r/Catholicism • u/Odd-Base-161 • 5h ago
I would really like to be Catholic again but I doubt I ever actually was one.
Somewhat of a ramble, but I left Catholicism at the age of 16, and started going to Mass again and reevaluating Catholic faith.
This past year I had a personal experience in which saying the Our Father released me from intense sleep paralysis. I'm a naturalist and empiricist yet I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something beyond my prior religious bias or upbringing which had an impact on that encounter. I've started attending Mass and going to Adoration and Confession but I still cannot consider myself Catholic again. I believe that if Christianity is true then the Orthodox and Catholic Churches are the spiritual authority which are most likely to be the legitimate representation and authority derived from Jesus but I do not think I personally will ever be able to actually believe in the most basic principles of Catholic or Christian belief again if I ever believed in them in the first place, Trinitarianism and transubstantiation.
I am VERY familiar with Classical philosophy and the terminology surrounding the Trinity. I know the differences between Sabellian Modalism, Partialism, Tritheism etc. I consistently hear one of two arguments from Christians on the Trinity. The first is that the Trinity is a mystery that must be taken on faith. There's an issue I'll highlight at the end of this write up regarding my take on this. The second is that God is one "what" with three "who"s. This is normally an argument about a difference between Person and Being? How are Catholics defining personhood because all of the Thomistic explanations of what a "Person" is essentially function the way that most philosophers post-1600 would define a "being"
I don't think I ever actually believed in the transubstantiation. That isn't to say that when I made my first communion that I didn't know or profess that the bread and wine were the body and blood of Christ, but I think most Catholics are unwitting heretics in this regard. If you asked them they would say that Jesus' spirit is there truly present in the bread and the wine, that his divinity and humanity are there but that the physical bread and wine are unchanged. This is if I recall, not the basis of the transubstantiation and would be considered heresy.
I think my best explanation for my experience though I am curious to hear the perspectives of others is that I was raised religious but being religious and being a person of faith are separate concepts. I dislike the concept of capital m "Mystery" because in my view there is nothing that is above reason ( sometimes called "supra-rational") there is only rational and irrational. As far as I'm concerned if God is Trinitarian and humans cannot understand the Trinity, then no one actually believes in that God at all. I think there are some who could argue growing closer to and understanding the will of God in my life but to me the concept of Mystery essentially falls apart and makes Christian belief something that I cannot get behind even if I would like to believe it or believe in the possibility that Christianity is true.
EDIT: Yeah I'm gonna be honest this didn't really go anywhere. I might actually believe less than when I posted this tbh. Idk I think some people are hardwired for belief and others just fundamentally never will and I'm one of them.
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u/Ozzie_Bloke 4h ago
Well I’m not an expert but maybe research the spontaneous healing and other miracles of the church.
If everything is rational or irrational then how would you describe the resurrection of Jesus? That is a mystery of faith and the cornerstone of the church. At some point you need to realise that some things are beyond understanding in the universe.
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u/Odd-Base-161 4h ago
Supernaturalism and the concept of something being "supra-rational" are different. I'm not opposed to the possibility that an entity outside the material universe could alter that universe in ways that our physical laws wouldn't permit or that it could enter and then re-enter that universe. The issue i have with Trinitarianism is less like a miraculous healing and more along the lines of, " this belief system requires me to believe in a triangle with four sides while it defines a triangle as a shape with three sides" .
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u/TheSilentPilgrims 4h ago edited 4h ago
"This is if I recall, not the basis of the transubstantiation and would be considered heresy"
Can you elaborate?
Transubstantiation. All it does is change the substance. The bread and wine still have their accidents, their external properties. The underlying substance of bread and wine changes to the body and blood of Christ, which we cannot physically determine, but assent in faith.
Are you getting it mixed up with consubstantiation, where the substance of bread and wine are present alongside the substance of Christ? If so, Its heretical because the substance of the bread and wine do not transform into the body and blood.
As for the Trinity, it's a mystery because we only work with what God has revealed to us (Divine revelation). We don't know If the Trinity has more to It on the objective why other than what God has already revealed in scripture, which is why we call it a mystery. Not that what God has revealed is somehow impossible and God has made a mistake in doing so, but we reason the Trinity and assent to faith alongside that. We cannot wander into what is outside Divine Revelation and then believe we know more. Its simply illogical.
