Children of Cain: The Oxymoron of American Catholicism

Ephraim Radner

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20040928085603/http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.org/

In the current crisis of the Episcopal Church, USA, and of the Anglican Communion, a couple of things at least have become clear. First, American Episcopalians do not understand who they are as Americans, and as a result their understanding of what is and ought to be the Christian Church in America is woefully obscured and perverted. At the same time, it has become increasingly obvious that those outside America looking in on and being swept up in this crisis – Africans, Asians, and even the British – do not understand what drives the American religious psyche, and hence they cannot grasp why it is that Americans do not comprehend the Church’s demands upon them. They have thrown up their hands in dismay and disgust; or, in a few cases, have lulled themselves into thinking there must be some mistake that will soon be made right. Very few seem willing to face the fact that for Americans the Church of Christ is fundamentally a struggle of titanic proportions, one that it is in the interests of the world to see virtuously engaged.

If I am known for anything among my fellow Episcopalians, it for having made a plea, as a conservative, to remain within this church, and to hold on to the catholic and apostolic faith received even in the face of that faith’s official repudiation – and even in the face of one’s own repudiation; and to do so for the sake of witnessing to the redeeming work of God’s recreation of humanity so hard won by Christ as to demand our own loss as a token of its promise. “We are the aroma of Christ to God, a fragrance of death to death, of life to life” (2 Cor. 2:15f.) At one time, the plea had a kind of noble ring, even in the ears of liberals. But it has progressively lost its resonance, as the actual prophetic character of its urgings have been relentlessly fulfilled.

I have argued in favor of “staying”, on the sinking ship if you will, for lots of reasons. But one is simply that there is an important work to be done, a long effort to be expended, for the sake of living into and demonstrating the necessary Christian alternative to the violence of continual self-rejuvenation that our American churches have so readily embraced. The secular outplaying of this violence is well-known, if perhaps not deeply appreciated. It can be seen in the long-standing conflict in America between the idealists and realists of political and social renewal; between, that is, those convinced of the possibility of immediate or progressive embodiments of virtue in our social lives, and those by contrast convinced of the ingrained need for pervasive self-protections one from another. The political scientist Robert Kagan made much of this not long ago in his extended essay on the differences between Europeans and Americans in the present day, and amid our tragic struggles over global order – the Europeans favoring an idealism of universal peace founded on universal capacities and rights; and the Americans working out of an almost Hobbesian vision of the savage world of conflicting instincts and depredations, demanding imposed restraint and caution.¹ What Kagan doesn’t address is the way these two attitudes actually lie together at the heart of American social expectation itself, and how both inevitably lead to their own forms of uncontrollable violence.²

The Christian experience, in America especially, embodies in its own spirit these two conflicting, and violence –laden orientations. They mark the present conflicts of our denominations, not only in the pragmatic choices seemingly offered to distraught members, but they even inform the issues at the root of the conflicts themselves, e.g. sexuality and how Scripture’s authority functions. And the muted struggle for some lived alternative to these two warring and war-prone ways of understanding human life and history marks, I believe, one of the great Christian vocations of the present era. The alternative is both possible and demanded, in my mind, precisely because it represents the vocation of Christ and the form of Christ within a world where the unanticipated “violence of innocence” – couching at the door (Gen.4:7) – and the accepted violence of conscious corruption finds its temporal redemption in the Body of Christ Jesus, and in the history of the one New Man of reconciled Jew and Gentile in Him. There is, in other words, a divine vocation for catholicism in America; but one bound up with the passage of Jesus Christ through the Cross; thus a vocation both necessary, because it belongs to Jesus first; and one whose outcome in the world moves only by “faith”, as a stranger and an exile, through a world whose contours color the display of such a faith as given in the painful limits of Christ’s own subjected body. Thus, we cannot run away, American or African or British; for here, in the contest of this vocation, the world as a whole is offered the chance to observe the redeeming work of God.

If there is something oxymoronic about being both “catholic” and “American”, then, it is bound up with the paradox of the God-Man Himself and with the life of His Body as the Church. And that, to return to my own case, is something I believe worth struggling for and in, and suffering to its end. And this is true for Lutherans, or Methodists, or Roman Catholics, as much as anyone, for reasons that I hope will come clear through the image of the Anglican catholic whose embrace extends, if only by desire, to the full range of our denominations. In what follows, I am therefore in a sense commenting on this common struggle, by asking the following questions as aimed at our own vocations as seen through the lens of my own particular church:

What is American, what is catholic, and why or how care about the two together?

Inevitably in a paper like this, I will be working in the realm of assertions, and not strictly of deductive analysis. And this is so not only for the sake of simplifying (which I must) and perhaps distorting (as I know I do) complex historical detail; but because we know, from the start that these details must somehow conform to the reality of Jesus Christ in the world, and therefore the risk of simplification and distortion is one we must assume: we know that the created world and its future must “look like Him” (cf. 1 John 3:1ff.). Our theological responsibility is to apprehend this shape within the welter of details that otherwise would overwhelm in their disparate diversities. So let me now pursue each of these questions in turn.

What is American?

Our national character has been a long-standing American and European interest – from the more limited self-criticisms of Puritan settlers to the political polemics and justifications of the Revolutionary period, through the more analytical observations that flourished in early 19^th-century descriptive writing of Tocqueville, Crevecoeur and even James Fennimore Cooper.³ Such reflections flourished among American moralists like the Transcendentalists and abolitionists in the mid-19^th-century and among English travelers like Dickens and Trollope later; and so it has continued, as I mentioned a moment ago, among political commentators to this day, in an era of intense concern with America’s role in the world.

