Moral Theology at Maud’s: On that weird transitional period b/w Tridentine Latin Mass & Novus Ordo
by Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.
We’re offering a 4th of July 60% off flash sale on annual subs. Click here to redeem.
Eric Rohmer’s 1969 film My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud) is famous among online Catholic nerds for the rare glimpses that it gives of a form of liturgy that was in use for just a few years before 1970—the 1965 Missal in the vernacular. It was transitional form between the Tridentine Mass and the Novus Ordo that looks rather odd to our eyes, accustomed to one or the other.
The odd, transitional form of liturgy shown in My Night at Maud’s is a fitting sign of the moral theology exemplified by the film’s protagonist, Jean-Louis.
Jean-Louis, a not very likeable Catholic man, sees a pretty blonde woman (Françoise) at Mass, and the idea comes to him (as he says in a voice-over) that she will be his wife. Like so many of Rohmer’s protagonists, however, Jean-Louis is tempted by another woman, the charming agnostic divorcée Maud, before ultimately ending up with Françoise.
After a late dinner with Maud and the friend who introduced them, Jean-Louis is persuaded to spend the night in Maud’s apartment to avoid driving up to his mountain village in the snow. A long conversation follows, in which Maud teases Jean-Louis for the breach of principle his agreeing to stay at her place seems to imply. As a Christian, Jean-Louis ought, Maud suggests, to be more consistent in his actions. Jean-Louis replies:
Life is a unit. It makes a whole. I mean by that that … the choice is never offered like that, .… exactly. I have never said to myself, “Should I sleep with a girl, or should I not sleep with her?’’ I’ve just made one choice, in advance, a global choice about a certain way of living. … If there is one thing I don’t like in the Church, … and that, moreover, is tending to disappear, it’s the accounting for actions, sins, ... or good deeds. What’s necessary is a pure heart. When you really love a girl, you don’t want to sleep with any other.
Jean-Louis’s reference to the tendency for older approaches to sin to “disappear” in the theological ferment following the Council is quite accurate. He himself exemplifies a new approach that seems to scramble elements of earlier moral theology.
My Night at Maud’s is set in Clermont and has some breathtaking shots of the city from above. Clermont is the birthplace of Blaise Pascal, and the film makes constant references not only to Pascal’s Pensées, but also to the Provincial Letters, in which Pascal attacked the Jesuits.
The Jesuit moral theologians had developed a sophisticated casuistry for evaluating particular human actions. They were particularly attentive to mitigating circumstances which could lighten the burden of conscience on troubled souls. Jesuits such as Tomás Sanchez (1550-1610), Leonardus Lessius (1554-1623), and Antonio Escobar (1589-1669) gave detailed accounts of different situations in which a person could find himself, and the psychological and social factors that could mitigate his guilt in a particular situation. For example, a nobleman in a society in which status depends on honor, which in turn required the avenging of insults, would be less culpable in killing someone in a duel than someone who killed without such social pressures.
To Pascal, the Jesuits’ approach was scandalously lax. He thought were explaining human sin away, rather than addressing it at its roots, and thus opening up a path toward salvation. In the Provincial Letters, he compares the human person to a man beset by robbers and left for dead, who calls for doctors, who give him contrary opinions:
The first examines his injuries, judges them fatal and tells him that God alone can give him back his lost strength. The second then arrives, and, wanting to please him, says that he still has sufficient strength left to reach home, insulting the first one, who holds the opposite view, and resolving to ruin him.
The first doctor is the Jansenists (the rigorists supported by Pascal), and the second the Jesuits. For Pascal, a necessary task of theology was to help persons to see the seriousness of their condition in order that they might come to a cure. Giving a duelist excuses for his addiction to honor and status only increases his misery. “This is the honor which has always been the idol of men possessed by a worldly spirit,” Pascal notes.
Pascal sees us human beings as deeply wounded by original sin, which causes us to be constantly deceiving ourselves. We have an aversion to the truth about ourselves, and it is this that prevents us from coming to God. Hence, the first step to overcoming sin is to face it squarely without any excuses. The legalistic casuistry of mitigating circumstances seems totally counter-productive to him.
Pascal’s debate with the Jansenists reminds me of an earlier debate between the great Cistercian St Bernard of Clairvaux and the early scholastic Peter Abelard. One aspect of the controversy centered on the notion of sin, and the extent to which it is possible to speak of “secret,” that is, unconscious, sin. For Abelard, the consideration of sin was a matter of assigning blame, and so consciousness belonged to the very definition of sin. But for Bernard, sin was any action that impeded someone from loving God, whether the action was done knowingly or not. The important thing was to realize one’s estrangement from God, including the estrangement of ignorance, as the first step towards overcoming separation from Him. And the great danger here is self-deception. Consider the following passage on excuses for sins from St Bernard’s book on humility:
There are many ways of excusing sins. One will say: ‘I didn’t do it.’ Another; ‘I did it, but I was perfectly right in doing it.’ If it was wrong he may say: ‘It isn’t all that bad.’ If it was decidedly harmful, he can fall back on: ‘I meant well.’ If the bad intention is too evident he will take refuge in the excuses of Adam and Eve and say someone else led him into it.
From Bernard’s perspective, Abelard’s sophisticated analysis of the subjective conditions of culpability could not fail to appear as giving fuel to the human compulsion for self-exoneration, and therefore a way of escaping an honest confession of one’s own misery. It might well be that there is some justification to a self-exoneration, but ultimately (from Bernard’s perspective) it is not helpful to the one making it.
In both the Bernard-Abelard debate and the Pascal-Jansenists debate, moral laxism is associated with a legalistic approach to moral theology, focused mainly on particular actions and their circumstances. Moral rigorism, by contrast, is associated with a more wholistic approach, focused on holiness and divine love as the form of Christian life. But in Jean-Louis (as in much moral theology at the time of the film) a reversal has taken place. Now it is moral rigorism that is associated with a legalistic/casuistic approach, and moral laxism that is associated with a more wholistic approach to the moral life, with “a global choice about a certain way of living,” as Jean-Louis calls it, or a “fundamental option” to use the term of many theologians of the time. Jean-Louis allows himself to drift into the near occasion of sin, because he doesn’t think that particular temptations are really all that dangerous.
Maud accuses Jean-Louis of being “Jesuitical,” and he accepts the accusation as a way of proving that he is not a Jansenist. But in a way, Jean-Louis uses Jansenist premises to draw Jesuitical conclusions. He has the worst of both worlds. In that way, his life resembles the transitional 1965 Missal; an unsuccessful combination of disparate elements, which it is nonetheless fascinating to watch.
Pater Edmund Waldstein is a monk of Stift Heiligenkreuz, a Cistercian abbey in Austria.
Please consider signing up for a paid subscription to this page for more riveting content.
If you’re new to Cracks in Pomo, check out the About page or read up on our Essentials. Also check out our podcast on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
MASA tortilla chips by Ancient Crunch is offering our followers 10% off their order with the promo code CRACKSINPOSTMODERNITY. Click here to redeem.
photo taken at the Church of the Intercession, Washington Heights
 |
|