Solipsism and the Synod

“As every man is a philosopher of sorts,” writes Mark Van Doren in a wise little book written more than eighty years ago called Liberal Education—a work which beautifully embodies the education it extols—“so every man is a theologian if he can see beyond his own nose.”  

Van Doren certainly had a lapidary way of putting things. But if he’s right about the need to look beyond the self when searching for the truth, then we’ve got a huge and festering crisis on our hands. Because what has become ever more obvious every day, never mind the mess things may have been in back then, is the fact that these days great numbers of philosophers and theologians appear to have joined the ranks of the self-absorbed, whose swelling numbers are fast approaching pandemic proportions. These days great numbers of philosophers and theologians appear to have joined the ranks of the self-absorbed, whose swelling numbers are fast approaching pandemic proportions. Tweet This

The fact that not a few of them command considerable salaries on the strength of their solipsism, along with the usual media attention the moment they open their mouths, does not inspire confidence concerning the mental health of so many philosophers and theologians in our midst. 

Far too many of them, is what I’m saying—including a great many Catholics of nominal persuasion—are not only not looking beyond their own noses but are busily looking down their noses at everyone else. Most especially at those simple souls who want only to be left in peace, free from the sneering dismissals of the learned and clever. “Often these are poor wretches,” writes Hans Urs von Balthasar, who first took note of the phenomenon a great many years ago, “who must shout so loud in order to justify to themselves their inner predicament of no longer being able to pray.”

Or even to think, which may come down to the same thing in the end, inasmuch as when we do think we are driven to ask questions about God, who is the ground and meaning of all that we think. Of course, when the talking heads do pray and think, it is often from a vantage point far above the rest of us, including the Church herself, whose deposit of faith and piety they view with disdain, so determined are they to dismantle entire structures of belief. 

Why, in the circumstance, should the self-centered-self look to the Church for guidance when it generates all the wisdom it needs from within? Not seeing her as Mother and Teacher (mater et magistra), why should they have anything to do with her? Not even Christ Himself, who endowed His Church with both the charism of truth and the capacity to teach and defend it—indeed, wedding Himself to her in the very nuptial meaning of His own Body—can have much to say to minds long accustomed to ignoring voices other than their own. To whom they will neither speak, nor listen.

When Tom Howard, for instance, wrote his splendid critique of modern secularism, Chance or the Dance?, he dedicated it to an old professor of his, “who took my arm and said, ‘Look.’” And not to be outdone in heaping praise, there is the example of Lorenzo Albacete, who, in dedicating his book, God at the Ritz, wrote the following moving tribute to his friend and mentor Msgr. Luigi Giussani: “Who helped me see the milky way.”                                   

The point is not a difficult one, and even a Ph.D. should be able to grasp hold of it, which is that unless we step outside ourselves, breaking free of appetite and ego, we will never escape, never look out upon a landscape larger than the one surrounding the enclosures we build to keep out the sunlight.  

Forget the milky way. Too many of us are trapped inside a room without windows, refusing to open the door onto transcendence, which leaves us gasping for breath, for grace, for that oxygen of the soul we need to breathe in order to see the things of God. “Destitution,” writes Jean Danielou, “is the condition of man left to himself, deprived of the energies of God.” Not to acknowledge all that we have, or trace all that we know, to the wealth and wisdom of God’s own Word, is the worst destitution of all.

And yet, how is this scenario so very different from what’s been going on in Rome for the past three years? An almost unending Synod on Synodality, in which meeting upon meeting threatens to go on until the end of recorded time. Where self-referentiality rules the roost, leaving no room for reality to break in and find a seat at the table. “A Church that speaks too much of herself,” warned Joseph Ratzinger almost a half-century ago when addressing a very different Synod, “does not in truth speak well of herself.”

Of whom, then, is she charged with speaking? Christ, who remains the perpetual font of her being, her identity and mission. It is not about us and the grievances we work up to distract attention from the far more demanding task of becoming saints. Or even the possibility of a life of sanctity or, at the very least, a passing nod in the direction of trying to live for God, that the sublime adventure of putting out into the deep might actually have something to commend.  

Where else are we to find joy and nourishment if not in a life of prayer and sacrament, of seeing the Church not as a machine to manipulate, reshaping the parts to suit our pleasure, but as a mystery before whom we stand in reverence because here is God’s very own Bride, the Sacrament of Someone transcendent to herself.

“He who does not cling to the one Bride,” Henri de Lubac reminds us in The Splendor of the Church, his great love poem to the Bride of Christ, “is not loved by the Bridegroom.” She whose voice is sweet, whose face is beautiful, will not reveal her mysteries to those who approach her not with love but with loathing. Who never seem to weary of dumping dirt, lest the least kind word were to get in the way of their endless grousing about all that’s wrong with the Church. 

“He can no longer have God for his Father,” says St. Cyprian, bishop and martyr of Carthage, “who has not the Church as Mother.” Sound advice, perhaps, but not likely to be heeded by children who seem to despise both their parents. 

[Photo Credit: Vatican Media]