Let me, therefore, enter this tradition with an assertion, by taking as an indicator of the specifically religious aspect of our national character a comment made by Thoreau in his 1863 Atlantic Monthly essay “Life without principle”.⁴ Thoreau has been lamenting the passivity of Americans in the face of material demands – consuming their existences in “earning a living”. And he comments on the way that American religion encourages this by inculcating a sense that we “merely come into the world as the heir of a fortune”, fated with this or that set of resources, which we use or lose, and try to increase or regain as the case may be. He links this to Americans’ obsession with Original Sin, which somehow locks us into a limited existence we are continually struggling against: “Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up”.⁵

Thoreau’s comment, inclusive of those he criticizes, seems to me emblematic of a deep-seated American imperative: “we must do something about the Fall”. “Do something” in the sense of govern our actions according to its purported reality – by rejecting it (as Thoreau does) or by figuring out the key to its resolution or by embracing it. Certainly the imperative has been posed before, as well we know: in the early centuries of the Church, it became an ordering issue when it was pressed from a decidedly particular origin – that is to say, what we call “Gnosticism”.⁶ The resemblance is significant. Historically, and in the context of Christian language, “gnosticism” represents a range of different ways of “doing something about the Fall”.

Among the early Gnostics, this fixation upon a moment or experience of human fallenness and release led to a bypassing of the Church and her history in the world. Within the American context also, this bypassing has proven endemic, although with peculiar reasons of origin. First, the anti-historical and anti-ecclesial attitude rooted in American Christianity is a product of a particular Protestant set of theological habits that have informed most Christian immigrants to America (and have clearly now influenced Roman Catholicism in America as well); habits which spring from a kind of primitivist restorationism that defines the descendents of the Reformation ab initio.⁷ In America, however, this basic Protestant impulse has been further shaped and expanded, perhaps even transformed, by something unique: the experience of an immovable, if variously traversed, geographical reality of landscape and social development, characterized at its heart by the inescapable experience of encounter with new sights, new opportunities, new peoples – the land, the spaces, the rocks, the rivers, the Indians, the beasts.⁸

This observation represents a well-established view of the political-social self-understanding and hope of Americans in a novus ordo seclorum (“a new order of the ages”) – as our national seal puts it⁹ -- bound up with the all-encompassing experience of a “new world” both in fact and in yearning. This consciousness has been extended by commentators to explain an entire cultural grasp of reality that is meant to characterize our national outlook, Frederick Turner Jackson’s thesis regarding the formative force of the persistent adaptation to “frontier” living in a constant reinvention of civilization from its barbarian beginnings, being perhaps the most famous¹⁰. Although Turner’s theory has been attacked on various specific grounds, its explanatory reach remains inescaspable.¹¹

In religious terms, this has taken the many forms of re-creationism. (And Turner’s theory, we need to recall, was less about the “progressivist” spirit of America, than it was about incessant generation and re-generation.) As Joseph Needleman said, in the context of an examination of the Shakers, “America is the land of zero. Start from zero, we start from nothing. That is the idea of America”.¹² And from an explicitly Christian perspective, that outlook has impelled among Americans a consideration of human existence not in historically shaped terms, but in terms of permanent “originals”, of Adam and of Adam’s family. Here, then, I simply assert the Scriptural character of American religion in practical terms: as the experienced enactment of this consideration and search for the “primordial”, however defined, the American religious character has involved itself in the constant tracing and retracing of the figure, not of the Christian Church’s life, not of the Body of Christ, itself a renewal of the human race in time, but of Adam’s progeny, of Cain and of the children of Cain¹³. The very fixation of American experience on beginnings and re-creation represents a return to the moment in which humanity stands on the brink of violence, to choose it or, in ignoring it, to be captured by it anew.¹⁴ Anne Bradstreet’s Puritan “contemplations” of human existence tellingly hovers over this event, universalizes it, and declines to move into even the outplaying of divine election’s process in time:

Who fancyes not [Cain’s] looks now at the Barr,

His face like death, his heart with horror fraught,

Nor Male-factor ever felt like warr,

When deep dispair, with wish of life hath sought,

Branded with guilt, and crusht with treble woes,

A vagabond to Land of Nod he goes.

A City builds, that wals might him secure from foes.

Who thinks not ofte upon the Fathers ages […]

How Adam sigh’d to see his Progeny,

Cloath’d all in his black sinfull Livery,

Who neither guilt, nor yet the punishment could fly.¹⁵

A recognition of this ineluctable fascination can open religious knowledge to a striking and honest vision of the self; even while its attraction may well pull us into the vortex of a kind of self-immolation.

What is catholic?

I will return to this matter in a moment. But first I want to contrast such “Cainite” primordialism with the very concept of catholicism. However we might define the concept in detail, catholicism represents a reality of “wholeness” and “completeness” which is meant to embrace the reach of Christ’s active redemption across time and space, and to establish our own religious experience within the apprehension of this context, and none other. Although the term is not itself Scriptural, its root cognates in the New Testament are used in a way directly continuous with later patristic definition: the “holos” of “cat-holic” is the faith and teaching and mission that embraces a “whole” region or the “whole” world with the truth of Christ and His life (in the Synoptics and Paul e.g. Mt. 26:13; Mk. 6:55; Lk. 8:39; 11:34ff; 13:21; Acts 15:22; Rom. 1:8; 16:23; etc.). It becomes with St. Cyril of Jerusalem the full extension of a divine creative and redemptive reach:

“[The Church] is called Catholic then because it extends over all the world, from one end of the earth to the other; and because it teaches universally and completely one and all the doctrines which ought to come to men’s knowledge, concerning things both visible and invisible, heavenly and earthly; and because it brings into subjection to godliness the whole race of mankind, governors and governed, learned and unlearned; and because it universally treats and heals the whole class of sins, which are committed by soul or body, and possesses in itself every form of virtue which is named, both in deeds and words, and in every kind of spiritual gifts”. ¹⁶

This is Catholicism as the description according to which the sheer sovereignty of the Creator God redeems His work through the very propagation of the Body of Christ within the history of the world, as His Church. Historical continuity, reach, power, and interpenetration stand as marks of such a vision, and are inherently pressed beyond life and death, beyond personal locations and national boundaries, and even beyond the simple choices of individuals to fathom and order their own lives. Let me turn to an extended illustration here, that has pertinence in our analysis of American Catholicism in particular.

