What Is Catholic Culture?
The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this academic year. This occasion calls for something of a retrospective mode, a contemplative reflection upon the Center’s very fundaments: “ethics,” “culture,” and—perhaps most importantly—the ampersand or coordinating conjunction between them. Next year is also the sixtieth anniversary of Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, a magisterial document which is, I think, the first to include a lengthy discussion of the phenomenon of human culture as such (GS §§53-62). And, finally, the historic Great Books-style liberal arts department in which I teach (the Program of Liberal Studies) is about to enter its seventy-fifth year at the university, which has prompted a collective conversation among our faculty about the place and enduring value of liberal arts education especially within a Catholic research institution. Such is the rich context in which arose the impulse to ask what is—I know!—a whale of a question: What is Catholic culture?
Any given culture, of course, includes the diverse and complex material, intellectual, artistic, social, political, spiritual, religious, linguistic, practical, technological, legal, symbolic, and otherwise real forces and values (articulated or hidden) that dynamically shape the communal life of human beings. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) once wrote a marvelous short story called “The Library of Babel,” which offers a strange and wonderful narrative about an infinite library in absolute space, a repository of interminably interlocking hexagons that contains “all that is able to be expressed, in every language” (43). And when Borges said “all,” he really meant “all”:
The detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus (44),
And so on and so forth. Within this infinite library—the whole universe—is every conceivable combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks, every single book real and imagined, actual and possible, those written and those which could conceivably ever have been written.
As with Borges’s mythical and mythically infinite library, the potential answers to the question What is Catholic culture? multiply in a riot of possibility nearly beyond all telling. Filed in the imagined card catalog under “Catholic Culture”—cross-referenced neatly under “Lectures I Might Have Written (But Did Not)”—are gathered a nearly infinite cloud of witnesses: Fra Angelico’s breathtaking frescos in the Convent of San Marco in Florence, raucous Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, Filipino believers gathering early on a December morning for the Simbang Gabi novena, mass-produced plastic rosaries, saint candles at the grocery store, young women wearing chapel veils, young women not wearing chapel veils, the beautiful, theologically rich poetry of Dante’s Divine Comedy, every one of Andy Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers, the glorious spectacle of Eucharistic processions, liturgical objects from vestments to reliquaries, chalices to patens, Flannery O’Connor’s searingly imperfect good country people, hagiographies, watercolor images of saints on holy cards, Gregorian chant and polyphony, enormous networks of our Catholic clinics and hospitals, diocesan schools, Gothic cathedrals like Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris, simple dorm chapels across campus, The Canterbury Tales, cradle Catholics, converts, and charisms and spiritualities as diverse as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Carmelites. What I am belaboring here, of course, is that there are as many and as polyphonous Catholic cultures—or at least subcultures—as there are Catholic practitioners, people who live and pray in Mexico, Italy, France, Peru, Brazil, the Philippines, Poland, Nigeria, the United States, and many more times and places besides. Here comes everybody.
This litany of examples should suggest to us that Catholic culture is not restricted to that which is elite, works of particular genius within the realms of high knowledge or art, or alternatively, reductively relegated only to the sphere of politics. Moreover, it should also suggest, in concert with the claims of Gaudium et Spes, that the Catholic Church is, by “virtue of her [universal] mission and nature . . . bound to no particular form of human culture, nor to any political, economic, or social system” (GS §42). That is to say, Catholic culture is a phenomenon which, at the very least, is non-monolithic, non-homogenous, and non-partisan. So far so good.
But now we turn down a long and lovely corridor and discover with a start that the shelves in the “Catholic Culture” library have somehow expanded to include books from non-Catholics and even non-Christians: there are the epics of Homer, all the dialogues of Plato, the poetry of Virgil, Cicero’s treatises on rhetoric, novels from the likes of C.S. Lewis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville; the shelves then begin to recede from our sight into the near infinite distance, and we get the sense that even more books are being added down the line. We might well remember here Flannery O’Connor’s quip in Mystery and Manners that “the Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.”
