Grateful for the Interpreters

Creative geniuses are hard to understand: they use language in obscure, strange ways to unveil the the Real as True, Good and Beauty in new ways. That's why their translators or interpretors are so helpful! They are themselves super-intelligent scholars who read, understand and re-present the difficult teaching in a way us common folk can understand.

My lifetime-lifeworld has been blessed by four such geniuses: Balthasar, John Paul, Rene Girard and Ivan Illich. In reading them I barely get 50% of what they are saying. But happily each has come to me by way of a congenial, helpful guide. These guides are themselves first rate thinkers who penetrate the heart/intellects of their mentors and have an extraordinary gift for making those insights clear, available and inspiring.

Edward Oakes S.J. in Patterns of Redemption gives a masterful, clear, inspiring summation of the main teachings of Balthasar. He himself was a marvelous translator of Balthasar and his school to America. In addition, of course, we have the Communio School at the John Paul Institute in Washington D.C. who together develop the work of the great Swiss.

John Paul's catecheses on human sexuality are ellusive but Christopher West, gifted populizer and catechist, has made them easily available to all of us. He himself studied at the John Paul Insitutite which is the primary purveyor of both John Paul and Balthasar to the English-speaking Church. On some points, and correctly, the rigorous Communio School along with others have been critical of West. But that does not detract from his extraordinary success in making that body of teaching available.

Rene Girard found in Gil Baile an extraordinary, deep, supple disciple who gave us a breath-taking account of Girardian "mimetics" in Violence Unveiled. More recently he gives us, in God's Gamble, a creative, insighful synthesis of the best of Girard, Balthasar, and John Paul. He is the King of Interpreters and himself, in my view, a firsgt-rate creative thinker.

Ivan Illich fascinated me in the 1960s before he became a major critic of modernity in the 70s-80s but fell into disfavor when his Genderoffended mainstream femininism. I am now reading David Cayley's majesterial, authoritative Ivan Illich: an Intellectual Journey. Wow! No wonder I couldn't quite get Illich. Cayley is smart enough to know what makes sense in Illich and what is confounded and what is ellusive. This is definitely the hardest guy to intepret. But SO worth it.

The word "interpretor" or "translator" does not do justice to the work of these four. Each is himself an original, creative thinker in his own right. Each brings a wealth of scholarship, personal insight and charism to their work. What you get is two-for-the-price-of-one: the vision of the original genius as mediated to our world through a secondary but outstanding thinker.

In our Catholic world, however, there is another kind of genius who combines the two into one: delivers depth of insight in clear, understandable prose. Such tend not to be so creative. They have read widely and digest this erudtion into a message that is clear, inspiring, and easy to digest. Newman was such. Ratzinger is also. Sheen, Sheed, Guarino, Guardino, Lewis, Dulles, DeLubac, Hahn...the list goes on!

Thank God for our theological geniuses: those we can understand, those we cannot, and the ones who help us with that!