Sharings

Polytheism and pro-life

Dear Editor:
Sorry to complain to you about Richard Gaillardetz's article in your September issue ("Recovering the Sacred Mystery: How to Connect Liturgy and Life," ML 24:7). Normally your publication is a grand success in every respect. Perhaps Dr. Gaillardetz has only misspoken himself. There are two points in his otherwise nice article that should be checked, I think.
The first is what I see as polytheism. A supreme being must be one (in order to be supreme). I think the word "being" denotes an individual self-sustaining (in God's case) entity. To say there are "three individual beings in God" might mean God is comprised of three beings (wrong) or that three individual beings are contained in God (like three apples in a basket, which would be a fourth being; also wrong). Anyway, that's a matter that can easily be mended. Perhaps a word of explanation in the next issue would help.
The second is of a more serious nature: I object to his use of the abortion issue as an illustration or analogy for the main thesis of his article. His statement that "both pro-life extremists and pro-choice zealots tend to rely on the same moral language of individual rights" is exactly wrong. That "one group stresses the rights of the unborn to the exclusion of any real concern for the mother and the social and economic circumstances that might lead a woman to make such a difficult decision" is also precisely wrong. If, like an unborn child, Dr. Gaillardetz were decapitated in his office, bagged and thrown into a dumpster by the student who murdered him, who in the world would rightly argue that only pro- life extremists would object? Who would defend the student who, because Dr. Gaillardetz gave him or her a failing grade, felt that his or her "social and economic circumstances" were being wrecked? Where's the balance? What kind of value system is that? How can any liturgist or liturgy celebrate that kind of dishonesty?
Now, if Dr. Gaillardetz is essentially different from an unborn child, then let him make that understanding clear. Let him put the case, or don't use the case, in its absence, to support his thesis.
There are a lot of good people out there who rely on the phantom "authority" of teachers and writers of articles to push their decision in the direction of killing. So, let Dr. Gaillardetz explain to your readers what it is that makes for a human being (with a right to life); let him put his case before using a misstatement of undenied and undeniable facts regarding abortion to support an argument.
I would appreciate knowing if there was or was not a storm of replies like mine.
How can he have given this article as a speech at a liturgical conference and not been set upon immediately? Does he intend to explain himself? To anyone?
Sorry to burden you with this. Keep up the good work on your magazine. Surely you can find brighter lights to illumine the issues. Or just find some local philosophers or theologians who would be willing to proofread for you gratis.
David M. Wanner
Hartland, Wisc.
Richard Gaillardetz replies:
Let me respond to your criticisms in turn. Your first criticism concerning my purported "polytheism" has me a bit puzzled. It is directed, I must presume, at my rejection of a kind of unitarian theism in which God is posited as "an individual being who is bigger, better and more powerful than ourselves but an individual being nevertheless" (11). You argue that if God is supreme, God must be one. Of course I agree completely. The problem is that you apparently equate the perfect unity of God with individuality, hence you speak of God as "an individual self-sustaining entity." At this point your objection is not with me but with St. Thomas and all who came after him in that tradition. For it is St. Thomas who rejected the teaching that God is an individual. Because, at least in scholastic philosophy, by "individual" one meant a single instantiation of a particular class or group of which there could be more than one member, God could not possibly be an individual. As Thomas taught, God is not an individual instance or suppositum of being. Rather, God is perfectly self-subsistent being, esse subsistens ipsum (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, Q.3, aa. 3-7). In other words, God cannot be an "entity," no matter how powerful such an entity might be. As the German theologian Karl Rahner put it, such a being would simply be "one more being in the larger household of reality." This is the foundation for St. Thomas's well-known ontology of participation wherein God alone is perfectly self-subsistent being, and all else that exists exists only insofar as they are created participations in divine being. The view that God is an individual entity is all too common and is the reason I said what I did in the address. It is a kind of theism that presumes a desiccated and wholly untheological view of God which emerged during the Enlightenment and did more than anything else to bring about the rise of atheism, that philosophical tradition which rejected the theism, or, more accurately, the deism, of the Enlightenment.
Let me turn now to your heated complaint regarding my very brief comment regarding the abortion debate. I must simply observe that at no point did I deny the church's unambiguous condemnation of abortion. I support the church's teaching on this matter without reservation. I did suggest that in the contemporary debate over this issue, "pro-life extremists" share part of the blame for the intransigence of the various camps because of the individualistic philosophical language they employ. Obviously it was not my intention to indict the whole pro-life movement, for many in the movement are by no means extremists. Unfortunately, the more moderate voices in the pro-life movement, such as the American bishops' representative Helen Alvarez, do not get as much attention as people like Randall Terry. I went on to suggest that the language of the common good in Catholicism’s social justice tradition might better serve the pro-life position. You may not agree with this, but it is a position that hardly deserves the kind of extended diatribe which you offered in your letter. Indeed, the kind of rhetorical excess manifested in your letter is precisely what I mean when I refer to the intransigence of the various camps in this debate.

Misrepresented