Thus, when in late 1839 John Henry Newman wrote of the phenomenon and growth of an “Anglican” American church in the 19^th-century, he did so on the basis of a renewed vision of Catholicism that seemed to him to be drawing America into the realm of an expanding history of hope within the wider world.¹⁷ For Newman, the American church was not some newly created wonder, but the fruit of a universal providence – the grasp of the Body of Christ – that had long been at work to gather all of humanity. Newman had read an account of the young Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States written by an English priest, Henry Caswall.¹⁸ Caswall’s volume offered the first lengthy analysis of the American “Anglican” church (and an early account of Mormonism too!), and was based on a decade of pastoral work in, among other places, the Ohio frontier. Newman was now approaching the end of his own Anglican Tractarian phase and, having glimpsed in the Monophysite separation from the “orthodox” a mirror image of Anglicanism’s separation from Rome, he was beginning to falter in his convictions regarding Anglican integrity.¹⁹ He was perhaps already, and unconsciously, searching for reasons still to hope in the “catholic” character of the Church of England. Caswall’s volume both provided him some, as well as struck deeper notes of an already resonating anxiety. It is instructive to hear both aspects in order to get a sense of what “catholicism” might mean to someone deeply committed to its apprehension.

Newman begins his extended essay on the “Anglo-American Church” with a lamentation over the desultory state of the Church of England, which he describes primarily in terms of her isolation and barrenness among the “nations”. Although in this the English Church resembles all the other scattered pieces of “Christendom broken up”, the Anglican Church has suffered particularly in her loneliness from the assaults of State and infidelity (pp. 310f.). “She has been solitary. She has been among strangers; statesmen, lawyers, and soldiers frisked and prowled around; creatures wild or tame have held a parliament over her, but still she has wanted some one to converse with, to repose on, to consult, to love” (pp. 311f.). This is the lack that the rise of the American Anglican church has filled, according to Newman. “This friendly Church is a daughter of ours, and is our pride as well as our consolation. The daughter is the evidence of the mother’s origin; that which lives is the true Church; that which is fruitful lives; the English Church, the desolate one, has children….[The] day of rebuke is passed. The English Church has fulfilled the law which evidences her vitality” (pp. 312f.).

Newman here outlines the primary character of “catholicity” as being the providentially attested “life” that grows to include the “nations”, and that draws them into the single life of God’s redemptive work in Christ, as an organic and mutually entwined Body. Much of the rest of the essay’s comments on the American’s church’s hopeful existence play upon this organic image of growth – the words “vitality”, “energy”, and “vigor” reappear frequently as Newman reiterates Caswall’s account of the remarkable growth, from a condition of near ruin, of 19^th century Episcopalianism in numbers and resources. And this account Newman ties to his vision of embodied catholicity: American Episcopalianism, bound to the Prayer Book’s exemplified faith as given through the Church of England, represents a lived connection of the actual church with the world’s unfolding history.

Although Newman makes much of the Americans’ adoption of the formal elements of “Catholic” life in the shape of apostolic “succession” of bishops and of a realist eucharistic devotion (cf. pp. 336-42), these aspects are essential as being expressive of this deeper historical connection – something he calls a “creative principle” (p. 335) at work in the Episcopal Church’s very being, like a seed growing from some invisible source into the fullness of her divine nature. Her external form and her doctrine stand together (cf. discussion on pp. 364ff.) as the articulation of the scriptured figuration of this history, given in the narrative of the Fall, Redemption, and Consummation of the human race, explicated through Israel and enacted within the temporal experience of the nations and peoples brought within the sway of this divine work. As it moves and is apprehended backwards and forwards, this history itself displays the Body of Christ – and the Episcopal Church is exemplifying it!, Newman enthuses.

And so Newman began his essay with an almost ecstatic claim: “Few passages in the history of the Church are better calculated to raise the Christian heart in admiration and gratitude to the giver of all good, than her fortunes in the United States, fortunes which have a still greater promise in the future, than a present accomplishment”. But not all is well. For by the end of his long reflection, the “promise” seems blighted by the particular constraints America herself has placed upon this hope. Newman adopts a phrase of Caswall to describe these constraints in terms of “extraneous influences”, working from the social context of the Episcopal Church’s life and in a sense corrupting the outworking of the grand “catholic and apostolic idea” that was sown in its heart (cf. pp. 342ff.). These “influences”, in Newman’s analysis, derive from the religious character of the United States itself – the multiplication of sects; and from the adaptation of American Anglicanism to the national dynamics of economic and intellectual life – self-preservation, material security, and reciprocal restraint against the intrusion of others.

In one of the most telling passages of this “negative” accounting, Newman describes the confluence of a number of these peculiarly American influences, and unveils the full potential force of their work upon the spiritual witness of Episcopalians. Growing up within a culture of political and religious choice, in which proliferating denominational allegiances are encouraged and protected, the “catholic” principle is reduced to a religious “preference”, and with this comes the whole undercutting of the historical unity and embracing thrust of the Gospel’s witness. Newman points to the debates at the founding conventions of the Episcopal Church in the 1780’s, in which numerous representatives worried over the “divisive” potential of a strongly “creedal” form of Christianity, that might somehow press for an embodied unitary faith amid the new Republic’s valorization of diversity (cf. pp. 344ff.). “Socinianism”, as Newman calls the anti-creedal and Unitarian impulse of this outlook, inevitably becomes entrenched among a people whose concern is to maintain a realm of security for individuals whose public mission is transferred from evangelical goals to economic ones. “Secure from all her foes”, as Bradstreet wrote. There is, as Tocqueville also noted, a kind of paradoxical relationship between a fixation upon individual meaning and individual life amid the threats of a vast and unwelcoming world, and the search for a place of “generalized” benevolence and departicularized demand. “A trading country is the habitat of Socinianism”, Newman notes (p. 347). For

“commerce is free as air; it knows no distinctions, mutual intercourse is its medium of operation. Exclusiveness, separations, rules of life, observance of days, nice scruples of conscience, are odious to it […] A religion which neither irritates their reason nor interferes with their comfort, will be all in all in such a society. Severity whether of creed or precept, high mysteries, corrective practices, subjection of whatever kind, whether to a doctrine or to a priest, will be offensive to them. They need nothing to fill the heart, to feed upon, or to live in; they despise enthusiasm, they abhor fanaticism, they persecute bigotry […] Reason teaches them that utter disregard of their Maker is unbecoming; and they determine to be religious, not from love and fear, but from good sense” (pp. 348f.).

