Slow-motion conversion
It is by living and dying that one becomes a theologian, Martin Luther said. With that comment in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939 and asked theologians to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, questions and hopes as people of faith and to consider how their work and life have been intertwined. This article is the third in the series.
On July 11, 1991, the Feast of St. Benedict, I was baptized and received as a Catholic in the chapel of the twin Benedictine communities of St. Mary’s Monastery and St. Scholastica Priory in Petersham, Massachusetts. Any views I’ve acquired since then pale in significance, washed out in the light of the gospel and creed I accepted on that day. Yet a gradual change began then, and continues to the present, as I assimilate the effects of baptism and confirmation. No doubt there are corners of my mind that still haven’t heard the news.
Mine was a slow-motion, book-driven conversion. For many years I ran on two tracks. Along one track, I inched toward the church. I longed to press forward, forgetting what lies behind, as St. Paul writes (Philippians 3:13–14, a key text for Augustine’s Confessions and thereafter for countless narratives of Christian conversion), but nonetheless I held back, searching and temporizing, out of respect for my Jewish heritage. Since my upbringing had been wholly secular, whatever I knew of Judaism and Christianity came to me mainly through reading. The chief influences were Augustine, Anselm and the monastic theologians of the 12th century, in whose writings I caught sight of a country I longed to inhabit but—I know this will seem strange—didn’t know where to find.
I met Christ in my studies, but it took much longer to get to know the church. I found in the works of Marie-Dominique Chenu, Étienne Gilson, Jean Daniélou, Emile Mersch, and especially in Henri de Lubac’s four-volume Exégèse médiévale, a Baedeker to this distant native land. But I had no inkling of the role that some of these thinkers had played as figures in the ressourcement movement that informed the Second Vatican Council. I knew nothing of the supposedly arid neo-scholasticism that was being overthrown—and is now being rehabilitated. I had barely heard of Rahner and Lonergan. I read Karl Barth enthusiastically but naively, as if he were a second Kierkegaard, and Hans Urs von Balthasar as a transmitter of patristic wisdom. I held a key in my hand, and it almost rusted there.
On the other track, I was a student of world religions, trained in the latest theoretical approaches—a devoted reader of Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Carl Jung, a student of classical Indian Buddhism, interested in mythology, iconography, philosophical yoga, folklore and visual culture, and at the same time a product of a graduate theology program that involved grappling with Enlightenment and modernist thinkers. Studying world religions while reading medieval Cistercians and 19th-century Romantics gave me a taste for symbol and sacrament, but, unchurched as I was, I could not fully grasp the gulf between religion as object of study and the church as supernatural reality.
Funny things happened whenever these two tracks crossed.
In my first book, Otherworld Journeys (1987), I made a comparative study of medieval and modern accounts of near-death experience, highlighting the cultural factors that shape visionary experience. As a historical and comparative exploration, the book still seems sound. But there are a few pages in which I venture into theology and go off the rails:
Theology . . . is a discipline of critical reflection on religious experience and religious language. As such, no matter how objective or systematic it becomes, it cannot escape the fundamental limitations that apply to religious discourse in general.
. . . although theology involves analytic thought, its fundamental material is symbol. Its task is to assess the health of our symbols; for when one judges a symbol, one cannot say whether it is true or false, but only whether it is vital or weak. When a contemporary theologian announces, for example, that God is dead or that God is not only Father but also Mother, he or she is not describing the facts per se, but is evaluating the potency of our culture’s images for God—their capacity to evoke a sense of relationship to the transcendent. . . .
To say that theology is a diagnostic discipline is also to say that its method is pragmatic. . . . We must judge those images and ideas valid that serve a remedial function, healing the intellect and the will. In this sense, all theology is pastoral theology, for its proper task is not to describe the truth but to promote and assist the quest for truth.
You see, I was trying to acknowledge all the factors—medical, psychological and sociological—that contribute to mystical and visionary experience, while removing the reductionist sting from such explanations. I was trying to defend the right of individuals to believe in their own experiences, without resorting to protective strategies. I was trying to clear away the obstacles to wholehearted religious belief and practice, while admitting that religious belief and practice are culturally shaped. I thought William James could help me with this project.
But what a jumble of half-baked epistemological ideas crowd the above paragraphs! Despite what I said, I must not have believed it possible for theology to be truly objective or systematic. Therefore I cobbled together a Barthian sense of the unfitness of the human instrument, a Romantic value for imagination, a mystical apophaticism, a commonsense pragmatism and a false deference toward passing fashions (for, to be honest, I never took seriously the suggestion that God should be described as Father/Mother, let alone the idea that God is dead). The principle of divine transcendence I invoke is unobjectionable in the right context—I might simply be echoing Augustine’s si comprehendis non est deus (if you understand him, he is not God)—but the all-important countervailing principle of revelation is occluded.
Perhaps this is understandable, for I was writing as an uninitiate, whose relation to theology was idiosyncratic and bookish. Though by this point I had read searchingly in the spiritual writers of the 11th and 12th centuries, under the tutelage of Caroline Bynum and Arthur McGill, my education as a graduate student in theology had been largely taken up with Kant, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Husserl and James. I still love these thinkers for their genius and good will, and feel immense gratitude to Richard R. Niebuhr and the other generous teachers who introduced me to them. Yet I lacked the means to systematize these diverse perspectives. I was by turns a Christian Platonist, a neo-Romantic and a historicist interpreter of the religious imagination. And all the time, the integrating vision I needed lay hidden in the catechism.
Readers of Otherworld Journeys often say to me, well, yes, this is all very interesting, but what do you really think is going on in near-death experience? The short answer is that I consider near-death experience no different from other visions or private revelations, for which the standard methods of discernment should be employed, taking into account the relevant naturalistic explanations without dogmatically ruling out or credulously ruling in a supernatural origin. I am distinctly unimpressed by claims of the paranormal and consider psychical research a tawdry substitute for religion. My default setting when it comes to visionary testimony is at once sympathetic and skeptical. The right to believe is precious; the capacity for self-deception is boundless. My belief in life after death rests on entirely different grounds.
A better index of what I think as a Christian about death and afterlife can be found in the Ingersoll lecture I gave at Harvard in 2000 and in the little book, The Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope, based on the Albert Cardinal Meyer lectures I gave at Mundelein Seminary in 1993. By then I had rejected the constructivism I was flirting with in 1991. To the “yes, but what do you really think?” question, I had a new answer to give:
