It's always open season for Resurrection
Dialectical materialism with Bishop Robert Barron
His apostles kept asking for a temporal Kingdom, even with Christ Himself to guide and enlighten them they did not see the primacy of the spiritual. Only when the Holy Ghost descended on them did they see.
— Dorothy Day, On the Catholic Worker’s Opposition to the Use of Force, September 1938
My friend and I, as long-time readers of the London Review of Books (LRB), have frequently rolled our eyes when the LRB tackles religion. It often reads like an early-twentieth-century writer in a fedora describing “the curious natives” of a country below the equator for audiences back home in the “civilized world” of the north. I allow, it can be grating, especially when you yourself are a native of that country of Religion.
But I truly believe intelligent readers can parse when and how a publication treats them as a foreigner and their homeland as Terra Exotica. I believe that if you do yourself that compliment of picking up a text to read it, you can give yourself the compliment of knowing where, when and how you depart in agreement from the person writing.
Perhaps this deeply ingrained faith in the human literary mind comes from my long years being homeschooled. As a citizen of that unchartered territory, I am used to being a freak among my peers and have long ago stopped expecting what is normal to me to be normative to everyone else. As painful as this can sometimes be, especially when young, being a foreigner in your own country is a very useful and instructive experience. You cannot simply be a carbon copy of other people, so, one way or another, you will learn to chisel and embrace the singularity of your own persona.
This brings me to today’s internet item. I recently re-subscribed to the New Yorker. Which, in terms of getting news, has been a fun alternative to the internet. I’m a fan of the Condé Nast greats: Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. In terms of literary value, it’s no London Review of Books, but, then, nothing is.
The New Yorker publishes essays on religion with less frequency, it seems to me, than the LRB does, but, recently, in a March issue, Adam Gopnik wrote an essay titled, “Why we’re still not done with Jesus.”
On first glance, it’s a great title. Provocative, irreverent and also true: I, for one, am still not done with Jesus. But, not for one second, did I think that Mr. Gopnik’s essay was going to articulate my own reasons for not being done with Jesus. Why would I expect him to? Mr. Gopnik is not a 30-something cradle Catholic woman or a daily Mass-goer or a disciple of Peter Maurin. He does not run a Catholic Worker house or extol voluntary poverty. That was not the article he set about to write. He is not a citizen of the country I am, so let us read each other’s diplomatic missives with patience and good faith. Women are often used to doing this. Older—and perhaps even younger—white men in America may have learned to expect the world to reflect their own experience as normative (and more on that later), but women have rarely been afforded such a luxury. We live in a society designed for the male sex, and we are born adjusting ourselves to it, as immigrants to a new country.
Mr. Gopnik’s article was dedicated to reviewing a new book by Elaine Pagels. I regret to note his article contained several factual errors. For one, assuming that all four Evangelists did not know Greek, when plenty of Johannine scholars theorize that the Fourth Gospel was written by and for a Hellenic, Greek-speaking community in Jerusalem.
So I should probably write a letter to the editor, as certainly at least ten letters would have been written if this were the London Review of Books. (I do wonder if such an error would have been allowed to pass muster in the LRB. But who knows?)
Anyhow, I didn’t catch the error until I decided to write this essay, because I knew that I am not the audience for an article about historical biblical criticism that does not reference A Marginal Jew, Rudolf Schnackenburg, Rudolf Bultmann, Oscar Cullmann, or Raymond Brown.
But, being an unrepentant completionist, I did scan the article, so I would not discard a magazine unfinished. And this paragraph near the conclusion caught my eye and elicited a twinge of pity (emphases added):
As Stephen Greenblatt reminded readers in his Lucretian adventure, “The Swerve,” some of these largely vanished thinkers, especially those at the Epicurean edge, seem to have already grasped what remains a core truth: the world is material and values are made by us, often shaped through poetic myths and transcendent metaphors.
This, to me, is perhaps one of the most depressing lines I have read in a long time.
I just can’t imagine how sad it would be to believe that all we are is water and no animating spirit. In a world so full of violence, so full of greed and hatred and fear, to believe that goodness, love, and forgiveness are just socially constructed alternatives to the evil that runs rampant in the world rather than spiritual forces would bring me to the brink of despair.
Thankfully, most of Adam Gopnik’s neighbors, I hope, could offer him a more hopeful anthropology. The view that the material world is all that exists is unsubstantiated by the wisdom of the majority of the human race. Out of the world’s eight billion people living today, the great majority of them—upwards of six billion—believe in a spiritual world, whether mapped out on the contours of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or Christianity. Even 57% of “nones,” those with no religious affiliation, still profess that there is “something spiritual beyond the natural world,” according to the most recent Pew Religious Landscape Study.
