Not everything is grace, and on the danger of “little-flower”-ism

I had a moment of discouragement and lassitude the other day. A B12 deficiency maybe? (B12 is the cobalt vitamin; it’s essential, you can’t live without cobalt!) Or perhaps the being so beset by falsehoods, for the most part depressingly unoriginal, mere trite clichés, but still so stubbornly defended by people who seem never to tire of kicking against the goad if you dare offer them something different from what they’re accustomed to hearing. How tiresome!

And then there was Peter Kreeft! And St Therese! Et tu? (Et vos?)

I came across this sentence from the pen of Kreeft:

“Everything is grace”, said Saint Thérèse. This is neither pious exaggeration nor false humility; it is utter realism, the confession of clear and certain fact. (Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners (Ignatius, 2000), p. 116.)

Here’s what he was referring to, reportedly spoken by Therese four months before her death:

If you should find me dead one morning, be not troubled: it’s that Papa the good God would have come quite simply to get me. Without doubt, it’s a great grace to receive the Sacraments; but when the good God doesn’t permit it, it’s good all the same, all is grace.

[“Si vous me trouviez morte un matin, n'ayez pas de peine : c'est que Papa le bon Dieu serait venu tout simplement me chercher. Sans doute, c'est une grande grâce de recevoir les Sacrements ; mais quand le bon Dieu ne le permets pas, c'est bien quand même, tout est grâce.” (Carnet jaune, June 4, 1897)]

Commenting on the passage, in the introduction to his book Everything Is Grace, Joseph F. Schmidt writes:

By her comment that everything is grace, she was sharing her spirituality of the Little Way – the spiritual way of accepting with loving surrender and gratitude all the happenings of life as sent by divine providence. [All the happenings of life? Sent? Not just permitted but sent?] If the experiences of life, even the ordinary and trivial, are received in this attitude of surrender and gratitude as gifts of God, then not just appropriate religious devotions and sacramental activities communicate grace, but surely everything is grace.

(Joseph F. Schmidt, FSC, Everything is Grace (2007).)

Well, maybe. The first thing to note here is that that’s a pretty big “if”: If the ordinary and trivial experiences of life (this applies also to the Sacraments, by the way!) are received in the appropriate manner, then in a sense everything is grace (or rather: an occasion of grace). But unfortunately people – including people who are highly religiously and spiritually motivated and devoted – tend to skip right over the “if” and run instead with just the nakedly false claim: everything is grace.

This “utter realism,” this “confession of clear and certain fact,” as Peter Kreeft would have it, in fact looks like a plain contradiction of Catholic truth. Consider, for example, the following passage from Dei filius, Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic faith:

Unhappily, it has yet further come to pass that, while this impiety prevailed on every side, many even of the children of the Catholic Church have strayed from the path of true piety, and by the gradual diminution of the truths they held, the Catholic sense became weakened in them. For, led away by various and strange doctrines, utterly confusing nature and grace, human science and divine faith, they are found to deprave the true sense of the doctrines which our holy Mother Church holds and teaches, and endanger the integrity and the soundness of the faith.

Hac porro impietate circum quaque grassante, infeliciter contigit, ut plures etiam e Catholicæ Ecclesiæ filiis a via veræ pietatis aberrarent, in iisque, diminutis paullatim veritatibus, sensus Catholicus attenuaretur. Variis enim ac peregrinis doctrinis abducti, naturam et gratiam, scientiam humanam et fidem divinam perperam commiscentes, genuinum sensum dogmatum, quem tenet ac docet sancta mater Ecclesia, depravare, integritatemque et sinceritatem fidei in periculum adducere comperiuntur.

Now the claim everything is grace implies either that nature just is grace, or that nature is nothing. In other words, the unqualified claim everything is grace seems to “utterly confuse nature and grace.” Pace Kreeft, it is anything but a “confession of clear and certain fact.”

So should “little” Therese (apparently she was actually quite tall!) – for many the doctor of the 20^th/21^st-century Church par excellence – be condemned as a heretic? Hardly. But some of her writings and sayings – as also in the case of St Paul, so not necessarily in bad company! – are certainly easily liable to be misleading for “unlearned and unstable” minds (see 2Pet 3:16). And this observation about the theological caution required in approaching St Therese is not restricted to this one reported saying.

In his Everything Is Grace book Schmidt notes that Therese was not extraordinarily gifted, as many saints have been. If anything, she was extraordinarily ordinary (if that makes any sense!). In fact, as Schmidt writes, “The one capacity Therese possessed is actually often an obstacle to holiness rather than a contributing factor – namely, a capability to be self-preoccupied and self-reflective.” 

