Sharing God's Good Company: A Theology of the Communion of Saints
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Sharing God's Good Company: A Theology of the Communion of Saints
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Overview
Although books about saints abound, Sharing God's Good Company takes a uniquely philosophical and theological approach to the topic. Interested general readers and Catholic scholars alike will find McCarthy's book refreshing and informative.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802867094 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2012 |
| Pages: | 182 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sharing God's Good Company
A THEOLOGY OF THE COMMUNION OF SAINTSBy David Matzko McCarthy
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2012 David Matzko McCarthyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6709-4
Chapter One
Social Desire* * *
The saints desire to be near God, and many of us desire to be near the saints. In either case, it is a social desire, a longing to be in good company with God. The saints are attractive because (among other things) they situate our lives on a landscape of metaphysical yet social relations. In this chapter and throughout the book, I will repeatedly use the word "metaphysical," and by it I mean an understanding of reality and one's place in it that goes beyond physical connections and beyond knowledge that limits itself to material relations. One way of putting it is this. Social relationships can be understood in terms of physical proximity—genetically as a family or race and spatially as neighborhood or state. The saints, in contrast, are set within social relationships that are figurative and metaphysical. They embody our kinship of adoption and shared relationship to God. The communion of saints is a network of relationships on an expansive landscape of times and places throughout the ages and across the world. The lives of the saints embody a desire for kinship that connects us to the meaning and source of life. They are media of participation in the full and future presence of the kingdom of God.
This chapter (along with chapter 2) reviews conceptual and intellectual problems in understanding the saints. The following chapters (chapters 3 through 8) reverse the process. They ask how openness to the communion of saints can reorient our way of thinking about the world. For example, how do we think about the holy in history, in events (e.g., miracles), and in a place (e.g., pilgrimage sites)? If the conceptual problems can be described well, then we might be able to see more clearly what the saints are doing in our world. If we can get a better perspective on what the saints are about, perhaps we can see more clearly and more theologically who we are, where God is, and how things really are. People, as much as ever, tell the stories of saints and are devoted to them. But people, as much as ever, find the saints survivors of a bygone age of leprechauns and fairies. This chapter reviews problems in accounting for saints, and it asks what these problems and our persistent attraction to saints tell us about our world.
The communion of saints populates the cosmos with personal relations. In accounting for the saints here, I could step back and offer a purely academic review of theories, but it seems appropriate to begin with my personal investment. I have been feeling an attraction to the saints for a long time. About twenty years ago, I managed to include a few saints and the meaning of sainthood in two chapters of my dissertation. At one family get-together in 1992, during my years of research and dissertation writing, my two older sisters happened to ask me about my topic. I offered a complex and convoluted explanation, which was for them a great source of delight. "David, so many years of school, and you can't even explain what you are doing. Need a few more years?" After that day, they took every opportunity to ask me about my progress. Since then, when asked about my dissertation, I have been honest. I say it is about "books I have read." The answer does not satisfy friendly inquirers; they think I am being evasive. They persist by asking for a title, and I say the real title is "Things I Wanted to Know." From here, the conversation is always the same. I have to convince them that I am not just putting them off—that it really was a loosely connected set of chapters unified by what, at the time, I wanted to know. By giving specifics, I am able to show that I have not been disingenuous; I am so convincing that it is rare for someone to ask again for the actual, printed title. A large portion of my explanation is that I desired and still desire to know the saints.
In my dissertation (ca. 1992), I made enough progress with saints and hagiography to keeping wanting more. As a matter of full disclosure, the title of my dissertation was "Hazarding Theology: Theological Descriptions and Particular Lives." I just cringed as I typed the words. I can hear my sisters feigning sophistication as they dwell on the word "hazarding." The dissertation was good enough to earn a degree, but entirely unsatisfying as a "work." A few years later (around 1995), I expanded my dealings with the saints and produced another entire manuscript (280 pages). After one rejection from a publisher, I threw it in a filing cabinet. The editor told me what I already knew. It may have been worth writing (for me) but was not worth reading. The title was "Fortunate Saints," in reference to the reversal of fortunes in the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-12). In the introduction, I put the main point in italics: Stories of particular women and men function for us as fortunate saints when the telling of their lives creates access to a landscape for our faithfulness. The italics compensate for the lack of clarity, as though talking slower and louder would make a difference. For a thesis, it does not illuminate much about the saints. It seems that I have constructed a thesis sentence in which the saints are passive: it is their stories and our telling of their lives that do something. Looking back at "Hazarding Theology" and "Fortunate Saints," I can see bothmy dissatisfaction and whymy straight-talking sisters would poke fun at their academic little brother. Although I was trying to account for the saints, I seemed to have been pushing them aside and talking over them.