Theologians have suggested similar ideas in many different idioms. In the early Church, St. Justin Martyr spoke of the Logos spermatikos, or “seeds of the Word,” sown throughout pagan culture. St. John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University articulates with force that the Catholic Church’s “principle is one and the same throughout: not to prohibit truth of any kind” (178). Romano Guardini wrote provocatively in The Church and the Catholic that “genuine Catholicity, which is seriously convinced of the supernatural and dogmatic character of Catholicism, is the most open-minded and the most comprehensive attitude, or rather, the only open-minded comprehensive attitude, in existence” (114). Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar made a similar intervention in his own little book on catholicity, In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic, when he claimed that “being Catholic means embracing everything, leaving nothing out” (27-28). And, in his Theological Fragments, Henri de Lubac, SJ praises the French Catholic poet Paul Claudel’s exultant “Yes to everything: ‘yes’ to being, ‘yes’ to creation as to its Creator, ‘yes’ to the Church, who brings the Savior’s presence to us. ‘O complete Credo of things visible and invisible, I accept you with a Catholic heart!’ . . . ‘Yes’ to God, the God ‘ever greater’—that is, to the inexhaustible Being, always beyond all that we can think and say about him” (“Claudel as Theologian,” 436).
For many of these theologians, the structural generosity of catholicity to the other (which, let me be the first to admit, has certainly not always been borne out in either Christian history or contemporary practice), rests fundamentally upon theological claims about the nature of God. “The Church,” as Balthasar has argued, “can be Catholic only because God is Catholic first” (In the Fullness of Faith, 30). That is to say, God’s divine nature is characterized not only by the catholicity of divine plenitude or fullness but also by a capaciousness which is always slipping its bounds. Divine essence is a paradoxically ecstatic existence which is always, so to speak “beyond” itself; it joyfully exists in the Other: God the Father is in the Son (“he who has seen me,” Jesus said, “has seen the Father”); God the infinite Son exists in the finite flesh of humanity, simultaneously other and yet also the same; it is the very essence of divine nature to pour itself into the other, “carried outside of [God’s] self in the loving care [God] has for everything” (Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names IV, 712B). Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Divine Names praises God’s capacity—precisely insofar as God is Good—to abide in the other “by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself” (DN IV, 712B).
Of course, such faithful Catholic luminaries as de Lubac, Guardini, Balthasar, and Newman do not mean at all to suggest by these statements that this radically open disposition or posture toward everything everywhere all at once should ever degrade into what I have elsewhere called the “de-evolution of all these ‘yeses; into counterfeit generosities of eclecticism, relativism, or shallow pluralism.”[1] It is, rather, a discerning “yes,” a “yes” that transfigures, a “yes” that elevates, a “yes” to grace which builds upon nature.
The University of Notre Dame’s own mission statement likewise proclaims that its Catholic identity—which is rooted in a commitment first to the Incarnation of Jesus Christ as the Logos and source of all integrated wisdom—directly animates the affirmation that—while not everything can be affirmed without critique or transformation, “no genuine search for the truth in the human or cosmic order is alien to the life of faith.” Ten years after Notre Dame was founded in 1842, John Henry Newman delivered the lectures which were eventually published as The Idea of a University. Perhaps much to the surprise of his non-Catholic audience (who would have been more than a little suspicious of his establishing a Catholic university in Ireland at the time) he argued that the institution was not obliged merely to be a mouthpiece for Catholic views and Catholic authority, but rather a place wherein teachers and students could exercise that same freedom or liberality in pursuit of truth.
The push-and-pull negotiation between Christian and pagan culture is of course as old as Christianity itself. And, interestingly, the organic metaphor to describe it is just as old, if not older. The fourth-century Cappadocian Father Basil of Caesarea wrote an address to adolescents, probably in 363 or 364 AD, on the most discerning way for Christians to engage classical Greek literature. There he argues compellingly that Christians ought to be “conversant with poets, with historians, with orators, indeed with all . . . who may further our soul’s salvation” (II). While Christians must cultivate their ultimate desires for that which is beyond the immanent frame (“things which are beyond, and in preparation for the life eternal”), not mistaking natural desires like “pride of ancestry, nor bodily strength, nor beauty, nor greatness, nor the esteem of all men, nor kingly authority, nor, indeed, whatever of human affairs may be called great” for their final end, the wisdom gained from reading the classics can most certainly develop penultimate goods.
