Notes on the Catechism, Part 1
Notes on the Catechism: King Oswald’s Heirs:
Meditations on the Catechism of the English Church by Fr. Thomas Plant
Some introductory remarks and a brief overview of the first eleven Chapters, (pp. 7-123)
Fr. Thomas Plant addresses a world which has lost a sense of the spiritual, of things seen and unseen, distinguishing between the limits of our natural vision and the forgetting of our supernatural vision or seeing. One might think about Austin Farrer’s point that reason versus revelation is a false or at least a poor and incomplete dichotomy.
“We ought to say ‘Natural Reason and Supernatural Revelation’, and we ought to throw the emphasis on the adjectives rather than upon the nouns. We have not to distinguish between God’s action and ours, but between two phases of God’s action – his supernatural action, and his action by way of nature. It is difficult to see how anything resembling Christianity can survive the denial of this distinction. For Christianity is faith in Christ, and Christ is God acting not by way of nature, but supernaturally. If you reduce Christ to a part of God’s natural action, is he Christ any longer?” (The Glass of Vision, p. 16).
Plant suggests that we live in “a disenchanted world,” an idea popularised by Charles Taylor following Max Weber. At the same time, however, his book constantly calls attention to the forms of enchantment for good or for ill in our world, for instance, in literature and poetry in the images of dragons, fairies, and ghosts. The idea of disenchantment suggests the ways in which we are disengaged and disconnected from everything – the world, ourselves, one another, and God. But as has been well noted, the loss of the idea of living in an enchanted world belongs to the “myth of disenchantment” (Jason A. Josephson Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment). There is more than enough superstition and myths in the sense of untruths in our ‘post-truth’ world as there was ever before. The fascination with daily horoscopes is but one example.
‘Science’ in its mechanical, empiricist, and materialistic assumptions has much in common with magic, it is worth noting. Both are modern phenomena and in their modern forms seek to manipulate and control nature and humans, both in the natural sciences and the human sciences. In both cases, there is a problem about the forms of our knowing, about what scientia means in our modern world. One of the questions in the natural and human sciences, so-called, is whether we are primarily interested in trying to understand the world and human behavior or to predict and control both. It is really a question about the ethical, especially with respect to the ideology of progress. The great writers of satire, such as Swift (A Modest Proposal) and Voltaire (Candide), knew only too well that wanting to make the world better doesn’t always mean that we do. Our utopian fantasies turn into dystopias, as in Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
