Journey Home - 2019-04-09 - Dr. Lawrence Feingold

[Music] [Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program and once again we get to sit and relax and hear a story I'm excited about our guests we almost had to shut up here a moment ago because I'm anxious to hear about his story dr. Lawrence Feingold former agnostic he's the associate professor a philosophy and theology at Kenrick Glen and Seminary author of his newest book is the Eucharist mystery of presents sacrificing communion we were talking a bit about artwork and maybe I will get to it I won't come out I don't want to get ahead welcome to the program you it's wonderful to be here yeah it's good to have you here and I'm anxious to hear your story a lot of it has to do with beauty and I've heard that always what we talk about here but let me get all the way shut up and we ask you to start from the beginning let's hear your story okay the beginning is I was raised as an atheist basically by M so my dad was Jewish but um when he was 13 and bar Mitzvahed he that was it for and which always amazes me those of us that don't have a lot of Jewish background at all or anything like that there are whole groups of Jews and their families that they're Jews mm-hmm but even the idea of having a religion as a part of their life is really none right membership and the people is very important you know but yeah so he he he kind of went so he was a physicist my dad and it was his religion at least through most of us till towards the end was that of science yeah and so that's how he's brought up finding the unified theory but an interesting thing was in science he would use as one of his principles than the the theory that's simple elegant and beautiful that's that's what will be the the true one and so there was that sense of and mystery and beauty of the universe but that's about us so that way how was my dad's side and my mom said she was too full and away Protestant congregations but so my really experience was a few a handful of times at the Unitarian Church and Sunday schooled unitarian church on astronomy so that was more or less special for them was it were they teaching you a theism or we just said well let it know indoctrination yeah it was just okay yeah and so they're really the first step towards faith came in in college and so I went to Washington University in st. Louis and I was undecided what to study but I won in all those early years tried to bring you into faith of any sort so you can now have no nothing no I mean I knew I had this vague awareness that some my friends were Catholics but um ya know nothing and so the really the first experience was that college freshman year and I took an art history class and so this class ended up really changing my like planting seeds that 10 years later brought us into the church and so it was a class on art history and I remember the the first it's the only thing I remember from I'm slightly exactly but it's one of the few classes I remember from undergraduate was so the first class the professor was am and I think he was a Presbyterian so he was a very much a believing Christian and he put these two slides on the board woman number four by de Kooning an abstract expressionist kind of someone degrading and chaotic and and a Rembrandt portrait of yon C so it's just that it was a Rembrandt a secular portrait but showing the dignity of the human person I mean it was and so we the question was if you were on your deathbed which of these two images paintings would you want to have over your bed to contemplate and so they're two hundred freshmen in this class and and so I was making things like woman number four at that time I was interested in abstract expressionist and I was kind of doctoring Modern Art and but I knew my deathbed I would want to have the Rembrandt and I the only thing I would have said it was there's an image of human dignity there and so throughout the course he kept on making comparisons and his thesis was that art and isn't just about you know giving visual pleasure or aesthetic pleasure or expressing the times it's expressing a worldview I think he got this from and Francis Schaeffer and you know that idea of the art expressing worldly and and so the whole course was kind of modeled on that idea and so we looked at different world views expressed in the arts and so the Greek Poli cleitus and the Roman the Parthenon the Roman triumphal arch and showing how the form is shown a vision that's much more global about really about God man society would it have that's fascinating because if you think of music there is certain kinds of music that you hear it well I know that Spanish boom there's certain kinds of music well I know that's British huh I know that's a French or German right and I'm wondering like you said in a in a time an artist artwork at a time is it because there were lots of people doing art but people of this culture gravitated towards this because there was an expression of their culture right it's just parents so it's I think art is very much a social phenomena and you can't do art as an island I'm going to talk more about that in a minute and and so art ends up I mean the reason why it expresses this worldview is because the artist shares a worldview of his society and so and even if a particular artist like on Caravaggio might not be an exemplary Catholic his works can show it a very very deep insight into the Catholic world yeah so the combination of the artist expressing what he has experienced in culture but then the people that buy it or like it or doing it are also coming out of their culture so that's why these guys survive and not fret over here then did that crazy thing it didn't fit the time of that culture even though that was him right but the people didn't like it so it kind of fell by the wayside and alright they could be part of that so but then the professor had another point so he also was very anti Galen so there's very this idea of belt on shine world view is a hick alien kind of idea right that the artists expressing the worldview of a culture and the idea would be to be on the avant-garde of that pushing pushing that world viewport and some and his idea was know that the mission of the artist is to express the true world view and therefore not simply to be a mirror of his times that would be slavish but to be a prophetic witness a prophetic witness of them the truth of man gotten so a thread then would be going through all these cultures right be what you're talking about exactly and so he taught us to compare these different expressions of world view for seeking the true one and that the underlying idea is that beauty and truth go together and therefore this one that has this profound beauty that can't that's got to show us something about the truth all right so this is the way of beauty the in other words the reason why the way of beauty can lead to and with the truth of the faith it's because truth and beauty are which is interesting it kind of paralyzed your dad's ideas kind of the simple variety because in other words in from totally scientific view with all the different theories and out okay there's this thread of this beat to simul the beauty the clear e equals mc-squared it's just a perfect little idea that it just makes sense and beauty and it just ah mm-hmm right there's a beauty written into creation that's the idea and therefore in the arts and that can be a way to lead us to the and all right so that was kind of different so through this course I fell in love with Christian art because I found in Christian art um a depth and so it was interesting kind of laid out and say a Greek Apollo you know a Roman portrait oh but there's something in the Christian are that even though it's it's obviously drawing a man Renaissance artist drawing on the the classical but there's something different and that's something different comes from the fact that them saying Greek arts the Apollo inner there's the ideal the tonic form of man but in Christian art there's this idea that you and I have this right made in the image of God redeemed by all the blood of Christ and so individuality so what's where I'm running portrait that has been elevated right that's that individuality is itself and something so loved by God right so I fell in love with that other see the average person doesn't see all that in the picture but there's something inside of that says you know I don't like that yeah exactly there's something there that connects with right now of course he told us if we wrote I like that would failed of course we do the reasons why but but yeah that's the first reaction and all right so this led us names so I love that course and a couple years later and I was in my wife and I we weren't we were not yet married and we're in Germany for Julie junior year abroad and to the University of Tubingen in Germany and so we had a long break between semesters about six weeks where we got an int array pass and traveled through Europe looking at art works and again might so my wife and my then future wife Marcia was also from a Jewish family and she'd lost her face she was likewise a Jewish atheist smart guest is dr. Lawrence Feingold so the two of you yeah so there's not a part of your design not a part of any and when sunday or saturday but we went through europe going to church after church so we went through so that's the great gothic you know so one day we were in one day christmas day of that year we were in Chartres Cathedral Wow after so in the afternoon early afternoon it was lunchtime so the cathedrals totally empty except me everybody instead Christmas lunch except for monks chanting Gregorian chant in the in the sanctuary and I mean it was heaven on earth okay so that was they were so looking in in hindsight we could see all these things where God was poking us and and attracting that was a beautiful and and then Italy we fell in love with you know Renaissance aren't there and so forth and so we're constantly in church we would leave when the mass came and we ended up after college we ended up getting married and my wife's backyard and there was no mention of God and we had some Shakespeare sonnets read instead of instead of scriptural quotes and but and so then I stated our history for a couple years in Columbia and what I really wanted to do was to do art but I couldn't find any place where I could study art in the with with the Christian worldview in other words in the classical style so I watch in university because they've all totally sold out sure oh well there's just a different ideology of I mean I think ideologies right word here it's em I mean there was very much an anti tradition and an anti representational attitude unless you were a super realist so it's like you had to be non realistic or go totally the other way so I had a professor there who was a super-realistic do body casts and and so he would anyway but that ends up dehumanizing too because you get just simply it looks like a corpse when you take a body it's like the the the time that came during literature during that period you write a story but there can't be applied yeah was that Vietnamese kind of notice there can't be a goal of this story you can just yeah or a music note really mental thought that's just going yeah so so I was very descendent find a place I mean they're probably but anyway and so we we ended up in and what I was thinking or he said it's the offered a stone sculpture course is elective so I just kind of took it and fell in love with stone sculpture and so we ended up and so it's hard it's for a year I worked on some statues in New York and their studio and Soho but it really to do it right you have to know the craft and so they everybody told me you have to go to Italy a town called pitler Santa it's a sculptors town next to Carrara a little bit north of Pisa and and so we moved there and we lived there for three years and I did a statue of my wife and a nude statue and life-size and another a bronze then of her when she was pregnant and with our son and that um so during all this time we're always visiting and churches but again leaving when the mass starts memorable just like what you're just looking at the statues they're getting closer and so because I remember when it cracks me up because I think about the Protestants coming to church one thing they don't it's good summer one time we were in I was in the Sistine Chapel this is about a month before a conversion and looking at the Last Judgement there and it and you know tons of tourists everybody eating pictures it just hit me you know Here I am admiring this and thinking how beautiful it is and not asking is there a judgement and where will I stand and what would Michael angeleka bout that hmm I mean he painted this basically so that we would think about the truth of what he was depicting and here I've divorced it from the truth question right because again going back to the idea that beauty and truth have to go together how can I be admiring this for its beauty and not willing to admit interesting but I didn't and and I had a friend at this time who was my next-door neighbor was a fallen away Catholic but he kind of he was defending so even though he fell away he was still defending Catholicism and I was defending Buddhism at that time anyway at this time my wife was pregnant and so about that's a whole nother story I remember thinking I don't have anything to pass on to my son to our to our child a worldview a conviction about going back to that professor he said you know I'm a professor a professor supposed to profess if I don't profess a conviction I've failed as a professor so I'm thinking this now as a father I have to anyway they'd bothered me but I didn't have an answer I had you in that mindset at that time thinking about what you're gonna pass on to your child and you confirmed the idea of what's the foundation for whatever morality you're gonna teach your child or anything yeah no I mean that I mean sure be good but what's that right side just avoided those questions of the foundation yeah and there's a whole interesting story about how we decided to have a child so we've been living seven years and after marriage contracepting and and my mom came to visit us and we were actually so we were in Siena and you can stay in st. Catherine of Siena's at least at that time as a you know in her house and so we were there and we had this discussion with my and yeah we yeah we should we should try to conceive it so I think yeah st. catherine was interceding for us so towards about six months through the pregnancy my wife got this terrible anxiety um and it was irrational and it was about the health of the child and and one day when she was posing for me because she was my model and she said she didn't want to live and she doesn't even remember saying that but boy do I and did it hit me oh my goodness because I had just naively assumed we could fulfill one another just as we could project values we could project whether their moral values or artistic values and and it hit me I wasn't able to fulfill her I wasn't able to love her she needed to be loved and not only that I wanted to run away from the problem and so it just hit me oh my goodness there's I could see her as this heart needing to be loved infinitely and if it hit me if there isn't God the Father who loves her that way life doesn't make sense and woman number four would be true although those things that I had originally been indoctrinated in about Modern Art you know no that would be true and that can't be them and so it hit me I have to also pray to him and ask him to teach me to love her so I never prayed in my life so that I think that's kind of unusual I was 29 and I hadn't even you know played for a grade or a bicycle or anything and and so I thought all right I'm gonna go to Florence beauty and pray in the Duomo so I got on a train it was about an hour trip from our house so you're on the train by myself and halfway there I