Basil appeals to a metaphor from botany or agriculture to illustrate this point, where engagement with “pagan” culture is like the formation of the leaves on a tree or plant which grow to protect and shelter the real “fruit” of salvation. While these outgrowths are certainly not interchangeable in terms of their absolute value, one can be the condition of the possibility for the other. And yet, Basil cautions, young people must be cautious not to take in the poison with the honey, but must read judiciously, taking on board the benefits but not, for instance, accepting any glorification of immorality, any deliberate deceptions of rhetoric, or the polytheism of the antique Greek epics. We have to read, Basil thinks, like bees sip their nectar: “for the bees do not visit all the flowers without discrimination, nor indeed do they seek to carry away entire those upon which they light, but rather, having taken so much as is adapted to their needs, they let the rest go. So we, if wise, shall take from heathen books whatever befits us and is allied to the truth, and shall pass over the rest” (IV).
So: if it is true that non-Catholics can indeed be counted, at least in a manner of speaking, among “Catholic” writers, and if it is true that it is in fact the particular dogmatic claims of Catholicism which oblige Catholics to engage generously with the whole of human culture, then we can see just what we are up against today, as we hapless Ahabs try to get a handle on the great white whale of “Catholic culture.” With all these possible iterations and complications of responses to the query, What Is Catholic Culture?—besides the obvious option of remaining forever within the indefinite, inexhaustible universe of the library of Babel wherein “my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite” (Borges, 38-9)—we must consider what is of the question’s core or objective essence. We must go to the root. I will thus proceed first by offering what at least I think are four of the most important general characteristics of Catholic culture, and then move towards a conclusion by identifying what I think is the fundamental principle that animates all the sundry expressions of Catholic culture.
As an ardent, even evangelical, backyard kitchen gardener (so fervent in my devotions that my husband has taken to calling these years, with apologies to Taylor Swift, my “feral dirt witch era”), I am inclined to return us to the deepest meaning the word “culture” had among the ancients. In the antique world, more than anything else, “culture” had to do with the tilling and the cultivation of the soil. The word’s etymology bears this out, as we trace the English “cult” of “culture” back to the German Kult, which is related to the Latin verb colere which means “to protect,” “to till,” “to farm,” “to cultivate,” and—something that will prove fundamental—also “to worship.”
That the word “culture” is related to the Latin word for “cultivation,” for “tending”—like a gardener cultivates soil by supplying it with necessary nutrients, amending it with natural fertilizers, or removing weeds—signifies that culture does not merely indicate high-level products or content which emerge from any given society, but is in fact the very living substratum from which these products emerge. I have learned over the years that with gardening, having good soil is everything. To cultivate it, to culture it, is patient, care-ful work (literally work that is full of care) that requires sustained, supple, devoted attention. Virgil’s Georgics, written in 29 BC, has to do almost entirely with rural matters, with the natural culture of the earth. The genre of the georgic is concerned both with agricultural activities (animal husbandry, farming, and so on) as well as the theatre of the material conditions in which these activities take place: the soil, air, water, and land. Virgil waxes lyrical—as I am also wont to do—over composting and crop rotation, over first spring harvests and the somber, holy putting-to-sleep of the garden beds in late fall when they are raked and covered with decaying leaves or straw. Listen to Virgil, as he speaks resoundingly across more than 2000 years:
Likewise alternate years let your cut fields lie fallow,
and the idle ground harden with neglect:
or sow yellow corn, under another star, where you
first harvested beans rich in their quivering pods,
or a crop of slender vetch, and the fragile stalks
and rattling stems of bitter lupin. For example
a harvest of flax exhausts the ground, oats exhaust it,
and poppies exhaust it, filled with Lethean sleep:
but by rotation, the labor prospers: don’t be ashamed
to saturate the arid soil with rich dung,
and scatter charred ashes over the weary fields.
