A Phantom Heresy
By way of historical analogy
I wrote a piece recently for The Drift’s newsletter, in which I contributed to the discussion about the new pope’s namesake, Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 to 1903. The piece was about the old, now-rescinded heresy of “Americanism.” A quick read of my piece would see a simple, if intriguing reversal: a century and more ago, the American Church fell into Vatican disfavor for pursuing innovations that supposedly ran contrary to tradition, while today, the American Church has been in conflict with the Vatican in defense of supposed tradition against Rome’s supposed innovations. This is mostly what I wanted to get across, but there’s something else about the affair that interests me—something messier, a bit less categorical—that I think will continue to interest me for some time to come, and will guide my writing here more evidently than it might in my other work.
As I say in my piece, what really kicked off the affair wasn’t anything any American thought or said. It was actually the introduction, written by a French priest, to a French translation of a biography of Isaac Hecker, an American priest and founder of the Paulist Fathers, a group dedicated to the Catholic evangelization of America in a specifically American way. The French priest, one Abbé Felix Klein, dutifully submitted to the Vatican’s censure and allowed the Hecker biography to be removed from circulation, but he was outraged by the reception his work received.
Fifty years later in 1949, “having nothing left to fear or desire in this world,” Klein wrote a scathing account of the episode. Over the course of 300 pages he detailed the absurdity of the attacks, insisting not only that he and the American progressive he counted allies did not adhere to the errors ascribed to them—the range of which amounted to the subversion of social and ecclesial integrity in favor of individual agency—but that, in effect, no one did. The whole Americanism affair was, Klein argued, a very effective smokescreen invented by anti-democratic French clergy and theologians to degrade the progressive cause by distorting its goals and so turning a once-supportive Vatican against it and toward their own regressive purposes. But the success of the gambit didn’t make its content any truer; Americanism was, he insisted, a phantom heresy.
There is, as we say, a lot going on here, and I intend to return in the future to certain elements of what this historical example might tell us about our own moment. For now, what interests me is Klein’s phrase itself: une hérésie fantôme, a phantom heresy, a ghostly error. Klein meant it as a term of derision and contempt, of course, dismissing the claims against him by refusing his opponents’ terms altogether. But there is also something useful about it in a more neutral sense: after all, however false the basis of Americanism may or may not have been, it not only existed as an event, as a fact, but its effects are still with us today, perhaps even because it was so movable, so elusive, so spectral.
Increasingly, I have the sense that the phantom heresy is far graver and more effective than the living one. So much of what passes for discourse in our ill-fated present is concerned not so much with the meaning or effect of ideas and events, but with implications and resonances, insinuations and suggestions, and, above all, endless, endlessly amorphous vibes. We spill infinite ink detailing hidden genealogies and decoding dog whistles, while plausible deniability and rhetorical redirection have become primary political tools for the increasingly violent fascist takeover of our governing institutions. Vagueness reigns, and appeals to the fact-checkers sound like nothing so much as a murder victim screaming not in pain and terror but from outrage that a law—indeed, a norm—is being violated. Even now, as the confrontation with reactionary nihilism is underway, there remains a prevailing sense of it being somehow second-hand, debatable: even as our nightmare is rapidly becoming actual, we are haunted by its possibility.
If this description sounds dire—and in most ways it obviously is—I don’t mean wholly as a condemnation. Belatedness is a defining feature of our late modernity, and it can be hard not to feel like the terms of our experience, from the epochal to the everyday, have been laid out in advance, our minds unable to distinguish between what is happening in the moment and what we’ve heard or read or been taught about having already happened somewhere else to someone else. Every aspect of life can seem like it has been, as it were, covered. Except, of course, for life itself, the fact that we are living.
I’ve named this newsletter Phantom Heresy because I want to use it as an ongoing experiment in writing about our situation in ways that do justice to its inherent (or, anyway, persistent) vagueness and belatedness without succumbing to these forces, to speak to the possible without losing grip on the actual, to understand how concrete determinations of experience are always ringed by the otherwise. This kind of speculative thinking, on the model set by Gillian Rose but also by many of my friends and colleagues working today in criticism, literature, art, and scholarship, remains an open avenue.
I’ll take religion and Catholicism in particular as my point of departure—R.C. is, as Ezra Pound once called literature, news that stays news, the old fascist seeming to miss that memorable phrase’s Talmudic and Gospel resonances—but this will hardly be the only or even the primary subject I’d like to cover. In addition to discussions of the Catholic past and present, I want Phantom Heresy to be a place I can write about poetry again, publish book and film and even music reviews I couldn’t or wouldn’t place with a magazine, and to talk about political and cultural subjects that might blur some of the boundaries that an editor requires and the churlish writer despises.
The late philosopher Stanley Rosen had a phrase in his book on nihilism that I’ve always loved. Discussing how the overestimation of classical certainty laid the foundation both for reactionary nostalgia for and radical attacks on the presumed self-knowledge of the past, he argues that the real practice of thinking is not the expectation of clear rules or conclusion, but a faith in the fact that the world is, ultimately, open to our attempts to think about it. He writes:
To the Socratic philosophers, the world is "logical" or "reasonable" because it provides us with a basis for speaking meaningfully about the relative merits of the various human activities. The link between theory and practice, then, is not an abstract argument in epistemology or an imagined developing pattern in world history, but the nature of man as the animal who both speaks and acts. There is then a reasonable basis in nature for distinguishing and responding to the unreasonable.
I think there’s a way of speaking meaningfully about our world, even if we can’t necessarily make any final sense of it. That’s all this is. It might also be, in the end, all there is.