Essays in honour of Fr. Mervyn Fernando on the Golden Jubilee of Priesthood, 1959-2009 (Subodhi, Moratuwa: 2009)
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
The present collection of papers illustrates Father Mervyn’s large range of interests and his equally large range of friends who have paid him tribute. They deal with the following topics: education, science, development and peace, wisdom and love, the arts, theology and scripture, spirituality and Teilhard de Chardin and several "personal" tributes, including a poem by Ashley Halpe. It is a pity that Fr. Mervyn’s deceased friend Arthur C. Clarke did not have an opportunity to write to this volume but we are grateful for a fine piece on Clarke by Nalaka Gunawardene who, rightly speaks of him as "a rare public intellectual" (p.52), a term that is also applicable to Fr. Mervyn. I am afraid that some of the topics listed above does not interest me and in this review I shall deal primarily with those Catholic intellectuals who have attempted to combine Christian spirituality with modern science, especially evolutionary theory and in the process boldly criticizing members of their own Church, sometimes openly, sometimes in a veiled manner. Thus, George V. Coyne has a good summary statement of our contemporary understanding of the cosmos, of human evolution and the development of our extraordinary complex brains (pp. 33-38). Yet, it would have been difficult if not impossible in the period before Darwinism for churchmen to even pose the question: "Did our planetary system come about by a miracle?" and unflinchingly answer: "Absolutely not" (p. 35). It was Baruch de Spinoza who in his Tractatus Theologico Politicus (1670) denied Christian miracle, Genesis and the providential God of the Old Testament and all forms of popular religiosity thereby laying the foundations of modern critical Biblical scholarship and creating a space for many intellectuals, believers as well as atheists, to affirm with Carlo Fonseka that "a dose of skepticism is an integral part of the philosophical basis of modern science" (p. 43). Nevertheless, a skeptical tradition can coexist with religion and therefore one should not be surprised if Coyne affirms that scientific knowledge entails the co-affirmation of a "God [that] created this scientific knowledge and reflection," a position that any Catholic intellectual must necessarily adopt (p. 37).
It is within this skeptical tradition of modern Catholicism that the contributors to this volume take their bearing. Let me begin with Aloy Pieris of the Society of Jesus sensitively probing the Tridentine Mass and the New Liturgy and the implications for modern Catholics. The basic argument can be summed up thus: the Tridentine Mass formulated during the Council of Trent (1545-1563) formalized the authoritarian and hierarchical order of the Church where the laity was in effect spectators of a ritual and of a liturgy enacted by "priest-performers." Whereas after Vatican 2 a new and less authoritarian structure was envisaged wherein the laity might eventually participate in "holiness" along with the clergy, such that the radical distinction between the two would in time be bridged. Everyone belongs equally before Christ as a "priestly community" or the "people of God" engaged in a "liturgy of life," a phrase invented by Pieris. The reaction to Vatican 2 by the "strongest lobby of Latin Worshipers" in effect hopes to restore the Church hierarchy and a return to the Latin Mass. Pieris’s argument is that Vatican 2 is a restorative undertaking that creatively resurrects an older pre-Tridentine ecclesiology. The present Archbishop Malcolm Ranjit, representing the conservative Catholic tradition, in a recent circular stated that "It is the Lord who gave us the Liturgy and no one else has the right to change it" (p. 161). It is easy to demonstrate, as Pieris does, that this is nonsense and the Church has consistently changed its positions on many a matter. For example "even the so-called ‘words of consecration’ in the Eucharist coming directly from the lips of Christ appear in four different versions in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Paul, as also Our Father which varies from Matthew to Luke" (p. 161). The problem raised by Pieris reflects larger issues that beset all salvation religions in our time: the need to adapt the liturgical, ritualistic even theological doctrines to contemporary reality governed by modern science, democracy and a critical but not destructive skepticism. Unsurprisingly Aloy Pieris wants his fellow Catholics to go back to a more meaningful tradition and to creatively transform that past in the present. As he recognizes it is a long struggle whose future must, I think, be as unpredictable in Catholicism as it is with similar struggles in other religions.
An inevitable by-product of such a non-authoritarian view of religion must in a sense result in a Christocentric view of pastoralism. It is therefore not surprising that the traditional God of the Old Testament is barely mentioned by any of the thinkers represented here. So is it with Genesis. Hence Shirley Lal Wijesinghe could say that "most of those who are not informed of modern Biblical scholarship succumb to the pitfall of treating Genesis 1-3 as history" (p. 144). Others make similar claims, especially if one is a follower of Teilhard de Chardin. This skeptical posture is found in many religions, including Buddhism, especially in such things as the miraculous birth of the Buddha, although not as fundamental to its doctrine as a rejection of Genesis as truth. But the problem with such postures is an awesome one, namely, that millions of believers before our own times, and that included many Church fathers and virtuosos in other religions, in treating myth literally, were in effect ignoramuses! Yet, it seems to me that for an intellectualist modernity to emerge a Christocentric reorientation is both inevitable and necessary. We know that to some degree this has been anticipated in forms of medieval Catholicism and in the Protestant dissenters of the 17th and 18th centuries, the prime and most radical example being the poet William Blake (1757-1827) who in saying "Christ died an Unbeliever" was in effect affirming that Christ and not the Father was the only true God.