felt moved to pray for the first time in my life and it was again something I hadn't planned out it was teach me to love and then the second thing and to be a light unto others where did that come from so you know what I'd only interrupt your focus I'm trying to you have the the sculpture the external mm-hmm and you also were committed to the mind even it's almost like you were discovering the heart yeah absolutely the motion no no that's right exactly no the heart that and there's a deeper thing that's right here that you couldn't fill that's right her looks it exactly was you exactly her the heart that's right mm-hmm yeah the reasons of the heart this is doing so I'll talk more about that a minute and so then the second after making that prayer I I felt different I mean it was just it would happen to be April in Italy and it was looking after me I mean you've got the buds coming into it so if you see it so it felt like a rebirth but then what so I knew I knew the Bible from art history an art in art history basically this is especially if you study Renaissance art you have to know the New Testament because all the subjects baptism of Christ and so what so we and so I knew the verses even though I'd never pregnant so what came into my heart right at that moment was a combination of Psalm number two you are my son this day have begotten you and the baptism of Christ you are my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased that came a night but what what hid me was all this time I wasn't thinking about Jesus I was thinking about God the Father and but what came into my mind there is that those words you are my son we're actually being said to Jesus by the father and to us in him I saw yeah theologians call that divine filiation but and and so I knew that we had to be Christian I mean it was yeah we would call it an infusion all of a sudden of an idea right in your own heart right and then I felt again that could you explain that to your wife so I ended up going to the Duomo and it was really hard to kneel down and praying but the key thing had already happened it was what happened in the Train so then I go home and I I took my and she very much wanted to believe because she again part of her anxiety was this sense of that we were alone in the universe that there were you know that death is the end and and we're ultimate you know I have this infinite responsibility and all the things that go with kind of atheists accentual ISM nobody wants to stay in that place orderly I shouldn't say nobody but so she she wanted to be but she didn't want to believe irresponsibly and so we had this tug-of-war for for a time and so the next week we decided to go to our local church and we would pray together before mass and then leave that mass but just as we're about and so it was a beautiful again beauty the town we lived and had a 9th century church Romanesque Church and kind of you know one of these living churches that get in constant use for 12 centuries 11th century and so we went there and then as we were leaving when mass was starting our landlady came in Feingold's what are you doing here anyway so we ended up going in and instead from s I was our first mass and a both of us were impacted by it and again in the ways that we hadn't so it was the fourth Sunday of Easter which is vocation Sunday in Good Shepherd Sunday and so it's really simple service and mass on vocation the Christian vocation the married vocation and the priestly vocation and I was really moved by it and then during the communion had an experience one of the there was an old woman sitting next to me you know must have been in the late 80s and when she went down to receive Communion I somehow felt in communion with her and her faith and later found out she had been to Lourdes and had been cured she had been a hunchback and had received a miraculous anyway what that wasn't what what moved me was her faith that was being and my wife said a similar spirit so we kind of the tug of war went for a while but there was totally um so we knew we had to be Christian but we had no idea about Catholic and Protestant that was a whole nother that'll let we had to go through and why we pause there it was a good time for break I was thinking because you're go said it's not doesn't sound like what was drawing you to the church was your intellectual apologetics no nothing none of that it was really being drawn by the heart right in terms of that there's something inside of the statue here this person there's something deeper here right that you're starting to realize and part of it is seeing the faith this woman there's something connecting yeah that's drawing both of your wife there but but yet you don't have you don't doesn't so you have labels to put on it yet no not at not at all right yeah so later I come you know Pascal reasons of the heart the heart has reasons okay let's come back to that in a moment our guest is dr. Lawrence Feingold and I hope that his story is tweaking you if you're watching this program and yourself are maybe coming from a position where you really have no faith background at all but you're listening the story and it's tweaking your idea that there's something deeper here that maybe I'm created for a purpose and if you're in that journey I hope you connect with the coming on network because