"Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes." I kicked off my quick-takes last Friday by pointing to a few general dismantlings of the recent YouTube hit "Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus" (which I will not rehash here). Not surprisingly, the frustration to this kind of approach to "spirituality" is not limited to Catholics, as my friend Mr Nathanael Blake has let his own misgivings be known. The trend of claiming to be "spiritual,but not religious" or of attempting to distance oneself from religion by claiming that it gets in the way of a relationship with God.
So what does this have to do with Chesterton's observation that most "new ideas" are in fact "old mistakes"? It may seem a simplistic critique, but I believe that Mr Jefferson Bethke is, even if subconsciously, embracing the Gnostic heresy of Manicheism in making this video (and apparently, I'm not alone in this assessment). A strong claim, to be sure, and perhaps overkill for the video itself, or even the"spiritual,but nor religious" trend as a whole. But it does have something in common with that heresy in particular, a sort of revulsion of the body as opposed to the spirit.
What I mean is this. Belonging to the church (yes, small c in this case) means belonging to the Christian religion, and accepting at least certain dogmas and doctrines (e.g. that Jesus is true God and true Man, that He died for us, that the Bible is the inspired written word of God). Of particular relevance to this discussion is that belonging to this religion means being a member of the mystical Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12-14) [1]. That means that human beings—yes, in our frailty and weakness, in the fallen state we suffer in this vale of tears—are in effect Christ's hands and feet and even (gasp) His voice in this world.
In a more strictly Catholic understanding, the Church (large C this time) is the Faithful who are the body of Christ, and this body is guided by the Holy Spirit. More broadly, the (small c) church is made up of believers who would profess Christ, and yet who are also sinners who would at times deny Him. Both of these things appear as contradictions—though they are only paradoxes. What manner of chimera consists of a body of men and yet is animated by the Spirit of God? And how can we follow a religion of people who claim that they are believers yet who often fall well short of what faith demands of them? Worse still, religion seems to demand that we submit ourselves to this body of believers—it is from them that we learn about Christ, and from them that we get our Bible, to them that we must at times turn for help in understanding what we ought to believe.
We see that the other members of the body of Christ are sinners. We know this, we recognize it, and we often want to proclaim it as a way of distancing ourselves from their sins. "I am not like those others, those miserable sinners who boast of their religion and ritual like the pharisee but who really don't know you!" (Luke 18:11). We see the sins of the members of Christ's Body, and so want to separate ourselves from it, as Mr Bethke attempts to separate himself from it by embracing the pure spirit of just wanting the relationship without the religion. The problem is that the religion is a part of the relationship, and indeed an integral part. The former cannot be denied without damaging the latter.
This "spiritual, but not religious" attitude seems to me to be a way for those so-inclined to remove themselves from the nitty-gritty part of living as a member of the body of Christ. Yes, they still care about some of the works of mercy—feeding the poor, for instance [2]—but these are often the "noncontroversial" or "feel-good" works, and not the "hard" works of (say) rebuking sinners or instructing the ignorant. These latter are "hard" because they often force ourselves to come into contact with our own failings—either by making us keenly aware of our own sins or by risking being truly judgmental. Moreover, as we are members of a larger body which is as a whole accountable to Christ, our turn may yet come to be rebuked or corrected; we may face the fact that though we profess with our mouths (and even our hearts and minds) Christ, we proclaim sin with our lives. Dissociating ourselves from the other sinners, from "religion", does nothing to resolve this problem. Learning to live in the humility which recognizes that we are not too good for the rest of the body of Christ, however, may go a long way in helping us to truly repent.
"Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact the guide to the maze. It has been compiled form knowledge which, even considered as a human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel. There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years."
--Footnotes--
[1] Yes, s**t just got corporeal.
[2] Though again, it is the institutionalized religions which have done more than anyone to carry out these works.
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