yogita

The late Mr. Buckley, famously erudite and charming (and as famously caustic and condescending: the spotlight also caught his shadow), confesses at the start: "I am not remotely qualified as a theologian or historian of Christianity [and:] my mode tends to be argumentative. ... This argumentative habit makes for poor exposition... [and this book's:] tone is not what I'd have hoped for. ... I am not trained in the devotional mode, nor disposed to it. ... I leave it at this, that if I could juggle, I'd do so for Our Lady. i suppose I am required to say that, in fact, I have here endeavored to do my act for her." And his whole act is here: the wit, the intellect, the impishness, the disdain, the namedropping, the logical rigor, the arresting conviction, the journalistic adventitiousness (Buckley would have liked that word), the odd and even stubborn failure to carry through with an obvious question, but above all the tender and loyal heart. His politics were the kind driven by fear, but here he writes of all that gave him assurance. Buckley protests that he has little or nothing new to say (inevitable for a conservative?): "so habitual is it for me to learn and perform by contention, I have been derivatively influenced by others' contentions." Who hasn't been? His invitation to several friends - converts to Catholicism: a lifelong Catholic, he seeks the perspectives of (former) outsiders - to answer questions he wants to explore is an expression of that habit. So is his focus on a book of published letters between a priest and a layman, the former a Catholic convert and the latter soon to be converted, in effect a theological debate. He was attracted to the contentious, as he says. We knew that, before he said it. What is new here, in particular witness if not in content, is his testimony about the beneficial effects of religious practice. He offers three gems: his experience of chapel services and prayers in private school, his impressions on visiting Lourdes, and his correspondence with a nephew who became a Benedictine priest. While he makes the error of our era - mistaking belief for religion - he nevertheless presents the distinction. Religious practice yields truth and meaning that logic cannot parse. It offers assurance and consolation beyond the power of argument. It gives challenge and clarity unattainable by reason. Buckley devotes much space to theological contention as if it would radiate light instead of heat. He asserts Church teaching as if it explained religious experience. He does these things because he loved contention and relied upon it as much as upon the authority of the Church. But when he writes of prayer or pilgrimage or vocation, he recognizes - if obliquely - that through these things we glimpse truth unanswerable by theology. Even untouchable by it. It is this boundary of experience - where it is forever unreachable by words, marked but unexplained by symbols - that God-talk is meant to navigate. Again, Buckley falls into the modern mire of knowing the words but not the grammar of this rhetoric. But in so doing, he illumines it. The true grammar of God-talk begins to shine through, casting shadows of contradiction that owe their sharpness, probably, to Mr. Buckley's contentious intellect. Not only do his accounts of religious practice touch the heart, but his unqualified wrestle with theology and tradition lights a flare over shoals he - without chart - learned to circumnavigate. I'm glad he wrote this book.

2022-10-21 05:51