we're a whole fellowship of folk on the journey those of us that come toward the church and those of us that are seeking to live our faithful Christian lives if you'd like to connect with us please do it CH network.org you're back in the morning [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and our guest is dr. Lawrence Feingold I interrupted you in your journey you were ill you you and your wife were being drawn forward yeah so its beauty and it's love right so those things and let me see something about love is the motive of credibility so I I mean again when we were going through this I wasn't looking at it intellectually but I have had a lot of time to think about afterwards and and so afterwards I discovered the line of Pascal where he talks about reasons of the heart the heart has reasons that reason doesn't comprehend so they are reasons the heart and and and lots all right love actually very often we say love is blind right but in reality love opens our eyes because love can see something about the person when you love somebody you can't in the abstract that's neethu stand it you know an atheist as extensions I can say you life is meaningless and death is the end but when you love somebody you can't say that right I'm not right love my my boy and likewise that she not that there not be somebody to love her perfectly and that the heart has that intuition that is smarter than our Cartesian reason you know and so I don't want to say it's something irrational at all no it's it's totally rational it's just that the heart because it loves can see the whole person yeah I mean you're talking about something that an atheist maybe can't face up to or can't recognize because what you're talking about is not a physical organ inside the body I'm talking about something right just very much there right and we see it happening all around us so from a reason standpoint it's not empirically proved reality other than the experience people yeah so beauty and match of marriage is I mean so for me the path was beauty and marriage and it's you say I'm thinking about my dad my dad just passed away a few days ago and so I've been thinking about his life and and so and he was much more open to faith at the end and it was again his wife I knew from my past twenty-five years ago and so the day that she had the funeral he said you know I saw envied believers I so much want to see her again and she and that's what spouses spouses represent God and God's love to one another anyway so that was the reasons of the heart at this moment though we might we come to believe in God but and Christ is at the center because we're sons and daughters in him but what's the church so that was that the next question that we had to wrestle with and so that hope this happen being this happened in April and for a whole summer I was wrestling going back and forth so we're living in Italy but I went to the Anglican priest in Florence so there's one angler kiddin bro actually there were two at that time and and so he gave me a stack of books and was so excited the family you know coming out of atheism and the first book that he gave me to read was a band meant to divine providence a Catholic book my father de Quesada in 18th century Jesuit French desert and that actually totally changed my life the way I looked at things because it was the idea that God has Providence right believe in God and he is a Providence that governs the ordinary and not just the extraordinary and therefore all the things that happen in our day like right now are ordered by his Providence and we can see them as a kind of sacramental and the sacrament of the present moment anyway so that changed the way I looked at the world and and but at the same I was attracted by Catholic vision but at the same time growing up in the United States as an atheist there's a really strong anti-catholic I said I had breathed in somehow without knowing it and so I had all the old you know typical question that positive might have sometimes I think of and I obviously can't speak of this from experience but often I imagine that that from a Jewish background given the Holocaust and all of that that the idea of God's prophet mmm and control can actually be oh sure going off you know did that come to your mind at all I mean where's God in this I think it bled many see that was the key to our conversion because that's what my I mean this this anxiety that my wife had was again about and yeah I mean it wasn't Holocaust it was much more personal but and what we saw was that it's precisely the I mean like I wouldn't been able to say at the moment but an encounter with the cross is actually the way to conversion I mean I that's the universal principle because that forces you to post the questions and again we can pose them abstractly or personally and then imposing them personally you've got it if you look at the Holocaust for example you know where's a God in this but the fact that you think it's wrong mm-hmm that's proof there's a god the fact you can look at that so there's something heinous Lee here that's that's proof that there's a good and a bad right there so we can see that outraged yeah if we didn't see the human dignity that's made in the image and likeness of God but anyway so we didn't pose all those questions but yeah and the question that we