The Christian Humanist Episode #3: The Crazy Uncles No One Talks To: The Church Fathers

The third episode of The Christian Humanist Podcast should be up on iTunes shortly. In the meantime, you can download it here (not at the time I'm writing, but soon). In this episode, we discuss the Church Fathers and our relationship with them today. Listen as I display my utter ignorance of Church history! Listen as David and Nathan put me to shame! Just listen.

Show Notes

General Introduction
- Who are the Church Fathers?
- Are all Fathers saints?

Our Own Experiences with the Patristics
- And how do we feel today?
- Reformers and Patristics
- The hazy lines between Apostles and Fathers

The Fathers' Relationship with the Classics
- Their concern with philosophers
- Augustine's City of God
- Tertullian's denunciation of Christian humanism

The Church Fathers in Our Own Disciplines
- John Updike's Roger's Version
- The Wife of Bath objects!
- The Patristics up for grabs in the Renaissance

The Elephant in the Room
- Are we incorrect in our interpretations of the Bible when they differ from the Patristics'?
- The tyranny of the democracy of the dead
- C.S. Lewis suggests a via media
- The big Orthodox question
- What does "unanimous consent" even mean?
- Apostolic succession or unanimity of teaching?

Are the Patristics Fathers to Protestants, Too?
- Too influential to ignore
- Don't skip fifteen centuries of theology
- The Christian Classics Ethereal Library


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.

Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man. Ft. Collins, Co.: Ignatius, 1993.

Fathers of the Church. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Charlotte, N.C.: TAN, 2009.

Justin Martyr. The Writings of Justin Martyr. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Berkeley, Ca.: Apocryphile, 2007.

Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994.

Luther, Martin. The Bondage of the Will. New York: General Books LLC, 2009.

McGrath, Alistair. Christianity's Dangerous Idea. New York: HarperOne, 2008.

Milton, John. "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce." The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 182-226.

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.

Norris, Frederick W. Christianity: A Short Global History. Oxford: Oneworld, 2002.

Tertullian. On Idolatry. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004.

Updike, John. Roger's Version. New York: Knopf, 1996.

LINKS
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
The Catholic Encyclopedia: Fathers of the Church

Bury Me

Hello, you few readers who are left. I know it's been a bad semester in terms of posting, but I'm now done with the bulk of my coursework and will (I hope) be posting more, especially now that I've begun reading in earnest for my comprehensive exams. Be ready for months of very tiresome posts on Existentialism.

In the meantime, here's the basic plot of the two papers I wrote this semester.

"'The Snake Was There Before Adam': Faulkner's Inversion of Augustinian Ponerology." I build off of my earlier post on Quentin Compson as a failed St. Augustine but recast it in much more theological terms. In brief, I argue that Faulkner's Sanctuary presents us with a ponerology that's the exact opposite of St. Augustine. Here, good is a privation of evil, and it is the male element that most clearly signifies nothingness. As femaleness is biologically a lack of maleness, so good is a lack of evil. This is a bleak worldview, especially since the mingling of female and male is necessary for the race's survival.

"More Art with Less Matter: Anxiety of Meaninglessness in 'Gertrude and Claudius.'" I examine Updike's much-neglected "prequel" to Hamlet and argue that, in its inversion of "good" and "bad" characters and its influx of religious and theological references--Claudius at one point or another represents just about every religion ever conceived--Updike turns Hamlet from a mere tragedy to something much, much darker: a negation of all meaning, be it interpersonal, religious, or philosophical.

I guess it's been a dark semester, you might say. More later.

Burning Burning Burning Burning

When I introduced myself to my students my first semester of teaching, I mentioned that one of my academic interests was Christian existentialism. Most of them looked back at me like groupers in tank (as freshmen are wont to do), but I had one student follow me out of the classroom. "Christian existentialism?" he said. "I thought that was an oxymoron."

It's a common opinion, I suppose, and an understandable one, given existentialism's close association with the atheists Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche. But it's (to say the least) a limited opinion, if not historically blind. Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic, gave the philosophical movement its name, and the philosophy itself is based heavily on the nonfiction of Soren Kierkegaard (a Lutheran) and the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky (an Orthodox Christian).

But existentialism, as Walter Kaufmann suggests in his introduction to the anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, really stretches back to St. Augustine. I suppose this fact shouldn't be too surprising; existentialism developed out of theology, and there's no theological movement (at least in the Christian West) that hasn't been influenced by Augustine to some degree or another. But the prefiguring of the existentialists (Sartre in particular, but you hear Pascal, Heidegger, and Karl Barth, too) in Augustine is too frequent and too strong to ignore.

And so it is that Christian existentialism begins literally when the Confessions does, with Augustine's avowal of an emotional salvation. Here's the famous statement: "You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you" (I.i.1). That's the popular concept of the "God-shaped hole" in its infancy. Humanity, the theory says, has an inborn religious impulse, but Adam's breach of the covenant between himself and Jehovah messed it up. (Barth deals with this quite extensively.)

The end result of that sin is a three-fold alienation: from oneself ("my heart had become gross . . . and I had no clear vision even of my own self” [VII.i.2]); from others (“I therefore polluted the spring water of friendship with the filth of concupiscence” [III.i.1]); and ultimately from one's Creator, which is why that God-shaped hole exists at all.

Because of this alienation, we live in a world marked by what Heidegger will later call being-against-one-another and curiosity (a word that Augustine himself frequently uses, and I'm curious as to whether Heidegger took it from him). In other words, we're at odds with one another (and, Augustine would add, with ourselves and with God), and we fear stability--we hate and fear the very thing we need for salvation.

Another interesting aspect of Confessions is Augustine's theory of sin. His famous rejection of Manichaeism (which states that good and evil are equal and opposed forces in eternal combat) results in a theory of evil in which "evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being" (III.vii.12). That sounds like a Christianized version of the Sartrean concept of being and nothingness, although of course it's more accurate to say that Sartre's philosophy is a de-Christianized version of Augustine's theology, at least on this point. Evil, strictly speaking, does not exist--it's a gaping hole of negation, something that threatens to suck us all into a black hole of nonexistence. Such are the pernicious effects of original sin and the alienation that follows it.

Augustine, however, offers us what Sartre, Heidegger, and even Kierkegaard do not: a solution to the problem of alienation, of angst, of the being-against-one-another. Filling that God-shaped hole--legitimately filling it, which is to say, with God and not with a Barthian Tower of Babel--heals us. Obviously, it allows for a renewed relationship with God, but it also allows genuine self-reflection (the kind it takes to write the world's first autobiography, for example), and it even allows for renewed relationships among human beings: "true friendship . . . is not possible unless you bond together those who cleave to one another by the love which is ‘poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us’ (Rom. 5:5)” (IV.iv.7).

There are many other prefigurings of existentialism in the Confessions (and I'm sure they're also present in Augustine's vast catalogue, none of which I've read)--his personalized hermeneutic, for example, or his rejection of the science of Genesis 1. But I think his treatment of the three kinds of alienation makes the strongest case for his status as the grandfather of existentialism. It's wild to think that one man essentially created philosophies as diverse as Catholicism, existentialism, and Calvinism. I suppose it helps to be a genius.