Jerry Harkins
To say that Andrew M. Greeley is a writer would be an act of supreme lèse-majesté. Since 1961, by my count he has published 140 books—about three a year. Fifty-nine of these have been novels and now, nearing 80, he has at least two more in the works. To say he is a Catholic priest is either obvious or blasphemous, maybe both, for reasons I hope to make clear. In his spare time, he teaches sociology at the University of Arizona, conducts research at the University of Chicago, and lectures at the National University of Ireland. He writes a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributes regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal. Oh, yes, he also preaches.
Let it be said at the outset: he is not a particularly good writer. His prose is often mannered and there is no writer in English more in need of a proofreader. His fictional landscape is limited to one plotline which involves a fair amount of sex, always in the service of love which is his big theme. Of course, there aren’t very many literary themes and boy-meets-girl is far and away the most popular. But Father Greeley reminds me of Saint Paul. You remember Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians where he provides a gorgeous but idealized description of love. Reading it, I always get the feeling that Paul is a man who has thought about the subject deeply but has had little experience of the real thing. That describes Father Greeley’s take on sex: too much, too obsessive, too perfect, too merely provocative, in short, too long on imagination and too short on human nature and its discontents. (As a confessor, I suspect he knows all too well the difference between what it is and what it should be and chooses to write only about the latter.) He is also a romantic, not necessarily a capital offense but a trait that offends the delicate sensibilities of refined literary critics. Finally, he is a bit of a mystic. The spirits of those who have gone before have speaking parts in some of his novels and are just offstage in others. His characters regularly encounter poltergeists and, occasionally, even angels. In his book Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing (Prentice-Hall, 1974) he describes what some psychologists call peak experiences that reveal a kind of sudden awareness and a pleasure beyond pleasure. In several of his novels, the central character comes face to face with a guardian angel and experiences an inexplicable but powerful force that connects him ecstatically to the life-giving energy of the universe. In Patience of a Saint (1987), there is a description which gives a good idea of what the author is thinking about. The principal character is standing on a Chicago street corner. He hears a “whooshing” sound:
Then time stood still, the whole of eternity filling a single second and a single second filling the whole of eternity…With [it] there came a love so enormous that his own puny identity was submerged in it…It filled him with heat and light, fire that tore at his existence and seemed about to destroy him with pleasure and joy.
Still another book in this series is Contract with an Angel (1998). The protagonist ultimately dies and goes to heaven where he has a conversation with God, certainly not the God of Job (“Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me,”) but more like that played by George Burns in the film Oh, God. Greeley’s God explains, “I create because I love stories, especially love stories. Like all romantics I delight in happy endings.” God, it seems, is not unlike Andrew Greeley.
This is the thinnest of literary ice. Moreover, it simply does not sound like it comes from the same pen that produced a 1962 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago entitled, “The Influence of Religion on the Career Plans and Occupational Values of June 1961 College Graduates.” A fair amount of Greeley does not sound like Greeley. Except for the sex scenes which are more or less interchangeable. Including the angelic sex scenes.
Having said all that, if the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for work done “in an ideal direction” and bestowing “the greatest benefit on mankind” as it was supposed to, Greeley would surely have won it years ago. But it does not. Embarrassed by its anointing the likes of Pearl S. Buck and Sinclair Lewis in the 1930’s, it explicitly excluded popular (which is to say accessible) literature after World War II. Thus, there is no chance that you will see Father Greeley in white tie and tails accepting a medal from King Carl XVI Gustaf any time soon. Not to worry. As a non-laureate, he joins such worthies as James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Emile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings and Vladmir Nabokov.
Now the good parts: Greeley is one of the smartest, most humane writers around. He knows pretty much everything worth knowing and a lot of stuff that is not really essential to living the examined life. He is a marvelous storyteller, a worthy pilgrim in the long line of Irish saints, scholars and seanchais. Naturally, he has a point to make as do all storytellers: he thinks that God’s love is, to use a word that comes up frequently, implacable and that passionate sex is a metaphor for that love.