So with changes of crop the land can rest,
And then the untilled earth is not ungrateful.
There is much wisdom here, and not just of the agrarian variety. What fundamental principles or characteristics of Catholic culture might we begin to intuit, so to speak, from the ground up, that is, from the soil itself?
The first principle, perhaps, is the sacramental valuation of embodiment and the material. To paraphrase what Flannery O’Connor wrote about the nature of fiction writing in Mystery and Manners, Catholic culture is “about everything human, and we are made out of dust.” It thus will not (or at least ought not) scorn the body. In keeping with the resolutely incarnational commitment at the very center of Christianity—that is, that the Son or Logos, as the second person of the Trinity, united divine nature with human nature and became genuinely enfleshed and embodied as the human being Jesus Christ, becoming like us in all things save sin—Catholic culture stipulates the intrinsic value of matter and materiality. Part and parcel with the affirmation of materiality is the assumption that nature is inherently good or at least, when transfigured by grace, has an innate capacity to become good. According to a sacramental view, visible, material reality expresses and can even bring to presence invisible and spiritual reality. This commitment can also translate into Catholic art and literature which affirms not only the physical or material as such but also celebrates sensuality and immanence. Some examples might include Michelangelo’s depiction of beautifully chiseled, muscular human figures (as in his David sculpture or the figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling), Bernini’s erotic “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” sculpture in Santa Maria della Victoria in Rome, Evelyn Waugh’s decadent irony in Brideshead Revisited, Vivaldi’s exuberantly baroque music, even the glorious heterogeneity and ephemerality of devotional Catholic kitsch.[2]
A second principle we can draw from the connections between “culture” and agricultural “cultivation” is that good soil is enormously hospitable: it has the capacity to take in and transform organic matter, even things which otherwise would have been discarded—banana peels, wilted kale, the ends of green beans, coffee grounds and their filters, eggshells, apple cores—and by some miracle transfigures them entirely into a rich, nutrient-dense growing medium which is full of life and potency. Truthfully, the process of composting has never ceased to amaze me: how can it be that from the decay of all these heterogenous bits and bobs proceeds a crumbly, fine, and uniformly colored finished compost?
Such a phenomenon may be somewhat analogous to the operation of Catholic culture, which—at least in the best versions of itself—dialogues with and builds upon non-Catholic, non-Christian, and non-theological sources. As Remi Brague argued in a 2017 article “From What Is Left Over,” which reflects upon Pope Benedict XVI’s address to European intelligentsia on the roots of Western culture, the phenomenon of Christian culture is particularly strange because, paradoxically, it is “not made up of Christian elements . . . Hailing from both Athens and Jerusalem,” Brague wrote, “a Christian culture would not seem to be ‘Christian’ at all, but instead an amalgam, a by-product of the meeting of Athens and Jerusalem.” Christianity emerged within the philosophical and cultural foundations of Judaism and the Greco-Roman world and simply adopted what was to hand in the surrounding cultures: Logos from the Stoics, ousia from the ancient Greeks, Passover and the feast of the unleavened bread from Judaism, and so on and so forth (although of course the situation of Christian and Judaism is different given the great debts, close kinship, and shared patrimony). While Christianity came to prominence within Greek and Roman cultures, “the same Christian framework,” Brague argues, “could very well be filled with other content. Later on in Christian history, Germanic and Slavic mores, Celtic legends, and other materials were included.” The paradoxical power of Christian or Catholic culture is that it can transfigure so much of what it contacts, and this by virtue of its living members who are continuously converted, given over to a life of faith and love.
