Sartre and Teleology - who'd have thought it?

One of the journals I read regularly is a rather geeky one called Philosophy Now.  It’s not exactly mass-market: I think Smith’s in Lancaster have about two copies, and it comes out every two months.  So I have it on subscription.  In the present issue, the focus is on the notion of consciousness, and there is a piece on the significant twentieth century philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).

 

At the heart of Sartre’s philosophy is the apparently paradoxical notion that humanity’s freedom is a burden, because of the responsibility for self-determination it brings.  This is explained by a present-day commentator as follows:

 

When we make something – a clock, an engine, a butter knife – we begin with an idea of what that thing will do, so that the purpose of that thing is built into it.  In other words, we start out with the idea of its purpose before even we begin to make it.  But human beings are not like that.  We come into the world without a purpose.  We first come into being, and then must decide for ourselves for what purpose we exist.  We cannot ascribe our actions to some pre-existing human nature, in the way that we can explain a clock’s actions by virtue of its nature…Sartre says that we must accept responsibility for who we are and what we do.  It is our fate to create ourselves through the choices we make (Terence Green).

 

We can see straightaway that Sartre is working with a modern, secular idea of humanity as being in some sense self-sufficient and self-determining.  Humanity (not God) is placed the very centre of reality in this scheme of thought.  It is a million miles away from the idea of humanity which our Catholic faith gives to us; as is Sartre’s contention that we come into the world without a purpose and that, by implication, there is nothing distinctive or God-given about human nature as such.

 

By contrast, Christians do not believe that we have simply come into being by chance and with no purpose.  We have been created in the image and likeness of God with the purpose of entering into a free relationship with God so that he can share with us the fullness of his life.  We are not compelled, of course, to respond to his gracious invitation nor to his desire that we be at all; but we do believe that this is the purpose set out for human beings.  This conviction lies at the heart of the Church’s life and the imperative we have for mission to the world; it is our responsibility to help others to share this conviction, so that they begin to see that there is a transcendent purpose to our lives, and which lies profoundly beyond the desire for material affluence or well-being in this world.  Jesus’ claim to have come so that people may have life to the full is an objective claim about what that fullness consists in, namely communion with God.  It’s a far more exciting prospect than Sartre’s mundane view that we have to find a purpose for ourselves, with the miserable implication that if we fail, there is no point in our existing at all.  I wonder how many people in our society operate with that model without even realising it.

 

Sartre’s atheism is well known but, reflecting on himself shortly before his death he made this remark: ‘I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured.  In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.’  I wonder if, in a strange kind of way, Sartre came to some appreciation of his true (inherent) purpose, and of how this purpose, far from being something of his own creation, was actually bestowed upon him as a gift, from the very first moment of his existence.

SPRING, EASTERTIDE AND OUR LADY

Spring is my favourite time of the year, and not primarily because the cricket season gets underway again.  I love the signs of new life all around us, in the created order; and, of course, it’s Eastertide, the Christian feast of new life par excellence. In addition to this, but fittingly, May is traditionally the ‘Month of Mary’, from whom new life sprang in the form of our Saviour and Redeemer.

Eastertide is the longest and most important of all the liturgical seasons.  It lasts for fifty days and culminates in the feast of Pentecost, this year on 4^th June.  In the cycle of readings for the daily Mass, we hear from the Acts of the Apostles, and we learn about the growth of the infant Church. The shared life of the earliest Christian communities made a real impression on the people of the surrounding cultures and many were converted to the Faith and sought baptism.  We are reminded powerfully that it is the witness of ordinary Christians like ourselves which makes the Church grow, or not.  During the Easter season especially, we should pray for the grace to become good and better disciples, so that others may believe.

But what of May, Mary’s Month?  Our Lady is central to the Christian life and not, as some Christians seem to believe, something of an optional extra, at best.  Mary is a creature, like ourselves, in whom the grace of God was active and fruitful in a particular and specific way.  She was called to a lofty vocation and, like ourselves, she was free to accept or reject it.  Because of her disposition towards God, and because of her faith and trust in him, she was able to accept, even though what God asked had the potential to wreck her plans for her life.  Consequently, new life in the form of Jesus our Saviour sprang forth.  Her womb became the dwelling place of God in human form.  She was the one, specially chosen by God, to be the Mother of his Son. The best answer to the question of why we honour Mary so much is to say that we honour her because God honoured her – it really is that simple.

Devotion to Mary ensures that our devotion to Christ is healthy and rightly-ordered.  He is God-in-the-flesh, the God-Man, in whom divinity and humanity are united in the mystery of his Person.  The Fathers of the Council of Ephesus in the year 431 gave Mary the title theotokos (God-bearer, or Mother of God) precisely to say something about Jesus at a time when false teaching about Jesus’ Person was threatening to gain hold in the early centuries of the Christian Church.  Mary always points to Christ; devotion to Our Lady always leads us to Him – and that is why most depictions of her, in art or statuary, have her holding the infant Christ.

