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By Rodolfo F. Acuña / Guest contributor
One of the most difficult chores for activists is recognizing how they acquired knowledge and why they react in so and so manner. I know that I am passionate about what I do, write and that am often intolerant – a characteristic that some people interpret as anger but stems from strong feelings as to what is right and wrong.
I am not religious, indeed I don’t believe in the hereafter or spirituality. Nevertheless, I recognize that my core beliefs were formed by my Catholic upbringing. I was raised in a day when only Catholics went to heaven and Jews were said to have killed Christ. There was right and wrong, a mortal and venial sin; although we believed that the former was the most interesting.
Like most Catholic boys of my time, I wanted to become a priest. However, doubts kept creeping into my mind like when the priest told my sister that she should stay in an abusive marriage because it was her cross. That along with whiff of perfume woke me up to the fact that this was not my calling. Nevertheless, it imbued me with a missionary spirit. My favorite movie along these lines was Robert De Niro’s The Mission [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcJdjXr2d6g ]
However, I recognize now that these altruistic roles aside from promoting religious values also nurtured the cult of the hero that drives too many of us. I never questioned this impulse until I was teaching in a high school and one of my colleagues was a former nun. I naively believed that once a priest or once a nun you were always a religious. Religion was much more dogmatic than it is today when you can rationalize being a good Catholic and a bigot toward immigrants or gays. For me this is a contradiction that surely should condemn the nativist to burn in eternity.
One day in the teachers’ smoking room I asked Marguerite, a former nun, why she had left the convent. She sighed and gave me a very measured response saying that she was a sister for over ten years and that she prayed intently always capping this meditation with the expression Ad maiorem Dei gloriam “for the greater glory of god,” [http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/13507/for-the-greater-glory-of-god/ ] a saying familiar to me because of my Jesuit training.
As Marguerite described it, one day while in deep prayer she had an epiphany. [ http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epiphany ]. She asked herself whether she was a nun because it was for the greater glory of god or whether it was for the greater glory of Marguerite. When she realized that she was deluding herself, she left the convent.
My own awakening was not nearly as sudden or dramatic. As a kid I expressed the same fervor as Marguerite. I supposedly wanted to change the world for the greater glory of god. My world was comprised of comic books and bible stories. One of my first heroes was St. Augustine of Hippo (354-386) [http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02084a.htm ]. I guess that I was first drawn to him because he was a sinner.
However, like every human being, the more I learned about him the more critical I became. My criticism grew as I studied scholasticism http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Scholasticism and the importance of solving contradictions became more apparent and important.
There was one Augustinian story in particular that brought me to my Marguerite moment after which I could not live the contradiction.
The story goes that St. Augustine wanted to understand and be able to explain the Holy Trinity. Augustine spent over 30 years working on his treatise De Trinitate [about the Holy Trinity] [http://canonandcreed.com/2013/05/15/augustines-de-trinitate-my-complete-summaries/ ]. Oversimplifying the problem Augustine sought to solve the mystery of how there were three separate persons in one.
At first I could pretty much accepted that it was possible because god operated under different rules. However, Augustine explanation only raised further contradictions: “if your view of God does not match the reality of God, you do not really love God and your faith is a false faith!”
The explanations of my religious teachers further heigtened the contradiction. One that I heard repeated since the third grade was the story of Augustine trying to understand the Trinity. In deep thought he was walking along the beach when he suddenly came upon a little boy who was all alone and playing in the sand. Augustine saw the small boy running back and forth from the water to the sand. The boy was using a sea shell to carry the water from the sea and place it into a small hole in the sand.
Augustine asked, “My boy, what are doing?” The smiling boy replied,
“I am trying to bring all the sea into this hole,”
Dismayed Augustine replied that it was impossible for the hole to hold all that water. The boy and looked into the eyes of Augustine and said, “It is no more impossible than what you are trying to do – comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your small intelligence.” Well, I could not buy that.
Some say that the boy was Jesus. The message was that there are limits of human understanding – which I conceded was possible. But for me contradictions have to be resolved. Instead of resolving the mystery of the Trinity it made me doubt it, a characteristic that has formed my character.
If everything was resolved by faith there would be no need for scientific knowledge or reform. If we had taken it on faith that the Church Fathers have a pipeline to God we would still be discriminating against homosexuals, Jews, and Moslems. The world would still be thought to be flat and we would be driving around in a horse and carriage.
My rupture with scholasticism was over the question of faith. Scholasticism is a method of learning that puts a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to resolve contradictions. I found it rigorous. Problems were broached in the form of a question with responses and counterproposals.
My disenchantment with the method came down to the appeal to authority. Although scholastic thought was in theory the conjunction of faith and reason it had its Augustinian Moment where faith trumped reason.
So I then began to doubt and found scholasticism useful but eventually amusing and hopelessly antiquated. Nevertheless, scholastic thought continues to influence our cultural, social and political traditions. Take a majority of the American electorate where a false faith has eclipsed all reason.
They believe an Ayn Rand fairy tale. They have faith in American institutions although they are riddled with corruption and the Supreme Court Justices are in the pay of corporate America.
Given my background, it is difficult to respect university administrators who justify their pillage of student funds with myths such as molting or the invisible hand explanations substituting myth for reason. It is difficult to tolerate Chicanos and Chicanas who claim to love their community in mind and then sell out its interests.
Contradictions must be broached if there is to be justice. It is not Just Us.
We can only speculate what heights Augustine would have reached without the shackles of faith.
— Rodolfo F. Acuña is an historian, professor emeritus teaching at CSU Northridge. He is the author of “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.” Visit http://rudyacuna.net for more information.
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