Let that sink in: Therese’s outstanding character trait, that for which is admired and loved, is actually often an obstacle to holiness, namely: “a capability to be self-preoccupied and self-reflective” – which is very near to saying a tendency to be narcissistic. (In the myth, Narcissus falls in love with his own self-reflection… and is transformed (go figure!) into a little flower – as in the case of Therese, the question of how little is debatable.) Schmidt continues: “Therese noticed everything about herself, and she was willing to share that not as a display of ego-centeredness, but as a manifestation of God’s work in her.” However: “The difference between these two attitudes constitutes a very fine line, and the temptation to cross the line is always lurking.”

It seems that Schmidt’s observation here would imply that devotion to St Therese may be spiritually dangerous, especially for those with narcissistic tendencies – not necessarily in a clinical sense, of course, but just in the sense of a tendency to self-centeredness. But since most people indeed have a tendency to self-centeredness, it follows that St Therese may be spiritually dangerous for most people. And this implies also that (widespread) devotion to St Therese (“the little flower”) may be as much a symptom of a (widespread) tendency to narcissism (“little-flower”-ism, we might say), as it is of a sign of the extraordinary sanctity of Therese herself – even if it is true, as Schmidt writes, that “Therese’s glory is that she did not give in to that temptation,” that is, the temptation to cross the line from self-preoccupied and self-reflective to self-centered (and narcissistic).

“Little-flower”-ism (compare the recent term “snowflake” – as Schmidt writes of St Therese, “she suffered a great deal from her excessive sensitivity” – ah yes, don’t we all: je suis Therese!) may also be a manifestation of a sick form of Christianity (or more generally, a sick form of relating to the world) fueled by ressentiment, a phenomenon the real existence of which Nietzsche rightly identified, but which he mistakenly thought was essentially Christian.  Max Scheler (a philosopher admired by John Paul II) was taken by Nietzsche’s insight into the phenomenon of ressentiment and developed an extended, more insightful discussion of it, wherein he argues against Nietzsche’s artificial, animus-filled attempt to make of it a specifically and essentially Christian phenomenon. Against Nietzsche, Scheler argues that ressentiment is neither proper to nor characteristic of Christianity. Instead it is an endemic human tendency and not what Christ or Christianity is really about. Nietzsche, in any case, argued that the Christian ethos was nothing other than “le fine fleur [the delicate flower again!] du ressentiment” – an ingeniously insidious way for all that is base, weak, ugly, deformed, sick, inhibited, downtrodden, and needy (“blessed are the poor and hungry!”), and moreover envious and vengeful, to subvert all that shows up it baseness and aggravates its envy, that is, all that is noble, beautiful, strong, self-sufficient, free, powerful, flourishing. The weak and ignoble does this through the artifice of an essentially nature-despising claim to moral superiority. What is naturally good must be despised, and suffering, self-abnegation, and death must be embraced – claim those who are ignoble and powerless by nature’s standard – in order to pass beyond nature to the kingdom of God. The supposed goodness of nature has been swallowed up, according to this form of moralism, by the depravity of sin, and so nature must be rejected. If there is no goodness in nature, nature must be eliminated. By nature, man is totally depraved (Calvinism, anyone?), so grace becomes everything, that is, “everything (good!) is grace.”

But of course Nietzsche was right to condemn this view, just as the Catholic Church always has – even while individual Catholics remain ever susceptible to confusion on this point, with the result that “they are found to deprave the true sense of the doctrines which our holy Mother Church holds and teaches, and endanger the integrity and the soundness of the faith” (see above, Vatican I's Dei filius).

So to conclude: No, not everything is grace! Nature is not grace, although nature is good and necessary in its own right, within the plan of divine providence. Grace presupposes nature, and nature is perfected, not eliminated, by grace. And if you're going by the teaching of the Catholic Church, that, I take it, is a “confession of clear and certain fact.”

Fisher of men? Or fisher of people? On Canadian Catholic Fem-speak

At a recent RCIA meeting I attended, we read the following from Luke’s gospel: “Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’” (Lk 5:10)

One of the RCIA candidates sniffed out something fishy about this. She mentioned that she seemed to remember a more classical reading of “fisher of men.” The leader mentioned something about different translations and one person piped in something about the passage used to apply to just men (male men, that is), but now it applies to women too (including female postal carriers)!

