Pre-Christmas intercontextual reading assignment

Other bloggers talk about taking the Christmas holidays off, but since the Annals is so infrequently updated, what would be the point in that? There’s always something to say about something….

So I’m rummaging through the meager Web site of John Vennari’s Catholic Family News, to which I’ve never had a subscription.* One of the few articles it does replicate online is “Karl Rahner’s Girlfriend,” referring to the infamous Jesuit considered the foremost of the Modernist periti of Vatican II and the late German feminoid writer (and aren’t all contemporary German women writers feminoids???) Luise Rinser and the, um, unusual relationship they shared during the Council and for the rest of Rahner’s life (he died in 1984). Well, Vennari reports that she protested that this relationship did not include direct sexual acts….

Oh, but this is where the intercontextual reading comes into play. Googling her name, I fished up an academic paper out of the Spring 2003 issue of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association’s journal. Albrecht Classen, professor of German studies at the University of Arizona, published there his reading of another work of Rinser’s, the 1991 pseudo-historical novel Abaelards Liebe [Abelard's Love], narrated from the standpoint of Astrolabe, the bastard son of the legendary medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise. Those who persevere through the academic styling conventions will learn something here, but I’ll go ahead and highlight a couple of things:

1) Prof. Classen points out that Rinser pursues a “modern feminist agenda” through the figure of Astrolabe in this work; indeed Rinser’s feminism is mentioned several times by Claussen in context of some point being made about the novel’s text. Here’s one indirect example of this mentality in action, in the words of the Professor:

Abelard’s struggle against the Synod of Soisson is recounted in considerable detail, because the narrator — obviously reflecting Rinser’s own thoughts — increasingly reveals his profound sympathy and pity for this great teacher who was far ahead of his time and was condemned to humiliating acts of submission under the orthodox doctrines of the church. He himself would have, in Abelard’s position, protested, would have rallied friends and students, would have appealed to the pope, but nothing of this sort took place, and Astrolabe observed in great disappointment that his idol consigned, and then abandoned his theological struggle…. Abelard and his thoughts, apart from his passionate love for Heloise, assume the fundamental function of fighting for intellectual freedom, of struggling against dictatorship, and of resisting the inquisition: »Bücher kann man verbrennen, nicht aber den Geist. Der lebt, geliebt oder gefürchtet, von der Kirche verketzert oder kanonisiert.« ["Books can be burned, but not the spirit. It lives, loved or feared, denounced or canonized by the church."]

2) I have to wonder if the following sentiments of Rinser’s Astrolabe weren’t lifted straight out of Act II of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde:

[Astrolabe's criticism of his mother Heloise] also extends to the Church that practically made it impossible for the two lovers to join in marriage without Abelard losing his public reputation as a teacher. The whole notion of celibacy appears as a perversity in light of human conditions that always involve sexuality as well: »Was für eine Kirche. Oder: Was für ein Gott? Was für einen Sinn hat denn dieses Nein zum Leben, das uns doch gegeben ist zu unsrer Lust und Freude?« ["What kind of church is that? Or, what kind of God is that? What sense is there in saying no to life, which after all is given to us for our joy and pleasure?"] Astrolabe’s struggle, and by the same token Rinser’s struggle, with the phenomenon of this famous couple, is directed against the clerical denial of the human body with all its senses, desires, needs, and feelings. His protest against a God who is pleased with the renunciation of “life, of love, of lust, of children” is actually not directed against God, but against the Church that has instituted these values.**

A “perversity in light of human conditions that always involve sexuality as well”? Quid?? Do we not refer to “conditions” that invariably involve the varied wounds of Original Sin here? Oh, yes, the quintessential Modernist denial of this critical dogma, without which not only is it impossible to make any sense of not only the human condition but of the created universe itself: “For creation was made subject to vanity — not by its own will but by reason of him who made it subject — in hope, because creation itself also will be delivered from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the sons of God. For we know that all creation groans and travails in pain until now.” [Romans VIII.20ff] Not to mention the fact that the dogma of Original Sin is critical to making any real sense of the theology of our Redemption!

I don’t suppose you need to be a rocket scientist to figure out who here really had the problem with “the Church that has instituted these values” of clerical celibacy — never minding the fact that these have their genesis in certain words of St. Paul and even our Lord Himself, Who spoke of “eunuchs” for the kingdom of God! [Cf. Matt. XIX.12; several verses of I Corinthians VII.] But St. Paul warned us through his protegé St. Timothy long ago: “For there will come a time when they will not endure the sound doctrine; but having itching ears, will heap up to themselves teachers according to their own lusts. And they will turn away their hearing from the truth and turn aside rather to fables.” [II Timothy IV.3f]

Now that Fr. Rahner and Frau Rinser have both gone to their eternal reward, I can only ask: how do their ears feel now???

* It always seemed to me that not only are half of its articles replicated elsewhere, at least in substance, but that the masthead is a misnomer, as most of which it treats of are standard Catholic traditionalist polemical issues, not exactly the first thing I’d expect from something dubbed “family news.”

** Let’s not forget that Wagner wrote his Tristan libretto under the heavy influence of his own mysteriously irregular friendship with the already-married Mathilde Wesendonck.