Pope Benedict XVI braves the specter of Dante

Although there is sadness at his leaving, there are a number of reasons to appreciate the action that Pope Benedict XVI has taken in resigning the papacy.  As I noted in the last post, Pope Benedict has broken a longstanding custom that popes serve until death.  In so doing, he has provided one way for declining popes to avoid a situation where the Church must attempt to cope with a pope who becomes unable to function in his office.  Further, as Vincent J. Miller points out in this post on America’s “In All Things” blog, Pope Benedict’s resignation is itself an act of teaching—a humble recognition that even the Pope functions under constraints of history and of his own humanity.  As Jack Hunt commented on Miller’s post, now we can see the papacy more clearly as a ministry rather than as some kind of monarchy.

This was a courageous move, and not only because it was a break with custom.  For in resigning his office, Pope Benedict dared to brave the specter of Dante Alighieri himself.  In the third canto of Inferno, the pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil pass through the fearsome gate of hell into a place of darkness, noise and tumult.  Here, Virgil reveals, are “the wretched souls of those who lived/ without disgrace yet without praise.” [Hollander trans.]  No one here is named—“the world does not permit report of them,” Virgil sneers—but Dante notes that among them is “the shade of him/ who, through cowardice, made the great refusal.”

Most of the early commentators on the poem saw this as a reference to Pope Celestine V, a simple hermit who was drafted into the papacy in 1294.  Overwhelmed by the office and the ecclesiastical and political intrigues that surrounded it, he resigned after only a few months.  His resignation paved the way for Benedetto Caetani, a  pope whom Dante detested, to  begin his reign as Pope Boniface VIII.

It is easy to imagine that any pope—and particularly an Italian pope!—who considered resignation would be daunted by Dante’s imagined postmortem disdain.  Perhaps it took a German pope—and one with courage and a strong sense of himself—to take that step. 

Although these thoughts came to me almost as soon as I heard of Pope Benedict’s decision, I am grateful to my wife, Maureen O’Brien, for pointing out another post on the America site in which Fr. Drew Christiansen recounts that Pope Benedict had visited Celestine’s tomb in Aquila, Italy, on more than one occasion.  Perhaps, Fr. Christiansen wonders, these pilgrimages can now be seen as occasions when Pope Benedict pursued the prayerful discernment that led to his decision to resign.

On Prof. King's Papyrus

The headlines, as usual, are sensational: “Shedding new light on Jesus’ marital status?”; “A faded piece of papyrus refers to Jesus’ wife; Historians believe it is authentic; may reignite debate.” 

The article that follows, published in today’s Post-Gazette, was written by Laura Goldstein of the New York Times.  It concerns a tiny piece of papyrus in the possession of Prof. Karen L. King, an historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School.

The papyrus fragment includes a text in Coptic (an Egyptian language written with Greek characters) including the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’”  A later clause says, “She will be able to be my disciple.”  As far as Prof. King and other scholars can determine, the papyrus dates from the 4^th century.  She guesses that it may have been copied from a 2^nd-century text.

Back to the headlines.  None of them is actually wrong, although the first is certainly misleading, saved only by the question mark at the end.  As the article points out, Prof. King “repeatedly cautioned that this fragment should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married.  The text was probably written centuries after Jesus lived, and all other early, reliable Christian literature is silent on the question, she said.”  Just so.

What this text tells us is that its writer portrayed Jesus as having a wife.  That is interesting as a reflection of the author’s outlook, but does not constitute strong historical evidence that Jesus was actually married.  In this regard, the present discovery is much like the “Gospel of Judas” that was brought to public notice in 2010.  That document, apparently produced within a 2^nd century Christian community influenced by gnosticism, has Jesus commend Judas as his best disciple.  For more on that document, on gnosticism, and on how we should regard such finds, see this article that I wrote at the time.

To the headlines again.  There can be no disputing that “a faded piece of papyrus refers to Jesus’ wife.”  That “historians believe it is authentic” is true as long as we read the article and see that here “authentic” means “actually a 4^th century scrap rather than a much more recent forgery.”  “Authentic” does not imply, as we saw Prof. King emphasizing, that the document is accurate in seeing Jesus as married.

Finally, the “may reignite debate” headline.  This one is undoubtedly accurate—anything will get people arguing again over things we think important enough to argue over.  According to Ms. Goldstein, the papyrus could spur debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had female disciples.  She notes that debates on these questions seem “relevant today, when global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.”

I think it safe to say that the new find will become an occasion for more discussion on these issues.  I don’t believe that it has anything new and substantial to bring to that discussion. What we might say about the questions themselves is perhaps matter for future blog posts!

A final note, for the sake of accuracy.  Ms Goldstein says in the article that discussion “is particularly animated in the Roman Catholic Church, where despite calls for change, the Vatican has reiterated the teaching that the priesthood cannot be opened to women and married men because of the model set by Jesus.” 

It is a mistake to say that the Catholic Church says that the priesthood cannot be opened to married men.  There are married Roman Catholic priests—generally men who were married Anglican or Episcopal priests and who joined the Catholic Church.  Celibacy for priests is a matter of discipline in the Catholic Church, not a matter of doctrine.  Theoretically, the Church could modify this discipline at any time.   

On the other hand, Pope John Paul II wrote in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994 that, as a matter of doctrine, “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”

                                                                                                  © 2012 Andrew K. Bechman

St. Augustine of Hippo--August 28

     There are few saints whose lives have been considered from more angles than St. Augustine’s. I was reminded recently of one aspect of Augustine’s legacy—his enormous influence on Christian theology. I’ve been (very slowly) working my way through Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. (The title’s not a misprint, by the way—MacCulloch begins the story of Christianity with an exploration of Greek culture and of the story of the Jews, both of which are rooted in times long before the appearance of Jesus on the scene.)

      MacCulloch notes that beginning around 1490, the first scholarly edition of St. Augustine’s works was published in Basel. St. Augustine himself had died over a millennium before, but this was a time in which the combination of a new approach to learning (that we call humanism) and the development of printing led to widespread new consideration of ancient texts. In the decades that followed, theologians mined Augustine’s thought. The saint’s writings are so vast in scope, and his thought at times so paradoxical (if not self-contradictory) that the new thinkers tended not to be able to hold together all that Augustine seems to have held together in his own mind.

      MacCulloch quotes B. B. Warfield, a historian of theology: “The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.” Martin Luther and the reformers followed the bishop of Hippo’s insistence on God’s grace as the sole font of our salvation; Catholic theologians emphasized the need to be connected to the Church. “From one perspective,” MacCulloch concludes, “a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of the long-dead Augustine.”
                                                                             --Andy Bechman