America (americamagazine.org), Vol. 188 No. 11, March 31, 2003
Vatican II: Official Norms
By John W. O'Malley
In his recent article in America (2/24), Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., very
helpfully called our attention to six norms for interpreting the Second Vatican
Council that were issued as part of the final report of the Synod of Bishops in
1985, the 20th anniversary of the conclusion of the council. Cardinal Dulles
supplied an accurate paraphrase of those norms, which ran as follows:
1. Each passage and document of the council must be interpreted in the context
of all the others, so that the integral teaching of the council may be rightly
grasped.
2. The four constitutions of the council (those on liturgy, church, revelation
and church in the modern world) are the hermeneutical key to the other
document—namely, the council’s nine decrees and three declarations.
3. The pastoral import of the documents ought not to be separated from, or set
in opposition to, their doctrinal content.
4. No opposition may be made between the spirit and the letter of the council.
5. The council must be interpreted in continuity with the great tradition of the
church, including other councils.
6. Vatican II should be accepted as illuminating the problems of our day.
I would like to comment on these norms as a professional historian who is also a
believer. I do so in order to contribute to the discussion, the debate, about
the interpretation of Vatican II that has continued to exercise theologians and
historians even after the issuance of these norms and that was clearly
manifested in the different approaches Cardinal Dulles and I took to the problem
in that same issue of America.
If I examine the norms from the perspective of a historian, I have to say that
they strike me as resoundingly sound. I cannot imagine a practicing historian
having any difficulty with them. If I look at them as a believing Catholic, I
have the same reaction, perhaps even stronger, especially regarding Norm 5,
which insists on the continuity of the council with “the great tradition of the
church.” As they stand, then, they supply excellent guidelines for interpreting
the council—indeed, for interpreting almost any official church document from
any period.
I respectfully submit, however, that they need to be complemented by two further
norms, norms with which I think any historian would agree and, I should hope,
any theologian. My first norm is a complement to Norm 5. It would go something
like this: “While always keeping in mind the fundamental continuity in the great
tradition of the church, interpreters must also take due account of how the
council is discontinuous with previous practices, teachings and traditions.”
My second norm is a specification of Norm 4. It would read: “In order to
understand the relationship between the spirit and the letter of the council,
due attention must be given to the style and literary forms in which the
teaching of the council finds expression.”
Let me now elaborate on each of these norms in turn.
Continuity/Discontinuity
As I indicated in my article that appeared in tandem with Cardinal Dulles’s,
I believe this is the fundamental issue facing all historians as they go about
their task of interpreting the past—discerning the continuities within
discontinuities and vice versa. It is also the basic issue facing theologians,
especially in dealing with Vatican II. Did not John Courtney Murray, S.J., at
one point say that “development of doctrine was the issue under all the issues
at Vatican II”? I take “development” as indicating both continuity and
discontinuity.
As a principle of historical method, the continuities in history must, I
believe, always and invariably be given the benefit of the doubt as being
stronger than the discontinuities, even when we deal with what Thomas Kuhn
taught us to call paradigm shifts. A thousand examples spring to mind. The
American Revolution was a true revolution. It established a new nation and set
it on a new and independent path. Yet after it occurred, the citizens of the new
republic continued to speak English, to read English books and, indeed, to found
their nation on principles largely derived from their English experience. I need
not go on.
Not only in fact but in theory this principle of continuity has to obtain in the
church and obtain in an even more profound way. The mission is to preach the
word that was received from the mouth of Christ and the Apostles. If that
continuity is not maintained, forget it! I cannot imagine any theologian, any
historian, any believer disagreeing with that principle.
All that having been said, change happens. That is, along with continuity in
history, along with continuity in our own persons, there is discontinuity. One
of the great continuities in history lies precisely in that it is
discontinuous—things keep changing. One of my specialities is the history of the
early Society of Jesus. I have often told people that as he drew his last
breath, St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder, could have said, “Ah, me, I am not
dying in the Society I joined”—the organization, with all its continuity, had
changed so much in the 15 years since it began.
Not to take account of the discontinuities, then, inevitably results in
distortion. The distortion is greater in proportion to the magnitude of the
discontinuities. But whatever that magnitude, or lack of it, a hermeneutical
grid that admits only continuity is by definition inadequate and distorting. If
there is only continuity, then nothing happened. If Vatican II is to be
interpreted only insofar as it was continuous with the past, it turns out to be
an expensive four-year ecclesiastical jamboree. That is why I believe another
norm, complementary to Norm 5, needs to be added.
I might mention that in historical writing about the history of Christianity,
Catholic historians since the 16th century have by and large shown themselves to
be different from others by wearing lenses that magnify the continuities and
seem sometimes almost to black out the discontinuities. Although that is not so
true now as it was up to a generation or two ago, it has not entirely
disappeared. There seems to be an almost endemic Catholic resistance to
admitting change. Why is it, for instance, that the word never appears as such
in the documents of Vatican II? Some of my colleagues call this one-sidedness
“the typical Catholic ploy,” a severe allergy to admitting the reality of change
and even to using the word regarding the church. We prefer soft synonyms like
renewal and aggiornamento. When this resistance to change is applied to the
church, it results in what R. G. Collingwood called substantialism—the bark of
the church sails through the sea of history, unaffected by it.