Is he a heretic? Is he on his way to hell? Well, if you were brought up Catholic in the 1950’s and have never recovered from it, the question need not detain you. Similarly, if you were seduced by the false spring of Vatican II, you can skip to the next question. But if you are a fallen Catholic or some other form of rational Christian and are sick of silly old men making hash out of the gospel of love, these are good questions if only because the answers may apply equally to your own salvation.
Father Greeley is a Pelagian as were all the Irish Saints. As you know, Pelagius (c. 354 - c. 420/440) was an ascetic monk and reformer who denied the doctrine of original sin deduced from the fall of Adam and was several times declared a heretic by the various authorities of the church. He was also acquitted several times but his belief system was certainly contrary to the considered opinion of Saint Augustine of Hippo who held that the default condition of the human race is evil. Exactly how Gus convinced himself of such an absurdity is another story but it was attractive to the hierarchs because it gave them exclusive power over the question of salvation or damnation. Even the Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, promoted the Augustinian view, the former in a somewhat softer version than the latter. The problem Pelagius saw was basic: what kind of God would create an essentially evil universe? And, if humans were created in the image and likeness of God, as Genesis claims, is God all evil instead of all good? Now there is a real dilemma here. After all, God is also said to be all-knowing. Knowing everything and going ahead anyway is a pretty strong argument for predestination. So every Augustinian must believe that God has predestined a number—a very large number—of people to hell. In which case, why bother paying any attention to the clergy?
Greeley’s answer begins with the idea that the first and most certain thing Christians can know about God is that God is love which, of course, is also the title of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est [Note 1]. However, I doubt Benedict means love in the comprehensive sense Greeley does. Instead, he divides it into two distinct manifestations, eros and agape. Although eros can be morally good, it has frequently been distorted and “divinized.” The Pope writes:
The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness. All other powers in heaven and on earth thus appear secondary…
That “divine madness” is the crux of the problem. It is true, he says that “…eros tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves.” But, in the next breath, he asserts that dodim, the Hebrew equivalent of eros in the Bible, suggests a love that “…is still insecure, indeterminate and searching.” It is self-seeking in contrast to ahaba or agape which, “…becomes renunciation and…is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.” Ecstasy as opposed to renunciation, especially in the male of the species, threatens the church which can’t help thinking of Eve’s seduction of Adam.
I believe Greeley would argue the opposite: that eros, especially in its ecstatic state, heightens our awareness, appreciation and connections to all things heavenly and earthly. In almost all his fiction, he explicitly says that sexual attraction is a metaphor for God’s unquenchable love for his creatures. The metaphor of sex is meant by God to remind us that we sinners cannot escape his love. The church, however, has historically regarded sex as entirely reproductive in purpose although in recent times it has discovered that it also has what it calls a “unitive” function. I think that means it brings people together. If so, it has taken the church the better part of two thousand years to get even a tenuous grip on the obvious. But reproduction is the key for the church in determining sexual morality. Eros is morally acceptable only when it is open or opens the way to conception. It is an execrable means of fulfilling the commandment “Be fruitful and multiply.” If God had consulted the church, humans would reproduce through binary fission.
I think Greeley would resist any alienation or division of love. Rather, he seems to believe that love is a single phenomenon made manifest in many ways including sexual love. Greeley would say that these manifestations are of the same species differing only in their accidentals. The love of double chocolate malteds is on the same emotional spectrum—if different in degree—as the love of a spouse. The feeling is similar, only more or less intense. If agape, as its etymology suggests, is selfless love, how shall we say that eros is necessarily any different? Like any human characteristic, it can be distorted in ways that range from self-absorbed sex to pedophilia. The Pope’s problem is that his list of erotic distortions is too long because it fails to distinguish between practices rooted in love and those rooted in pathology. It is the quality of the love between the lovers not its externalities that determines whether sex is or is not pathological. The markers of high quality are mutuality, sensitivity and commitment which are what we mean by “love, honor and cherish,” “forsaking all others” and “until death do us part.” Quality has nothing to do with race, religion, gender or the alleged permeability of latex.
Pelagius was certainly right about all the main points which means that Augustine and Jerome were wrong. It may be that the church has always known this or, more likely, feared it might be the case. The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia admitted that, “The gravest error into which he [Pelagius] and the rest of the Pelagians fell, was that they did not submit to the doctrinal decisions of the Church.” In other words, it has little or nothing to do with theology or logic, but only power.
