Barron’s Catholicism
Father Robert Barron’s book Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith is the single best volume on the subject to date. Give it to your godchildren, your roommates, your parents, your next door neighbor, and the friendly neighborhood agnostic.
I’ve published a full review here but want to focus on a larger issue for those unfamilar with Fr. Barron or his work. I’ve read several of his pieces, and wrote a review of his earlier book Bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative Evangelical Catholic in an academic journal. As these two titles indicate, Barron is interested in getting to the heart of Catholic faith and dwelling within that place of beauty. He wants the Church to tell its own story, and not have it told by others who misunderstand it or twist it to unholy ends (even if, following Dante, those include some of its leaders).
Thus his method is to ignite the imagination, just as his own imagination was ignited as a doctoral student in Paris gazing at the rose window in the transept of Notre Dame Cathedral. Catholicism is never about how poorly we sinners are doing at any moment in our history; it is about the great beauty to which we are summoned by the great love of Christ poured out for the world. If beauty is possible, he seems to suggest, then Christ must be at the heart of it.
I find this a compelling argument, one that reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man. Lewis’ thesis is that moderns get beauty wrong, suggesting that it’s just something we burp up as a reaction. Beauty is never in the eye of the beholder; it’s in the nature of things as loved by God. The world, Lewis suggests (following Dostoevsky?) is saved by beauty.
If Barron’s intuition is right, it would suggest to me that Catholics ought to be putting a lot more energy into cultivating the arts. Right now we do a lot of thinking and not a lot of painting or screenwriting (h/t Barbara Nicolosi), even though we know from our own history that there is no better catechesis than that of the arts: Cologne Cathedral; Palestrina motets; Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus; the Book of Kells; Michelangelo; Roman catacomb paintings; Byzantine mosaics; and so many others. At present we pour a lot of energy (especially in the blogosphere!) on words, words, words. Barron suggests that what we need is more than good ideas: we need imagination.
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Barron is keenly aware that, while most moderns pretend to make their decisions on purely rational grounds, that this is simply not the case. No matter what we tell ourselves, our vision of the true is somehow (even if distortedly, as when we sarcastically ask, with Pilate, “What is truth?”) tied to our vision of the good and the beautiful.
Barron knows how human persons work, and talks to them accordingly.
Thank God!
Brett,
This might seem an odd point to quibble on, but where do you get that “moderns pretend to make their decisions on purely rational grounds.” that is something one finds, interestingly, in a lot of religious discourse, but where else, seriously. On TV the view prevailing is that “bias” rules all, so you always need “opposing” sides, even if one side is clearly crazy. That same view seems to predominate in a lot of academia, only on fancier level. In fact one of the few places this ambition is to be clearly found is in the Catholic sphere. In my opinion, often is a quite forced and leading fashion these days. It appears Barron has both set up a straw man in this notion of “pretending” , and, as depth psychologists often said, given a “tell” to nature of his complex.
I haven’t read this book and can’t comment on it, though I have read some of Barron’s other work. But it strikes me as odd that a “post-liberal and post-conservative” theologian’s book could attract such a one-sided crop of back-cover endorsements. (I see no index entry on the option for the poor, though there is a fairly lengthy one on nonviolence. Maybe Weigel, Chaput, et al. skimmed those sections?)
I am, however, delighted to see a photo of the sanctuary of St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Wheeling, West Virginia on page five. Beauty indeed.
I don’t think he talks much about sex in it either, though I haven’t seen it yet myself, so I could be wrong.
But, yes, if I were the marketing director, I would have aimed at a wider swath for endorsements.
Theologian Muldoon wrote:
“If beauty is possible, he seems to suggest, then Christ must be at the heart of it.”
