Sat, 15 Feb 2014 | Cover | Page 10

The Hermeneutic of Continuity —

■ The citing of the hermeneutic of continuity is not an explanation at all: it’s just a gratuitous assertion.

By Nate Metzger

Faithfulness

requires a clear head and the ability to call out nonsense for what it is. To be steeped in history is to cease to be neo-Catholic. It is to see the truth of Tradition, and the farce that is the ritual reference to the hermeneutic of continuity.

I’m always amazed by the sheer number of converts who have written books about their journey to the Church. I’m not sure who reads these books, but apparently there’s quite a market for them. I promise you to never join that fray. For one thing, I can’t imagine My Story would be of interest to anyone but a small group of (no doubt annoyed) confessional Lutherans. For another thing, even within this niche market, it would prove to be terribly boring reading. I simply have had no Road to Damascus experience, no existentialist crisis, no particular phenomenological breakthrough, and no precise ‘ah ha!’ moment; I didn’t have an apparition or vision, and I was never ‘shaken to the core’ or some such thing. More importantly for my present purposes, I didn’t see in the Church the solution to some life crisis or trauma, I didn’t ‘feel’ my way into the Church, I didn’t ‘fall in love’ with any aspect of it, and as a result of finding the Church, I didn’t ‘find myself’, nor did I have any other sort of emotional epiphany or therapeutic recovery (though it should be noted that if my conversion had given me such an emotional headway, no Lutheran worth his salt would have taken me seriously anyway—call it the Lutheran Catch-22).

If my conversion story were made into a movie, it would be incredibly drab. It would basically consist of me reading some book or other, usually while sitting in a pub; perhaps it would also have a few scenes of me arguing with friends about Catholic dogma…while sitting in a pub (actually, I wouldn’t mind if they made this movie, provided they cast me as me). My conversion was simply a matter of my own phlegmatic, contrarian, and skeptical nature going out and investigating things—and I can’t imagine my inner monologue would be that captivating to anyone but a select few. In fact, it’s probably exciting only for me. My conversion story boils down to this: as a result of conversation, reading and research, I slowly figured out that the Church was right about….well, everything.

I hate testimonials, so let’s not get carried away here (consider the above two paragraphs my story). I mention this all to make a serious point: one fortuitous advantage of a dispassionate discovery of the Truth is that it better allows one to see what the Catholic Church can do, and what false churches cannot do. To wit: the Church can tell you precisely why it says what it says about anything. Indeed, part of the reason that the Church has been attractive to skeptics and intellectuals since its inception, is that it is quite willing to back up its claims, and show its work.

Typical of any healthy skeptic, I am not going to believe what the Church tells me ‘just because’. I am simply not conditioned, culturally or emotionally, to care one cent what the Church teaches about anything; I’m not going to believe what the church says simply because it declares something to be such. Rather, I believe it (all) because I’ve found it (all) to be true. I must emphasize: this attitude is not unique to me, but to many converts—or, at the very least, to those converts who are not privy to mystical experiences, epiphanies, or emotional breakdowns. If you did not find in the Church a therapeutic answer to your own psychological hang-ups, but instead found it to contain the truth (perhaps begrudgingly, as in my case), you are probably like me. For folks like me, the magisterium of the Catholic Church did not get the benefit of the doubt: it had to prove its salt. This might seem scandalous to some faithful readers, but I assure you that it’s a trait that has proven handy in these confusing times.

An oft cited quip of John Henry Newman goes something like this: to be steeped in history is to cease to be protestant. You bet. To get past the protestant’s own historical index liborum prohibitorum, and to engage in some detailed reading of the Church’s history, is to discover a Christianity practiced since its inception that looks inconveniently identical to the one advanced by the Church Immemorial, and it is to see the ideas of the Reformation as a rupture from this continuity. Yet we must recognize that the post-conciliar Church has cleverly censored the past to its liking as well. Indeed: the same detailed reading into the Church’s history that should shake a protestant, should also shake a neo-Catholic.

