Over the 50 or so years since the 1960s, there has been much scholarly analysis, commentary, criticism about Vatican II. There has never been as keen reporting on what happened as John O'Malley's most recent book: What Happened at Vatican II, published by Belknap Press of Harvard University on September 30, 2008.
An historian of tremendous renown, now teaching at Georgetown University, he used to say that his specialty was the 16th century: The Council of Trent, 1563; the founding of the Society of Jesus, 1540, immortalized in his The First Jesuits, 1993. And yet, in his many years as a professor at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, located right in the heart of Harvard University in Cambridge, he taught "a standard course,' Two Great Councils: Trent and Vatican II.' "
In the Preface to What Happened at Vatican II, he writes:
Meanwhile, my interest in styles of discourse helped me understand the two councils in a new way, to the point that my book Four Cultures of the West was for me a vestibule leading into What Happened at Vatican II.
The reading assignment, then, is that vestibule. Here are my thoughts about it. I'll try to do a review on What Happened at Vatican II when I finish reading it.
THE VADEMECUM
January 10. 2005
A Review of John W. O'Malley, SJ, Four Cultures of the West, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 261.
____________________________________________________________________
First Impressions
"This is a gem of a book." That's what I said, when I first read it, but on the rereads for these comments, it has become a Vademecum. It is far more important that it be with me as a companion, than something I look at for pleasure.
This book is not about one man's selection of four cultures from those available. It is an invitation to all of us from John W. O'Malley, SJ, Distinguished Professor of Church History at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, who listened to the words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux in a homily to his monks, delivered just about 900 or so years ago. "Today the text we are to study is the book of our own experience." Father O'Malley, gave heed, opened the book of his own mind, looked in there for his own experiences, and then sat down to tell us what he saw. He wrote this Vademecum with a purpose, which will be disclosed at the very end of this review.
Picture ourselves for what we are, a product of western civilization: Ancient Greece and Rome, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Early Modern and now the Most Modern of Eras. We are asked to stroke with a broad brush in painting a sketch of the great groups or types prominent in the events which occurred throughout all those ages, the ones who shaped their own times and gave meaning to them in such a way that they also give us an understanding of what it was like then, and especially who we are and what we are about now. Not what we are told by others, but what we see in the experiences in the open books of our own minds. Pick just four.
We go straight to the Conquerors, don't we? Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Crusader Knights, The Wars of the Roses and the other flowers, or those named by years of Thirty or a Hundred, maybe Dwight Eisenhower or Erwin Rommel, out of the most recent century. Then, to balance ferocity with leisure, we look at the Writers: Homer, Virgil, Augustine, Shakespeare, Hemenway. Warming up, we think of architecture, but we aren't familiar with any names, other than the modern ones. And, then, there are the athletes, those guys in the first Marathon and Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. We jump centuries, sometimes whole millennia, in our own minds, don't we? And by this time we know it's all kind of streaked, awkward. We're at play building a house of cards which will all fall down and go boom. We think -- Well O'Malley's a pro, he's been at this stuff for over 50 years, might as well read The Vademecum.
And we are correct. When he looked, he saw "four phenomena in the history of the West" and said, "I call them cultures." It takes the whole book to define that word "cultures," so that they become ours, but to borrow one of his helpful analogies, try "gulf streams." He sees them as gulf streams in the ocean of human history, side by side, overlapping, intertwining, moving in and out so much so that out of memory comes that trenchant phrase of Thomas Lambert, Roscoe Pound Scholar of the Law, in a talk in New Hampshire in 1961, "The Common Law is not a stagnant pond, it is a flowing stream." There is nothing stagnant in Father O'Malleys four cultures. They are vibrant. They flow as in a dance down the ages, coursing this way and that through time. He also describes the four cultures as "lenses" through which we can see and understand.
The Four Cultures
Each of us can be at home in at least one of the four, often in more.
- Culture One is Prophecy: Its people are Jeremiah, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King.
- Culture Two is Academic: Aristotle, Aquinas, The Modern University itself.
- Culture Three is Humanistic: Cicero, Erasmus, Eleanor Roosevelt.
- Culture Four is Art and Performance: Phidias, Michelangelo, Balanchine.
Ponder them. See how Western minds thought and acted, as they lived the experiences of their times, from way back then, up to the now. Let history tell us, through these four cultures, who we are today, whence we came, and, of the utmost import, where we are now and, perhaps, will be tomorrow.
The Introduction,
Athens and Jerusalem
A professor's syllabus, or his welcome in the first class, where he lays out the roadmap of the course, and, if we are paying attention, leaves a tip or two, those user-friendly tools with which we will master the course and make it our own. O'Malley offers short sketches of each of the four cultures, making it clear that they are not the four cultures, just as, in his best analogy, four gulf streams are not the ocean.
Skipping The Introduction or being in a hurry to get through it to the important parts means that we won't heed Bernard of Clairvaux either. Our good and genial professor of the history of Christianity polishes these four cultures as lenses, to illuminate the larger history of the West so brilliantly, that we see ourselves, today, as we are. No other book can make that claim, nor produce that result.