It is historically very interesting that this logic does NOT seem to have been the “mind of the church” at various points in the evolution of Catholic doctrine and liturgical praxis. In fact, the very case of Palestrina shows this clearly. The more simplified style of Palestrina was influenced by Church sources that the more intricate previous style, was by its very intricate beauty a distraction from the liturgy. (Surely Dufay was beautiful!) The same might be said of the Pius X’s Motu Proprio at the beginning of the Twentieth Century which curtailed a lot of very beautiful music. Surely, Catholics can argue that the Church had its own reasons. But it is just not coherent to make an argument from “beauty” as if the Church was deeply in accord with that across the centuries and the highest desideratum for identifying with Christ. Of course, none of this gainsays the great beauties that the Catholic Church has been responsible for.
That’s a really interesting point, Peter Paul. One general response is that the Church has its own metrics of beauty which differ from those of the culture. The image which comes to mind is of a dinner party at which the host determines the music and lighting: he might downplay these elements in order to avoid distraction from the conversation at the table. There are many elements which are beautiful, but in the end all are secondary to what happens at the meal.
muldoont,
Oh well, I tried. I see we are back at the aesthetics of the St. Louis Jesuits. It is like a vortex out of which nothing escapes. Now that the Catholic Church has permanently distanced itself from its glorious past, and gone with the “what happens at a meal” aesthetic, it seems the attempt to identify with “beauty” is only trope to bliss out on. Only those who have been through countless modern Catholic liturgies can understand the depth of the misprision here. It is like an amputee feeling a leg that is long gone.
Good heavens, then I’ve given the wrong impression. I find the St. Louis Jesuits fine for kids but trite for grownups. The reason I fell in love with the cathedrals of Europe is that they know something about history and the long story of Western art. Pendulum swings back to liturgy with aesthetics are fine with me.
Tim,
You’re a cool customer. I’m impressed. Anyways, the St. Louis jesuits makes me think more of the Pit and the Pendulum! Cheers!
ps. since the St, Louis jesuits, I believe, are still sung at a lot of liturgies in the US, are you saying that most American Catholics are kids, or are childish??
I’m saying that there’s been a dumbing-down of liturgy, well intentioned but not all that helpful, a kind of infantilization of the laity (with Paul Lakeland). The situation is analogous to what happened when China introduced simplified forms of traditional characters in order to increase literacy. Now many adult Chinese are unable to understand Chinese classics; and the literacy goal would probably have been achieved anyway if they were just patient. (Literacy rates in Taiwan are not significantly different from mainland China, and they never went to the simplified characters.)
Tim,
You so smart (seriously!). In Catholic Churches in China do they possibly serve Dim Sum after Mass in the parish hall instead of Donuts??
I bought this book, and had it signed, when Fr. Barron spoke at St. Matthew’s Cathedral a few weeks ago. I’ve only skimmed through it so far, but it looks really good. However, like Michael I, I was really turned off my the endorsements. My only reaction was: what was the publisher thinking?
Has anybody seen the DVD series that goes with it? At $150, that seemed too much for me to pay!
My parish bought the DVD series, and we are showing it in small segments as part of our Adult Spiritual Formation program here. We have just started, but I can already say that the imagery of the locations Fr. Barron visits is breathtaking. He is just like in his YouTube videos — personable, eloquent, and yet uncompromisingly Catholic.
Does the book discuss the beauty of global Catholicism, or just Euro-Catholicism?
Michael, if you mean non-European Catholicism, only a little. (Some would say that “global Catholicism” is redundant.) There is mention of the Ugandan martyrs, for one example. But Barron’s emphasis is on the patrimony of the Church–i.e. its roots in the Palestinian and Hellenistic worlds and the Church’s growth through the middle ages–so I wouldn’t critique it as being Eurocentric in the negative sense of assuming that European iterations of Catholic praxis are normative over and against emerging Asian, African, and American iterations. It’s just not an issue he raises; he’s interested in roots, not branches.
Somewhat off topic question: Does anyone know of a good book that takes this approach (using historical and artistic touchstones) to write about the history and theology of Islam?
I have one book somewhat along these lines Living Islam but it’s the companion book for a PBS series from a couple decades ago and has something of that cursory, made-for-TV feel.