Published October 14, 2024
In 1827 or thereabouts, Felix Mendelssohn attended G. W. F. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics at the University of Berlin. Those were the days in which Mendelssohn was writing the charming overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, while pondering how he might revive Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which hadn’t been performed since Bach died in 1750—a feat Mendelssohn pulled off in 1829, earning the everlasting gratitude of all musically-inclined humanity. In that same period, Mendelssohn was attending a glittering dinner party in Berlin when a bejeweled woman sitting beside him asked, “Who is that gentleman across the table, speaking so intensely?” “That, my dear lady,” the young composer replied, “is the great philosopher, Hegel.”
A similar lack of recognition might be said to characterize the Synods of 2014, 2015, 2018, 2023, and now 2024. In each of these exercises, claims have been made, redolent of some aspects of Hegel’s thought, that we live in the raging torrent of history, trying to stay afloat and navigate without stable reference points. The matter is never quite put so baldly. What is said—and ever more intensely at Synod-2024—is that “lived experience” is the starting point for the Church’s doctrine, theology, and pastoral practice. And if that “lived experience” contradicts what had seemed to be the Church’s settled understanding of God’s revealed will for humanity’s flourishing and, ultimately, salvation, then what once seemed settled must be tossed overboard to keep the Barque of Peter afloat: or to use one of Synod-2024’s preferred buzzwords, “credible.”
It’s almost certainly the case that the great majority of the 368 participants in the Synod proper, and those who make up the Off-Broadway parallel “synod” of interest groups and lobbies—the two groups intersect in the energetic person and synodal activity of Fr. James Martin, S.J.—would not recognize this quasi-Hegelian privileging of history over revelation for what it is. Nonetheless, that was one of the dynamics at work in the 2014–15 Synod’s discussion on reception of Holy Communion by the divorced and remarried, in Synod-2018’s discussion of LGBTQ+ issues in the context of Catholic youth ministry, and now in the 2023–2024 Synod’s discussions on “synodality.” If John Henry Newman, now canonized, was the hidden father of the Second Vatican Council, then Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is not going to be canonized, may well be the hidden father of recent synodal history.
If Christianity is not revealed religion, then it is false religion. If the Church’s understanding of the meaning of divine revelation can change so fundamentally that what was true teaching in the letters of St. Paul, and even in the teaching of the Lord himself, can now be modified or altered by the flow of history and “lived experience,” then the Catholic Church is incoherent. And if the Church is incoherent, it cannot evangelize.
If the Church cannot say that X is true over time, irrespective of historical and cultural circumstances, then it becomes the Church of Maybe, the Church of Perhaps, in which no one will be seriously interested. Evangelization is short-circuited and Catholicism becomes simply another international non-governmental organization in the good works business.
Today’s LETTER offers reflections on this crucial issue in two contrasting but complementary keys. XR II
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George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