Closely connected is the third principle that good soil is enormously diverse. A single teaspoon of it can have up to 10,000 different species invisibly dwelling within it: microbes, spiders, earthworms, bacteria, nematodes, centipedes, fungi, and all the rest. As many farmers and prominent figures in agrarian movements already know well, it is precisely agricultural monoculture that depletes the necessary balance of these microorganisms and nutrients, stripping the soil of its capacity to nourish. In our extrapolations from agri-culture to Catholic culture, the intrinsic value of diversity can be seen not only in the goodness of the global Church on its global stage, but also a bit more narrowly within the context of Catholic educational institutions like our own. Institutions which historically have upheld a commitment to the principles of Catholic culture should be more rather than less likely to be rigorous and excellent according to the terms and standards of each discipline, more rather than less likely to respect proper methodological borders and boundaries within the disciplines, and more rather than less likely to affirm the intrinsic goodness of these disciplines for their own sake without instrumentalizing them. Engineers, mathematicians, historians, artists, scientists, sociologists, and poets retain the integrity of their respective disciplines even as the truths in each field mutually condition one another as part of an integrated whole.
Finally, because (and not in spite of) this radical diversity, good soil is utterly teeming with life. It is literally a culture of life. And it’s not simply that when a sterile patch of backyard grass gets cultivated into a vegetable or flower garden it invites the bees, hummingbirds, goldfinches, and butterflies into our mini ecosystems, although it certainly does that. As we have already seen, the soil itself is not inert or dead matter, but rather (as Sir Albert Howard’s lectures in The Soil and Health remind us) populated by “millions and millions of minute existences, quite invisible to our eyes . . . who pursue their own lives. They come into being, grow, work, and die. . . . It is this life which is continually being passed into the plant” (22-23). Healthy soil ecosystems which are able to sustain life—to grow food or flower—are built upon complex matrices of balanced relation and constantly adapting relations of mutual dependence. So too it is with Catholic culture more broadly, rooted as it is in a profound commitment to the intrinsic human dignity of all persons, born and unborn, who are always already embedded within relations of dependence and care, up to and including the dependence of the dead upon the prayers of the living. Catholic culture privileges community, social justice, the common good, subsidiarity, the preferential option for the poor, and the protection of life from conception to natural death.
While these four principles may express or embody features of Catholic culture to varying degrees, we must still discuss the one needful thing: the fundamental and objective force that comprises the soul of Catholic culture, that which provides the form of the body, that which provides integrity and intelligibility to the diversity and multiplicity of its many manifestations. What I have in mind here is a decisively Catholic vision of the final end or goods of human nature. All cultures, of course, presuppose an anthropology, even if only implicitly. Whether or not these fundamental questions get articulated privately or voiced out loud, they are still implicated in the development of any culture: what is the nature of human being? What are the proximate goods toward which the human being is oriented? What is the human being’s true end, purpose, or perfection, that is, her ultimate good? What, in her most intimate heart of hearts, does she want or desire? Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes defines culture in terms of perfections; that is, as “everything whereby [the human being] develops and perfects his [or her] many bodily and spiritual qualities” (§53).
The notion of perfection provokes an ultimate answer to the question of what’s good—a question which herewith invites the long-promised reflection upon the intimate relationship between ethics and culture. Here we can take some guidance from Thomas Aquinas. Commentators have noted that for Thomas, “the cause of culture is human nature, tending toward goods that perfect it,” thus, the very anima or soul of culture is none other than human perfection, that is, our God-given grace and capacity to be perfected in our desire for the Good. A Catholic theological anthropology, especially as articulated by the Angelic Doctor, assumes both the natural end of human happiness and the supernatural end of her beatitude, while union with God—who is, metaphysically speaking, Goodness itself and thus the ultimate object of all desire—is her highest good.
Thus the question of ethics, if it is to be as abundant and fertile and complex as it must be, cannot be reductively or narrowly contracted into philosophical puzzles, or do’s and don’ts, or rules to be followed, but must rather be closely intertwined with those human questions at the root and fundament of culture itself. In Veritatis Splendor John Paul II offers an interpretive gloss on the question that the rich young ruler poses to Jesus in the Gospel (“what must I do to inherit eternal life?”), suggesting that what animates the question is not a mere legalism but is in fact a question about “the full meaning of life.” He goes on to say that
This is in fact the aspiration at the heart of every human decision and action, the quiet searching and interior prompting which sets freedom in motion. This question is ultimately an appeal to the absolute Good which attracts us and beckons us; it is the echo of a call from God who is the origin and goal of [human] life . . . Only God can answer the question about what is good, because he is the Good itself. To ask about the good, in fact, ultimately means to turn towards God, the fullness of goodness (§7, §9).