Of course the expression “fisher of men” always did apply to ‘catching’ males and females, and until feminism came along no one was misled into thinking otherwise by the use of the generic term ‘men.’ As philosopher Michael Levin writes (my comments in square brackets):

We may dismiss the idea that masculine pronouns [or masculine nouns, used in a generic sense] are misleading. Words are misleading when they mislead. If nobody is misled by a turn of phrase, it is not misleading, and there is no one over the age of three who has been fooled by “he” [or “fisher of men”] into thinking that women are unpersons [or into thinking the Jesus intended Simon Peter’s mission to be to adult males only]. It is not possible to produce a woman who believed (until feminists cleared things up) that “He who hesitates is lost” did not apply to her. It is universally understood that “he” is used with the intention of referring to both men and women, and that this intention has settled into a convention. Nothing more is required for a purely designative expression like “he” [or “men”] to mean men and women both. (from Michael Levin, Feminism, Freedom, and Language)

However, now that feminist ideology is increasingly being insinuated into our language, and thence into our thinking, people (apparently!) really are increasingly getting confused about some of the basic intentions and conventions that find expression in the English language, and on the basis of the linguistic confusion we are (apparently!) in danger of passing on to some quite farcically naïve suggestions about the scope of the Church’s mission, past vs. present, as noted above. (I say “apparently,” because one should be cautious about reading too much into what were perhaps mere idle remarks.)

The RCIA candidate responded to the vague comments about different translations by saying, in a somewhat uneasy tone, something like, “Okay, so the Church decided to change the translation.” To which some of the leaders responded with something like, “quite so, and indeed it’s important to remember that the Church is always changing.”

Well, something like that. It might have been more accurate, however, if the RCIA candidate had said (still in a somewhat uneasy tone), “So in formulating the lectionary readings for use in Canada, the Church in Canada has decided to follow the advice of feminist ideologues.” Whereas, by contrast, we find in the US lectionary – a lectionary apparently less under the influence of feminist ideologues (see usccb.org) – “Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.’"

Now you might still wonder what happened to the classic “fisher of men” expression. In fact that’s the expression used in the parallel passage in Matthew’s gospel (see Mt 4:19), but in Luke the expression is just “catching men” (the generic ‘men,’ of course – anthropous in Greek and homines in Latin).

You might think that ‘people’ vs. (generic) ‘men’ is perhaps an issue for felicity of expression, for poetry, for tradition, etc., but not necessarily a strictly translation (i.e., accuracy) issue. Granted. So to take a more blatant example of fem-speak in the Canadian lectionary, consider the gospel reading for March 3. From the US bishops’ website we get the following (accurate) translation:

Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye,

but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?

How can you say to your brother,

'Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,'

when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?

You hypocrite!  Remove the wooden beam from your eye first;

then you will see clearly

to remove the splinter in your brother's eye.

In the Canadian lectionary we find the following:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbour's eye,

but do not notice the log in your own eye?

Or how can you say to your neighbour,

'Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,'

when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye?

You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye;

then you will see clearly

to take the speck out of your neighbour's eye.

Now brother is clearly stronger, richer, than neighbour/friend. Still, slight differences of meaning, surely! Which might invite the question: Isn’t the advancement of feminist ideology more important than fidelity to the revealed word of God? And really that is the question, and those answering it, unfortunately, are divided. In any case, the CCCB seems to have gone with a “yes.” But this “yes” to the advancement of feminist ideology has consequences. We might consider in this connection clericalism and ecumenism.

First, I think the Canadian lectionary is an embodiment of (bad) clericalism. Scripture has been manipulated and filtered by the clerics before being presented to the laity. This is inevitable in a selective lectionary, because it is selective. But what is selected should at least be presented faithfully. Instead the authentic language of the revealed word of God is effectively hidden, seen only by the diligent few who dare to look behind the veil the Church (in Canada) has drawn over the scriptures read at mass. The clerics, and those who advise them, have taken it upon themselves to bowdlerize the word of God and then, at mass, to dishonestly proclaim this feminist redaction as “the holy gospel according to Luke” (for example) – that is, the hypothetical incarnation of Luke as a 21^st-century feminist, who has been enlightened about the prejudicial, exclusionary import of his original language choices in the composition of his gospel.

This issue matters also from the standpoint of ecumenism. This feminist policy/practice, one may suppose, is helpful for ecumenism with other Church communities whose version of Christian faith has (also) been influenced by feminist ideology. For those separated brethren who are actually closer to the authentic Catholic faith, however, who actually have a deep love and respect for the revealed word of God, for the “full gospel”  (notwithstanding their flawed understanding of it), this practice is surely a stumbling block. It must remind them of the old canard about the Church chaining up scriptures.  Ironically churches used to chain up the scriptures because, given their great value, they wanted to prevent their being stolen. It was about protecting a treasure. Now that treasure of the inspired word of God has been distorted by feminist ideologues (in the Church in Canada, anyway) and is handed out in missalettes like cheap candy! Better, perhaps, were it still chained! But the question is whether ecumenism – or more generally evangelization – should be about catching flies with honey (feminist-devised or otherwise) or about seeking authentic Christian unity through true faith in Christ. And the Catholic Church (notwithstanding various national aberrations) of course teaches that it should be the latter.