September 28, 2003
Interview questions by Alicia
Alicia has asked the following questions as part of the St. Blog's interview:
1) Your blog refers to food, art, music, bullfighting, and politics. How do these connect to Catholic Theology?
As I believe you or Kathy the Carmelite pointed out, our Catholic Faith is an incarnational one. "And the Word became Flesh." Of course the Incarnation was the key to understanding what God has already revealed, from Genesis on: "He looked over His creation and called it good." Our Roman calendar is organized in terms of feasts and fasts. We commemorate our great saints and even martyrs by celebratory feasting. Our liturgy is centered around the great sacrament of the Eucharist, which has got to be one of the most sensual, amazing realities of our faith, second only to the Creation ex nihil of the universe itself.
However, we must temper our love of Creation, expressed in the love of food, with the virtues of prudence and charity. We must avoid gluttony, and I see the sin of gluttony in how the average American eats: excessive processed food eaten on the go, or alone, outside of the context of the family meal or parish feast. Even the reliance on processed food is a form of gluttony: the stuff only exists so that the maximum profit may be squeezed out of the market. Quality suffers, the intricate relationship between man and fellow man, between man and God's creation are all ruined by the likes of modified food starch, hot house tomatoes, soil sterilization and the like. Factory farming is dependent upon poor stewardship, appalingly cheap labor, and an emphasis on quantity over quality.
Good food, centered around the family meal, along with a place at the table for needy friend and foe alike, made with love and care and constantly in mind of the splendor of God's creation, is the cure for the fast food culture. One of my favorite Italian traditions is the feast of St. Joseph. Here we get to suspend our Lenten fast, to prepare a sumptuous banquet in honor of the husband of the Blessed Mother of God, the step-father of Christ himself. We make fruit fritters, and fill a home altar with food, which is blessed by a priest. After our friends and family have eaten, we take the food on the altar and give it to the poor. What a tradition!
Along with good food, we must have art. Art is one of the few things, along with prayer (and combined in liturgy), that "stops time" for us. It draws us into a world of contemplation of beauty, initiates an internal dialog that allows us to experience beauty both intellectually and emotionally. When we really look at a good painting, whether it is realistic, impressionalistic, expressionistic, or abstract, we are able to get a glimpse of the world that was not previously known to us.
I like art of just about every era and place. Whether in the geometric tilework of the near East or the subtle fresco work of Piero della Francesca, or the calm abstraction of a Richard Diebenkorn, or the heated emotion of a German Expressionist, we can, if we are properly disposed and can look deeply, see the work of man in the image of God. Even in the work of a notorious sinner like Picasso is the basic goodness of humanity evident.
Of all the arts, my favorite is painting, followed by music. In certain arts, like opera or dance, the visual is combined with the musical (and often the narrative) to create an experience that really takes us out of our daily worries. Of all of these synthetic arts, the bullfight is one of the most glorious. To Northerners who do not understand the art, bullfighting is a cruel sport. It is no more of a sport than ballet. One cannot bet on bullfighting. The outcome is as much a constant as the outcome of Hamlet.
As to the cruelty, the bull is an animal with little ability to contemplate. It enters the ring in full fury, and receives his wounds in hot blood. I have received wounds in hot blood, and the pain is minimal. When enough time has elapsed for the bull to really feel the pain, it is dead. The bull is in the ring for about twenty minutes, and dies at the end.
Meanwhile the bull, in concert with a talented torero, provides the viewer with an art that is breathtaking. We see clearly the interaction of the wild with the civilized, with the human and the beast, the rural with the urban. In those moments of supreme art (a series of linked naturales, with the bull slowly spinning around the matador, slowing and starting at the matador's command), there is complete union between the two. Nowhere else does an animal get a chance to participate as gloriously in the unique human undertaking of art as the bull does in the bullfight.
If we view the Eucharist as the moment when the human and the divine mingle, we can see the bullfight as the next rung down on the ladder, where the human and the natural mingle as they do nowhere else. In this act, we can gain an amazing understanding of our Divinely ordained place in the universe, and time stops while we are participating as spectators.
Politics, alas, is the least of human affairs. I am more and more convinced that to solve the problems of our society, we must bring about cultural change, rather than engage in the arena of politics. However, we are commanded to love our neighbor, and to do this we must take keen interest in the affairs of the polis. Because we are of a fallen nature, this means coming up with solutions to the effects of sin. So we have the dreary art of politics.
Thankfully, we are not left alone in these matters. We have, first and foremost the Gospels. Then we have the Sacred Tradition, especially as manifested in the great social encyclicals. I am convinced that we need a Syndicalist state, with liberal borrowings from Franco, as well as careful readings of the Rule of St. Benedict, the Rule of St. Francis, the encyclicals, the Dominican constitutions, the Distributists (although they should be seen as outlining a goal more than a practical economic theory to obtaining that goal), as well as the writings of learned men outside the Faith, classical and modern.
I find myself more admiring of Francisco Franco than ever, but realize that he did not create a perfect system, just as I realize that the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley is a step in the right direction, even though its members may have some goofy ideas as well. I have been called a right-wing hippy, and perhaps I am, but I will always favor the small and the local over the megachains.
While believing strongly in subsidiarity, I am extremely wary of democracy, especially as it is practiced nowadays in the West.
