peace,
Dan

To say “if it were incommunicable, then catechism goes out the window” begs the question: why focus on communicability and intelligibility so much? Who thinks these things are incommunicable? Some more fundamentalist elements of Xn America?

To focus so much on intelligibility gives the impression of someone who, say, wants to talk about how the shooting of free-throws must be communicable, or else catechism in shooting freethrows is out the window.

OK, one wants to say, but the main point isn’t the communicability, right, but learning to shoot freethrows, which takes more than communicability (it takes practice, for starters!).

The early catechumenate was dominated by concern for “amending one’s life” moreso than doctrinal instruction, which came moreso (though not without exception) in post-baptismal mystagogy. So for instance, when Catholics developed the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), which sought to retrieve the early catechumenate, they incorporated this sensibility in various ways. Why? B/c it’s clear throughout the patristic era that heavy doctrinal lifting (intellectual engagement) required as a precursor the substantive formation and amendment of life–not least in prayer–such that, in having carved room in the life for the life-creating Spirit, the Christian might know that Spirit first-hand and incontrovertibly and in some fullness.

But lacking this sense of ordering, as Josef Jungmann (the great Catholic liturgical scholar) lamented some 70 yrs ago, we now find ourselves in a situation when the average Xn actually has much more factual information re their faith, and has encountered more factual information, than most any priest in the patristic or medieval era, though for lack of coherence between life and thought, the average Xn today gets remarkably little mileage from that information. It’s mostly in one ear out the other, or it settles in as a confused jumble of supposedly related propositions. For Jungmann, the solution to the intellectual dissaray in the current church is not better or more rigorous thinking, but, as w/ the catechumenate, of finding the integrating links between dogma and life throught the difficult practice of amending one’s life, of practicing humility, prayer, virtue in general, that is, of attaining purity of heart and thereby attracting the life-creating Spirit, whereby one’s “eyes” might truly “see”–even the eyes of the simple (cf. here the catechesis of Paul the Simple as an extreme case–or Aquinas’ last considerations upon his theologizing).

None of which is to deny the importance of doctrinal formulation or intelligibility (just the opposite, actually). But it is to say that deciding to spend one’s time mostly defending ‘intelligibility’, esp. under the name of ‘catechesis’ (or, for that matter, in the name of obviating lesser instances of evangelical enthusiasm) is, again, a bit akin to trying to learn to shoot free-throws in a classroom: it assumes that most of what is needed is intellectual.

Re the “Kantian” turn: the fathers were comfortable acknowledging various factors influencing cognition, even at what we might today call “pre-conscious” levels. In other words, Ricoeur’s post-Kantian “masters of suspicion” (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx) might be conflated in interesting ways with monastic writings on the various and subtle influences upon cognition arising from the passions–the remedy for which was not more time ironing things out in the study but more time in prayer, in vigil, and so forth–inasmuch as these tools were used to strengthen the Godward orientation of the heart.

But what do I know…

Yeah, of course. I don’t think that’s what I’m suggesting, as it would be pretty ridiculous to make an argument from the foundational supposition that I”m arguing about nothing.

“If it were incommunicable, then catechism goes out the window.”

Exactly, the question is, then, what exactly is catechesis? It’s formation in a very particular set of practices, to which is subordinated a Salvation history, to which is further subordinated a ratio cognoscibilis that flows from the practices that deliver to us that Salvation History.

If that is the context of what Chesterton said, then I’m glad to know that. If at root he’s upholding a Christian account of God’s ‘concurrence’/’sustaining action’, then that sounds good to me; especially b/c I do quite like Orthodoxy!

Dan,

Good question: must some christian practice be intelligible? Or, maybe I would reformulate the question, ‘must the christian practice in question be entirely intelligible?’ If we ask the latter question; then yeah, I could concede that there are non-intelligible features just so long as we don’t from the start suppose there is nothing intelligible about them. If that were the case, it’d be hard to see how any *infused* beliefs were involved. A nice Patristic argument for the practice being *not* wholly intelligible goes as follows. If we can understand x, without any act of trust (faith), then that takes away the merit of faith. So, if we aim to say that faith is required, then there must be some ways that acts of understanding are insufficient to the task. And, if this is the scheme we’re working with, then yeah, I’m happy with that. At minimum I’m wanting to affirm that there is *content* to the faith- and that this *content* is communicable from person to person. If it were incommunicable, then catechism goes out the window.

If you’re not advocating for some kind of ideal, then I can’t see that you’re saying anything more here than you want to make sure that we can talk about things like baptism, that it HAS to be intelligible. Well, of course we talk about it. We talk about everything. The point is that there are ineffable aspects of our faith. So, yes, we talk about practices, and we talk about Salvation History as well. but in neither case does our talking about the things precede them.

When Chesterton said that for all we know, the sun comes up every morning because every day God says, “Encore, encore,” he was not intending a dismissal of natural causation. He is making a more radical claim that the entire ongoing work of art depends radically upon the divine love and enjoyment that set in motion and sustains it.

I think that primarily Chesterton was countering the emerging naturalism of his period. I.e. that things are “just the way they are” and that’s the end of the explanation. This is metaphysically and ratinally inadequate for Chesterton. There is supernatural causation within and behind (and in front of) natural causation.

Regarding the math example; yeah, I’d disagree. When I learned base six in college, I didn’t have any ‘cognitive dissonance’ when counting by base six, and I believe this was so because the meta-addition principles still held.

Yeah– if you take a Kantian turn, I see that what you may follow. But if one doesn’t go Kantian, what then?

What you say about the Trinity here escapes me. There are lots of problems to sticking with Augustinian gloss about the HS being the bond of love btwn. Father and Son; or at least, to just assert this without stating how one should interpret it. But maybe you take this as an non-explainable, or not able to be denied? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for the mutual love stuff in Trinitarian theology – but if you are happy with that articulation you are gonna have BIG problems. For example, this might entail a bad subordinationism of the Holy Spirit. Is the HS not able to be a lover, too? Isn’t each divine person a lover and beloved? If that is the case, then loving/being loved won’t meet the job description of a distinctive personal property. Perhaps such concerns are just my concerns? But, I hasten to add that Augustine too was worried about such misleading claims, like saying that the Son just is divine wisdom, etc. (De Trin.6-7).

In which case, I’m not sure how we get from some account of the Trinity to some account about human cognition in general? Is this a case of explaining the mysterious (human cognition) by the most mysterious (the Trinity)?

But even if we do go Kantian (of some variety), I don’t think one can appeal to some Trinitarian account to _justify_ our holding a Kantian account. Why would we use an account of the Trinity to justify some account we have about human cognition? What would motivate such an enterprise? Well, I suppose apologetics (see, if you believe in the Trinity, then all these problems about human cognition are explained)? One worry I have about this approach is that we just read our theory of human cognition back into the Trinity; this would be a version of Feuerbachian projection of an extreme kind. Karen Kilby has written about this in an article, published at the Nottingham (Milbank) website.