were posing at this moment was Catholic or Protestant and so what was interesting was and I would go back and forth week one way week the other way and I noticed and when I thought that we should be Catholic there was a joy there and there was a certain sadness when I thought that we couldn't and the reason for that and I think in my case was and because the path of beauty had led us in this sense through an experience of Christian culture and half the culture in Italy for you know all right maybe it's not living in the same way today but at least for 17th century I'm in a long time and that idea that God was with the whole of that and when I thought we had to be Protestant in a way it seemed that God wouldn't have been working in that and there would be something tragic about another I had somehow fallen in love with catholicity through the in culture in in art and I couldn't put my finger but anyway so I was having that just later I found out about Ignatian discernment and but that's the summit of spirits well search that that peace and that joy is a sign then we ended up getting baptized in the Anglican Church in Florence with with our baby who has then three months yeah halfway between that's right and kind of Catholic but not all the way right but I am and I was thinking at this time of them I wanted to to give up I felt called to give up the art and study theology and give myself totally to just transmitting the faith and so I knew that the Anglicans had married priests and collected and so that was part of but and the Reformation just bothered me and so I just kind of put it under the rug and didn't think about it week but a couple months later we were about to leave Italy I was browsing in the the British Library in Florence and this book just kind of said take me a Newman reader so I pulled it off the shelf and I fell in love with with John Henry Newman and I just felt like he was speaking to me because again so many of his concerns and so he talked about the dogmatic principle that is that as opposed to a kind of liberal so I had come out the idea that we're creating meaning that was you know what I'd been a doctor and then what I found is no we received it and so that's what he calls the dogmatic principle that faith comes from above it's not our building it up from below and that anyway just it spoke to me and so I got his what about ography apologia probably to me I started to charity read through it and his essay on development of Christian doctrine and so at this time I my wife was visiting her parents we were not so we're separated for the moment and and so I called her at the telephone I told her Marsh I think we should become Catholic it just kind of this pause silence for a few moments and but then it was like in the Book of Ruth no you you trust your so we started the are saying that it was I was gonna say you know phone call it's kind of hard to summarize the apology or probita suet I guess he had developed my doctrine an awful lot there even to try and explain to the audience what it was about those really grabbed you but but again it was his buying into the whole alright so that's so he's sent out in one summer vacation to read the father's that's ridiculous you can't you can't do that in even in a long summer vacation but it was that love that he had as an Anglican for the whole tradition and so that's what really spoke to me and and that's what ended up leading him to I think as a conversion happens in a scientist when he goes from thinking on the one hand look what I created to when he realized no look what I discovered had always been there that's right yeah that's a conversion so that's what I was seeing there in what he called the dogmatic principle that dog many dogma has a bad name reputation right but I mean it's glorious right it means it's something yeah not to review this with as yes this evening truth so your wife came in obediently yeah so we did right that's right and yeah so after that so that's kind of so we ended up entering the RCA just a couple months after we're Baptist and it was December eighth and I'm I didn't know too much about so mary has a place in this story I D I skip this Oh Marian the Eucharist are kind of go the steps along the way and well I was still did certain Catholic and Protestant and the and it would make him around and it was the next month after the beginning for commercial and it was 1988 was a Marian year and so our little parts celebrated the Marian year by having a miraculous an image that have been attributed saving the village from a drought or something of Our Lady and so there was a procession with the the Archbishop of Pisa and all the people praying the rosary and and again this was all totally foreign to us but there was something and we tracked them about and so we and there were it was a novena of eight homilies on Mary as the new Eve Susan my given by the Archbishop of Pisa in our local church and so we went to those every night this was baptized okay so about three or four months before baptized and yeah so that really spoke to him but again can I trust this but it was yes that was one day and then an experience about the the Eucharist again before baptized I went to st. Peters and I was walking down the the main nave and to my right I saw um angels by Bernini that I had always wanted to