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u/Odd-Base-161 4h ago
My issue with believing in the Transubstantiation is I do not belief material objects have an inherent essence divorced from their accidents or properties. Lifeforms are more tricky because you get into discussions of the hard problem of consciousness etc. I'm not entirely opposed to the belief that Jesus' soul is present in the body and blood but the actual process of change in a physical object and his consubstantiation of the Eucharist raise rational objections
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u/TheSilentPilgrims 4h ago edited 4h ago
Its not the soul, its the substance of the body of Christ. Saying only soul is like saying Jesus is only spiritually present, rather than the claim made in transubstantiation that Christ is physically present in what appears to be bread. Christ does not consubstantiate both the substance of bread and of his body. The substance of the bread changes into the substance of the body of Christ.
The accidents surround the substance. The accidents are not the substance. One can lose the substance of the bread and the accidents be sustained miraculously. For what looks and tastes like bread, is not bread. It is called the body of Christ and we do not refer to it as bread, but as a host. What does a host host? The body of Christ, that takes over completely the substance of the accident.
Edit: Check this video for a more nuanced defense by former Anglican Christian B. Wagner who used to be against transubstantiation. Now Catholic.
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u/Odd-Base-161 4h ago
I understand what you're saying and I believe that is accurate. What I'm saying is that I struggle to believe that as true even though my resistance to Jesus as a deity has softened
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u/TheSilentPilgrims 4h ago
I understand. Please give it much thought, for I don't have a doubt reason can bring you to the position brought forth with greater understanding, even despite your current beliefs.
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u/Odd-Base-161 4h ago
My concern is that the Transubstantiation is a "Mystery " a word that is inconsistently applied by Catholic faith as something not revealed but could potentially be understood logically and something which "cannot" be known by humans.
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u/tubby_chumpkins 4h ago
There is a paper by Peter Van Ingawan about the Trinity. I haven't read it myself but he defends the concept as not irrational although still mysterious. He's one of the great metaphysicians of our time so if he can accept it as plausible I think that's a good reason to say it can at least be accepted on faith without being called out for being an idiot.
As far as mystery goes, I'd take the opposite view. The idea that humans should be able to understand everything, including the source of reality itself, just comes across as an indefensible product of human pride that came out of the enlightenment. When you spend too much time with the intellect it's easy to delude yourself into believing it's infallible and the only way we can know anything.
You mention Aquinas. Aquinas had a mystical revelation himself which causes him to conclude that all he had written was nothing but straw. If you don't let go of the demand to grasp God with your intellect you will never know him at all.
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u/Odd-Base-161 4h ago
That's an appeal to authority. The issue I find is "Mystery" is a somewhat loaded concept when I speak to Catholics, particularly priests and theologians. In some use cases they refer to mystery in the contemporary sense of something which has an explanation unknown to humans, there are many other instances however where they refer to Mysteries as being things which can't be known or understood via logic. There are plenty of limitations on what a human being can model understand or compute, but I find it very difficult as someone who was raised Catholic to profess belief in something that a human cannot actually understand because if you can't understand it, how can it be believed. This is a discourse issue I see a lot but as I mentioned to others I don't see any evidence for a category of concepts that are outside of the laws of logic that are not themselves illogical. To me that's no better than postmodernist word mincing.
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u/tubby_chumpkins 3h ago
Not all appeals to authority are fallacies. The Trinity is still debated today. It's not a settled issue.
if you can't understand it, how can it be believed.
It's Kierkegaard's leap of faith. Nobody claims mysteries are discoverable with reasoning. You accept the Trinity because it's been revealed to us.
This is a discourse issue I see a lot but as I mentioned to others I don't see any evidence for a category of concepts that are outside of the laws of logic that are not themselves illogic
Some people abuse the term yes but that doesn't mean that it's not valid. A mystery doesn't have anything to do with logic. It's basically a problem that doesn't seem to be tractable at all to us. Mysteries are not a fringe idea in even secular philosophy. There seem to be things that we really can't even begin to construct an understanding. Why is it hard to believe that God, the root of existence and maximal being, is mysterious? I'd rather be highly skeptical if someone told me God and his infinite being can be grapsed my a finite mind.
