In this between-times, which both separates and links the first and second comings of Christ, this time of Pentecost (as both beginning and fulfillment), everything is in a state of development. On the one hand, there is the perfect kingdom that Christ’s return will establish, but, on the other, there is also the kingdom germinating and growing in our midst—in us and through us. This latter is the kingdom that is revealed to us under the images of a seed, a grain of mustard, the yeast in the dough, and which acts upon the dough donec fermentatum est totum (until all of it is leavened, Matt 13:33), donec omnia fiant (until all is accomplished, Matt 5:18). This is the seed of the word of God, the grain of mustard of the faith, the leaven of the Holy Spirit…
This is the way the church, in which and through which the kingdom grows, has to develop in the field or in the dough of the world. In this sense the church is also essentially apostolic or missionary. Utilizing the two great functions of its ministry, preaching the faith and celebrating the sacraments of the faith, the church’s pattern is progressively to help the kingdom of God to come into a humanity which has (for its part) received the mandate to “grow, multiply, and fill the earth.” The church’s mandate
is to bring about the transition, bit by bit, of the passage of the whole substance of the first Adam into that of the second—to progressively recapitulate the whole of humanity in Christ.
The church has to develop, then, and to make progress in the world along with the world. This is the case not just for the group of apostles (its primitive cell) nor just a matter of making contact with an unchanging world. The church is obliged to follow the ceaseless development and variety of the ever-growing innovation and new situations of humanity. The church has to move forward on the human journey. R. Dumaine summed up a study day consecrated to the future of the church in the November 1963 Semaine des intellectuelles catholiques français with the phrase, “the future of the church means to be present to the future of the world.”
With respect to this obligation, the church finds itself confronted with temptations similar to those to which Judaism gave in. Here it is not a question of fulfilling the law with the Gospel or fulfilling figures with reality. Rather, the church runs the risk of becoming attached, with respect to its own proper development, to familiar and established forms and then of failing to hear the call for new needs and for new growth requiring new forms. Throughout the world humanity has a longing for new solutions— for fresh adaptations, ideas and ways of seeing things. Everywhere, continuously, these new forces are looking for new values. The variety of these innovations across time exceeds the variety of types and experiences expressed in different places. The catholicity of the church ought to be able to integrate these innovations. A keen awareness of this problem becomes upsetting for many, however, and leads to the kind of discomfort that led a priest (in 1946) to propose the following description: “The church’s body has grown, but not its skin. So it is in danger of splitting open …”
Great transformations come about in phases; great developments come in stages. Using spatial images, we see large, extended uniform areas, and then a change of climate or of ethnic perspective or of culture. As to time, there are periods of tranquility and then, sometimes after long preparation, moments of profound renewal, crises of transformation, moments where opportunities for the future come together. This is what Péguy has called the “epochs.”51
There is little doubt that, from the point of view of human affairs, we are living in one of these epochs. Forces whose meanings have yet to be recognized are struggling to be expressed. Naturally these forces are linked to the most active social elements, called the rising class, without necessarily appealing to Marxist theory.52 These new forces confront the forces representing established, already acquired and entrenched social realities. These latter have the tendency to remain in possession of social authority and to perpetuate the structures in which they are expressed. There is a great risk that the old forces will slow down social development and that they will impede the forces of openness, innovation, and integration from making their impact upon history.
Feudalism sought to obstruct the Commune movement, the bourgeoisie sought to forestall the coming of a true economic and social democracy in 1848, etc. There is a whole order of people in place who feel and believe themselves linked to these social or
cultural forms that are being called into question by the movement of history. Most theologians, especially those from religious orders, reacted in this way when faced with the cultural and theological innovation of modern humanism.53 When the present becomes frozen in the past, it blocks the flow of life. There is never a shortage of motivations, either really or apparently noble and urgent, for refusing to run risks, and above all to run the risk of modifying our articulation of the deposit of faith. As for the Synagogue of old, fidelity is often the reason given for turning away from change. But just as with the Synagogue, an excessive attachment to the historical forms that give the church its cultural expression, and are by that very fact dated and partial, can lead to an inappropriate blocking of the church’s fidelity to its living principle.
In every generation those who have accomplished something (for which they deserve great respect), and who are thus “in charge,” tend to try to impose their view of things on those who have only fresh energies and ideas to contribute. What parent has not known the temptation to impose the same rules on their children that they themselves had to follow—times for returning home, things to read, types of entertainment, and how to feel or how to express themselves? These are all the things that a new generation wants to do for itself, with its own ideas, experience, and creativity. The reaction of children against their parents is a major theme in life, before becoming one in literature or in theater.54
Having geriatric leaders can only make this difficulty worse. After a certain age, it is very rare that someone can really think through problems in a new situation, even if they want to. We saw this in 1940 … It was said (a bit unjustly and with some levity) that the General Staff are always behind in waging combat, and the church is always late in recognizing a revolution.55 There is a lot more to say about this, and perhaps that is the way it should be.