In my study of the saints up to that point, I had delineated a set of problems. The main problem was a disjunction between definitions of sainthood and the actual saints. In my thesis on fortunate saints, I used "fortunate" as a modifier because I was committed to giving a definition and yet aware that any definition would not hold for a multitude of saints. My concern was to delineate a political space and a social function for the saints. The question of social function is the right question, but I reduced this role to the social world of the storyteller and "interpreter." Without going into the content of the manuscript further, allow me to use the phrase "fortunate saints" in this chapter to refer to a failed attempt to understand the saints. It is a failed postmodern attempt. Although attempting to understand the saints, I focused on the relationship between interpreter and texts (not people).
In "Fortunate Saints" I undercut and talked over the agency of the saints while trying to solve a different problem. I was troubled by what seemed to be an adversarial relationship between saints and those who are devoted to them. I remember reading Hippolyte Delehaye's Legends of the Saints (first published in 1905). I was more than a bit dismayed that retrieving the saints was in large part a project of rooting out and overcoming popular distortions — the simplifications, abstractions, and hidden social interests of popular legends. Could the saints withstand the scrutiny of history? I had the inclination to defend popular devotion and stories, which I realized were not superimposed on the saints (as saints) but were an important part of their real history and identity. In the process, stories and storytellers became the agents of my study of saints. As Kenneth Woodward puts it in Making Saints, "saints are their stories." This fusion of saint and story relieved the tension between saints and their cults, but the agency of so-called fortunate saints receded into the background. Storytellers were in control; saints were not persons as much as texts.
I was attempting to be "postmodern." I note this point now because this chapter is, in large part, about modern and postmodern struggles with realism. Given the unsatisfactory results of these struggles, chapters 3 and 4 take up the issue of realism from the point of view of the communion of saints. In this chapter, I amusing "modernism" and "postmodernism" in the following ways. Modernism distrusts realism and our ability to refer to reality as it really is out there beyond us. It is, in a sense, Newtonian: it concerns itself with texts as worlds in themselves with their own, autonomous laws of operation. The mechanisms of language govern the reality of the text. Postmodernism distrusts these seamless textual worlds and shows how interpreters intrude upon them. Like quantum physics, postmodernism imagines many textual worlds. Every text has multiple universes. The subjective intrusion of the interpreter on the text does not retrieve but creates a world, and there are countless possible worlds. My "Fortunate Saints," in short, was postmodern. It was an attempt to ac count for the social world of the saints through the interaction of story and interpreter. The actual saints receded into the background, and the storytellers became the agents.
Despite its problems, there is a valid point in this thesis on storytelling. I just expanded the point too far. I allowed two saintly figures to define sainthood — martyred Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero (d. 1980) and Dorothy Day (d. 1980) of the Catholic Worker. My interest in Romero and Daywas religious and personal; it was not at first academic. But once I read everything I could find by and about them, I made a discovery about how to interpret the saints. Each becomes a focal point of common life and a way of living faithfully: Day in the Catholic Worker (beginning in New York in the 1930s) and Romero in El Salvador in the late 1970s. They become focal points largely because they tell the stories of others. Romero is archbishop amid the violence, poverty, and injustices of El Salvador in the 1970s, and as the common epithet explains, he becomes "the voice for the voiceless." Not only does he represent the poor and tell their story in general, but many of his homilies and addresses name and tell the stories of particular people. Likewise, Dorothy Day's books and her writing in the Catholic Worker newspaper are almost always autobiographical, and the autobiography is almost always about other people. My interest in Romero and Day had something to do with their faith and their politics, and I found that they inspired devotion (now as servants of God) largely because they were devoted to the lives of others. They could see the way of God in the poor, not the poor as a category or concept, but particular people with distinctive gifts and callings. Romero and Day are media for people to tell about their own lives and to express their own hopes and faith.
With Romero and Day in view, the social role of the saints came into focus for me in relationship to Edith Wyschogrod's Saints and Postmodernism (1990). It is a heady book, and it represents a stage in my intellectual life when I was captivated by a hyper-theoretical postmodernism, especially with its criticisms of modern moral theory. I was young; theories about theories were interesting for what they could do in the academic world of theories. I was young and had the time to wade through Wyschogrod's discussions of Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. I was disoriented by Saints and Postmodernism. Disorientation is the intended effect, I suspect. I found an orientation (a point of reference) to the book when I reached Wyschogrod's discussion of Nelson Mandela, in a section called "Political Saints." With Mandela in view, I was able to see that what Wyschogrod had been developing (for 150 pages or so) as saintly self-sacrifice and radical altruism was simply the negative image of modern self-possession. Saints were supposed to be selfless, and this standard of radical altruism had long been a modern way of setting piety and religious aspiration outside of practical life. In the modern frame, to be a person who lacks rational self-interest is to be an entity outside the social contract. Saints, in this frame of radical altruism, are by definition otherworldly. For moderns the radically selfless saint inhabits another world. With postmodern flair, Wyschogrod simply inverts the modern self (who defines itself) and creates a saint who is inexplicably "other" in the world.