Whether all this springs up in a field as it were forcibly “cleared”, politically, for commerce, or the reverse, Newman does not say. But he details the frightening consequences of such a social ordering of individual religious preference for the sake of unobstructed and self-assertive material advancement. In the first place, the continuities of human life in Christ are ignored and even destroyed: in such a society as this, the poor are written off and the deep yearnings of the desperately needy, which can be fulfilled only through a substantive, particularistic, and exclusive (because focused) Gospel of redemption, are covered over so that common human failing can be repulsed from the self’s consciousness. “If [the trading person] thinks of religion at all, he will not like from being a great man to become a little one; he bargains for some or other compensation to his self-importance, some little power of judging or managing, some small permission to have his own way” (p. 348). And “his own way” means the veiling of the world’s poor and humble in favor of personal “comfort” and material ease, which themselves are but the mask of a frightened self hiding from the encroachments of death and sin. Although congratulating, with Caswall, the material advancement of the Episcopal Church in building and financial resources, Newman realizes that, in the end, such success and celebration may be a sign of a terrible disease, rather than of blessing.²⁰

Secondly, by so restricting religious meaning to the support of individual security, the very power of God in Christ to save, to work for the redemption of the world and her peoples, is obscured and finally denied. If salvation is tied to a personal preference, it is also reduced to a moment and confined in a corner. In the one place where Newman avails himself of some other perspective upon America than Caswall’s, he turns to James Fennimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers, and its description of an Anglican divine seeking to establish a congregation in the 18^th-century forests of upstate New York. In two episodes of this book, Cooper recounts how the priest’s attempts to use the Prayer Book liturgy and to communicate a vital knowledge of the Christian mysteries of salvation to frontiersmen and Native Americans are inevitably circumscribed by a perception of their superficial value as “mere forms” of religious self-expression. The frontier families respond to the preacher and to his personal style, not to the prayers of the catholic church that draw together the living and the dead; the Indian meets his death at the end of the novel on his own terms, turning to his own “great Spirit”, which is judged “right for him” by his American friends, even as Mr. Grant, the Anglican minister who stands beside the dying warrior, proffering him the truths of the ancient Gospel, is left visibly ignored, prattling uselessly, in the paltry comforts of his own beliefs.²¹ In the context of the “primeval” forests and the passions of “uncivilized” settlers and indigenous peoples, the Church here stands in Newman’s eyes not only accused, but convicted and, from the American perspective, openly accepted as being neither catholic nor apostolic in the power of its life.

Newman perceives, with Tocqueville, that the “democratic” character of American society is somehow tied to all of this, and he expresses an almost shrill concern over the Episcopal Church’s subjection of episcopal council at diocesan and national conventions to agreement with lay and clerical deputies (pp. 360ff.), individuals with neither the office certainly, nor the grace, to govern the church’s formal life. And with Tocqueville he raises the possibility that “Catholicism” as he defines it stands as the only real alternative to the creeping “pantheism” that must finally take hold of the democratic search for individual freedom within the “cleared field” of mutual self-protection. Tocqueville, for his part, saw this as an opportunity for Catholicism’s growth in America²² -- Protestantism would prove too empty a draught in the end for truly spiritual thirsts -- but Newman at this stage is not so sure. Indeed, although the later “Roman Catholic” note he appends to his essay on the “Anglo-American Church” makes clear that a “worldly vitality” among this or that Protestant and Anglican church means little in comparison with the true “life” that (Roman) Catholicism spreads and embodies around the globe, he voices an overall anxiety that local or regional influences so characterize a church – even a purportedly “catholic” one – that it become but the expression of the individual, and not the history of the race in God’s hands. Thus he remarks of all churches but the Roman, that “they depend on time and place for their existence, they live in periods or in regions. They are children of the soil, indigenous plants, which readily flourish under a certain temperature, in a certain aspect, in moist or in dry, and die if they are transplanted” (p. 384).²³ Can Catholicism be “localized”?

American Catholicism, in its Anglican form at least, Newman hesitantly predicts, is threatened with a kind of horrible desiccation of faith, fixated upon self and locality and personal need, “disguising” histories and commonalities and continuities of need and redemption, and so veiling with its own “disguise” God Himself in His reality of Christ and Cross. The result? A “drying up of the seas” (pp. 348-50), that is, of the sea of God’s own mysterious abysses and sovereign purposes; and with it the very death of Christianity through the obscuring of the redemptive scope of Christ in the Church as it reaches into the dark depths of human life.

To summarize Newman’s vision of “Catholicism”, detailed through its American dangers, we see something close enough to Cyril’s definition: the grasping of commonalities in the redemptive power of Christ within and across the nations; a grasp, furthermore, that demands an attention to the reality of these peoples impinging upon oneself; a going out of self and a transformative encounter with “the other” (as we say today) – the Indian, the poor, the English, the immigrant – each one given particularistically in Christ; the encounter of these and other particularities in Christ that strips the self to such a point that at last it can be apprehended by God’s own depth; and finally the reality of “grace” as involving the giving of one’s self over to a history embracing the very world, and not just touching a place nearby, and hence, in a way, grace as leaving one’s own powers dangling in time for another’s use.