Rome has continued in this vein ever since. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, it insisted that the Celtic manner of dating Easter and the way the Irish monks cut their hair were heretical. In 1431, it burned Joan of Arc for being a relapsed heretic in that she dressed like a man. Such trivial pursuits have nothing to do with heresy. Neither did Galileo’s proof of heliocentricity in 1633. Once the auto de fe went out of fashion, the church has been tongue-tied whenever it has confronted real heresy. In 1962, the Holy Office, formerly known as the Holy Inquisition, denounced Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for his denial of the doctrine of original sin. It reiterated its condemnation as recently as 1981 “…to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.” As usual, they were not being entirely candid. The Jesuits had already silenced him on the subject in 1925 and he had acceded to the ban. His works were circulating in a form of academic Samizdat limited pretty much to scholars. What the inquisitors were really worried about was that Teilhard’s speculations about evolution might be contagious.
Maybe the Curia is trying to bore its enemies to death. In 1979, the Holy Office tried unsuccessfully to silence Hans Küng for denying the bizarre doctrine of papal infallibility. In 2007, the Pope declared that pro choice politicians should be excommunicated or that they had already excommunicated themselves depending on which Vatican press release you read. In none of the modern cases did they use the word heretical although all three center on the denial of important teachings.
Unlike Pelagius and Teilhard, Greeley does not reject original sin at least in public. I have read more of his books than is good for me and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him mention it. I trust he realizes that eating that apple could not have been a sin because, at the time, poor Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil. The expulsion is a myth meant to teach us that we are incomplete beings who must strive to re-unite with the Godhead. Like all myths, you cannot parse it too closely without quickly running into absurdity. In all the torturous history of biblical commentary, no one has ever explained a thousand non-sequiturs like Luke 13:30, “Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.” The tortoise will beat the hare. If you read the Bible as anything other than myth and metaphor, you will rapidly descend into a Wonderland of logical chaos and pure nonsense. At the same time, if you fail to take its profound teachings to heart, you will be condemned to an impoverished existence. Worst of all, if you rely on the interpretations of professional religionists, you will be a slave to their self-interest. Take for example, the embarrassing arguments of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical banning birth control. The biblical citations in that document are adduced solely to bolster the contention that the church has the power to decide these matters. None address the substance of the issue for the very good reason that the Bible says nothing about birth control. Except, of course, for the much-abused story of poor Onan (Genesis 38:1-10) whose crime, whatever it was, merited death. Every single citation that does support the proposition that contraception is evil is referring to some recent papal encyclical, letter, exhortation or speech [Note 2]. In other words, contraception is evil because I say so and my predecessors said so. You cannot trust the hierarchs to be anything other than diligent in defense of their alleged power. So, if you are walking that lonesome valley, and you would like someone to point the way, stay away from the Catholic Church and, indeed, most other forms of modern Christianity.
Unless you find a pastor like Andrew Greeley, a godly man, a humanist, and a person perfectly in tune with the divine sense of humor.
Subsequently
Father Greeley died in his sleep during the night of May
29-30, 2013 in the eighty-sixth year of his age. He insisted he was only a priest and that all the things he
was known for—writing, teaching, doing research and being a partisan of Chicago
and its sports teams—were merely his way of being a priest. He said he wanted his tombstone to
read, “A loud-mouthed Irish priest.”
He is missed already.
Notes
1. The first sentence of the encyclical is “DEUS CARITAS EST, et, qui manet in caritate, in Deo manet, et Deus in eo manet.” The official Vatican translation renders this correctly as: “God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.” Even the Vatican would not mess with this translation which is more a direct quote from the First Epistle of Saint John. No such inhibitions restrain the American bishops. The translation prepared by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says, “God’s love for us is fundamental for our lives, and it raises important questions about who God is and who we are.” The bishops are better Latinists than that but they don’t want people thinking God is love or, even worse, love is God. So they make up a little fib.
2. There is one exception, a reference to Chapter 8 of the Catechism of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). This deals with the sacrament of matrimony and makes no reference whatever to contraception.