The majority of human beings disagree with Adam Gopnik: the world is not just material, it is material and spiritual. This is the crux of the essay, the crux of the argument, and the crux of the scholarship he is discussing: there is a material world and spiritual world, but one cannot, most humans have believed throughout history, understand the material world without the aid of the spiritual logos or ordering principle.
One of the Catholic Worker’s core beliefs is the primacy of the spiritual. Dorothy Day writes about it constantly. In the Aims and Purposes of 1940, she writes:
This work of ours toward a new heaven and a new earth shows a correlation between the material and the spiritual, and, of course, recognizes the primacy of the spiritual.
Materialism—the idea that ther is nothing here but us atoms, and every glimmer of something more is a psychocilibin hallucination, fault in our grey matter, or collaborative imagination—was, according to Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Mounier, and many of their contemporaries the number one root of much of the world’s evil. One could say Our Lady of Fatima warned about the error of Marxist materialism being spread throughout the world since her first appearance in Portugal before World War One.
In a review of Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Bourgeois Mind, published in a 1935 edition of The Catholic Worker, a reviewer writes (emphases mine):
The marvelous technical achievements of our modern mechanical civilization, the triumphs of science, have all tended to concentrate man’s faith in them to the exclusion of the spiritual. The spiritual ends of life became obscured. […] Socialism considers man only as member of collective society; his spiritual and eternal destiny are of no consequence, men will come and go but society remains, she only is eternal.
The spiritual realm keeps alive our innate dignity as humans made in the image and likeness of God, imago dei, in the face of the technocratic machine that tramples on the weak and bank account-less in the name of “preserving the species” or “maximizing profits” or creating a great deal of material comfort for a few.
I was rather surprised to see that Bishop Robert Barron responded to Adam Gopnik’s article in a Twitter (now X) video, that has since been turned into a First Things essay. He called Adam Gopnik’s article “annoying.” And, as an endurer of the LRB’s foreign correspondency on religion, I do understand what he means by that. But, as I listened, I grew alarmed that Barron did not highlight the reduction of the world to materialism in Gopnik’s conclusion. I was shocked that he did not preach the message of hope that he is called to preach year-round: that Christ is alive, that Jesus has gone to the Father and opened up a new mode of existence—a new way of being alive. We have died with Christ in baptism, and now our lives are hidden in this new life of the baptized, with Christ, in God (Paul’s Letter to the Colossians 3:3).
This is the Good News! What better invitation to preach it than the despairing message of materialism? What better time to preach it than during the Easter tide?
If, as Bishop Barron says, Easter is the time when the world “debunks” or “attacks” Christianity, well then what better time to listen to the world’s complaints and proclaim the good news?
The bishops seem to think they are constantly being persecuted. But Bishop Robert Barron has said nothing about the unlawful deportations taking place in this country. I would call being snatched off the street and condemned to a life sentence in a El Salvador prison persecution. I would call the fear of being arrested and having no redress to due process and the right to defend yourself before a judge persecution. Although more than 80% of migrants are Christian—and at least 60% identify as Catholic—according to a new report, Bishop Barron has said nothing about their persecution.
If the shepherds do not know how to suffer with their flock—to die with Christ—how can they rise with Christ? We are, as Teresa of Avila said, Christ’s hands and feet in this world. We are the Mystical Body of Christ on earth, and it is by our love for one another that the pagans will come to believe. It is through our love for one another that the Body of Christ on earth will continue. Not through our diocesan annual appeals, our lawsuits against insurance companies or federal governments, or our complaints that we are the “only religion” regularly ridiculed by the “Mainstream Media.”
Perhaps Easter is the perfect time for all of us—the men about to give Easter homilies, the bishops, the laity about to renew our baptisms—to ask if we really believe in Resurrection. Do we really believe that the seed must fall to the ground and die to bear fruit; that we must lose our lives to truly save them; that on the other side of dying to self and dying to the world is the fullness of life in God? Do we believe that Jesus is who he says he is? Would we rather follow the more comfortable cults of bourgeois mammon than the “harsh and dreadful” active love of Christianity? Are we willing to give up our citizenship in the familiar country of respectable society and risk everything to follow Christ?
Or are we done with Jesus?
Sweet Unrest in the Streets
I wrote a short history textbook on the history of the Catholic Worker at the University of Notre Dame. The fantastic John Nagy and Jason Kelly, editors at the magazine, helped me whittle it down to a readable history of Dorothy Day’s connections with my Alma Mater. I had a fantastic time researching it, writing it, and crafting it into a story. (And had an absolutely torturous time editing it down to under 5,000 words.) You can read it online here.
Wisdom’s Dwelling has been offering daily Lenten reflections. Below is mine, on the tax collector and the pharisee:
This was well played & well written. It always is but the CW history connections were a plus. Why does no one mention the NYRB anymore? It is always the LRB?