Beyond Naive Belief: The Bible and Adult Catholic Faith.

Paul Dinter spent fifteen years as Catholic chaplain at Columbia University. Beyond Naive Belief is best appreciated as a reflection on preaching to college congregations: Sacred Scripture for Skeptics. The university community is most likely to be dominated by two different brands of skepticism: amateur and professional. The adolescent student population expresses a sort of reflex rebelliousness against authority; the professoriat a deliberated doubt on all absolutist claims. Dinter reflects on both skepticisms and finds a common connection. The adolescent is in rebellion against the naive emotional ties of childhood; the faculty pursues the Enlightenment's rebellion against the historical childhood of human culture.

Individuals and historical human culture begin life with "mythopoetic" beliefs which become the emotional foundation of later life. A mother consoles a child in a thunderstone: "Everything is all right." But, of course, everything does not turn out to be exactly, or always, or largely "all right." The nursery lesson is unlearned. Melville describes the trajectory: "Though infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence's doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting on manhood's pondering repose of If." Dinter explains the common doom of adolescent skepticism via Freud's analysis of the course of human maturation. Sexual awakening in adolescence propels the individual out of naive emotional bonding toward independence. Adolescence is the great crisis of maturity and it is not always traversed; it is always traversed with travail. Dinter summarizes: "[T]he developing adolescent's inner struggle relates to. .. the loss of an early certainty about self and world and the new-found freedom ... [andl is exhilarating and frightening at the same time. This causes ... overreactions: ideological identification, peer group overidentification ... the loss of self in mass movements or musical subcultures, and, tragically, the compulsion to avoid it all through suicide." As a consequence, freshmen are a tough congregation for a traditional gospel.

Faculty may be no better. Having delineated a Freudian course for individual growth (or lack thereof), Dinter makes bold to apply a similar analysis to cultural history. Human culture begins with the emotional childhood of the race expressed in the great mythic stories (Gilgamesh, Homer, the Bible). But the time comes when these emotional reassurances falter before fact. The Enlightenment brings critical rationality to bear on biblical tales and moves to "disbelief and manhood's pondering repose of If." Neither the rebellious adolescent nor the rationalist professor can accept childhood tales as sensible or salvific. So it goes - and so have collegiate congregations gone: out the door.

Dinter regards both the adolescent and the rationalist university tutor as cases of "arrested development." One needs to move through the common doom and disbelief, from childhood naivete to the "second naivete" in which our emotional foundation is recovered in adult form. One can learn from the "hermeneutic of suspicion" but still affirm a faith, albeit with, as he says, a "whispered no... for each dogmatic proclamation. To that end, Dinter judges the current posture of the official church in Rome counter productive - well, disastrous would be more accurate.

In the first place, they don't read the Bible correctly. As recently as Humani generis (1950) it was claimed that the first eleven books of Genesis were historical record. While Catholic biblical scholarship has now caught up with the nineteenth century and so on, the curia has not. Powerful mythic structures continue to be purveyed as putative fact. Rome not only muddles die message, it mistakes the method. Dinter rejects Vatican I's doctrine of infallibility as narcissistic fabrication. He resymbolizes the two infallible Marian dogmas of recent memory, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, rejecting any proven or necessary relation to "fact" and reordering their importance down Vatican II's "hierarchy of Christian truths."

I am sympathetic with the direction of Dinter's argument. The discussion of adolescence and the problems of traditional faith is perceptive and valuable. I would raise two fundamental questions, however: one regarding the argument, the second with the character of the conclusion.

Despite important disclaimers about details, some version of the Freudian trajectory is persuasive about individual development; it is much less plausible in regard to great cultural movements. Freud's own psychoanalysis of history is highly dubious. The childhood-to-adulthood mythology of history is itself an Enlightenment fiction and I am as distrustful of it in Dinter as in Diderot. I wonder whether Dinter's account of cultural history does not commit the same error as his curial nemesis: passing off myth as fact.

My uneasiness about the historical account of academic rationality is reinforced by queasiness about Dinter's final position. While I agree with the need to re-integrate a kind of childhood naivete into adult maturity, I could not detect in Dinter whether Christian symbolism had some special capacity to accomplish this. More serious, I think, is that Dinter's larger argument never quite reaches what I would call the lived "density" of religious belief While it certainly is true that a second naivete cannot have the consoling immediacy of first naivete ("...nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendor in the grass..."), Dinter's characterization of the end-state may be too infected with the academic setting in which he preached for so many years. It is indeed a mark of "rationality" and good theology to utter dogmatic proclamations with a "whispered `no.'" The Eucharist is the Body of Christ - but not exactly. But Melville may be closer to the mature religious stance when he recognizes the need to "Speak your `No' with thunder." By the same token, however, mustn't faith speak its "Yes" with some sort of "thunder"? In this context, infallibility may be a muffled echo of distant thunder.

Look at it this way. Religious utterance, positive or negative, is essentially "dense" or "thunderous" in that it is commensurate with the density of individual existence. Characteristically, Sartre's atheism sees existence as "too much," a nauseating overflow; saints see existence as "glory." One of the strengths or scandals Of Christianity is investing the historical "density" of Jesus with the trapping of mythopoetic theology. In a weak moment, Dinter says, "Postcritical belief acts on the hunch that creation is a more comprehensive reality that is not yet fully manifest." But can we find the necessary religious thunder in such a hunch?

If one writes from memories of a university chaplaincy, there will be a great temptation to struggle with the "truth" claims of religion because Truth is what is emblazoned on the university seal. (Lux et Veritas and all that!) From the standpoint of the scientific advance of truth, faith may be just a hunch. My own view is that the truths of religion are derivatives of a wholly different "language game" which, for brevity's sake, one might call the game of promises."

The mother says to the frightened child, "Everything will be all right." Does the skeptic of the nursery whisper "no"? The mother is not so much describing how the world is - she knows travail - she is promising protection, offering fundamental reassurance beyond life's obvious and inevitable failures. Without that promise underlying all the dismaying facts, emotional maturity may be impossible. Religious faith and its accompanying "dogmas" exist primarily within the logic of promises. The famous "second naivete" might be thought of like a second marriage. The romantic illusions of youth are tempered by realism, yet the second promise contains no "whispered `no.'" Promising to be loving and true with the first or second (or however many) vows flies in the face of sober empiricism and the divorce statistics. But promises are not promises at all with a whispered "no." If you say you promise, you have fully done the deed whatever odd reservations rattle in the brain. Promises are by nature "dense" to the reality that they create.

First one believes in a promise, then one may puzzle how it could possibly be fulfilled. The fulfillment remains a mystery to simple fact and converts dogmatic "truths" into symbols, myths. But faith is beyond hunches, a trust beyond "truths." Why believe implausible promises? Faith in Jesus, given his history and story, offers a "Yes" beyond all "No's."