Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Glaube, katholischer Glaube - Sprache: direkt, spezifisch, konkret (Joh 1:1: Wort, Fleisch); heute: Demystifizierung: Natur, Körper, Sexualität, Tod; Vision des neuen Menschen

Kurzinhalt: This modern detachment of man from his body is most apparent in the abstract language that today in matters of sex and death replaces the direct, concrete expressions of earlier ages. Lust is free love, adultery is open marriage ...

Textausschnitt: THE CATHOLIC FAITH AND LANGUAGE

54a Edwin Newman characterizes the good use of language, or "a civil tongue", as he calls it, as "direct, specific, concrete, vigorous, colorful, subtle, and imaginative when it should be, and as lucid and eloquent as we are able to make it".1 And common sense alone should be enough to tell us he is right. But if he is right, and if language is bound up with our perception of reality, then there must also be something about reality itself that allows us to perceive it more readily by way of specific, concrete words than by way of abstractions. To return to one of the questions raised at the beginning: Is there such a thing as a Catholic sentence?

54b If by that question we mean, are there sentences which convey, by their very use of language, a view of reality that is consistent with the Catholic faith, the answer must be an unmistakable yes. What kinds of sentences are they? They are precisely the kind Edwin Newman describes: "direct, specific, concrete". Why? The answer is obvious and simple and can be found in a single verse at the beginning of John's Gospel: "And the Word became flesh." If I may draw once again on Chesterton:

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.2
54d In the beginning, and by his word, God spoke things into existence, and the things he spoke into existence were direct, specific and concrete. They were, in short, materially embodied and materially related to one another. And God looked at what he had made and declared it to be very good. (Fs)

55a Millions of years later, scientific man looked at God's handiwork and asked what makes it tick. And he discovered that he could only find out by taking it apart. Thus began what we might call the great deconstruction of that world—and, to some degree, the deconstruction of man himself. The result, as Guardini has observed, is that "man's relations with nature have been altered radically, have become indirect. The old immediateness has been lost, for now his relations are transmitted by mathematics or by instruments. Abstract and formalized, nature has lost all concreteness; having become inorganic and technical, it has lost the quality of real experience."3

55b Abstracted or removed from his old direct relationship with the natural order, man has also abstracted himself from his own human nature, which is to say, from his own flesh. And just as he has come to see the whole order of nature, all of its powers, its forces, as rationally understandable and subject to technological control, so also he has come to see his own body, his own physical existence, in much the same light—as rationally understandable and technologically controllable. (Fs) (notabene)

55c This "demystification of the human body", as one writer puts it, removes all of the traditional restraints that previous ages attached to the two most bodily events we know: sex and death. The result, as that same writer points out, is that

the unborn child is no longer a human person, attached by indelible rights and obligations to the mother who bears him, but a slowly ripening deformity, which can be aborted at will, should the mother choose to cure herself. In surrogate motherhood the relation between mother and child ceases to issue from the very body of the mother and is severed from the experience of incarnation. The bond between mother and child is demystified, made clear, intelligible, scientific— and also provisional, revocable and of no more than contractual force.... In just the same way the sexual bond has become clear and intelligible, and also provisional, revocable and of merely contractual force, governed by the morality of adult "consent".... It no longer seems to us that the merely bodily character of our acts can determine their moral value. Hence arises the extraordinary view that the homosexual act, considered in itself, is morally indistinguishable from the heterosexual act: for what is there, in its merely physical character, to justify the traditional stigma?4

56a This modern detachment of man from his body is most apparent in the abstract language that today in matters of sex and death replaces the direct, concrete expressions of earlier ages. Lust is free love, adultery is open marriage, homosexuality is a lifestyle, masturbation is safe sex, pregnancy is disease, abortion is termination of that disease, procreation is reproduction, birth prevention is birth control, natural mothers are surrogate mothers, unborn children are embryos, embryos are property, murder is mercy killing, mercy killing is assisted suicide, and suicide is death with dignity. (Fs) (notabene)

56b There was a time when I viewed this new language as euphemistic, that is, as a deliberate attempt to find pleasing ways to characterize nasty things in order to rationalize the doing of those things. Unfortunately, something much more ominous is abroad in the land. The people who use this language are not, from their point of view, speaking euphemistically. They are speaking quite accurately, because they are operating with what Cardinal Ratzinger recently characterized as a "revolutionary vision of man". At the heart of this vision, as Ratzinger points out,

the body is something that one has and that one uses. No longer does man expect to receive a message from his bodiliness as to who he is and what he should do; but definitely, on the basis of his reasonable deliberations and even with complete independence, he expects to do with it as he wishes. In consequence, there is indeed no difference whether the body be of the masculine or the feminine sex; the body no longer expresses being at all; on the contrary, it has become a piece of property.5

57a When it no longer matters whether the body be masculine or feminine, then it no longer matters that language reflect the masculine or feminine character of specific human beings; hence the feminist insistence that we employ so-called nonsexist or inclusive language. Men and women become persons, mothering and fathering become parenting, couples expecting a baby are encouraged to mouth such nonsense as "we are pregnant". The abstractive character of such language achieves heights heretofore undreamed of in the expression "significant other", which abstracts not only from sexual differentiation but also from every conceivable differentiation. My "significant other" can be literally anything from my pet rock to God himself (though, of course, we are no longer allowed to refer to God as a "him"). (Fs)

57b At the same time, if my body is my property, at my disposal, then there are virtually no limits to what I can do with it. I can rent it out for sex (hence current justifications of prostitution), rent out my womb for the bearing of someone else's child, view my own children as diseases to be surgically removed, or treat my own physical life as something to be ended when I wish. Women who talk about their rights to control their reproductive organs really do view their bodies, as the language suggests, in some fashion as machines producing goods, such that both the machine and the goods are at the disposal of the woman who possesses them. And the "control" they have in mind is not the control which is appropriate to persons, i.e., self-control, but those kinds of external controls appropriate to machines, i.e., pills, diaphragms, condoms and, if all else fails, abortionists. These women have abstracted themselves from their own materiality, and hence, when they speak of freeing themselves from their biology, they are not talking euphemistically; they are talking abstractly, and they are doing so because abstract language does accurately express their perception of reality. (Fs)

57c The most alarming feature of such language is that, by abstracting from the concrete, the specific, the materially embodied, we also abstract from the limits within which we must live our lives. Just as abstractions float free of any particular context, so human beings who perceive reality this way float free of any particular order. The incessant use of the word "liberation" today expresses precisely the modern, abstracted perception of reality that supposes human beings to be no longer constrained by authority, by irrevocable commitments, by tradition, by history, or even by God. Everything in creation, from our bodies to the farthest flung galaxies, now appears to us to be at our disposal. Everything is just so much playdough, to be manipulated at will. (Fs)

58a As Chesterton once observed: "The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about."6 Battles about words are always battles about competing views of reality. And the battle today is about competing and mutually exclusive visions of man, a conflict that confronts Catholics with, in the words of Cardinal Ratzinger, a "truly fundamental opposition to Faith's vision of man, an opposition which admits no possibility of compromise but places squarely before us the alternatives of believing or not".7 (Fs)