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u/Odd-Base-161 3h ago
Appeal to authority is a fallacy. The person or authority could aid in arguing something is right or wrong but the act of merely stating xyz smart person argued for it is a fallacious argument. Infinity is something which can be argued for logically or used in mathematics. My objection is I keep seeing two very different interpretations of what a Mystery is. If a mystery cannot be known by humans or understood logically then the act of saying it as a belief such as in the Nicene Creed loses it's significance.
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u/tubby_chumpkins 3h ago
That's not what makes it a fallacy but ok. Whatever you say. If experts disagree it's a valid reason to withhold judgement or not be so sure you know better than them.
If a mystery cannot be known by humans or understood logically then the act of saying it as a belief such as in the Nicene Creed loses it's significance.
Why does a mystery mean belief isn't possible?
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u/Odd-Base-161 3h ago
Yeah no I'd need to see what Van Ingawan's actual argument is. I judge arguments not authorities. To answer your second question if you don't know what the Trinity is or how it works how can you profess it or maintain an internal understanding within your kind that could be considered belief. Thats the same as saying imagine a square circle
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u/tubby_chumpkins 2h ago
A square circle is illogical. We know it doesn't exist based on the rules of logic. It's a lot harder to say that same thing about the Trinity because we don't really understand what "divine nature" means and we don't understand how a Person embodies divine nature. With people we know how it works, but how can you try to apply that to God?
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u/Odd-Base-161 2h ago
See but every argument I hear from Catholic doctrine says that the Trinity can't be understood not that it isn't understood. The way I see it Trinitarianism breaks the law of noncontradiction. I do hear some people say that God is one Being but Three Persons but they don't define what those terms mean.
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u/tubby_chumpkins 2h ago
I do hear some people say that God is one Being but Three Persons but they don't define what those terms mean.
The mystery is precisely that we have no idea what they actually are. If we have no idea what they actually are how can we make a statement about them logically? We only know what scripture reveals.
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u/Odd-Base-161 2h ago
Yeah this is a waste of time. If you can't even define your terms I can't take your argument seriously at all whatsoever
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u/Odd-Base-161 3h ago
My biggest problem is that in my terminology a mystery is something which has a logical answer that is not known, not something which is unknown because it doesn't make any sense
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u/tubby_chumpkins 2h ago
Your terminology is not the way it's understood usually. Many philosophers consider the hard problem of consciousness to be a mystery. It's not illogical because we know it's real. It's simply something we have no means to really be able to understand.
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u/Odd-Base-161 2h ago
Ok I feel like we're going in circles at this point but I'll explain this one more time. I'll use your example of the hard problem of consciousness. Consciousness is a " "mystery" that means there's an explanation for where it comes from but we don't know what it is. The Trinity is a "Mystery" which means Catholics say humans can't know what it is. That is different and to me signifies that the ideology of Trinitarianism isn't following the laws of logic.
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u/tubby_chumpkins 2h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism
You can see the way it's used by philosophers here. A mystery is something we can't know. It does not mean there is a problem with a hidden solution that could be known if we had better technology or thought harder about it. It's something that simply is unknowable.
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u/Odd-Base-161 1h ago
I think I'm starting to remember why I'm not Catholic. Could be my religious experiences are a limitation in my own skepticism and not in the ideas of reason and skepticism
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u/Medical-Resolve-4872 3h ago
One thing I note is that you seem to be conflating belief and understanding. “If you can’t understand it, how can it be believed?”
I don’t understand how FM radio waves work, but every morning when I start my car, I believe that when I turn my radio on my fave classic rock station will be playing. That’s totally simplistic, but humans regularly believe things we don’t understand.
Also, one other observation: you may be overstating the Church’s reliance on the concept of a capital-M Mystery. That is, you seem (to me) to be saying that the Church uses it to shut down the question. I would argue that it’s individuals who rely on it to bridge the gaps for themselves. We don’t all think or process in the same way. Many humans are happy to live with unanswered questions and cannot convey the theological or philosophical underpinnings of Catholic teaching. So we say “mystery”. BTW — we are not required to understand even the definition of Transubstantiation. We’re required to believe in /assent to the Real Presence. That Jesus Christ is truly present in the Eucharist, body,blood, soul, and divinity.
I get that your brain and mind work in such a way that you prefer to approach belief intellectually and philosophically. But that’s a preference, not a necessity, for belief.
God bless you and prayers for your journey :)