Given the background I have sketched it is not surprising that the new Catholic critics should also have strong reactions to colonialism and its unhappy effects whereby alien lands were appropriated by Western powers and indigenous populations wiped out. Father Tissa Balasuriya documents the vast territories "conquered or stolen from previous occupants such as the native Americans" (p. 136). I urge the reader to consider his excellent account and his insistence that the current "world system is racist" and that wars such as that against Iraq exhibits "international lawlessness" (p. 138). For me, even more impressive is Tissa Balasuriya’s searing honesty: "The Christian Churches shared in this colonial expansion of the European nation states. The European peoples and Churches regarded the native indigenous peoples of the rest of the world as non-Christians, unbelievers, pagans" (p. 139). However, he refuses to wallow in guilt but instead invokes the responsibility of "moral theologians" to recognize the responsibility of the Churches in erecting the "present unjust world system, both by their teaching about sin and salvation by Christianity, and by participating in imperial expansion of European powers" (p. 140). He suggests ways of dealing with these issues but I am not sure how much of this will succeed because "a conversion of heart and mind to acknowledge the rights of the poor peoples of the world" (p. 142) is a long hard road. And yet, how can one live without hope? As a Buddhist I can only wish that some of my fellow religionists will help bring about a "Buddhocentric" moral and philosophical vision in our present day fearful situation.
It is a popular mistake to imagine that the Catholic and larger Christian Churches were implacably authoritarian. There were plenty of voices of protest within multiple Christian denominations, especially those in the Christian mystical traditions that expressed both philosophical and moral reactions against the dominant authoritarianism. Although perhaps not as broadminded as that of the great Protestant mystical thinker Jacob Boehme (1575-1629) who influenced later dissenters and could say: "whether he be Christian, Jew or Turk or a Heathen; it is all the same to me; my warehouse shall stand open to anyone" (Aurora, John Sparrow, trans., 313). This is what our new theologians are in effect saying and it is not surprising that almost all of them have sympathy with those expressing moral dissidence with the establishment. No wonder that Teilhard de Chardin comes in a big way in this book, partly stimulated by Fr. Mervyn’s own work on this philosopher. The special section devoted to de Chardin entitled "Spirituality and Teilhard de Chardin" will no doubt benefit the general reader unfamiliar with this thinker although nothing can take the place of his provocative work The Phenomenon of Man, one of the earliest attempts to creatively re-imagine, from a Christian perspective, the radical changes brought about by Darwinism. Unhappily Teilhard de Chardin’s books were condemned by the Church but not by the Society of Jesus. Fortunately for us de Chardin’s work is freely available to those willing to pore through some very difficult, even problematic, arguments.
I want to end this selective reading of this festschrift with my own protest at the poor quality of the production. In this age of modern computer technology, surely better formatting could be expected. There are many blank spaces, some erratic punctuation, especially when virtually every sentence in Aloy Pieris’s article appears with exclamations! Worse: we all know that Aloy is an authority on both Christian and Buddhist "canons" but I find it hard to imagine this gentle soul firing at his adversaries with "cannons"! In many places there are unconscionable displays of editorial incompetence. Sometimes, authors are to blame when they imagine that a festschrift does not require the adoption of scholarly conventions. An example: Justice Weeramantry has an interesting essay on "Traditional Global Wisdom on Environmental Protection" but I find it hard to accept his barbarism "suththa" instead of the accepted term "sutta." He has wonderful quotes and references from Chief Seattle and others in small-scale societies but no references are given. I for one am not willing to accept such things on faith. So is it with an equally powerful address by Arahant Mahinda to King Devanampiyatissa who was out hunting: "O great King, the birds of the air and the beasts have as equal a right to live and move about in any part of the land as thou. The land belongs to the people and all living beings. Thou are only the guardian of it" (p. 94). The reader ought to be told where this important quotation is from, especially because it is not in the Mahavamsa, but might have been excerpted from a lesser known text. So with another interesting text, the Vanaropa Sutta, in which the Buddha urges people to create gardens, forests, causeways and thereby earn merit (p. 95). This short text is surely worth reading in full but extremely difficult for the average reader to locate unless accurate references are given (for example, "Planters of groves" in vol. 1, p. 122 in Bhikkhu Bodhi’s new translation of the Samyutta Nikaya). But these are minor qualifications of an incorrigible academic and it is now time to drop these cavils and raise an imaginary glass to wish my friend Father Mervyn many more years of a rich and productive life.
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