American concerns with the “Catholicism” of Newman’s stripe

I have elsewhere, and in a way congruent with this broad sense of “Catholicism”, described “communion” in an ecclesial sense as the Body of Christ, in the integrity of its temporal life and witness, expressing itself in mission; and in the course of this mission, subjecting itself to the demands of such an encounter with new members of the Body and to the changes wrought in Christ through it.²⁴ The context of this description was precisely the conflicts and estrangements that have arisen within Anglicanism over the past months, which have pitted American and African or Asian – we might even note in some cases, white American and African-American -- against one another. The character and imperative of “conciliarism” as an alternative way of life, wherein decisions are made in subjection to the “whole”, and wherein the “whole” is understood as the breadth of time’s teaching in the Body in a way that extends beyond local borders and constricted epochs – all this is embedded in this kind of view of communion, as is a flexible and adjustable form of hierarchicalism that can order such “subjections in council” in a way that holds accountable the determining force of the Body’s breadth.

But this is also exactly what seems so difficult assimilate into the constraining focus of American sensibilities. Whether one came in search of a “new start” or was surprised by its possibility, or even the failure of its hopes, the land confronted Americans with something inescapable that seemed to truncate the continuities of historically forged bonds, such as the Catholic understanding of the Body of Christ assumes. In its place, as we know from the imagery of American religion even in its unreflective start, history was rewritten by the landscape and its inhabiting peoples and their mutual encounter, in terms of “wilderness” or “Eden”. And these terms were ever re-injected with an astonishment at the sheer creative mystery of the terrain and tribes (again, whether barbaric or edenic) in such a way as to brush aside all conceptions of the human past in favor of some vision of actual and immediate generation. One can still catch something of this sense, for instance, by traversing the strange landscapes of Utah, where it seems as if the cover of the world has been stripped away so as to glimpse into the workshop or laboratory of the Creator himself, as He invents new and seemingly alien wonders. This is a passing response that nonetheless replicates the enveloping perceptions of immigrants and explorers from their first encounter 500 years ago, and informed the very construction of the “new nation”.²⁵

The search among immigrants for “new beginnings”, religious and economic, that were then inextricably bound to the imposed vision of geographical newness, created a potion of almost boiling anxiety over enslavement of the self to a human past – to the “old Europe”, for instance, of the Puritans’ disdain and fantastical nightmare; as well as to a charted human future that could somehow transcend the powers of immediate creation. I have already suggested that the proper way to describe religiously this outlook is that of “primordialism”, given in either innocence or Fall: loosened from the Fall, or still struggling in its first and unrehearsed meaning. Either way, the self in this religious need demanded some space of release from time.

We are familiar with the 18^th-century political forms of this contrast, e.g. in the anti-Federalist search for a society of regenerated and purely held local virtue uncorrupted by the impediments and burdens of past (or vast) cultures, a vision of the nation’s purpose that was held in bitter argument with the Federalist constitutional ordering of checks and balances, designed to protect sinners one from another (and from the “constitution of human nature” itself, as Hamilton put it²⁶), even while freeing them for productive life under the emerged guidance of a higher reason. We can even observe what at first appears to be the strange combination of the two visions, as in Washington’s “Farewell Address”, where he perorates on the need for the virtuous citizen, even while he counsels a vigorous mistrust of other nations and peoples, and a policy of vigilant self-protection. But once the religious intuitions for this debate, deriving from different emphases of a more profound and single primordialist fixation are noted, we can see that Washington, among others, was merely expressing, to a contentious audience, the imperatives of their common root.

And the more explicitly religious inventions of America – what Paul Conkin has called the “American Originals” of the Disciples, Unitarian-Universalists, Adventists and Witnesses, Mormons, Christian Scientists, and Pentecostal churches – each constitutes an offshoot from this common primordialist stock.²⁷ And each, through their various gnostic, hermetic, rationalist, or restorationist prophetcisms, have attempted somehow to stake out a space within the wilderness for the experiment of spiritual virginity. The “pantheist” temptation that Tocqueville suggested as being endemic to democratic societies, we can see, is not simply driven by the search for unity on the part of a multiplied and divided citizenry of discrete individuals, but is even more so the intuition of created commonality, inhabiting the first corners of a still-uncivilized, unsubjected world. If you are first, you hold the key to the life of everyone else, and of all other worlds.

Thus, from the beginning of the United States’ religious self-reflection, “sectarianism” positively seen as the proliferation of various and unconnected local spiritual self-assertions, was understood to be a vehicle of truth as well as of self-protection. In all their ramifications and individual trivializations of doctrine and moral demand, America’s endless stream of denominations could actually articulate their more common subterranean meaning, bubbling up from the springs of original reason, original encounter with God, original facing off of evil, original glory, so leading to the apprehension of the deeper truths of the divine life. This is what the ex-Unitarian and Transcendentalist Theodore Parker meant when, on the one hand, he castigated Christians for failing to arrive at a clear understanding the “first principles” of their faith – the “absolute morality and religion” of love for God and man --- and on the other hand celebrated the intrinsically American pursuit of novelty, practicality, disdain for tradition, and temporal impatience. For these very characteristics that mark the nation’s unsubsiding sectarianism will serve to strip away veneers and pretenses, and finally uncover the “universal truth” that marks pure religious knowledge: “The Roman Church has been all men know what and how; the American Church, with freedom for the mind, freedom for the heart, freedom for the soul, is yet to be, sundering no chord of the human harp, but tuning all to harmony”.²⁸ Sectarianism itself becomes a new kind of “Catholicism” – the “American Church” -- the entry into the mysteries of original truth and the sentinel of religious “essence”. (The religion of “diversity” is a direct, if pallid, offspring of this conviction.) It was a view already expressed by pre-revolutionary Protestants a century earlier, in the arguments against appointing Anglican bishops for America, when they claimed that “Catholicism” was not a term to be possessed by a single Christian group, but could only refer to the profession of Christianity’s “essentials”, something done by “Lutheran, Calvinist, Congregation, Consociated, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker and all other churches of America”.²⁹

