On Relyks: A Further Note

Making millions of decisions over a lifetime develops in each of us, I think, powerful, personal categories and capacities of acceptance and rejection.  That is, by the continuing and necessary process of choosing we create, and then act upon, a range of dispositions, prejudices, convictions, conclusions which make up, shape, and perhaps even determine our personalities.  If, as I suspect, we live more by habit and custom than by logic, this range is the context in which our rational calculations take place.

Being raised Protestant rather than Catholic there was never a possibility that I could accept the efficacy of relics.  However, since my best friend in high school was an extremely devout Roman Catholic, I now wish I had asked him to  respond to John Calvin’s claim that churches in Charrox, Hildesheim, and Rome each displayed the foreskin of Jesus.

Self-denying acts of piety to gain divine attention can be impressive.  Thus pilgrimages to holy places and things like Canterbury have a very long Christian history.  Never forgotten, when I was thirteen years old on a hot day in Mexico City, I saw a sad-faced woman crawling on her knees–inch by inch–toward the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary Into Heaven.  Over the years I have viewed many relics in many places, including the 5,000 at St. Anthony’s Chapel in Pittsburgh carrying, of course, all my proclivities with me.

Nevertheless. I once stood in the crypt of the Cologne Cathedral  expecting to gaze again  askance at the relics on display.  Instead I experienced a mighty burst of emotion which I immediately attempted to  reduce to rational articulation by summoning the comfortable categories of objective and subjective.  I think my Catholic friends would vote for objective recognition of the divine presence; I think my Protestant friends would vote for the subjective impact of human piety.

Whatever the dogma, I would never flea from my two Great Danes:  Soren and Hamlet, each a wag in his own way, which is a tail for another day.  I think they would both agree that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my theology.

Teat for Tat

Anointing events as the will of God is a devotional, if not exactly theological, temptation.  Christians accept God’s providence in both prosperity and adversity, a sentiment famously expressed in the Heidelberg Catechism, which I think represents the irenic and ecumenical Lutheranism of Philip Melanchthon within the burning heart of Calvinism.  As a passionate advocate for The Book of Confessions, I only wish American Presbyterians had been so bold as to include Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession (1530) in it and not so stupid as to exclude Calvin’s Gallican Confession (1559) from it. 

Anyway, in addition to its splendid catechism, Heidelberg is forever associated in my mind with the gloriously romantic melodies of Sigmund Romberg’s Student Prince.  Since, dear reader, my sweetheart and I were once young and in Alt-Heidelberg in the spring, you will not mind when I pause now to sing off-text and off-key.  Join in if you like.  The words are “In Heidelberg fair/ You’ll breathe sweeter air/ While roses a-bloom/ Bring sweet perfume./  The welcome we sing to life may it always bring/ Remembrance of Heidelberg and youth and spring.”

I admire the profound gravity of the Reformed tradition, but surely the burning heart does not entirely exclude the lyric heart.  I am truly sorry that my friend, John Calvin, suffered such wretched health, which in part explains his overwhelming seriousness.  I know of only two places, both in his Inventory of Relics, where Calvin wrote something I thought was genuinely funny.  Calvin had seen a reliquary containing milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary.  In a sardonic aside, Brother John wondered exactly how and by whom this relic was collected.  After a thousand pages of mind-bending theology, that comment is an unexpected knee-slapper.  At least for all us disgusting male types.

Among the former generation of American Presbyterian conservatives, there was no greater than Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (Wallis Warfield Simpson for whom Edward VIII gave up the throne of England was a distant relation).  B. B. Warfield is identified with the so-called “old Princeton theology,” but he spent nine years in Pittsburgh where I walked for 30 years past a plaque commemorating the courageous champion of reformed orthodoxy and his wife.  I think Warfield’s basic theological stance is quite wrong, but I honor his name for two things:  (1) he loved his wife and (2) he thought John Calvin was funny.  On their honeymoon Annie Kinkead Warfield was so severely traumatized in a violent lightning storm that she became invalid.  For the rest of her life Benjamin never spent a night absent from her side.  I think we can predict with some confidence where Professor Warfield would stand on the debate whether marriage should be defined as a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman.

In his book, Calvin and Calvinism, Warfield devotes several pages to Calvin’s humor (pp. 295f).  Warfield does not cite Calvin’s comment on the milk of the Holy Mother.  However,  not to titillate, but to keep a breast of this topic within the bosom of the family, Calvin dug down, goes bust and takes a trip down mammary lane.  He asserts of ordinary mothers that some “have full and abundant breasts, but others are almost dry, as God wills to feed one [infant] more liberally, but another more meagerly” (Institutes I.16.3).

No bull and not cowed, but udderly confused, Calvin’s observation on the milk of divine kindness demonstrates the perils of doctrinal enthusiasm overreaching biological facticity.  To be quite upfront, this two part subject might receive considerable augmentation from someone more amply endowed.

I am glad to get that off my chest.