see but I hadn't located them and there they were actually the adoring angels in the Blessed Sacrament chapel right so I didn't know anything about what the chapel that was so I go we need to see the angels and and then I look around and see everybody's on their knees and that monstrance is exposed which I didn't know what it was but it hit me I mean like physically and I and I ended up going in and and being moved to tears even though I didn't know from a you know a theological point of view that was but again we still ended up getting have you said earlier that one of the reasons you had known so much about the New Testament was because you saw it an art not right to ask that very question if you're studying art and Europe you can't escape Mary all over the place and the Eucharist even an art obviously in physical art I mean the Mont beautiful of monstrance is seen museums were there they are artwork and the people have no clue what this is about but really disappoints due to our Lord right so it did I mean again the reasons of the heart would be all three of these it's the the reason of the heart are that the human being is made for love right to be loved totally and to return that love and and so again believing in the father who loves and that he would send his son I mean those two go together that's why again I mean Judaism Christianity are just it's an extension of the logic the divine so this is again I couldn't put it like that then but today the fancy term would be the divine condescension which just means the divine boomerang to love us on our level I know that after you come into the church you've been very connected to hebrew catholics and as this journey helped yury preciate your background yes you can see from what I've said I was totally estranged my own background I totally completely I mean I was I would go to Passover Seder with family but it would they were non religious and I mean I knew that our family was Jewish but ya know so it was only afterwards so after we became Catholic I am about six months later I discovered there was this association of Hebrew Catholics and and so I ended up I got a newsletter somehow I don't know how and so the president David Mawson so I called him up out of the blue and so we and I didn't end up medium for another 15 years haha but what I what happened was I felt a strong attraction to all things Jewish that I'd never had before and through rice I mean which makes sense so I wanted to sorry I studied Hebrew and we ended up living for a year in Israel later and I'm kind of getting ahead of myself so after we became Catholic I wanted to study theology and so we ended up since we knew Italian from living in Italy doing sculpture we ended up going to Rome and so I stayed in Rome for eight years and at the University the Holy Cross that's the Opus Dei school there and I did one year we in Jerusalem and to learn Hebrew and so we ended up living a 10-minute walk from the holy sepulchre which is our parish so every morning we would it was early 5:30 in the morning is mass on the empty tomb or on Fridays on Calvary Tsui but yes you walk in the footsteps Christ but also rediscovering that Jewish shared so we I think it I mean it's so tragic that it's an I so often understood as an either/or as whereas for us becoming Catholic you opened up the way to the Old Testament Pope Benedict particularly emphasizes a hermeneutic of continuity yeah and maybe talk a little bit about that the hermeneutic of continuity between the Jewish and our Catholicism they're almost everything in our Catholic faith has Jewish roots because it's one plant right it's one God think God is the ultimate artist and so he you can't do the perfect thing without perfectly preparing the perfect thing is that God becomes man so as to love us with the human heart and shed all of that blood for us he's got to prepare it and so it prepares it in a properly human way by calling a people in which he's going to become man and forming that people with all of their particular harity right in their language so that she can become men in them in there in a family yeah and so that's you know I think about those that that want to describe what they find in nature from a totally naturalistic perspective they're looking for the flow of things but they're blind to the the continuities they see is because of a common creator right and so continuity you see on every level right and so again it's the beauty written to the cosmos calling us but above all the beauty written into the human heart that's the principal thing and and then the beauty of salvation history is this plan of continuity right and so and now you can't interrupt or blocked I mean that was kind of the first heresy Gnosticism separating the two and and then the same thing within Christianity it was the same thing speaking to me in each of those places and so again Catholic and Protestant was the key thing was the principle of continuity the hermeneutics of continuity that it's and that's what I fell in love with in Newman right so it's the same principle I think governing Judaism Christianity and the Catholic I guess the dr. Lawrence Feingold how important is it to helping a child's grow in their faith to helping them understand beauty oh so important it's so important because and their different tempo let me just