This should be a short review, because there is no need to call attention to the other four chapters of the book, The Four Cultures themselves, not even to prove this reviewer read the entire book. Some brief references, though, may firm up the motivation we need to follow Augustine's Tolle, lege! – Pick it up and read!
Prophetic Culture
O'Malley is talking about those who stand and speak truth to power, crusaders, fundamentalists, martyrs, reformers. They speak in imperatives, often with loud voices, issue manifestos, campaign against evils, think in dichotomies and act through polarization. Who are they? Ezekiel, Thomas More, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Daniel Berrigan. There was also Pope Gregory VII, who did more to change the direction of civilization during the 11th century than any other, and Martin Luther, the very father of our own era, which is about to repeat his.
Academic and Professional Culture
Far broader than first glance displays. Plato and Aristotle are legendaries, but the single most important fact is that this culture produced the great universities of the world in the dim light of the Middle Ages, all through Europe, long, long before we here knew of Harvard, Georgetown, Stanford or the ones appearing at this time of year almost daily in our sports pages: USC, Oklahoma, Auburn, Florida. Close our eyes for a moment and try to imagine our world without them, without Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Freud, Einstein, Feynman, O'Malley.
Humanistic Culture
Does not carry with it the pejorative connotations some have associated with "Humanism" or "Secular Humanism." It is the famous saying of Terrence, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. – I am a human being. Noting human is foreign to me." It, too, is larger than at first sight. It covers philosophy, poetry, drama, history, literature, the whole realm of paideia in education and the art of leisure. Cicero sits beside Eleanor Roosevelt, who is as comfortable with the search for human rights in Dante, Shakespeare and Petrarch, as she was as chair of the committee which produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. One of the delights of this Vademecum are those names O'Malley considers as role models and as friends. Ever hear of Pier Paolo Vergerio, Vittorino da Feltre? We will. And there are many more. Part of the great fun in reading Four Cultures is spotting a familiar name and watching which culture suits best, in O'Malley's opinion. We may not agree with the professor, for that is our experience in the open book of our mind.
Art and Performance Culture
The most fascinating. We may feel that we would never have thought of this one, as we might have of Prophets or Scholars. What is more fascinating is O'Malley's stress on the performing artists, whence liturgy, ceremony, inaugurations, funerals, super bowls. The need of society to express itself, so often overlooked, but not by the young in their love for their music and the concerts. The first three cultures are in words; this one is in performance, as art. Think on our experiences with the swift-moving grace of ice hockey; the power of a silent march for peace; the muffled drums beating out the gait of the riderless horse in a President's funeral of State; walking the Viet Nam Memorial on the rolling green in Washington, sitting quietly and aching with pride as a daughter graciously receives her diploma and tosses her tassel to the other side, then looks for us, with a wave and that smile. As I tried this before, I'll do it again: Imagine life without ceremony, without the performing arts.
A Companion -- With a Gift
There are other parts, important parts, to the book. No book is a whole without them. The Index is, like the book, a gem. The Notes are just enough. It is in the Further Reading that Fr. O'Malley's restraint and his own grace as a seasoned professor who knows readers as well as students, glow as they did all through the book: it is merely six pages and, therefore, contains only the essential works we need should we wish to go father on the journey begun in this book. This is noteworthy, compared to the book that "originated as the D'Arcy Lectures he gave in 1993 at Campion Hall, Oxford, where the Bibliography and Notes were 64 pages long, while the text itself was a mere 142.
The people in that Oxford audience were his colleagues. The topic, while seemingly simple, involved challenging the greatest historians of the Reformation. He left no doubt of his scholarship or of his mastery of his expertise in the 16th century. That book, Trent And All That, is his contribution to renaming the Catholic Church's response to the one named "The Protestant Reformation" from variations of a Catholic Reformation to "Early Modern Catholicism." He saw that name through the lenses of the Four Cultures, and it is t he perfect one. Father O'Malley also wrote: The First Jesuits and Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II.
A hint. We may bedevil ourselves with which culture we are in or from. The short answer could be: One or more. Never less than one. Remember the gulf streams and know that we are never stuck in one. If we can't swim, we can certainly drift and let the currents carry us. O'Malley himself thinks he is in and out of at least three of the four. Our call. After we finish the book. And after we open the book of our own mind and look therein.
There's more. Obviously.
Tolle. Lege.
Epilogue: The Book of Our Experience,
The last section of the book offers this gift.
I hope that the book will spark reflection along these and many other lines. The epideictic genre, I repeat, is a genre of invitation. As an exercise in that genre the book invites you to reflect further and to make application to your own milieu --- personal, political, cultural. It has provided you with four lenses. Now it invites to put them on and do what Bernard of Clairvaux invited his monks to do: Open the book of your experience. Look at what you find there.
+++++
No comments:
Post a Comment