It’s noteworthy that, whilst little is said of Mary in the Gospels, the tradition has her present at many of the critical occasions in Jesus’ life.  As well as her presence in the biblical birth and infancy narratives, she is present at Jesus’ first recorded miracle at Cana in Galilee (John 2:1-11); and she is present at the foot of the cross (John 19:25-27).  She is mentioned at other points in the respective gospels when the evangelists want to stress Jesus’ humanity (e.g. Mark 6:3), or the virtue of humility and obedience (e.g. Luke 11:27-28).  Mary also features in the traditional Lenten devotion of the Stations of the Cross where, at the fourth station, she meets her son as he carries the cross to Calvary.  The Rosary, a hugely popular Marian devotion since the Middle Ages, introduces us to meditation on the mysteries of the Lord’s life seen through the eyes of the one closest to him.  In the teaching of the Universal Church, she is understood as a ‘type’ of the Church – prototypical in the sense that what we see and admire in her, we should also be able to see and admire in the Church and in the lives of all individual Christians; and, of course, in her Assumption into heaven, body and soul, we are given a kind of ‘proof-text’ that what God promises us in terms of our eternal salvation has already been shown forth, through divine grace, in the life of one of our fellow-creatures.

So Mary is a central figure in the Christian life; she is second only to Jesus who is True God and True Man.  Mary is unique among God’s creatures in that she is the one who was chosen by God to be the means for his sharing in our human nature so that he might share with us his divine nature.

I commend to you for daily use in your prayers during the Easter season the Marian anthem for Eastertide, the Regina Coeli:

 

Joy fill your heart, O Queen most high, alleluia!

Your Son who in the tomb did lie, alleluia!

Has risen as he did prophesy, alleluia!

Pray for us, Mother, when we die, alleluia!

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

Our Ecclesial Vocation

This is the text of a letter I wrote to Bishop Philip North of Burnley in April 2016. In the light of recent events, I commend it to the Catholic movement in the Church of England as thought must now be given as to the way ahead.

Thank you for your series of articles in New Directions (December 2015, January and February 2016) on Catholic Evangelism, and for the inspiring sessions you have provided for us in the Diocese of Blackburn since your arrival last year.  Many people, including those beyond our constituency, have cause to appreciate your contribution to the mission and witness of the Church as you have spoken with genuine insight to the ecclesial and cultural situation which faces us.

In speaking of the recovery of a ‘distinctively Catholic evangelism’ in the third of your ND pieces, you say that we return to the heart and to the purpose of the Oxford Movement and the subsequent Catholic movement in the Church of England; in the sense that our forbears, rather than trying to ‘catholicise’ the Church of England, sought to recall the whole Church of England to an awareness of its inherent (Catholic) nature.  I remember writing a letter which was published in the Church Times before 1992 in reply to a correspondent who had said that he was sick of  “‘Anglo-Catholics’ trying to make the Church of England ‘Catholic’”.  My response was along the lines of saying that we were not trying to do this, precisely because the Church was Catholic already; and that we were simply trying to raise a more general awareness of what was, in fact, already the case.  This had always been part of my raison d’être since my ordination as deacon in 1985 and even before that.  I agree with you that the carving out of a Catholic niche for ourselves within the Church of England, which is effectively what we have done over the past twenty years, is reductive and represents a significant diminishment of our ecclesial vocation.

It remained possible to witness to a conviction about the essential catholicity of the Church of England after 1992-4, even though the Church of England’s claim to such had been severely compromised by the presbyteral ordination of women; it was possible because of the principle and process of ‘reception’, which introduced an at least notional degree of equivocation as to the Church of England’s self-understanding.  The present situation, however, now that the process of reception has ended, is rather different.  The Church of England, whilst honouring conscientious views as to the (im)propriety of its unilateral decision on the episcopal ordination of women, has now stated unequivocally that it has adopted a position which is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of Catholic Christendom. 

This means that, for me, it is no longer appropriate to articulate our purpose as being to bring members of the Church of England to an awareness of its Catholic identity as an ecclesial community; and this is for the simple reason that our corporate, collective identity has changed.  It is untenable to think that the Church of England can proceed to the admission of women to the episcopate and leave its essence unaffected or, indeed, intact.  I have never accepted the argument, which I associate with Affirming Catholicism, that the Church of England is, and will always be, Catholic solely by virtue of its being the Church of England; it seems clear to me that the Church of England has changed into something which it was arguably not only a few years ago.

Whilst it is undoubtedly true that we Catholics have a distinctive contribution to make to the life of the whole Church of England, and that we are a constitutive part of the whole whose convictions fall within an acknowledged spectrum of what is legitimate to be held, I would argue that we have now been reduced to inhabiting a niche.  Whilst, of course, there is the potential to give witness to the historic faith and order of the Church and thereby to wield influence and to change some minds, there is no prospect of undoing what has been done.  Further, our inhabiting of this niche is largely dependent upon the goodwill of those who do not share our convictions, since we have even been required to concede the very jurisdiction which we had originally said was an irreducible minimum requirement for us.

The Church of England is different in essence from what we have understood it to be in the past; and thus it has become impossible for me at least to understand my vocation within it in the way I understood it in the past and to which you refer in your ND piece.  We have reached the stage, I think, where serious thought is needed, on the broadest possible canvas, as to how we articulate our place and purpose afresh.