let me emphasize again, if EVERY Maria Monk style story
ever told were to turn out, per accidens,
to be true this would not change the underlying phenomenon one single bit.
[6] It is a telling point in favor of puritanism that the evidence is very ambiguous as to whether things like art, religion, eros and even philosophy (the highest of human pursuits) actually make us better people. On this point I am a pagan polytheist however: it matters not what we make or fail to make of Aphrodite, Apollo or Dionysius because they will be there regardless.
[7] I have met a number of Pococurrantes in academia including a jazz aficionado who despised and dismissed almost every artist I mentioned to him. Clearly, he loved jazz so much he hated nearly all instantiations of it.
Hey is this Ahmed again?
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