2) I understand that you are a graduate of the University of California's Santa Cruz campus. This campus is not exactly known as a bastion of conservative thought. How did your values system and the university work together during your years there?
I started out as an athiest libertarian and ended up as a Catholic Franquisto. I was somehow elected as chairman of the student senate, and was, I think, the only chairman to have a portrait of Franco and a portrait of the Pope over my desk. I found the exchange of ideas, the atmosphere of debate, the constant challenging of each other to be wonderful. There was the aspect of political correctness, no stronger nor weeker at UCSC than any other modern University, but I found that it primarily hindered the coward. One of the reasons I stopped writing for the conservative newspaper was that I found that every case of someone "persecuted" for thought crimes was basically a jerk and a whiner. Sure, people challenged my ideas, and I grew from that, but I challenged theirs as well. I was always able to find a circle of intelligent, thoughtful people to drink coffee with and debate until the wee hours. These folks were from all parts of the political spectrum.
I have found that so-called conservative colleges are as much into group-think and self-validation as any Womens' Studies department. I decided that I would not consider a school that offered a business major. I do not think that the UCSC general ed requirements guarantee an education. One had to find one's own way, but if one wanted a good education, one could find it.
3) You seem to be a talented cook as well as musician. Do you see a connection between the culinary and musical arts?
All of the arts basically use the mechanics peculiar to themselves to strive for the same basic ideals of diversity in unity. Cooking and music share timing, texture, counterpoint, balance, craftsmanship and the need to reach the audience through the senses. When art neglects these crucial goals, it ends up as that horrible hybrid known as conceptual art, which is either bad literature dressed as art, or bad art under the cloak of literature.
4) What prompted you to become a virtuoso in the kitchen?
The Bucchione family has taken food seriously for generations. Being stubborn and competitive made me want to do things just a little bit better than the rest. Sharp, quick slaps upside the head from my 4'11" nonna, kept me true to the great traditions of Tuscan cooking. Driving through the South made me keenly appreciative of regional distinctions and made me want to find a genuinely Californian voice in the kitchen. Then I read Paul Bertolli, Alice Waters, MFK Fisher, and the rest.
When I started to take my Catholic Faith seriously, the elements of food outlined in my answer to the fist question motivated me even further.
5) Who would you personally like to see as the next Pope?
An Italian or at least a Latin. It is good to have some transalpine blood in the Vatican once in awhile, but I hope it is not a general trend. I do not worry about specifics, as that is the job of the Holy Spirit. In some ways I think it would be great to have a Rembert Weakland or Roger Mahoney as Pope, because what a wonderful example of the charism of the office of Peter it would be to see one of these men solemnly embrace orthodoxy, as they would be guaranteed by Christ Himself to do.
Barring all that, I think the Panzer Cardinal Ratzinger would be good, as would Arinze.
Posted by erik at September 28, 2003 12:15 AM | TrackBackThe masterful answer to the question of formalism in Catholicism can be found in Chesterton.
"When the great Greek cry breaks into the Latin of the Mass, as old as Christianity itself, it may surprise some to learn that there are a good many people in church who really do say KYRIE ELEISON and mean exactly what they say. But anyhow, they mean what they say rather more than a man who begins a letter with "Dear Sir" means what he says. "Dear" is emphatically a dead word; in that place it has ceased to have any meaning. It is exactly what the Protestants would allege of Popish rites and forms; it is done rapidly, ritually, and without any memory even of the meaning of the rite. When Mr. Jones the solicitor uses it to Mr. Brown the banker, he does not mean that the banker is dear to him, or that his heart is filled with Christian love, even so much as the heart of some poor ignorant Papist listening to the Mass. Now, life, ordinary, jolly, heathen, human life, is simply chockful of these dead words and meaningless ceremonies. You will not escape from them by escaping from the Church into the world. When the critic in question, or a thousand other critics like him, say that we are only required to make a material or mechanical attendance at Mass, he says something which is NOT true about the ordinary Catholic in his feelings about the Catholic Sacraments. But he says something which IS true about the ordinary official attending official functions, about the ordinary Court levee or Ministerial reception, and about three-quarters of the ordinary society calls and polite visits in the town. This deadening of repeated social action may be a harmless thing; it may be a melancholy thing; it may be a mark of the Fall of Man; it may be anything the critic chooses to think. But those who have made it, hundreds and hundreds of times, a special and concentrated charge against the Church, are men blind to the whole human world they live in and unable to see anything but the thing they traduce."
I've been called a "right-wing hippy" myself. I'm more of a Reagan-style (whom I know you dislike-sorry) right-winger, though. Can't say there's anything about Franco I admire.
Your comments on gluttony are dead-on, I think, as an example of how spiritually dead our culture is.
The rituals you describe give me somewhat ambivalent feelings. Having grown up in the Catholic Church, seeing the high percentage of people who went to Mass each Sunday because it was a sin not to, not because they wanted to be there..when does ritualism become formalism?
I guess I'm displaying evangelical bias by my phrasing...when does, or can, the observance of a given ritual decay into mere formalism? The great Christian doctor and psychologist Paul Tournier is worth reading on this subject. He wrote of the European transition from nearly everyone formalistically participating in the various Catholic or Protestant traditions to nearly no one doing so, in the space of a generation or so.
Posted by: John Salmon at September 28, 2003 5:35 PM