(3) O'Malley also credits Pope Pius XII for "two decrees, in 1951 and 1955, in which he completely reorganized the liturgies for the last three days of Holy Week to bring them in line with liturgists' recommendations" thereby preparing the way for Vatican II's liturgical reforms (page 49).
(4) More broadly, O'Malley says, "In the mid-twentieth century, return to the sources, now explicitly under the neologism ressourcement, drove much of the theological ferment in France that played such a major role in Vatican II. At the council virtually all the participants accepted the validity of the return-to-the-sources principle. Disputes over it arose only when it seemed to be applied too radically. Those who balked at such application had a point because ressourcement had more potent implications than development. While development implies further movement along a given path, ressourcement says that we are no longer going to move along Path X. We are going back to a fork in the road and will now move along a better and different path" (page 54-55).
As O'Malley explains the "more potent implications," in theory, of ressourcement versus development, he, in effect, is suggesting that the individual council could interpret church tradition in a way somewhat similar in spirit to the way in which the poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) describes the individual poet interpreting literary tradition in his 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
Now, in his new 2019 book (pages 37, 43, 45, and 50), O'Malley accentuates the English historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood's terminology in his posthumously published book The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946, pages 42-45) -- terminology about so-called "substantialism" in the historical thinking of ancient Greco-Roman historians such as Livy. (For the record, Collingwood [1889-1943] was not a Roman Catholic, but an Anglican all his life.)
O'Malley says, "Livy, for instance, took for granted that Rome [the so-called 'eternal city'] was an unchanging substance that sailed through the sea of the centuries without being affected by it. Christian thinkers inherited this tradition and without examining it applied it to the church" (page 37). Like Rome, both Athens and Jerusalem are other famous ancient cities evoked in Western literature. St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) famously evokes The City of God. Later, John Winthrop (1588-1649) coined the famous expression about "a city on a hill." Those real and imagined cities would lend themselves to the illusion of "substantialism."
Now, Collingwood says, "If its humanism, however weak, is the chief merit of Greco-Roman historiography, its chief defect was substantialism. By this I mean that it is constructed on the basis of a metaphysical system whose chief category is the category of substance. Substance does not mean matter or physical substance; indeed, many Greek metaphysicians thought no substance could be material. For Plato, it would seem, substances are immaterial though not mental; they are objective forms. For Aristotle, in the last resort, the only ultimately real substance is mind. Now a substantialistic metaphysics implies a theory of knowledge according to which only what is changing is knowable. But what is unchanging is not historical. What is historical is the transitory event. The substance to which an event happens, or from whose nature it proceeds, is nothing to the historian. Hence the attempt to think historically and the attempt to think in terms of substance were incompatible" (1946, page 42).
As O'Malley explains it, "substantialism" is fundamentally ahistorical and unchanging in a word, static like Plato's Ideas. What Collingwood and O'Malley describe as "substantialism" can be aligned, on the one hand, with what Lonergan characterizes as the classicist worldview (or classicism, for short), but not with what he means by historical-mindedness, and, on the other hand, with what Ong means by closed-systems thought.
Coincidentally, and evidently independently of Collingwood, Ong reports something in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (pages 53-91), mentioned above, that strikes me as related to the pattern of "substantialism" that Collingwood describes in ancient Greco-Roman historians. Twentieth-century scholars in the history of the formal study of logic discovered that certain medieval logicians had made notable advances over Aristotle's works in logic. But the medieval logicians had such a strong sense that they were part of the Aristotelian tradition of logic that they apparently failed to explicitly credit the advances that they were making to themselves instead, crediting their own advances to Aristotle that's how strong their sense of the Aristotelian tradition was.
Now, Aristotelian logic is clearly a byproduct of ancient Greek literacy and literate modes of thought, according to Ong's later books such as his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, and his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, mentioned above, in which he aligns literacy and literate modes of thought with closed-systems thought (esp. pages 305-341). What Collingwood characterizes as "substantialism" in ancient Greco-Roman historians represents a certain kind of closed-systems thought, as does the "substantialism" O'Malley discusses in church history.
Now, because O'Malley in his new 2019 book works with Collingwood's terminology about "substantialism" in the Roman Catholic tradition of thought about the church, I want to mention here Lonergan's discussion of the human substance in the Roman Catholic tradition of thought in his essay "Existenz and Aggiornamento," mentioned above. Lonergan says that a distinction should be made about the human person between substance and subject (page 241). Using generic masculine terms commonly used in the 1960s, he says, "Of human substance it is true that human nature is always the same; a man is a man whether he is awake or asleep, young or old, sane or crazy, sober or drunk, a genius or a moron, a saint or a sinner. From the viewpoint of substance, those differences are merely accidental. But they are not accidental to the subject, for the subject is not an abstraction; he is a concrete reality, all of him, a being in the luminousness of being" (page 241).
But Lonergan also says, "There is a critical point in the increasing autonomy of the subject. It is reached when the subject finds out for himself that it is up to himself to decide what he is to make of himself" (page 242).
Now, Ong discusses decision-making and discernment of spirits in Jesuit spirituality in his article "'A.M.D.G.' [Abbreviation of the Latin "Ad majorem Dei gloriam," "For the greater glory of God"]: Dedication or Directive?" in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal Review for Religious, volume 11, number 5 (September 15, 1952): pages 257-264; and reprinted in Review for Religious, volume 50, number 1 (1991): pages 35-42; also reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995, pages 1-8). Also see Ong's 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (pages 78-81 and 87), mentioned above.
Overall, the reforms of Vatican II that O'Malley discusses contributed to renewed interest among American Catholics in spirituality, including new interest among lay American Catholics in Jesuit spirituality which could be good news for their developing what Lonergan refers to as "the being of the subject."
Unfortunately, after Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church experienced the widespread priest-sex-abuse and cover-up scandal. In light of the roles played by bishops in that ongoing scandal, the example that Ong reports of medieval logicians who thought of themselves as working within the Aristotelian tradition of logic should prompt us to reflect further on Roman Catholic bishops who venerate church tradition and its seeming "substantialism." In any event, it strikes me that as long as church authorities use the singular term "church" and the related singular term "tradition," those abstract terms may tend to take on a kind of "substantialism." But do certain other singular abstract terms that evoke a sense of identity in people also tend to take on a kind of "substantialism" for those people?
For further reading about Ong's life and work, see my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, 2nd ed. (New York: Hampton Press, 2015).
(Article changed on August 25, 2019 at 11:18)
(Article changed on August 25, 2019 at 14:33)
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