Genuine success can be the source of significant temptation. The historical periods and the structures that have succeeded too well have attempted to exercise a sort of perpetual hegemony over later generations by reason of their classical status and their success. Such is the case with medieval Christendom, with scholasticism, with the Grand Epoch in France. In a way, the revolt of the modern world against the church is precisely a revolt against too great a success in its administrative supervision—a guardianship opportune for its proper time but held onto long after it was no longer appropriate.
Even aside from their character as the “personnel in charge” (and for deeper reasons as well), it is understandable that the church hierarchy, who are responsible for guarding the “deposit of faith” by which the church maintains its deepest structure, would have a conservative spirit and be mistrustful of innovation. They have serious reasons for exercising pastoral prudence56 that may block demands for renewal, at least at first, even if these demands are perfectly legitimate.
Some things in the church are unchangeable because they are of divine institution and they represent the very foundations upon which the church is built. Among these, for example, are dogma, the sacraments, and the essential structure of the church. Other realities, without being as essential as that, are so deeply linked to the essence of the
church that they cannot be fundamentally changed; they demand our docility and our respect. (Here, for example, are found formulas of doctrine, even those that are not dogmatic formulas properly so called.) We should not rush to judge or change things that are linked to centuries of discernment, to a “Catholic” sensibility, like the customs of the church.
Ecclesial institutions, even those that are not strictly of “divine right,” represent a treasury of truth, wisdom, and practices that come from God. We would have to reflect long and hard, with great docility to the church’s tradition, before condemning some form of ecclesial life in the name of development. Judgments made too quickly are prone to errors that a more careful consideration of the matter would show to be superficial. History shows that it is wise and indeed more true if we do not let ourselves too quickly give credit to a judgment that ecclesial institutions may be out-of-date or obsolete. Often we are happy, finally, that the church hung onto what once appeared as anachronisms, that it knew how to appreciate such things in the light of its long experience.57
The church’s experience, shaping its consciousness and guiding its discernment, also teaches us that it would be dangerous always to call into question just anything, even things that are in themselves debatable. St. Thomas, following Aristotle here, says that since laws take a lot of their force from habit, they shouldn’t be changed easily.58 Contemporary psychologists support this conclusion from the point of view of the individual, when they observe that people become nervous or exhausted when faced with too many questions and too many options. The literary forms of scholasticism, as those of the theater in the classical period, may have been excessively rigid; but history shows us how this “rigor” worked in favor of creativity for the best minds, who thereby were not forced to exhaust themselves by inventing new structures to use.
History also shows that an attitude of permanent dissatisfaction or perpetual questioning undermines the spirit of the people. That is what happened in the fifteenth century in the face of the critique of the church: Catholic consciousness rather easily collapsed after the shockwaves of the Reformation. Monasteries, more detached from the events of the day, resisted the best. Péguy’s distinction between epochs and periods of history might be applied here in a way he did not foresee. Not everything should be considered a crisis or a question. There are periods of development as well as periods of tranquility. And careful attention should always be given not to weaken anything that pertains to the very substance of the Tradition.
Above all, we should not imagine that the ancient forms of the church are out-of-date simply because they come from the past. There is a continuity in Christian development which resists automatic or mechanical substitutions or replacements for ecclesiastical forms. Newman, at the beginning of his “Essay on St. Benedict’s Mission,”59 shows that Christian teaching passed through three periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. In each of these, Newman said, we find a great religious order and the personality of the founder that characterizes the times. St. Benedict was gifted especially with a poetic character. St. Dominic possessed a scientific character. St. Ignatius had a practical character. These three orders somehow reproduced in themselves the successive stages
that a human being goes through in human development: childhood (living by imagination, with poetic feeling), adulthood (given to logic and reasoning), and finally, with age, experience … We shouldn’t forget, however, what Newman adds to this:
The Catholic Church never loses what she once possessed … instead of passing from one phase of life to another, she carries her y outh and im m aturity into old age. She does not leave behind what she once possessed, but accum ulates experiences and, according to the Gospel expression, she draws treasure from both the new and the old. Dom inic did not m ake her lose Benedict; and she still possessed both of them as she becam e the m other of Ignatius.