All. All in their diversity, all in their localities, all in their burrowing into the heart of God’s own original purposes, in the land of originals. One could analyze more systematically the theological interests of this common and focalized burrowing, and in doing so I think one area one would need to concentrate is upon its specifically “pneumatist” character, one that informs the restorationist, Gnostic, and Transcendentalist embodiments of American religion together. It would include, even, the still too-little understood character of so-called “Americanism” among Roman Catholics. And certainly the “sentimental” appropriation of pneumatic universalism by main-line Protestants, including Episcopalians right down to the present Presiding Bishop.³⁰ But I am more concerned with the historical, and thus intrinstically pragmatic, settlement of this attitude, where it has “landed” in the vision and expectation of inhabited experience. And this place, I am arguing, is the land of beginnings, origins, and the encounter with those origins’ demands and limits: Cain and his children, seeking some immediate reconstitution of the immediate “face of God”³¹, struggling with the closeness of family, with the malignity of heart and the forlornness of love destroyed, wandering to the edges of the earth, extracting from the earth gifts God does not accept, building cities within which to hold a peace that is found ever wanting.

The image of Cain, in fact, has had enormous appeal for Americans. It very quickly stepped out from the general Christian tradition (mainly Augustinian) of its use as a parsing of human and world history. Once confronting the image’s sensed reality anew in the form, first, of Native American and then of slavery’s peculiar curse (the Indian and African as “Cain”, intractably and recalcitrantly in their midst), the image became indigenized in the United States and severed from its global context. In its face, ever struggling for a racialist purity that simply would not emerge, the figure of Cain was gradually transformed into some internalized explicator of unfulfilled innocence and repeated fall, some hoped-for and impossible regeneracy, that finally found its grand historical embodiment in the fratricidal conflagration of the Civil War. After which, quite simply, Cain becomes the tragic hero of all America and for all its time.³²

And in the process, “Catholicism”, in the tradition of Augustine’s world-embracing “City of Abel”³³, is made the iconically slaughtered virtue of the American Religion itself. The world and her peoples totter and disappear behind the stage of the peculiar American destiny. Primordialism and provincialism, the land of Nod as the tragic yet homely sect, become co-efficients. Anti-catholicism, in this sense, is embedded in the historical consciousness and lived understanding of the religious vocation of America. And if there is to be an “American Catholicism”, it can only be one that finds its vocation within the landscape of Cain himself.³⁴

Episcopal Catholicism

If we turn back to the actual character of Anglican “Catholicism” in America, we find matters constrained very much in the way Newman himself, for all his distance and abstraction, suspected; and furthermore for reasons that are peculiarly tied to the primordialist fixations of the nation as a whole. But it is this constraint within the bonds of these reasons that makes the catholic struggle within America so critical in a theological sense.

Newman’s sense of “Catholicism” as an organic connectionalism, the bonds of an expanding life and history that draws peoples together, and in doing so expresses the actual reality of God’s absolute reach within the temporal order of redemption, is something repeatedly alluded to in Episcopalian apologetics from the early 19^th-century on. Catholicism meant a genetic link with the Church of England, with the character of her teaching and formal witness, and within the structure of her ordered and continuous life, embodied in the episcopacy.³⁵ “Apostolic succession” as an essential element of catholicity, while certainly an articulated focus of more High Church sensibilities early on, was nonetheless a given, by definition, in the general Episcopal Church’s self-promotion within the spectrum of American religion.

But the claim to catholic apostolicity and connection was characterized in a special way by Episcopalian apologists, who were often eager to distinguish their history from England’s as being somehow “purer” in its form. This was most commonly described in terms of the American church’s freedom from state control, an element worked out in the colonial arguments against Protestant fears over the shape of an American episcopacy³⁶, but quickly embraced in the new church with a convert’s enthusiasm: the “voluntary” character of American Episcopalianism, its immersion in the disciplines of individual freedom and democracy, made of its “catholic” inheritance a kind of ever-renewed grace, recreated by sheer desire and will, and without the heavy hand of government demand, at every moment.³⁷ This, of course, was articulated as a quintessentially “Anglican” form of catholicism itself, in contrast with the corruptions of Roman imperialism. It was an argument easily assimilated, several decades later, by the movement of historical criticism in Scriptural studies which was tied, by Episcopalian apologists, to the Anglican freedoms of individually inspired readers, universally set loose in their own fields of personal religious scrutiny and discovery.³⁸

More revealingly, this regenerate – and unoppressive! -- Catholicism was ascribed to the peculiar history of the American nation itself. The story of the re-invention of Anglicanism after the Revolution’s destruction of the colonial Church of England’s raison d’être had already gained an almost mythic grandeur, as can be seen in Caswall’s description.³⁹ But the politico-theological analysis to which this episode was subjected went beyond extolling an act of divine mercy in preserving a threatened church. Simply put, the Revolution had provided Catholicism in America a new and pristine birth, by tearing apart the relationship of church to (the English) state, thereby reducing the church to a state of almost pure innocence: dioceses could be formed, councils gathered, bishops elected by the people, structures reordered from within an almost Rousseauian “state of nature”, “not-quite-anarchy”, as one writer put it admiringly, because there was always England, hovering somewhere on the other side of the sea, a memory and a justification, however and happily distant.⁴⁰

This is Catholicism-as-Adam; but the Adam who himself creates and forges and figures out. Not the New Adam in whom all humanity is taken up through the lineaments of a self-giving and expansive Body; but the one who finds himself alone, in a strange land, impelled by the memories and the dangers of the divorce of Eden. And the mission of this Adam and his progeny, the mission Cain, is to labor, to protect, to build, wherever he can find safety.

