A Jeffersonian Catholicism?

Perhaps, like me, you’ve had the following experience. Mass has just gotten underway. You’re not yet attending to it with your cus­tomary entire heart, soul, and mind. The Con­fiteor begins: “I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and….” The words catch you up short; they sound incongruously harsh, given the presid­er’s friendly (non-liturgical) greeting, given the sermon you know he’ll be preaching shortly (having heard it so often before), a sermon full of the “accepting” and “compassionate” senti­ments endemic to pop psychology and what often passes for social-justice Catholicism. Sinned through my own fault? Moi?

Or what about this one? You’re away from home one Sunday, attending Mass in an un­familiar parish. “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” you say with the rest of the congregation. “Hosanna in the highest!” Without thinking, you lean down and kneel. However, you’re the only one who does. The kindly priest says in soothing words something to the effect that since we’re the People of God, we stand throughout the Eucharistic Prayer. You stand, corrected.

Moments like these are common enough, I suspect. But if I were to say that their source lies in the gnosticism that pervades the American Roman Catholic Church, would you advise me to go join the other “crazies” (accord­ing to Garry Wills, at least) who made up the Buchanan for President campaign? After all, wasn’t gnosticism an early-Church problem, settled by some council or other, and thus a dead issue, like, say, Nestorianism?

Gnosticism was one of the enemies-in-its-midst with which the early Church did intellectual and spiritual battle, but gnosticism has many modern strains. Marion Montgomery, in his book Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home (Montgomery’s books are as intriguing as their titles), says modern gnostic thought is “an action of the mind limiting the arena in which the particular mind is willing to encounter being.” The modern gnostic effects a closure of mind, not against reality in its entirety, but against some significant part of it, simplifying it, reducing its complexity, settling for what Eric Voegelin called a “premature satisfaction.”

Such a constriction has taken place at a number of levels in the contemporary Catholic Church, including (but not limited to) a great deal of our preaching, pastoral care, and religious education. At its most basic, this mild churchly gnosticism, this closure of mind, takes the following form. While all of us are willing and eager to affirm both the dignity of the human person as created in God’s image, and the dignity of the Christian as redeemed in Christ (both revealed truths, to be sure), we seem to have our difficulties, as they say, affirming a truth that is just as much a part of revelation: that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We seem unable, any longer, to entertain these two thoughts — human dignity and human depravity — simul­taneously in our heads or hearts, and we tend to opt for the former, jettisoning the latter.

If, as many believe, Unitarianism is a form of modern gnosticism, consider these words of Thomas Jefferson, written toward the end of his life:

I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief…the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.

What if — just for fun — we were to take Jef­ferson’s last clause seriously, as prophecy? (Af­ter all, Jefferson, along with John Adams, died 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Signs and wonders!) What could it possibly mean?

Jefferson never formally joined a Unitarian congregation, so it would appear that he was not speaking of Unitarianism as a denomina­tion. Moreover, Jefferson’s prophecy must be read in its historical context: He did not mean the Unitarianism of the present-day Unitarian-Universalist denomination, for which the Bible is no more authoritative than the op-ed page of the newspaper. No. Jefferson meant that America’s young men were becoming theologi­cal liberals or “Unitarians” in the early 19th-century sense: They were abandoning Original Sin and the “absurdities” of Christian metaphysics.

William Ellery Channing the early 19th-century Unitarian theologian, declared, “What­ever doctrines seem to us to be clearly taught in the Scriptures, we receive without reserve or exception.” The key word here is, of course, “clearly.” This was biblical religion eviscerated of all its mystery. A triune God? “Irrational and unscriptural.” Two natures in the one per­son of Christ? A “corruption of Christianity, alike repugnant to common sense and to the general strain of Scripture.” What sense can the mind produced by this theological liberal­ism make of the claim that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, at once justified and a sinner? Not much. For it offends “common sense.”

So the next time the Roman Mass shocks your American sensibility with its dark re­minders of your innate sinfulness, or the next time you stand throughout the Eucharistic Prayer, having been forbidden from kneeling with awe before the Mystery, ask yourself if Thomas Jefferson didn’t see the future of this common-sensical and optimistic nation quite clearly.