Explaining and Excusing
Imagine the following scenario: Bob and Cindy are talking about human nature. Bob has a totally secular background; Cindy is a Catholic. Bob grants that much of the time, people do things that everyone would recognize as immoral. Cindy steps in with an explanation; she offers a theory (original sin) which, if accepted, would explain why people behave this way instead of simply following their consciences all the time. Cindy’s theory is rendered more intellectually appealing by virtue of its explanatory power. If Bob accepts it, he will then “know” why people do bad things against their better judgment.
Now a somewhat different scenario: Cindy is a CCD instructor who teaches confirmation classes for middle schoolers. Jim is a priest at her parish. In the course of her work, Cindy watches class after class of pious, devout teenagers go through the confirmation prep process and receive the sacrament, only to end up leaving the Church a couple years later, often never to return. She knows that confirmation is supposed to imbue her kids with the gifts of the holy spirit, an ourpouring of grace like at Pentecost, and to transform them into “soldiers of Christ”. She knows this because it’s in the catechetical materials she teaches year after year. But she doesn’t see anything like this in practice. She talks to Fr. Jim, the religious education co-ordinator, and he gives her an explanation: the fruits of the sacrament are only available to those open to receiving them. We cannot expect to see grace at work in any particular confirmation recipient, but we know it’s there because God promises it, and the Church teaches it. If the kids end up falling away, that’s simply a result of free will and original sin.
My point in this post is rather simple. There is a postural difference between the sort of explanation Cindy gave to Bob in the first scenario, and the sort of explanation Jim gave to Cindy in the second. This postural difference totally transforms the character of the explanation offered.
In the first case Cindy approaches Bob with answers to questions he’s asking. Her proposed belief adds something to his worldview in a way that seems (at least for now) to increase its scope and explanatory power. In the second case, what Jim offers to Cindy not only doesn’t add anything to her worldview, it actually decreases the explanatory power of the sacramental theology she believes. Because of Fr. Jim’s hedging on the topic, the theory of sacramental efficacy Cindy teaches her kids now becomes more or less empty, since it makes no real causal predictions about the effects of the sacraments on those who receive them, or at least softens those predictions to the point of compatibility with virtually any outcome.
If one student gets confirmed and becomes a mass murderer, that is just as well explained by Fr. Jim’s narrative as it would be if that same student became a great saint. And while this sort of explanation certainly makes the sacramental theory compatible with a wide range of observed phenomena, it also makes the theory useless as a way of making sense of real world phenomena.
One of the things one observes in popular Catholic media is how infrequent explanatory accounts of the first sort are, and how commonly we see explanatory accounts of the second sort. What does this tell us? Well, it suggests that Catholicism is the sort of thing that offers a few theories that augment a secular, non-Catholic worldview. It offers a theory of human morality, an account of original sin that explains why people do bad things, and a sort of cosmic unifying theory of the good, the meaning of life, and the destiny of existence.
The difficulty Catholicism faces, which I imagine is why there are so many “excuses” and so few real “explanations” in Catholic discourse, is that once accepted, the positive explanatory vision offered by Catholicism ends up being riddled with defects. The theory of original sin may do nicely to explain why people do things they know to be wrong, but once you accept that theory, a whole host of attendant problems show up: why would God allow original sin to persist? Why doesn’t the grace of baptism wipe out original sin? How does original sin get passed on? Why do those who die in a state of original sin only still merit hell? These questions all have various answers, but the answers generally take the form of an excuse: they decrease the explanatory power of the theory as originally proposed, and end up leaving more open questions than original sin provided answers to in the first place.
Another interesting thing about this phenomenon is what it shows us about the reasons for believing. The more excuses a theory needs to maintain plausibility in the face of contradictions or contrary empirical evidence, the clearer it becomes that that theory is being maintained out of a preference or a commitment (conscious or merely dispositional) to believe, rather than the explanatory power or evidentiary basis of the belief. Maybe Cindy convinces Bob that Original Sin is real on the basis of the evidence of human wickedness. But as time goes on, if Bob is going to continue believing in original sin, it will depend more and more on his commitment to believe, his adherence to the Church’s authority on the matter, and less on the evidence in favor of the belief itself. What began as a legitimate intellectual preference on the basis of explanatory power, ends up as a series of intellectual exercises to continually shift the goalposts on one’s belief to make it compatible with an ever-growing set of contrary facts.
There’s one more phenomenon I want to point out, which is the way we tend to alternate between these two postures, sometimes with respect to the very same beliefs. In one circumstance (say, preaching to an audience of devout believers) an appeal will be made to the belief as originally presented: the sacraments are powerful, they are sources of grace, they are transformative and sanctifying and holy. Appeals are made to the miraculous effects of the sacraments, and so on. In a different circumstance (say, responding to some doubt or criticism) the appeal is totally different: it’s to the invisibility of grace, the need for co-operation, the lack of guarantees, the mystery of it all.
The shift between postures would be excusable, except that it tends to result in a set of implicit contradictions about what one should expect or believe. One sees this perhaps nowhere more clearly than in treatments of the Pope as a figure of catholic unity and authoritative source of orthodox teaching. He is, until he isn’t, and when he isn’t all the pomp and certainty associated with papal claims end up being hedged into oblivion. This kind of hypocritical alternation between different concepts of the same thing is something I’ve described elsewhere.
In any case, I think there was a time when Christianity offered more explanations than excuses, when the Christian worldview gave people more answers than questions, and its overall perceived coherence with lived experience was high. The fact that most Christian (and Catholic) writers seem to occupy a defensive posture with respect to their beliefs, and are caught up providing excuses for beliefs rather than providing beliefs that explain reality, is a testament to the decrepitude of Christianity as a viable worldview. Christianity can’t explain life, or the world, or human behavior; instead it’s left furiously trying to explain how it isn’t actually incompatible with the general experience we have of life, the world, and human behavior.
Not a great way to win converts.