A Book That Will Shock You – Religion & Liberty Online

Dr. Michael Pakaluk, a philosopher and professor at the Catholic University of America, has written 11 books, but somehow this was the first to make it into my hands. Pakaluk is a bit of a legend in certain circles. He maintains a scholarly reputation as a thinker and writer, and his late wife Ruth’s cause for canonization was recently allowed to proceed by the Vatican. Pakaluk’s second wife, Dr. Catherine Pakaluk, is a noteworthy scholar of economics and family studies in her own right. Michael is also the father of 15 children, seven with Ruth and eight with Catherine.

Usually these kinds of biographical details are not particularly useful when reviewing a book, but in the case of The Shock of Holiness: Finding the Romance of Everyday Life, it is immensely helpful to have a sense of the personal life and habits of the author. The Shock of Holiness is a rhetorically balanced book. By that I mean each of the three elements of classical rhetoric—logos, or the demonstration of truth (usually through logic); pathos, or the stirring of the imagination and the emotions; and ethos, or the trustworthiness of the author—plays a role in the arguments and claims of the essays included here.

The book is a deeply moral one, in that it is calling us to a different and better way of life; with such books, it is natural to ask that our guide be an exemplar. In other words, when an author tells us we ought to consider changing our lives, we want to be confident he knows what he is talking about. Pakaluk, a devout Catholic whose main interest is in cultivating an awareness of the nearness of Christ despite, or through, tragedy and difficulty, has enough experience under his belt to command our attention and startle us out of whatever complacency we’ve fallen into. It is, however, deeply and unapologetically Catholic, which both deepens its insights and potentially narrows its audience.

Holiness on Earth?

Pakaluk takes as his definition of “holiness” the fairly common Catholic understanding as consecrated to God. He does not spell this out explicitly, but it is evident in the way he applies the word to various people, from actions to objects to moments. Holiness is, despite its centrality in the Christian faith, a tricky term; Scriptures applies it to God to describe his sublime and inimitable perfection (1 Samuel 2:2 says, “There is no one holy like the Lord”), but also to us, as when God says to the Israelites, “Be holy, because I am holy,” (a line from Leviticus that St. Peter later quotes in his first epistle). These seem like contradictions: How can we be called to holiness when only God is holy?

In fact, this is a microcosm of some of the disagreements between Catholics and Protestants about the nature of justification. Catholics are, broadly, more comfortable with the idea that God’s grace can make us and our deeds holy even here on earth (though holiness in creation is different from God’s holiness; whereas his holiness comes from his own nature, any holiness found in created things is a gift). Protestants, meanwhile, generally prefer to speak of grace as divine favor leading to spiritual fruit and to greater faith, while holiness is a characteristic belonging only to God and Christ and imputed to the believer, who becomes a “called-out one” (saint) for His service in the world. Because Pakaluk uses holiness with its Catholic connotation, Protestants may find the shock here to be more than they can stomach doctrinally.

Pakaluk’s essays are in the tradition of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, meaning they are intellectual explorations of a topic, not the personal or confessional pieces we often encounter under the name “essay.” Though none of the pieces here achieves the gonzo brilliance of Chesterton’s “A Piece of Chalk” or “I Begin with a Little Girl’s Hair,” Pakaluk is comfortable in his genre and can offer a complete and often intriguing argument grounded in vivid real-world observations in just four or five pages (a task harder than it looks). His work is conscientiously outward-facing and does not dwell on the personal tragedies that have shaped his life. But occasionally his personal experience clearly guides his creative choices, as when he reflects on the epitaph of Saint Thomas More (composed by More himself); Pakaluk concludes with More’s own closing lines dedicated to his two wives, one of whom died quite young.

Holiness: Shocking or Ordinary?

Although each essay could stand alone as meaningful and self-contained, throughout the book there is an accumulation of symbols and themes that slowly reveals to us how each essay stands in relation to the others. There is a good deal of pleasure to be found in returning to an earlier essay after reading five or six others and seeing how the later pieces expand and deepen the earlier ones.

Pakaluk writes in the preface that he “might have called them ‘Essays in Re-Enchantment.’” I am thankful he did not. Although The Shock of Holiness speaks to many of the longings expressed by the re-enchantment crowd, his own work is considerably more serious than “re-enchantment” books tend to be. Pakaluk is not a social commentator or a Substacker or a journalist; he is a philosopher, trained in logic and reasoning. He uses words with a rare precision, and he has the philosopher’s knack of developing a language all his own, cultivating subtle and specific meanings that give his work a shimmering clarity not often found either inside or outside the academy.

For example, in the fourth essay, titled “Do This in Remembrance of Me,” Pakaluk offers us a bracing and philosophical close reading of Luke’s account of the Last Supper, applying careful logic to the passage to demonstrate why he believes in the Catholic interpretation of Christ’s words of institution. Protestant readers may disagree, but they will have the fun of a rigorous disagreement, one in which they must puzzle out where they believe the logic of the argument falls apart, rather than debating a series of assertions to reject or accept along confessional lines.

