The critics of Catholicism are as numerous as the creeds of the world, and their criticisms are thus often contradictory. For the most part, they are all very old and very unoriginal. In this sense, the Church has the strange historical character of always finding herself younger than those who oppose her and more “modern” than those who frantically try to outgrow her. There is hardly anyone more progressive than the Church if her identity is really founded on the belief that there is only one thing new under the sun, namely the God-Man Jesus Christ.
Recently I came across a criticism of the Church which is new to me, though its original form is in fact very old. It is a sociological criticism. It says that the Christian Church became inextricably bound up with Greco-Roman culture in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., and since then every part of it, from its legal structures to its anthropology to its rituals and customs, has been so thoroughly soaked in that old Mediterranean stew that it cannot spread without smothering other, different cultures. Essentially, the gospel is its own culture. But insofar as all cultures are equal, the claims of the Church and her Creed to universality are nothing more than the most repulsive and antiquated imperialism. If there is something true at the heart of the Christian faith, it must be made “mobile”, so to speak, by being stripped of everything cultural. Only then can it become compatible with all cultures and times. Only then will it truly be “catholic”, truly universal.
So runs the cry. I discovered it in musty books stiff with disuse which were very difficult to read, since in the time it took for their authors to become so incredibly learned they had apparently forgotten at some point how English really works, and so the bits they intended to include as rhetorical flourishes often had the aesthetic appeal of burnt toast. But I have distracted myself again. Theirs is not necessarily an academic criticism. Sometimes, especially in the face of bad evangelism, it seems very down-to-earth and fair-minded. Today it flies the flag of Modernism, which is one of the fairest of the flags of Christianity’s foes for that very reason. It seems even-handed and undemanding, sympathetic with the deepest griefs and insecurities of mankind and willing to offer the ambrosial lullaby of uncritical affirmation.
I discovered a very good response, of course, in Ratzinger. I do not propose to summarize his argument, however: it is far too subtle (not to mention too long) for communications of this kind. The problem ultimately lies in the concept of culture. In its colloquial uses, “culture” seems to mean (especially for 21st century Americans) behaviors that belong to other places and other people. Culture is food and clothes and music; culture is how you celebrate and how you mourn; culture is geography and history and literature all rolled up into an inviolable communal identity; and all this becomes more apparent when we come across decidedly alien customs. But as Ratzinger points out these are all secondary aspects of culture. They do not provide an adequate understanding of its essence.
The reason for this is that if culture is nothing more than what you eat and what you wear, etc, then every culture is incompatible with the others. In other words, if the externals of human life are the essence of culture, then culture can never be universal. But it is inappropriate to think this. It is inappropriate for the same reason as it would be inappropriate to judge a man by his gait, or (for that matter) a book by its cover. All cultures are human; and insofar as they are human they are essentially similar. However varied the attempts to discover the meaning of human existence may be, the goal of all such attempts remains the same, namely cultivation of the truth. Culture is first of all a vision into the meaning of life. It is the crucible of the experiences of many generations in which is distilled a knowledge of what it means to be part of a family, a people, a nation. This knowledge is both above and before all physical experience because it informs all physical experience. The external forms of culture are ways of celebrating and protecting this quasi-supernatural vision into the meaning of life. In this sense, cultures are incarnate philosophies. That they differ so widely across history and across the planet suggests that culture is always experimental, as though we have yet to find the fullest expression of the things our ancestors were attempting to embody.
Now, if culture is outward facing as I am suggesting—meaning its most essential concern is with what is human and therefore with what is most universal—and if culture is a kind of vision of the community that sees what individual sense experiences cannot, then faith is culture. Catholic faith in particular is highest culture. But it is not culture in that secondary, particular, and external sense implied by the criticism outlined earlier. It is true culture because it provides a complete and coherent (and, from the perspective of faith, certain) vision of humanity. It provides a pattern for how life should be lived, seeing past what is accessible to ordinary experience.
This means that far from trampling over other cultures—as if the search for the meaning of human life could be competitive—faith as culture brings out what is good and true in every culture and age. It is not the imperialistic distribution of Greco-Roman customs and beliefs against the equally valid customs and beliefs of other people. It is not Neoplatonism. If it represents any pre-existing set of customs and beliefs, it can only be called Jewish; but it is more Jewish even than Jews. Culture is a Latin word originally, of agricultural origin. It means “to till”. Truth is the good soil out of which all culture grows. True faith is true cultivation.
To be sure, culture is nothing if not something shared within a community including its own system of rites and norms. In this sense, cultures really do compete (see, for instance, Key and Peele’s sketch about a stressful restaurant experience). But the root of all culture must be the truth of the human person; that is what is at stake, not food or entertainment or anything else; and that is precisely what the Catholic faith claims to offer. Speaking within the Catholic perspective, then, everything that is understood to be an essential part of Catholic identity—everything included in the Creed or the Catechism—is never introduced to a people or a nation except insofar as they reveal the truth of our human identity and the meaning that a certain Nazorean’s life has for all lives. One may disagree that some Catholic beliefs really do reveal the authentic meaning of human existence, but one should not argue that those beliefs are nothing more than a kind of garment that the faith shrug off without losing its identity. The former amounts to genuine disagreement; the latter is merely a gross misunderstanding of the Catholic position.
