You Can Only Come to the Morning Through the Shadows

“Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Catholicism, a bit simplistically, always has been considered the religion of the great ‘both/and’ – not of grand exclusivities, but of synthesis. The word ‘catholic’ means precisely ‘synthesis.’ “A good and truly Catholic pastoral approach means to live in the both/and; to live one’s own humanity and the humanism of man … and, at the same time, not to forget God. … Therefore, I’d say simply to commit myself to the great Catholic synthesis, to this ‘both/and.’ “In this sense, let’s live Catholicity joyously.  --Pope Benedict XVI 

A bit more on AND continued from the previous post.   

Polarization is not Catholic. A Catholic cannot think either-or (aut-aut) and reduce everything to polarization. The essence of what is Catholic is both-and (et-et)...This [saying] is not mine, but I repeat it: what is Catholic is not either-or, but is both-and, combining differences...  Pope Francis 

 As I wrote in the last post, AND is kind of a neutral.   It precedes distinctions, merely linking two or more things.   In the context of Pope Francis's warnings about division and polarization, he seems to be using the unifying conjunction as stating something greater about Catholic membership than the fact of division and strife.   In this respect, he may well be drawing from the many injunctions of the apostles in the New Testament -- avoiding division usually comes right along with injunctions against following old sinful ways of living.  

In the New Testament, there is a tension between this and what the apostles often also say about holding fast to the true traditions, and avoiding false teachers.   So the apostles are not encouraging a kind of syncretism, an abominable blend of contradictions which would add up to a sort of expedient coalition rather than a true communion or Body.

Pope Francis does not often say this outright, that conjoining two things is only the start -- to link them beyond the AND is to find a commonality between them, and often to find the correct relationship between them as well.  But often, he seems to assume it.

In that regard, there is a webpage devoted to "Both-And" by Fr Felix Just SJ, part of an extensive resource on Biblical scholarship.   He specifically talks about Pope Francis and particularly about Bergoglio's unfinished dissertation on the thought of Romano Guardini in relation to discernment.     Francis's thoughts on contraposition are interesting and help round out some of his public statements on division and dialogue:

A contraposition involves two poles in tension, pulling away from each other: horizon/limit, local/global, whole/part, and so on. These are contrapositions because they are opposites that nonetheless interact in a fruitful, creative tension. As Guardini taught me, creation is full of these living polarities, or Gegensatze; they are what make us alive and dynamic. 

Contradictions (Widerspruche) on the other hand demand that we choose, between right and wrong. (Good and evil can never be a contraposition, because evil is not the counterpart of good but its negation.) 

To see contrapositions as contradictions is the result of mediocre thinking that takes us away from reality. The bad spirit—the spirit of conflict, which undermines dialogue and fraternity—turns contrapositions into contradictions, demanding we choose, and reducing reality to simple binaries. This is what ideologies and unscrupulous politicians do. So when we run up against a contradiction that does not allow us to advance to a real solution, we know we are faced with a reductive, partial mental scheme that we must try to move beyond.

 But the bad spirit can also deny the tension between two poles in a contraposition, opting instead for a kind of static coexistence. This is the danger of relativism or false irenicism, an attitude of "peace at any price" in which the goal is to avoid conflict altogether. 

 Guardini speaks in terms of polarities -- things that are intrinsically balanced with a kind of "tension" between them.    There's a bit more about that in this paper:  Polar Tensions.  If I am understanding this correctly, Guardini's thought is not unlike that of Dietrich von Hildebrand in his Trojan Horse in the City of God.    In this, Hildebrand lists a variety of anthropological issues that have been skewed by the spirit of Vatican II.    The ones I remember include:   Man as individual vs man as member of community; marriage in its unitive and procreative aspects;  love of God vs love of neighbor.    In his book, Hildebrand resets these types of dichotomies with reference to a higher anthropological truth.   He does not explicitly use the terms of poles, tensions, or contrapositions, but he does insist on the integrity of both sides of the pairs.   

I'm just operating on intuition here, but it seems that these contrapositive ANDS are basically features of our human relatedness, a theme that is often brought out by Joseph Ratzinger in his writings on the human person.