It would be a great mistake to interpret my goal here as a call for change for the sake of change, and as the relativization of the church’s life into just a series of transitory historical expressions. Development, which is a law of life, requires respect for institutional structures and for the past, for fidelity, and for rootedness and continuity. But development also respects mobility, growth, and adaptation, and this is the point of view that my theme presses us to examine most particularly.
Refusing anything new in principle is no more likely to lead to the truth than always insisting on innovation. Yet this is a natural reaction, which seems even more justified in the area of religion, where tradition has a status that can make “novelty” seem synonymous with error. What matters is to know if tradition represents only intransigence, or if it also accepts development….59bis It would be unjust to the full meaning of tradition to see it exclusively as representing immobility and inertia. When St. Jerome made a new translation of the Bible, he was accused of disturbing the peace of the church and of weakening the foundations of the faith … This was to confuse the absolute and relative. The church has many human institutions. Even its core elements, which are essentially untouchable, have taken on in the course of history modes or forms of expression which are themselves contingent, historical, and subject to change. Christianity is eternal, but the forms in which it is expressed and currently embodied in Christian civilization, the actual organization of its apostolic life, the universal and local administrative structure of the church, even the celebration of worship and certain elements of the Christian philosophy of man and of society—all these in great part are linked to history and conditioned by a given stage of development.
To desire to ascribe the value and the permanence of all these things to Christianity itself would mean absolutizing what is actually relative. This is a kind of idolatry related to the mistake of relativizing what is absolute. Furthermore, this represents a serious failure in intellectual judgment and perhaps a sign of narrowness and lack of culture. At the risk of repeating myself a bit, I want to clarify the distinction and the connection between what is permanently valuable and what by its nature can become obsolete.
Most people don’t live Christianity at the level of principles but at the level of habits. Such habits are less personal choices than the custom of a sociological group, behaviors belonging to a cultural milieu. Practically speaking, they confuse received ideas with tradition. Imagining that they are maintaining fidelity to principle, in fact people cling to a simple translation of said principle into the language of a cultural period.
There’s no better example of this than the condemnation of Galileo, where the libellus [statement] of condemnation is so revealing:60 The ecclesiastical judges refused to budge concerning two or more conceptual links that the progress of science was just then in the
process of opening up. A century earlier, when Erasmus had published his Greek New Testament, he was accused (among other things) of denying the resurrection because he had reestablished the exact text of 1 Cor 15:5161 (the Reuchlin affair had just barely terminated [1520]). In all these matters church leaders thought they were defending the Tradition, and I don’t want to say that there was nothing of that in these cases; but above all they were defending received ideas, habits, and expressions that were, in themselves, contingent but which they treated as if they were essential to expressing the truth. At the same time, the treatise of Lefèvre d’Etaples on the three Marys caused such a storm that the author was obliged to leave Paris, with the result that his translation of St. Paul, itself important, failed to gain the attention it deserved. How true it is that our routine understandings are more devoutly cherished than what is essential.
These examples from the distant past, about which no one would argue, suffice. Every period can provide us similar examples, and on occasion I will refer to some others. Clearly, we have often failed to distinguish between spirit and mentality, orthodoxy and conformity, tradition and received ideas. Often we have taken “the survival of the past for the permanence of the eternal. This mistakes the unchanging for the immutable.”62 To hold on to something of permanent value expressed in the forms of an outdated world is an anachronism. They say that the Sisters of the Visitation still keep their accounts in aunes and denariuses because that’s how it was done at the time of their foundation (but that has to be a calumny)…
Here is an example from world history. Soloviev comments that Spain in the Middle Ages fulfilled its mission of providing security for Christianity by fighting the Moors. However, he remarks, instead of adapting this responsibility to new historical conditions, Spain remained fixed in its old ways, particularly by continuing to use force and constraint, and in this way it lost its ability to respond to the reality of history. The author from whom I borrow these remarks concludes for his part: “Through formal fidelity to its earlier calling, Spain became unfaithful to its deepest vocation.”63
We have to be faithful to the deepest meaning of the principle, even if that requires letting go of the forms that it has taken at times. This allows the living principle of tradition to develop new forms of application or expression in a style that is most meaningful and effective for its own period of time. In doing this, we need to be sure that, while recognizing the evolution of structures, we always honor the principle that was previously applied in a different way. For example, I think that certain criticisms of the present form of Christian teaching forget the basic principle that has to be honored under any circumstance, namely, the church’s responsibility to provide Christian education.
On the other hand, when we try to reinvigorate and adapt forms in a spirit of fidelity to principle, it often happens that by going beyond or setting aside forms that have deteriorated into mere routine, we rediscover the original actions—even materially. This is what we find in a number of actual pastoral practices and liturgical and community