Logic is only part of the rhetorical trinity we mentioned above. Indeed, in contemporary writing, it is the least common of the three, and the rigorous clarity of Pakaluk’s book is reason enough to read it. But Pakaluk does not rely entirely on argumentation. Each essay has a beating heart, if you will, whether the wrenching retelling of the murder of the Ulma family by the Germans for hiding Jewish families in Poland during WWII (essay 11, titled “Yes”) or a startling reimagining of Elizabeth’s joy at the Visitation (essay 22, titled “A Shout-Out to Mary”).

Here again, however, the differences between Catholic and Protestant conceptions of sanctification are notable. Pakaluk takes the Catholic Church seriously when she says that an individual shows evidence of holiness, of willing consecration to God, in his or her life—even when that raises difficult questions. In the essay “How to Repay the Love of Christ,” Pakaluk writes of

Blessed Henry Suso, who “one day took a knife and cut out in letters upon his breast the name of his beloved Lord. And when thus bathed in blood, he went into the church, and, prostrating himself before the crucifix, he said, “Behold, O Lord, Thou only Love of my soul, behold my desire, I would gladly have written Thee deeper within my heart; but this I cannot do.”

This is, indeed, shocking. Suso’s actions are staggering and confounding; surely there is no reason to exalt such behavior! Pakaluk walks a difficult line here. The Catholic Church has pronounced Suso a Blessed (someone in whose life there is evidence of God’s grace to an unusual or miraculous degree). But clearly Suso’s path is not one everyone can follow—or should. Pakaluk acknowledges this, explaining that it would go against God’s calling on many of our lives. He uses the example of a surgeon. Surgeons ought not be out at all hours ministering to the poor and needy; they must have steady hands and clear minds, which come from good food and rest, in order to fulfill their callings. Pakaluk concludes by saying that the primary responsibilities of Christians are to pursue God through the sacraments—he names baptism and the Eucharist specifically—and warns that activism can be a distraction.

Even though Pakaluk pushes readers to focus on the ordinary means of grace—baptism, the Eucharist, prayer, and meditation on Scripture—he does not offer a full-throated condemnation of Suso’s choice of penance. Many Protestant readers (and some Catholics) will be bothered by this. I (a Catholic) do not understand the rigorous penances adopted by some Saints and Blesseds. I do not understand the relationship between the body and the soul in the pursuit of holiness. My own understanding, cultivated by studying a different strain of Catholic theology, is much more “body-positive,” to use a contemporary term.

Pakaluk (wisely) does not undertake to universalize the impulse behind Suso’s actions. Instead, he tries to orient readers toward Christ, reminding them that holiness comes from daily pious habits. That said, he would have done well to address the distinction between holiness and scrupulosity. He offers many examples throughout the book of individuals suffering through no choice of their own, as when he describes (vividly) the martyrdom of Saint Jean de Brébeuf; in these, it is much easier to discern grace at work.

Glimpses of a Wide, Strange World

I found the first essay, “Moms at Mass, and Other Heroes,” uninspiring when I first read it. It struck me as cheesy. But as I pressed deeper into Pakaluk’s vision of reality, the placement of the first essay began to reveal itself as wise. I realized that my reaction to the essay was evidence of a buried guilt. I, after all, am not a mom who takes her children to daily Mass. Nothing in Pakaluk’s essay indicated that all moms must do so; any shame I felt came from me, not the book. But as I read through the subsequent essays (which instinctively I liked much more)—for example, “In Praise of Holy Water” and “The Lord of Substance”—their philosophical and philological explorations of the Mass and the sacraments worked backward in my imagination, illuminating that first off-putting essay until I was able to grapple with it on its own terms, instead of through my own defensive lens.

Not every book is this confident and effective at teaching readers how to read it. Pakaluk recognizes that there is an art to assembling essay collections and has put as much thought into the sequence of the book—the meta-argument, if you will—as into the individual essays themselves.

It’s refreshing in our age of self-identified “anti-theory” and “anti-argument” essay collections to find a book so confidently logical, in which the author establishes a series of premises and works forward from them throughout the collection. Pakaluk is, if not actually an axiomatic philosopher, working in the tradition of philosophical logicians like Spinoza, Leibniz, Wittgenstein—and of course, Aristotle. But anyone who picks up this book should also remember they are entering a profoundly anti-modern realm of saints, miracles, strange penances, and brutal martyrdoms. Yet there is a simple elegance in The Shock of Holiness’s structure and organization, a winning innocence in its faith that clear language, carefully applied, will bring readers—even readers who disagree with Pakaluk’s deeply personal Catholic convictions—closer to truth. These things make The Shock of Holiness a rare book, one whose words, images, and arguments kept returning to my mind long after I laid it down.