When Gaudium et Spes takes up the question of “the proper development of culture” in Chapter II, the council fathers assert that human beings can come “to a true and full humanity only through culture, that is through the cultivation of the goods and values of nature” (GS §53). These cultural goods, however, are to “be subordinated to the integral perfection of the human person, to the good of the community and of the whole society. Therefore it is necessary to develop the human faculties in such a way that there results a growth of the faculty of admiration, of intuition, of contemplation, of making personal judgment, of developing a religious, moral and social sense” (GS §59). These insights (especially those of cultivating contemplative, receptive postures of being in the world) could not be more crucial to developing our understanding of the ultimate foundation of Catholic culture.
If it is in fact human perfection which animates Catholic culture, and if the culmination of human perfection is union with the God who is Goodness itself, it should come as no surprise that the etymology of the Latin root colere which develops alongside the more explicitly agricultural valences we have already discussed is in fact, “to worship.” Readers of Josef Piper’s 1948 essay Leisure: the Basis of Culture will easily recognize this argument. (I will admit to no small amount of satisfaction that Pieper’s translator, when introducing the etymological connections, noted that “the repetitive, persistent, and loving care of the farmer (cf. agriculture) is not clearly enough indicated in the English ‘worship’”) (Leisure, 51n1). Pieper’s essay draws out compellingly the resonances between the word “culture” and the word “cultus” or “cult,” which originally signified a sacred space (and time) carved out from the ordinary saecula. Human beings, before they are anything else, are the ones who worship, or at least those who are structurally and existentially oriented to worship. It is this constitutive orientation of human beings towards worship—which takes place in festivity, feast, leisure, celebration—which is the condition of the possibility for culture to exist.
The modern world has adopted a culture of what Pieper damningly calls “total work,” where everything, even our breaks and vacations, are commodified and oriented toward doing more work. A recovery of genuine leisure, however, invites conscious withdrawal from such a deadening way of being and the cultivation of an interior disposition (“a condition of the soul”) characterized by a “stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality . . . the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion—in the real” (Pieper, Leisure, 31). While the ancient affinity between “culture” and “cultivation”—that is, specifically with tilling or farming—might have suggested that the phenomenon of culture is primarily an active enterprise produced solely from the work of human hands, Pieper’s articulation of culture as “worship” requires rather that human beings adopt a posture of receptivity rather than activity, something akin to the open, attentive, restful disposition of parishioners at eucharistic adoration. The leisure which is the basis of culture is not exemplified, Pieper suggests, by
The one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go. . . . The surge of new life that flows out to us when we give ourselves to the contemplation of a blossoming rose, a sleeping child, or of a divine mystery—is this not like the surge of life that comes from a deep, dreamless sleep? And as it is written in the Book of Job: “God gives us songs in the middle of the night” (Pieper, Leisure, 32).
It is gift. It is letting oneself receive a gift.
Let’s return now to Pope Benedict XVI’s presentation to the European elites on the roots of Western culture which made such an impression on Remi Brague, in which the pope utterly mystified his audience by talking mostly about the quiet prayer lives of medieval monks. But it was in fact these quiet monks, just going about their ordinary daily business in the graceful fecundity of voluntary obedience, who ended up preserving the whole of Western culture. As they copied, they preserved classical Latin and its related texts (most of which, of course, were non-Christian figures like Virgil, Ovid, and Lucretius!) not because they were intending to build a culture or preserve monuments to their own creativity and ingenuity or the creativity and ingenuity of their pagan predecessors. “Nevertheless,” as Brague argues, by their simple acceptance and cultivation of fundamentally Christian principles, like the value and intrinsic goodness of labor and a “vision of the world as created by a good God,” “they splendidly achieved what they didn’t intend.”