A detailed investigation into Catholic history and Catholic dogma should disturb anyone who has simply gone along with the idea that the present Church is ‘continuous’ with the past. To update Newman’s quip, we should say: to be steeped in history is to cease to see the novelties introduced by the Second Vatican Council as anything other than troubling. To be steeped in history is to see the New Mass as egregious, along with much else promulgated by Vatican II. To be stepped in history is to see what is deemed the ‘ordinary’ form of the Mass as anything but. To be steeped in history is to cease being a neo-Catholic. To be steeped in history is to be a traditionalist.

G.K. Chesterton once said that our religion should be less of a theory and more of a love affair. I appreciate his attitude, but in an important and relevant sense, I disagree with the Catholic Bard. When our approach to the Church becomes rooted in feelings and sentiments, and removed from ‘theory’ and argument, we can too easily be led astray, and we can fail to see when we’re being duped. To approach our true religion more dispassionately, by contrast, is to see not only precisely why its tenants are entirely and wholly true, but also why the post-conciliar mutation is frighteningly anomalous.

In other words, the same impassive approach to history, philosophy, and theology that rightly leads one to reject Protestantism and accept The Faith, should also lead one to reject so much that is contained in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. It is no wonder, therefore, that so many converts come to eventually embrace some form of ‘reactionary’ Catholicism. They are happily in a position that many cradles are not: they are able to see with greater clarity the absurdity of Vatican II, its discontinuity with what came previously, and the utter ridiculousness of the idea that ‘all is well.’ Many converts are not culturally or emotionally conditioned to find anything that the Church says to be so. They are obviously not in love with the Church prior to converting, and they are not struck with love potion during their confirmation. Therefore, they are more easily able to see our post-conciliar nightmare for what it is. They are not suffering from the sort of cognitive dissonance that understandably affects so many souls born into the Church— souls that love Her like a family member. It is easy to see how someone mired in emotional attachments brought on by years of cultural conditioning might fail to see how Vatican II led to the Church’s disintegration; such folks might be more easily led to believe in the risible idea that there is ‘continuity’ between the past and present.

Yes, continuity. What a silly notion. As far as I can tell, this continuity is like an autostereogram. We are told by most everyone in the know, that if you squint really hard, you will see continuity. Or even if you can’t see it, even after much practice, you should know that it’s there—it’s there between the Tridentine Mass and the Novus Ordo, between the magisterial teachings prior to the Council and after, between the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the Catechism promulgated by the late John Paul II, and between the tenants of Vatican II and the teachings of every council prior. We are told this. We are not shown this.

The citing of the hermeneutic of continuity is not an explanation at all: it’s just a gratuitous assertion.

If we are a bit more cool and collected—if we bracket our ‘love affair’ and hold on to some elements of good ‘theory’ (for example, elementary logic and ostensive data)—we can more easily notice the problem here. It’s one that in academic circles is known as ritual citation. The ritual citer plays a clever trick on his reader. He cites the work of those who challenge his own position, and then he makes reference to a concept that supposedly answers this objection, without actually making the argument himself. That is, he does not actually

ruminate on the counter-argument now cited, or offer detailed reasons for its falsity. He simply cites the problem and the gratuitous solution: for to cite the works at all is to give the impression to the inattentive reader that the writer has in fact dealt with the critique of the work. ‘Well,’ the casual reader might say, ‘he seems to know about this counterargument…’ Basically, it’s a way of bluffing. After all: most weak arguments are a result of simply not being aware of the relevant counter-arguments. Usually, when an argument or work is broached, it is properly dealt with. The ritual citer is exploiting your regular assumptions about how arguments are made: we regularly assume that arguments that are mentioned are analyzed and defeated. To ritually cite is to give the inattentive reader the impression that you not only know precisely what the criticism of your own view happens to be, but also that you have overcome it.

References to the hermeneutic of continuity are an example of such a bluff. Casual readers will often see references

Continued Next Page

[image]

A Thousand Years of Continuity....