Theology that is Therapeutic

In his recent, superb reflection on "bourgeois Catholicism," Prof Dr Larry Chapp puts his finger on precisely what ails the Church, especially in the United States.  He identifies, broadly, bureaucratic pettiness, the 'spirit of the age,' and the claim that a whole-hearted and full-throated following of Jesus Christ is often written off as being "fanatical."

It is a telltale sign of a fool's errand to give one, single cause to a set of problems, and with that I make my disclaimer:  What I'm about to say is only one ingredient in the bubbling cauldron of "bourgeois Catholicism" in addition to those pointed our by Dr Chapp.  It's only a pinch, but it multiplies its toxicity:  The Cartesian and Wolffian approach to theology, long since given up, but not without giving way to the reduction of the Church's doctrinal patrimony to theologoumena.  This, I submit, is precisely what Orthodox theologians mean when they criticise "Western theology."  So I make no attempt to hide my Byzantine--even Slavophile--bias.

Before I elaborate on this, it would be helpful to recall that the Greek Orthodox theologian Fr John Romanides "stressed emphatically that we can understand whether a theology is true by whether it is able to cure people.  If it cannot cure them, it is not true theology."  These words are relayed by Metropolitan Heirotheos Vlachos of Nafpaktos, a formidable dogmatician who has written several volumes on what has come to be known as "Orthodox psychotherapy."

Dogma, according to Metropolitan Heirotheos, does not only tell the truth about God and the world; it also tells the truth about the meaning of the human person and, for that reason, possesses a deeply curative and therapeutic import.  Dogma is applied principally through the Sacraments ("Mysteries") and asceticism, which is to say the Church's liturgical celebration and living out the virtues, gifts, and beatitudes.  We can already see how, on the beige-Catholic side of things, Biblically insipid liturgy functionally excises mystagogy from worship, thus subtracting from the believer's believing; reducing the Christian life to "Moral Therapeutic Deism" (which Dr Chapp alludes to) in which an imagined god only assuages us like a talk-show host or a motivational speaker instead of nudging us to yield to sanctifying grace.

If you see hints of St John Paul II's personalism or traces of "Lublin Thomism" in what I've just described, you're on the right track.

At the heart of this is what made for the decline of theology since the seventeenth century (as Fr Yves Congar OP identified in his History of Theology):  The reduction of dogmatics (yes, I know this is a recent term) to "philosophical theology" and treating the articles of faith more as "right ways to cogitate about God" rather than as blueprints for the life of grace.  The fact that we encounter so many Catholic-with-a-capital-K believers who know their catechism well yet obsessively chase after dubious Marian apparitions and undertake various forms of obscure devotions (e.g. Luisa Piccaretta, the Pieta Blue Book, &c.) betrays precisely this wrongful divide between doctrine and devotion.

By "Cartesian" and "Wolffian" we mean a theological system built upon supposedly indubitable first principles (Descartes) which engages in a profound misreading of the "treatise on God" in the First Part of the Summa theologiae by treating it as philosophy rather than theology, and in a highly synthentic and artificial organisation of the structure of dogmatics (Wolff) which ends up exaggerating "the powers of natural religion prepared the way for rationalistic systems of theology" (A. H. Strong).  For all the glories of the manuals of Ludwig Ott, Adlophe Tanqueray, the Spanish Summa, they suffer precisely this weakness--being excessively deductive and rationalist to the point that spirituality and mysticism becomes foreign to it.  Only Matthias Scheeben, it seems, was among the few to be immune to this Cartesian-Wolffian tendency.  This, I submit (especially to V. Lossky, J. Romanides, D. Staniloae, and Metropolitan Heirotheos) is what the Orthodox mean by the expression "Western theology"; it is also a misnomer, since it represents only a small, albeit loud, bloc within the enterprise of Catholic dogmatic theology.  But it is this "Western theology" which stands accused as being partially at the root of today's beige Catholicism.

As I have said previously, this "Baroque theology" makes the serious error of mistaking The Subject for an object and "balkanizes" (to use the words of Fr Romanus Cessario OP in his The Examined Life) the various "treatises" of theology into fragmented areas of specialisation (an ecclesiologist inept in Pneumatology has no business teaching theology, for example.)  Perhaps Nietzsche's imagery of Apollos and Dionysius is helpful here:  Until around the time of the Council, "Western theology" took the Apollonian approach to doctrine--logical, compartmentalised, and cerebral.  And what is logical, compartmentalised and cerebral does not speak warmly to the human heart.

As a result of this, dogmatics was accused of being "un-pastoral" because the connexion between believing and living was lost--not unlike how Dr Sheldon Cooper is a brilliant scientist but an inept human being.  Had the neoscholastics been true Thomists, they would have known that the rational part of the soul consists of not only the intellect but also the will, which directs desiring.  Thus the Byzantines speak of "sobornicity," that is, the integration of the intellect and the heart (cf Catherine Doherty).  In forgetting this, another wedge was driven--between truth and goodness.  This "balkanization" Cessario described of Baroque theology can therefore equally be applied to the human soul.  Regarding the "heart" we've just mentioned, Metropolitan John Zizioulas reminds us of St Macarius the Egyptian's minute, but vital contribution to theology:

Makarius introduced another faculty, the heart, into the discussion.  Rather than the mind, the heart was the source of our knowledge of God. Because the classical view of man understood the heart as the source of the emotions, Makarius was not always understood, but in fact he was not making a distinction between mind and emotion.