To put it bluntly, the council made changes. I believe there is evidence that
the changes the council articulated were in many regards major, not mere
tinkering with the system. I have elsewhere elaborated on what I think these
were, and this is not the place to repeat them. This article is not about
substance but about method. Here, then, I am not dealing directly with the
degree to which the council was continuous or discontinuous within the
tradition, but with further refinement of norms to help us soberly and
evenhandedly assess that degree. I am dealing with method. If we want to improve
our method, to Norm 5 on continuity we need to add another one, on
discontinuity.
Spirit/Letter
My second norm relates to the spirit/letter issue dealt with in No. 4 of the
synod document. The document does not specify what is meant by that vague word
spirit, but perhaps we can take it to mean something like the overall
orientation, the general thrust, the animating motivations, the general
configuration. Maybe even something as simple as “the point.” Put in question
form: What, in the big picture, was Vatican II all about? Perhaps if we have an
answer to that question, we are getting close to the “spirit.” Once we have
caught the spirit, we will be better able to interpret individual passages and
expressions. Sound principle, Norm 4!
But Norm 4 does not solve the problem because the problem is precisely
determining what the “spirit of Vatican II” was or is. That is to a large extent
what the debate is about. How do we begin to understand the spirit? Well, there
are all the tried and true measures that historians and theologians have been
applying for the past 40 years, such as study of the 53 folio volumes of the
official documentation the council produced, to get behind the words of the
decrees to the thinking that led to them. But whatever the measures, they have
not produced consensus. All of them seem to have asked, what did the council
say? They have not asked, how did the council say it?
The most obvious fact about the decrees of Vatican II is that they speak a
language different from that of all previous councils. In a course I teach on
“Two Great Councils; Trent and Vatican II,” my students are immediately struck
by the difference in language and style of the two councils, and they soon see
that simply comparing passage to passage will not do as a way of understanding
their likeness and difference. If you lay these two councils side by side, you
cannot miss how different the rhetoric is.
In Vatican II we are dealing, in other words, with a different literary genre. I
think I can identify it as an almost certainly unwitting embodiment of the
epideictic genre described in classical treatises on rhetoric going back at
least to Cicero and Quintilian. But that is too technical an argument to pursue
here. Let’s just say that the style of the documents of Vatican II more closely
resembles the style of the homilies and treatises of the fathers of the church
than it does the style of the canons of the Council of Trent. In fact, the
literary genre of the canon is absent from Vatican II, and this is unique or
almost unique in the history of ecumenical councils. If the genre has changed,
maybe we need to take that into account in our attempts to interpret the council
and especially to get at its “spirit.” We need to make an adjustment in our
method.
Anybody who in the past 50 years has read an academically respectable book or
heard an academically respectable lecture about Scripture knows that in order to
understand that complex collection of texts one needs to take due account, among
other things, of literary genres. The story of Job is not to be interpreted in
the same way as the Gospel of Mark. They are different genres. If you do not
take this into account, you get all mixed up. I have learned from exegetes, as
well as from my colleagues in the historical profession, that I will not
understand what a document is saying unless I pay as much attention to form as
to content.
I have been astounded over the years that I have never (or almost never) heard
this point made about the documents of Vatican II. Can they really be understood
if we do not self-consciously and with full deliberation take the “new” genre
(or genres) into account? Vatican II engaged in a new language-game for a
council. Vatican II, it seems to me, was in that regard as much a language event
as an ecclesiastical or historical event. Perhaps another way of saying we must
not separate the letter of Vatican II from the spirit is to say we must not
separate the content from the language—from the style.
I think a case can be made that proof-texting can, with many cautions, be used
to interpret councils up to Vatican II. I think that method may be viable
because of the genre of the canon, which almost invites it. A canon is, in and
of itself, free-standing. It is a short statement in technical language that can
be lifted out of the list without too much distortion. But proof-texting does
not work for Vatican II, and hence the necessity of dealing with its “spirit” as
the matrix for interpreting its letter—or, better, its many letters, for, as
Cardinal Dulles reminded us, the documents of Vatican II are committee documents
and sometimes deliberately ambiguous. The new wine of Vatican II cannot be
understood through the old wineskins. In other words, besides asking what the
council said we need to ask how it said it. I therefore submit that as a
specification of Norm 4, which deals with letter and spirit, we need a further
norm that deals with content and literary genres.
I see an intrinsic relationship between the two norms I am suggesting. In
speaking in a style different from previous councils, Vatican II in effect
redefined the very nature of a council. Until Vatican II, councils conceived of
themselves as legislative and judicial bodies. They made laws for the church,
and they pronounced judgment on persons and issues. In that first function they
were highly prescriptive; in the latter they threatened and punished. In Vatican
II the first function is present but not dominant, the second almost wholly
absent. This may be for the better or for the worse, but it is certainly
different. In that regard it makes Vatican II notably discontinuous with
previous councils.
____________________________
John W. O’Malley, S.J., is professor of church history at Weston Jesuit School
of Theology in Cambridge, Mass. His most recent book, Trent and All That:
Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era, was published by Harvard
University Press in 2000.