To look at the self-description of Episcopal missionaries in the 19^th century, is both to wonder at the energies expended, even while being taken aback at the self-limitations imposed. The great Daniel Tuttle, missionary bishop to Utah and the West, seems the epitome of both Newman’s hopes and anxieties about American Anglican catholics. Sent out as a young cleric, traveling the Platte, passing through Denver and the mountains, and finally after months to Salt Lake, he set about building schools and hospitals. But the motive of these great efforts was surprisingly modest: to provide a socially acceptable instance of the catholic life, without impinging overly on the many other varieties of religious expression he found along the way. The Indians were too itinerant to deal with and required a “whole life” of going native to reach (something impossible for “builders” and perhaps best left to Roman Catholic celibates and eccentrics); the Mormons were too well-established to dare threaten, and were, in any case, sincere and well-meaning people; and the Methodists and Baptists were all earnest sorts better equipped for dealing with the lower classes in any case.⁴¹ The diversity of Christian mission, for Tuttle, was part of the “democratizing” spirit of the nation, in which catholicism itself ought to find its special place, its native root, its original spring; hence, it was inherently self-limiting in its manifestations.

Thus Anglican self-assertions regarding “apostolic succession”, which in theory completely trumped the legitimacy of every other American denomination, in practice found their “integralist” pretensions met by the accepted impermeability of individual strivings, and devolved at most into a kind of cultural hauteur wed to a kindly noblesse oblige.⁴² When William Ingraham Kip was sent out as a missionary bishop to California a decade earlier even than Tuttle, this scholarly East Coast intellectual proved his mettle by bunking and bedding with the roughest men in his train. But he despised the crudeness of the gold-seekers, lamented the ineffectual fruit of the Spanish Roman Catholics, and consigned the native Indians to some “better suited” missionary group, still to be identified. In doing so, he offered Episcopalian catholicism as a means of raising the spiritual sights of California’s growing urban centers, and pointing to the “invisible realm” of divine life amid a too-rugged materialist and visible society.⁴³

This too represented a hope for building some new “city on a hill” (San Francisco, in this case), one that would civilize the more barbarous forms of life the California frontier had unleashed. But however refined his vision, it was a version of catholicism bound to denominational “preference”, embedded as a principle at the founding of the Episcopal Church after the Revolution⁴⁴, and so disdained by Newman. And the “Whig” dismissal of any profound sense of the episcopacy that Voltaire himself observed while visiting England long before⁴⁵, turned out to be an underlying pull even among High Church Episcopalians within the democratic United States, filled with the sowing and the reaping of original choices.

From the point of view of Episcopalians, then, American anti-Romanism was different in character than the English repugnance at political treason and irrationalism associated with “popery” in the 16^th and 17^th-centuries. Roman Catholicism, for Episcopalians, was instead berated as a religion intent on limiting the creative energies, possibilities, and hopes of Americans, whoever they might be, and wherever they might choose to settle themselves. The Roman religion, it was asserted, drew individuals into a realm outside of their own burrowing, encountering, deciding. It was not, of course, possible simply to dismiss Roman Catholics, as other Protestants did, since they at least had the appearance of some “apostolic form”. And thus, a peculiar tension is seen in the Episcopalian depictions of Catholics, with an ambivalence far more profound than among most British Anglicans. Bishop Kip, for instance, was an historian before his election as a missionary bishop, and was one of the first Americans to study sympathetically from original documents the Jesuit missions in America (even before Parkman).⁴⁶ Thus, for Kip the “Jesuits” were worthy of reflection largely because of their astonishing personal sacrifice, even though they were guilty of a kind of oppression, their “superstitions and errors [breaking] a noble spirit” within the Indian who “might otherwise have lived for years, a light in the wilderness”. These two elements – sacrificial energy and error -- combined to paint a picture of worrying fanaticism⁴⁷.

But for Kip it went beyond that. He could still recollect the Christian virtue of self-sacrifice for another’s soul as something valuable from the past and from the universal store of Christian treasure and could also note its general absence from American religion as a lost artifact. He reminds his readers, with a tone of special pleading, that Anglicans have their own missionary heroes (he mentions Henry Martyn, and Bishop George Augustus Selwyn of New Zealand, a short enough list, and one without room for any Americans). Hence his unresolved admiration of the Jesuits – internally struggling in the same vein as Parkman and Prescott did in their vast histories of Catholic imperialism in the Americas. Nonetheless, Kip’s final reaction was one of horror at the self-effacement of these “sons of Loyola”, given that their labors bore so little permanent fruit in his eyes. Theirs was a sacrifice with little to show for it, inefficacious in its personal profligacy. It is almost as if he recoils at the impediments to human success strewn by the Fall itself, and taken up only through the suffering of a crucified Christ granted a history in the church.⁴⁸ Kip’s turning away from this vista towards a more accessible and goal-oriented mission was not simply a mark of American shallowness; it was Cain’s denial and escape. And in the conflicted catholicism of the Episcopal Church, it was finally enunciated in terms of a simple yet profound distaste: surely, such sacrifice for another people is neither necessary if without visible fruit nor, because of that, prudent.

The ironic devolution of the “catholic” sensibility of American Anglicans into “niche group” religion, which so defines contemporary Episcopalianism (as well as other denominations) represents, therefore, less an explicit denial of the catholic motive than it does an almost pre-catholic sensibility regarding the potential reach of Cainite efforts, each in their individual striving sustainable as an image of all others, even while recognizing its own demanded, and often regretted, limitations. Like the anti-Federalist “Brutus” (Paper 1), this kind of religion could indeed “extend across the continent” and “realize the golden age” of humankind through the propagation of “free” and protected individual choices and questing. This was not an anti-imperialist attitude at all, and could occasionally reach world-embracing proportions, much as Mormonism could; but always couched in the parochial terms of localized virtue. As Bishop McCoskry of Michigan said in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1852, while discussing the particular role of American Episcopalianism as one portion of the “household” of the “Church of God”: “We, as part of this household, have no common responsibilities. Of late our territorial possessions have been greatly enlarged. California, New Mexico, and Oregon have been added.. Sooner or later Mexico and South America must come under Saxon control… and become the kingdoms and nations of God and of His Christ… even the walls of that old spiritual Jericho, Rome, will fall flat”.⁴⁹ It was not too much to think that the “Abrahamic Promise” of the original “nations”, clothed in the “Saxon” garb of American Episcopalianism would somehow sweep up the New World with its native virtue; a hope that Kip himself would uneasily share. It was not “too much”; it was merely vain.

