To study the history of the early Church is to
experience the history of the gradual articulation of her identity. First,
there was the controversy over the admission of the gentiles. Then came the battle with the Gnostics over the
primacy of love over knowledge. Eventually Marcionites and Valentinians dropped
away—they tried to differentiate the God of Jesus and the God of the Old
Testament, creation and redemption, personal religion and the public,
institutional life of the Church. Of course too there were the Christological
controversies surrounding Docetism, Monarchianism, and Arianism, in which the Holy
Spirit guided the Christian understanding of God as Trinitarian.
Because of the historical reality of the
Resurrection, the Catholic faith came under the discipline and guidance of
Apostolic tradition and authority. In the early Church, obedience to the eyewitness
of those whose experience authorized them to set the tradition was of overriding
significance. The truth was what they said it was—they were the authoritative
witnesses to the whole reality. It was not a new doctrine up for debate, but a
teaching which had to be received. The New Testament brims with concern for
unity of faith and life based on reception of the Apostolic tradition.
Yet Catholicism was open to and had the wherewithal
to assimilate people of different experiences, absorbing what was greatest in
their spiritual cultures. This was because the Church early on saw that she had
a universal mission.
Nevertheless, Catholicism is not a syncretistic
religion, but one always seeking to bring forth something new as she learns
from interactions with every culture and religion. Because it is Catholic, it
does not wish to overlook anything in other traditions which is good and
touched by grace. (Cf.
Luke 9:50) It enters into cultures and seeks to preach the Good News to all peoples
through their own language and cultural forms.
Yet we note that in this openness the Church
discriminates what it assimilates in accord with its own identity. The student
of Church history reads of how the Church assimilated Roman law, Barbarian
feasts and mythologies, and Arabic philosophy--but transformed them. It was the
Church's fusing energy that led it into dialogue with Hellenistic thought. St.
Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius absorbed Neo-Platonic spirituality, and fashioned
a Christian understanding of mysticism. St. Thomas Aquinas engaged Aristotelian
philosophy, and developed a synthesis of theology which remains a dominant
source of spiritual and theological insight and practice.
The bottom line is that synthesizing and
syncretism are fundamentally dissimilar. A syncretistic religion has no
identity of its own, whereas a synthetic religion has a clear identity. What the
Church absorbs, it transforms, and enhances. Catholicism never puts its own
identity and self-understanding in question or regards herself as on par with
other traditions, nor understands herself as open to absorption into something
higher; she sees herself as that which can absorb the best in other traditions.
At Vatican II the Church recommitted itself to
learning from all that is good in other religions, notably the great religions
of the East. Perhaps new syntheses will emerge, as the New Evangelization,
while recognizing the distinct value of other traditions, uses the culture's
own symbolic terminologies to convey the Good News of Jesus Christ, for she
possesses a distinctive understanding of the human situation and of how it can
be healed, which enables it to discriminate the truth or value of other ideas
and practices, and select from them. That which guards the Church's identity is
commitment to the risen Christ as the definitive Savior of the world, as He is
made known to us through Apostolic witness, Catholic doctrine, and the
sacramental life. Lose this, as many seem to be doing today, and all that remains
is maudlin syncretism.
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