"Sacrifice, Law and the Catholic Faith: is secularity really the enemy?": Intro (Part I)

A truly brilliant piece of thinking from James Alison; this one comes from way back in 2006 in a Lecture sponsored by The Tablet, a "British Catholic weekly journal."

I'm going to put up almost the whole article, in several posts, and then return and comment on each section.   Alison has made what I think are some really important points here and I'd like to think more about them and talk about them.   See also Parts II, III, IV and V.

BTW, I left out a section that contains Footnotes 2 and 3 - links to talks on secularism by Rowan Williams, (Secularism, Faith and Freedom) and Benedict XVI (Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections).  I haven't read these - "secularism" isn't actually my central concern here in fact! - but do plan to.


Anyway, here's the first part of the piece:

When [the editor of The Tablet and I] met .... in August, to talk over possible subjects, I suggested that I would like to talk about something which seemed to be missing in current public discourse. This is the way in which, contrary to easy talk about “rampant secularism” and “shoring up our religious identity”, it is and always has been a proper part of the Catholic faith, and the life of the Church, that it tends to generate a relatively benign secularity; that far from the “secular” being our “enemy” it is in fact our “baby”. And a fragile baby, one whose birth and development is well worth protecting. Nowadays our contemporaries are inclined to use the word “religious” as though it were synonymous with the word “sacred”, and the word “secular” as though it were synonymous with “common”, “normal” or “profane”. Nevertheless to regard those definitions as fixed is, I’m afraid, the result of a mixture of historical ignorance, cultural tone-deafness and the fact that thinking in dichotomies is a great deal easier than anything more subtle.

In fact the concept of the “secular” as it comes to us from St Augustine was born as a new form of historical time and culture brought into being by Christian faith in which there is no longer anything or any people who are properly “sacred” or anything or any people who are properly “profane” [1].

Instead there is a time when the patterns of desire leading to holiness and patterns of desire leading to destruction are to be found side by side, intertwined, and not to be uprooted by human agencies. They are present both in apparently “ecclesiastical” and in apparently “civil” spheres. The Church, which, with regard to its varying organisational structures, is as much part of the secular as is the civil, political, imperial, or democratic realm in which it lives, would, at its best, be the regime and discipline of signs, made alive by God. Signs pointing towards and actually being, God’s bringing about of his Kingdom by reconciling all humans together. Signs which are aimed at summoning forth certain shapes of human desire, interpretation, and living together, rather than coercing people into sacred structures. The driving force behind this is the Spirit breathed forth by Jesus in his dying. This alone, this breath of a crucified criminal, injustly put to death by the breathing together, the con-spiratio, of the sacred and the profane authorities of the time, this breath which cannot be tied down, is the holy power which turns apparent dregs of failed humanity into astounding witnesses of the holiness of God.

....

Happening

I would like to start in the least promising of places to begin an approach to secularity: by claiming that the centrepiece of the Catholic Faith is a divine happening breaking through into our scheme of things in the form of a very particular sort of Priest performing a very particular sort of Sacrifice and thus opening up a New Creation. This does not at all sound like secular language. So, in order to envisage with you where our perception of this happening leads us, I would ask you to imagine a crime scene in an American Cop show. And while scenarios of this sort are common to many such shows, I myself am thinking of a particular episode of the series called “CSI: Las Vegas”. In this episode, our investigators are called to a large, almost empty barn, riddled with bullet holes from high up on all four walls right down to floor level. On the floor there is the body of a teenager, very recently dead. Our investigators’ job is to piece together what happened so as to hold somebody accountable. They do the classic thing, tracing back from the bullet holes in the walls so as to pinpoint where the gun was fired from, using a mixture of rods and laser beams. The first problem they discover is that the bullet which went through the standing teenager and then hit the barn wall was clearly coming at a steep downward angle passing through him, and then hitting the wall somewhere below his standing height. In other words, the bullet had to have been fired from above the boy, from considerably higher, in fact than any other human could have fired, unless they were standing on some structure in the middle of the floor. But there is no forensic evidence of any such structure having stood in the middle of the floor. At this stage, a trigger-happy Tyrannosaurus Rex would just about fit the crime scene, but little else.

It then becomes clear that, though there is no structure standing in the middle, the bullets were all fired from different heights, some downwards, and some upwards, but all from roughly the middle of the barn. However there is no platform, let alone a moving platform, upon which someone might have stood to fire the bullets, nor was there time to remove such a platform between the boy’s death and the arrival of the investigators.

Finally, the investigators find some evidence that friends of the boy were at the barn with him. Through tracing them, questioning them, and breaking through their lies and cover up, the investigators are able to work out and envisage exactly what happened. The kids were playing a game of “dare”. The dare consisted of one of them climbing up onto the roof of the barn, and then lowering down a twisted rope from a hole in the ceiling. This youth then allowed a machine gun, with its trigger jammed into firing mode to spin down the rope, jerking slightly as it moved, and spraying the walls all the way round as it moved down. The other kids, so as to avoid being “chicken”, had to stand, or dance around, on the floor of the barn, “dodging” the random bullets. Amazingly, only one of them was killed. In other words, the investigators are able to determine that the “happening” which they are investigating was not a murder, but an accident in the midst of a crazily dangerous form of “extreme adolescent dares”.

Now the reason I tell you this story is because of the analogy which it offers. What we have, at the root of our Faith is the claim that something happened in the midst of a group of humans. Something huge, scarcely able to be put into words, something breaking through normal schemes of description, and something seen as opening up an entirely new perspective on being human.

Such a happening is too mobile and subtle to be seen in itself, it can only be detected in the various bits of evidence it left behind. In our Cop Show scenario it was impossible for the Crime Scene Investigators to see “the happening which had happened” in itself, they had to use a mixture of the forensic evidence and the effects on the emotional lives of the friends of the dead boy to posit as the most rational, and ultimately the true, explanation, a highly complex, evolving, and mobile “happening”, which they could then repeat if they wished, to see whether it did in fact have the effects which, according to their reconstruction it should have. Just so, the “happening” itself which is the root of our Faith cannot be seen in itself. It can be glimpsed and posited through a mixture of the patterns of bullet holes peppered on the walls, which we have in the words of the Apostolic Witness-put-into-writing which we call the New Testament, and the effects in the lives of the witnesses themselves about which we know something from other sources.

Now I ask you to hold onto this analogy because it is very important indeed in order to understand the generative function of Catholic Faith that we be able to distinguish between the “happening” and what one might call the “crime scene”. It is important for us that once we have distinguished the happening, we be able to imagine it as something which can in principle be detached from that particular barn, that particular gun, those particular bullets, and those particular teenagers. In fact the “happening” can be reproduced wherever, and the original barn and evidence will be a normative pointer to whether we are right in detecting the happening at work again. This is what we mean when we talk about Christ giving the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit turning us into other Christs, summoning us into living the same happening in a wide variety of “pock marked barns”. If the dynamic of the happening in the new circumstances is such as to produce an analogous trail of evidence, we will know that we are indeed talking about the same happening. And if not, we will know that something else is going on, a different sort of happening not organically the same as our original happening, and not to be confused with it.


[1] For further reading on this see R.A. Markus’ Saeculum or his more recent Christianity and the secular.