In the theology of Israel the heart was the faculty of cognition because it was the instrument of obedience. The heart represents man's obedience and so it knows God as God, since the pure in heart ‘shall sec God’ (Matthew 5.9). The heart is the place of freedom, where we say ‘yes' or ‘no' to one another and to God. The obedient heart does God’s will. So knowledge of God is not an issue simply of intellect or of emotion but of obedience. For those formed by the Greek worldview and coming to terms with the teaching of Scripture this was not obvious. For Greeks, knowledge had to point towards the identity and existence of something. An object must be much more than a moral summons, to which I respond with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Through obedience we acknowledge that someone truly exists, so for Makarius there was an ontological aspect to this knowledge (John Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics [London:  Continuum, 2008], 22-23).

This is why I think that the Catechism of the Catholic Church was right to place the human person's "desire for God" (capax Dei) at the very start, since all the doctrines that followed had the goal of satisfying the human heart by building up the believer's personal relationship with God.  Post-seventeenth century theology failed precisely on this point:  It dealt more with what to think than anything else, thus demarcating the mind and the heart--an error that can be traced back to Origen.

Going back to Dr Chapp's diagnosis, it seems to me that the Church's pastoral structure has, in large measure, failed because around the time of the Council it had inherited a theological method that was un-therapeutic.  Taking stock of this, the theology in vogue in the seventies and eighties (Revd Prof Mauro Gagliardi offers a good analysis of this in his recent Truth is a Synthesis:  Catholic Dogmatic Theology) became a wasteland of sentimentalism, Biblical scepticism, and pop psychology.  So when "bourgeois Catholics" push back at a doctrinally sound priest who tries to improve his parish's life, we must ask whether seminaries or theological academies is sufficiently preparing candidates by highlighting the "therapeutic value" of Christian dogma and whether previous generations of parishioners have been infected with the attitude of the doctrinal/pastoral dichotomy by those "old guards" who studied theology with these Cartesian-Wolffian manuals.

On that last note, I believe that my former seminary rector said it best:  "You can be right, but be wrong in the way that you're right."  Introducing doctrinally sound and liturgically correct practices in the parish must be done with tact and courtesy and, above all, presenting the teachings of the Church as being health-giving.  Doctrinal orthodoxy is a lot like eating broccoli--it's good for you, not just a rule at the dinner-table.  Here, again, Macarius' contribution can be enormously helpful.

Relying on grace, I hope that pastors of souls can learn to move beyond "dogmatic facts" to "living dogma," that is, to see how the articles of faith are "therapeutic" in healing the fallen human condition, and to rediscover how the dogmas of the Church are not only "correct" but also "curative."  Take to heart (pun intended) the warning given to the Church at Ephesus:

I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear evil men but have tested those who call themselves apostles but are not, and found them to be false; I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake, and you have not grown weary.  But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first (Apocalypse 2:2-5).

The leaders of the Ephesian Christian community, scholars tell us, were doctrinally sound but cold (why does this sound familiar?), and were thus summoned to return "to this love you had at first."  St Thomas Aquinas tells us that the place of the virtue of charity is in the will, which Macarius (and the Biblical tradition) identifies as the "heart."  But it is too facile to treat this "love you had at first" as something in addition to being Biblically sound, as though being "doctrinaire" and "nice" can work in tandem.  "Speaking the truth in love" does not represent an addition but an integration, like the Hypostatic Union.

When Christ--Who is Truth in Person--spoke truths, He did not do so with a volley of words (except to the corrupt religious leadership) but by addressing the human person beyond simply articulating divine abstractions.  We see this, for example, in His conversations with the likes of the  the Samaritan Woman or the Rich Young Ruler.  Thus, there is a kind of "Hypostatic Union" to dogma such that both truth and goodness integrate in addressing that which makes the human soul unique--the rational soul:  In both the intellect (which is drawn to truth) and the will or the heart (which is drawn to goodness), the articles of faith speaks existentially and not only ontologically.

At the start of St Thomas' Summa theologiae, his "treatise on God" (and not, please God, "treatise de Deo uno"!) opened with a discussion the divine Essence, inherited from the Sinai Theophany (Exodus 3) even more than the transition from metaphysics to theology.  In disclosing the unutterable divine Name, God was not merely giving St Moses a crash course in ontology, but was revealing his Presence to a person, and inviting future Lawgiver to enter into a personal relationship with him.  Though Moses approached the Burning Bush out of curiosity, God did not humour him until he had removed the sandals from his feet--the Near Eastern gesture of worship and reverence (Ex 3:5).  From there on, Moses came to know God "face-to-face, as a friend" (Ex 33:11) rather than as an object of curiosity and study.  As St Gregory of Nyssa tells us in his Life of Moses, this is precisely the paradigm of theology. 

It is only in this way that sacred theology can be therapeutic and, therefore, pastoral.