Why should we care?

None of this supremely Americanized catholicism – neither the self-limitations in religious industry nor its occasional self-revelation of potential power – represents anything that Thoreau himself would have understood as a positive response to his plea to “get up” and do something about the Fall. But Kip’s conflicted American conscience is not, in fact, wholly discontinuous with Thoreau’s own preferred direction of delving into the world of nature’s abyss unhampered by the tools of civilized America. Thoreau too sought to dwell within the shadow of the first Tree, to relive the savor of its fruit, and to recapture a world still struggling with its taste. In doing so, he reveled in the thrill of the first choices, the first challenges, even the first sufferings of a humanity only a step from Eden. As Richard Slotkin has pointed out, when Thoreau himself reflects upon Jesuit self-sacrifice, he recasts its Christian virtue -- in a way not wholly unrelated to Kip’s reflection -- as but the pale shadow of a deeper violence embraced and suffered by “natural” humanity, and only recently visible among the American Indian. And this desirous burrowing into the realm of a more original and wild virtue expressed itself, in Thoreau’s case, by his own intellectual violence against outsiders to his preserve, against the past, and against the contemporary world built upon it.⁵⁰ Not a few contemporary conservative Christians in America sound uncannily like Thoreau in this regard.

That Episcopalianism could never embrace such a whole-hearted abandonment of the nearby and developed world of men and women and of their history, and that the American Anglican church needed in fact to find ways of holding on to such realities if only through the forms of studied nostalgia, was an expression of a still-clinging catholicism struggling with the accepted forms of original man, of Cain still striving and hiding at once (much as Genesis depicts him). And the repeated failures of this catholic character have conversely embodied the violences of originality seeking its place in a world of self-assertion, unmasking in its wake the redemptive promise as an unexpected act of grace, terrible in the breadth of its scope and of its form. To a people ever living on the outskirts of Eden – that is, to the human race still somehow in search of Christ, to the Children of Cain, to Americans – the catholic vocation must seem both an assault upon their panting and straining hearts, as well as the embattled token of a truly realistic redemption.

The violences of disdain, of neglect, of hypocrisy are well-known vices of Episcopalians – whether they are directed at the poor, or the foreign, or the untutored, or the dying, they are of a piece with all the violences of the world, in which each of our churches and our selves have participated. But they are rendered brilliantly crimson through the fact that they clothe a specifically catholic claim. This catholic claim has provided for Episcopalianism’s most outrageous self-debasement. The current “tearing of the fabric” of ecumenical and Communion bonds that the Episcopal Church has accomplished with such supreme oblivion and abandon through her self-proclaimed autonomous propheticism -- enacted unflinchingly in Convention, diocese, and episcopal office -- stands as a great symbol of the anti-catholic magnet that marks her American identity. But it is the brilliance of the wound and the wonder of the current’s force that render the victim, the catholic promise of Christ’s redeeming Body in the world, in such starkly clear lines. She has become a spectacle, this church, so that the world can see that Cain is being dragged into the presence of the new Adam.

For there is a sense in which Catholicism itself -- even if we are impelled to identify it with Roman Catholicism -- may lose America as a whole (much as it lost what is now the Arab world), if it does not come to grips with America's own primordialist character as it embodies the still-striving character of fallen humanity.  And if Catholicism loses America, it risks losing also its open capacity to speak peace to the heaving bodies of Cain's children throughout the world.  Roman Catholics too, like the Anglicans, risk a "drying of the seas", in Newman's phrase, if they ignore this challenge.  The vocation of American catholics like Episcopalians is critical precisely because of their brazenly conflicted condition, because of the openness of the "wound", as I put it, that is displayed before the world much in the manner of Israel's fall in Lamentations:  "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?  Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger" (Lam. 1:12).  Stand, look, listen, and see.  I believe that is a divine vocation.

Churches like ours are being wrenched, dragged to this place, where we can observe each other’s flailings, where we can be shaken into a kind of hearing and seeing as we are held to account by a larger world, where we can see the Abel in the other, and hope in his resurrection. This is a novel kind of conciliarism, a strange new ecumenism of histories joined and made fertile, of self-giving filiation.

And that, for a world that still builds walls and holes or dreamily waits in its garden as the walls of others are torn down, is an intonation of the Gospel which I will stay to hear. And when this dragging is engaged as a missionary enterprise, where the diversities of such denominational agonies, the shattering of the niches as it were, are willfully linked and subjected to the larger world’s hearing, to the nations themselves (as today in the turmoil of the Anglican Communion’s restless rising), then this struggle for a true conciliar Church becomes the tracing of a Cross that I will stay to see. No longer fleeing from city to city. The “mark of Cain” will fulfill its promise. As Philo the Jew wrote longingly at the end of his treatise on The Posterity and Exile of Cain, might not the citizens of each town yet learn rightly to bring an end to the violence within their midst? “For faction and sedition, if we must speak the truth, is the archetypal model of wars”, and once gone, so will pass the imitations of these originals that so flood the earth, so that all humankind might enjoy the peace that is the true service of God.⁵¹ The struggle for American Catholicism is the struggle of the world’s redemption; but it must be a struggle – that is, it must embrace even the American repudiation of its truth within the form of our parochial denominations -- if truly it redeems. And so we stay, to hear, to see, to be made new.