The media are necessarily short-sighted: there would be no point in complaining that a daily newspaper focuses on events of the day, or that a blog responds to the event of one moment.
We are ephemeral, though as William Blake once argued, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Granted he presented this idea, like so many other marvellous ones fixed in my brain since adolescence, as one of the Proverbs of Hell. And granted, Blake was, in a sane Catholic view, quite a heretic at the best of times. But the proverb does give the glimmering of an interesting, and potentially orthodox, theological idea: that there may well have been some reason why God created the universe.
We—humans generally—are ephemeral, though not therefore “maya” or illusion, as certain eastern religions may arguably propose. “The past is a foreign country,” and we must also read some history and poetry, perhaps even Scripture, to make larger sense of time passing, and of passing events weaving themselves into larger frameworks of time. To the hypothetical observer who has become wise, the most ephemeral things will serve well enough to exhibit “a heaven in a grain of sand,” and the recurrences that make “nothing human foreign to us.”
It would be good if time were also in love with the productions of eternity, which may include even more than time itself. The individual who has allowed his innate religious sensibility to mature—allowed it to be formed and guided by the broad and deep of a religious tradition, and thus along a path away from spiritual narcissism—may have some idea to what I refer.
To be as obvious as possible, “eternity” cannot be ephemeral; and the thought of eternity must take us beyond and behind the world of our senses. The thought of eternity cannot exclude God, and the ultimate foundations of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Even in rejecting the utility of any theological view of “everything,” we are taking a theological position, and necessarily, one that it would be most cowardly not to think through.
One of the great difficulties any journalist must have, in reporting or commenting upon something like the pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, is in stepping out of his own shoes, and getting away from his own expectations.
Here is a document not only several years in the drafting, and not only a “production of time” to which many learned minds beside the Pope’s contributed. It is something written consciously in the view of eternity, and under the aegis of prayer. It is something addressed to all adult men and women, not only within but outside the Roman Catholic Church; indeed, to Christians and also to non-Christians. It purports to provide a fundamental Christian view of social questions, that is not narrow.
The encyclical is in fact dripping with allusions and references that cannot be ignored if it is to be understood, and hardly a statement is free of careful qualifications that must not be overlooked. The tone of the language comes into the interpretation: for the author is consciously writing with more or less magisterial authority, as he moves back and forth between religious teaching and worldly observation.
The author of this document plainly does not intend to weigh into disputes between “left” and “right,” or into party politics in any other form. And if it is reported and commented upon as if he did, it is misreported, and interpreted ignorantly.
My reader therefore should not trust the remarks of any journalist who pretends to understand Caritas in Veritate, without a serious grounding in the Church, her history, and how she works. Far better to read it, and think for yourself, without such (often malign) pre-judgments.
Pope Benedict does not claim to be a political scientist, an economist, a sociologist, an “energy expert.”
He is looking towards those fields from his own authoritative ground, as responsible guardian of the Catholic faith, and living spokesman for Catholic truth. He could even be naïve in some of his observations, or understandings of how the world works; though he has tried earnestly not to be so, to “do his homework.”
But then that homework itself has depended upon the men and women who have advised him, in fields often beyond his own competence, and sometimes possibly beyond theirs.
Over against this, every Catholic must remember, that the pope has not written without beseeching Christ’s guidance, and moreover, as we believe, Christ did promise to assist His Church. Under such circumstances, the Pope is not likely to have written the equivalent of a casual op-ed.
Pope Benedict himself makes plain, in the introduction to the encyclical, that “the Church does not have technical solutions to offer,” but, instead, a profound insight into how those who must offer technical solutions should go about their work, in “charity illumined by the light of faith and reason.” And that, in turn, is how we should read Charity in Truth.
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