This month our lead story is “Women in the Church”. I originally intended to use the title “Is the Church Misogynistic?” but I backtracked partly because it sounded a bit negative, but mostly because the criticism that the Church – “Mother Church” – is misogynistic seems to me to border on the absurd. Nobody will deny that individual men can be so, just as individual women can hate men; our human nature is fallen after all, and in Genesis the previously harmonious relationship between men and women is portrayed as the first victim of Original Sin.
But since the claim that the Church is misogynistic has recently been aired it does need examination, and so we have included three articles on the matter this month. Of course much more could be said on the matter and if you would like to read up more you could look up Erika Bachiochi’s Women, Sex, and the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching (Pauline Books & Media, 2010), or Christopher Kaczor’s The Seven Big Myths about the Catholic Church: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction about Catholicism (Ignatius Press, 2012), in particular the section entitled: “The Church Hates Women: The Myth of Catholic Misogyny”. Another very interesting writer and speaker on the topic of women and the Church is Sr Prudence Allen, a member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission. Sister Prudence’s work focuses in particular on women philosophers and on the philosophical concept of womanhood. You can find some of talks on YouTube.
I would like to use this Editorial to revisit the cover story of the March issue of Position Papers, namely the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. That topic garnered a lot of interest and feedback. Some people said that they’d never heard of him and they were grateful for the introduction. Others – the great Peterson fans – were delighted to see Position Papers joining the fan club. There were others, however, who voiced a word of caution, pointing out that not everything in Jordan Peterson is compatible with the Faith, and (on mature reflection) I share their concerns. There are, to my mind, three caveats which should be borne in mind when reading (or watching) Peterson. They concern things – we could call them tendencies – in his thought which are at odds with a Catholic understanding of religion.
Firstly, Peterson’s approach to Sacred Scripture is problematic. While he is doing trojan work mining Biblical texts for their psychological wealth, he does so as one would approach any text of mythology i.e. without faith in its historical character. He certainly considers Sacred Scripture as a work of great wisdom, and as “the foundational document for Western civilisation” which is now largely overlooked by intellectuals, and he taps into it in an admirable way. For a Christian, however, this approach is still “reductive” i.e. it brackets out the most important fact that revelation is a supernatural initiative of God. In other words the Bible is not the product of human, but of divine wisdom. Bishop Barron warns against this “Gnosticizing tendency”:
In a word, I have the same concern about Peterson that I have about both Campbell and Jung, namely, the Gnosticizing tendency to read Biblical religion purely psychologically and philosophically and not at all historically. No Christian should be surprised that the Scriptures can be profitably read through psychological and philosophical lenses, but at the same time, every Christian has to accept the fact that the God of the Bible is not simply a principle or an abstraction, but rather a living God who acts in history. (www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/02/27/the-jordan-peterson-phenomenon).
Thomas V. Mirus has also pointed out the danger in this approach to Sacred Scripture, saying that it runs the danger of falling into dishonesty:
The most immediately obvious pitfall of this approach is that any attempt to make the Bible accessible to those who do not believe in its central truths will necessarily be reductive. Peterson realizes this to an extent, but makes a problematic distinction between literal truth and “tool truth”, that is, something that may not be literally true but has good results when we stake our lives on it as though it were true (this is Peterson’s notion of belief, and the sense in which he calls himself a Christian). Putting aside the philosophical problems with this, and the way it ultimately guts Scripture of its primary incarnate, personal meaning, this sort of therapeutic approach runs the risk of dishonesty, for if one thinks something is not true but behaves as though it is, one is being dishonest (“Dangerous ideas at Google and the pain of Jordan Peterson” in Catholic culture.org).
A second caveat is in the area of Peterson’s excessive commitment to individualism. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, of Stalin’s USSR, of Hitler’s Germany, and of the Khmer Rouge appear to be the driving force behind the incredible passion with which Peterson speaks against our own lurching towards some kind of totalitarian system built on gender ideology. His is probably the clearest voice on the planet at the moment in its opposition to the suppression of basic freedoms in the name of politically correct views of gender. At the same time, however, his way of approaching the problem has probably swung too much towards the individual and away from the communal. For him – perhaps evidence of his Protestant upbringing – “religion is about individual development”. For a Catholic religion is about the development of a people – the people of God.
This is a point well made by Brandon McGinley in a recent article in the Catholic Herald entitled “What is a Catholic to make of Jordan Peterson?” There he writes of Peterson, that
He does not see, however, how it is precisely Enlightenment individualism that has dissolved the bonds of charity, solidarity and authority that made Christianity a living tradition…. And if, God willing, the Church is to baptise Jordan Peterson the man, let us pray that the grace of the sacrament washes away his commitment to individualism and replaces it with an integrated view of the human person, striving not for the greatness of alpha status in a world of brutes but for the greatness of communion with the God who is love.
The third and final caveat should be placed alongside Peterson’s tendency to reduce religion to morality (again perhaps a relic of his Protestant upbringing). For him “religious systems are about how we ought to act, and these arose in a quasi evolutionary manner”; “scientific truth tells you what things are, but genuine religious truth tells you how to act”. In this way, for Peterson, religious truths “are not true, in way of scientific truth, but ‘meta true’ or ‘hyper true’”. This is also quite problematic and potentially reductive of religion to moralism.
Peterson’s reduction of truth to “scientific truth” (facts) and “religious truth” (significant for action) is too simplistic. There is a whole metaphysical worldview underlying Christianity without which moral action would make no sense (and indeed would be impossible). This is a metaphysics of a creator God whose creative work is the work of love and wisdom; it is the metaphysics of the creative logos – the second person of the Trinity – entering into the drama of human history at a real moment in time.
Christianity, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “is not a new philosophy or a new form of morality. We are only Christians if we encounter Christ, even if He does not reveal Himself to us as clearly and irresistibly as he did to Paul in making him the Apostle of the Gentiles. We can also encounter Christ in reading Holy Scripture, in prayer, and in the liturgical life of the Church – touch Christ’s heart and feel that Christ touches ours. And it is only in this personal relationship with Christ, in this meeting with the Risen One, that we are truly Christian” (Address, Sept. 3, 2008).
I would like to finish by extending my condolences to our Subscriptions Manager, Liam Ó hAlmhain on the recent death of his wife Brighid. Please remember Brighid and her family in your prayers. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam dílis.