If we still think that the fundaments of Catholic culture have to do primarily with doing or knowing or making, the pope sets us straight as he recalls the day-to-day activities of most of Western monasticism: prayer, singing, work, obedience. Christian culture is thus not marked with the pace of frenetic making or content creation but rather is a culture of being in which we first receive the good gifts of our Creator and respond to them—and to the Good itself!—in the mode of joyful praise. As Ratzinger wrote,
The monks have to pray and sing in a manner commensurate with the grandeur of the word handed down to them, with its claim on true beauty. This intrinsic requirement of speaking with God and singing of him with words he himself has given, is what gave rise to the great tradition of Western music. It was not a form of private “creativity,” in which the individual leaves a memorial to himself and makes self-representation his essential criterion. Rather it is about vigilantly recognizing with the “ears of the heart” the inner laws of the music of creation, the archetypes of music that the Creator built into his world and into men, and thus discovering music that is worthy of God, and at the same time truly worthy of man, music whose worthiness resounds in purity . . . What gave Europe’s culture its foundation—the search for God and the readiness to listen to him—remains today the basis of any genuine culture.
Catholic culture, then, is ultimately a marvelously capacious way of being, a limitless capacity to engage everything that comes our way in all its giftedness and gratuity and return it to its Creator in the mode of worship and of praise. This receptivity to God as the Good at the heart of Catholic culture, or, in another idiom, the fundamental “leisure” which is the basis of culture, is therefore not in the first instance active but receptive, not primary but secondary. It is in an iterative, recursive, answering disposition of reception, response, return, even echo. The leaden echo of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” despairs over how human beings could possibly render the fragility and ephemerality of beautiful things stable, despairs over how to keep beauty from “vanishing away.” But the golden echo says, there is one way:
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
To give beauty back—to “find something we see good, glorious, wonderful . . . to love something lovable” (Pieper, Faith-Hope-Love, 192)—draws human beings into the generous giftedness of life in God; it re-enacts and re-performs the originary giftedness of all that exists in the created order and joins human creativity and affirmation with the divine creativity and affirmation of God, whose sustaining care elevates even the smallest and most ordinary thing. Moreover “leisure lives,” Pieper writes in Leisure, the Basis of Culture, “on affirmation,” (33) that is, on “the cheerful affirmation by [the human being] of his [or her] own existence, of the world as a whole, and of God—of Love, that is . . .” (29).
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good (Gen 1:31).
As Pieper is also often wont to say, the fundamental affirmation of real love is to say to the other: “It’s good that you are here; it’s wonderful that you exist”! (Faith-Hope-Love, 191). Is this fundamental affirmation not at the very root of Catholic culture: to praise the praiseworthy things, to love the lovable things, to elevate the good things of nature, art, literature, education, and ordinary life for the intrinsic goodness they have merely in virtue of their existence, to say with joyful sincerity to the aged, the sick, the fragile, the unborn, the disenfranchised, the very poor and the very weak: “It’s good that you are here; it’s wonderful that you exist”!
And would not such a vision of Catholic culture—one animated fundamentally by the return of goods to the divine Good, and thus always already reciprocal, enmeshed in relations of profound and profoundly loving dependence—likewise altogether reconfigure ethics, with which culture is so very deeply intertwined? Pieper is fond of quoting Thomas Aquinas’s dictum that “the essence of virtue consists more in the Good than in the Difficult” (Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 123, a. 12, ad 2). That is to say, the highest expression of an ethical act is not simply a matter of willpower, doing the hard thing, or the manifold exertions of work or effort (cf. Pieper, Leisure, 19), but rather a joyful fulfilment of positive desire for the Good. It is not the joylessness of mere duty, but something closer to the mode of desire, happiness, pleasure, and liberality, which is what we actually mean by Christian obedience. Thus, an ethics of culture is at the same time an ethics of good desiring. Though our final end is both a given and a gift, to receive that gift—or any good gift—with gratitude is nothing other than to habituate our desires to the generous, self-diffusive Good in whom we live and move and have our being.
EDITORIAL NOTE: The topic of this year’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture Fall Conference will be Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination. The video recording of this inaugural lecture can be viewed on YouTube here.