As far as I could tell, Wyschogrod's inverted modern saint did not explain the life and aspirations of Nelson Mandela. Mandela was imprisoned at the time of Wyschogrod's writing and released (after twenty-seven years) just months before I was reading the book. Mandela was noble and self-possessed, not self-emptied (as Wyschogrod argued). He was full of hopes and ambitions of a whole people for a free South Africa. He seemed to me to be self-abundant. Wyschogrod thinks of him as selfless. She highlights Mandela's refusal to be released from prison in 1985 because "the people are not free." Mandela and other political prisoners were offered release from prison if they promised to not continue their former political activities. Note Wyschogrod's explanation. "[T]he self must inspect its conduct retrospectively, approve or disapprove of itself, and thus always admire or despise itself. What is deemed admirable, however, is the choice of political freedom, but the moment this freedom becomes an object of admiration it ceases to be free. The freedom that has become admirable undergoes yet another reversal: it cannot be the object of admiration because it is freedom for the Other who resists discursive articulation." Contrast Mandela's own explanation, in a statement, from prison in 1985, given through his daughter. "Too many have died since I went to prison. Too many have suffered for the love of freedom. I am in prison as a representative of the people and of your organization, the African National Congress, which was banned. What freedom am I being offered while the organization of the people remains banned [?]" After his criticism of this false freedom, Mandela begins a litany of oppression. What freedom is offered when our people cannot live, work, gather, maintain a home, and move about freely? He concludes, "The people are not free.... Your freedom and mine cannot be separated." In effect, the freedom that I am being offered is a sham. I will simply be trading one kind of imprisonment for another.
Wyschogrod does follow Mandela's own line of interpretation. She gives a tortuous explanation about Mandela's self-inspection. Mandela, in contrast, offers no introspection at all. He says, in effect, "It is not about me, but about us, and whether or not I am in prison, we will not be free." He does not imagine himself to be separated from his people or somehow "other." On the contrary, he is inescapably "same." If he were released, he would not be free, as they were also not free in South Africa. He is connected to the people, and with them, he has an abundant and dignified self. The wonder of Mandela's life is that the identity of the people of South Africa spills over into him, and as a result, he stands for them. Hardly selfless, he is full of his people's good.
I had learned this point about the abundant self from Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day. Reading Saints and Postmodernism, by way of contrast, made the point plain. The identity of the saints is far more complex and attractive than Wyschogrod's radically altruistic saints, who live noble but miserable, selfless lives. Her postmodern saint shares the sorrow and suffering of others, but none of us would want to share this kind of saint's joyless and vacant identity. Wyschogrod's saints are lonely modern heroes. She holds that the postmodern saint is outside the customary self and beyond representation. While the modernist views saints as otherworldly, Wyschogrod's postmodern saint, as noted above, is "other" in the world. The selflessness of her saints is self-imposed. Their radical altruism seems to be, ironically, just another form of modern self-making: the making of the empty self. Because their altruism is complete, they give only and need nothing from us. They are autonomous and self-sufficient. In contrast, Romero and Day represent porous selves; they need as much as they give. They put their lives into others, and they are filled as others put their lives into them. Their so-called self-emptying is like a vacuum, empty for the slightest instant before being filled by an active, multifaceted, unpredictable, and densely populated network of people. This is Mother Teresa's dark night when alone in prayer and her contrasting joy with the poor in the abundant love of God. It is Romero's hope to live, after death, with Christ, in the Salvadoran people. It is Dorothy Day's appeal for voluntary poverty and affinity with Dostoevsky's "harsh and dreadful love"—to be at once in community with the poor and filled with the love of God.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sharing God's Good Company by David Matzko McCarthy Copyright © 2012 by David Matzko McCarthy. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................viiiINTRODUCTION....................1
1. Social Desire....................9
2. Saints....................29
3. Realism....................43
4. Participation....................60
5. Images....................79
6. Miracles....................97
7. Pilgrimage....................115
8. History....................134
9. Hagiography....................153
CONCLUSION....................169
INDEX....................171