preface this there are different temperaments right and so some temperaments are going to be more touched by but nevertheless I think for everyone um affirmation in beauty is crucial because beauty's we live in a cultures of beauties in the eye of the beholder right yeah and but we know it's not true right because and I mean there's there's a truth to it the truth to it is that the eye needs to be formed right so if beauty is that which pleases the eye that's kind of a safe Thomas definition we should better say beauty is that which pleases the well-formed mind's eye and therefore that's going to be something objective that which is truly beautiful to please the well-formed eye but I have to form that eye and that's where I think of formation in beauty is a really important part ought to be a really important part of Education and it's an apologetics of its own right but it's an apologetics that doesn't worry you with the with the syllogism our reasoning but that points yeah I wasn't saying it's like philosophy is so important to getting good theology but then one minute okay where do I start in philosophy because there's goodness bad out there and I know what's good or bad because we live in a soup of ideas mm-hmm in fact we live in a soup today were almost nobody knows philosophy for example and I think the same thing with beauty we were just so bombarded with so many contradictory ideas of beauty how do we begin to be able to form the conscience of our eye if you when it comes to beauty so I think the idea of the classics I mean this is for me that was really important that and so we are artistic conversion that happened first taught me that and I have to even if say my eyes been formed in contemporary art saying abstract expressionism there's if I give the the Rembrandt the Michelangelo the rifle a chance right there's there's a whole world there and so going to the classics is I think crucial for educates when I learned in art and then when we I applied that then in theology the same principle and so there - one should go to Augustine to Aquinas that the classics have a way of kind of like kind of like the great books ideas right would be the same thing with art yeah great record and that's the way this professor that I started the program speaking about did he gave it basically it was an interest in art history and he only didn't speak about that many images maybe 50 during the whole semester but those 50 are classics and you want to root yeah and I feel like there ought to be a good book mm-hmm that follows it through don't know if you have one to recommend to our audience you know in terms of that whole formation of the conscience of the eye this kind of we're talking about right right but the key thing is looking at and what's the bigger picture behind it right under though it's the vision of faith or its rejection that's lying behind it particular work about you or try to avoid any idea at all I mean answer that you've kind of said in many of this modern art the idea that there's an idea behind it no no we don't want to stay away from that I mean the deadness of that the emptiness that would kind of lead we have a email Jonathan from Missouri writes Catholics often are misunderstood for their emphasis on the role of sacred tradition in our faith I've heard however that the Jewish faith also recognizes the importance of tradition and even have extra scripture writings that they refer to could dr. Feingold elaborate a little more on the role of tradition from within a Jewish context right well yeah I mean everybody knows tradition tradition you know the song so we for North and XQ and there's a dual Torah the written Torah and the Oral Torah and you can't have one without the other because I mean how do you know what's the right interpretation of the written Tara without the oral torah and that oral torah is simply the idea of an oral tradition passed from orally from moses through the sages obviously the prophets and sages and to the rabbinic tradition to today and that's what make it without without that oral torah there's no Judaism I mean there's no and that's what enabled it to live in such adverse conditions of you know 19th centuries in the aspirin persecution and so forth and so that oral tradition then is I mean it's growing it's alive it's a living tradition I didn't incorporate things like the Hasidic movement and and you know culture and and so what was really beautiful for me was seeing how that matches now I didn't know about the oral torah growing up because I was estranged from that but was only finding it out contemporary with exploring the notion of attrition in the catholic context right so they they very much it sounds like the reason you'll end up with people or cultural Jews is because they've rejected that oral Turtle right and so what part of again what was interesting for me was seeing it's a three fold correspondence here so the the Jewish tradition the idea of Catholic tradition but also in art right in culture tradition is criticism part of the huge problems I think with in 20th century art or in contemporary art is red I mean we don't have a sense of any of a continuity right that hermeneutics of continuity and that culture lives on that it can't because we're simply that's part of our our limitation a human person that we don't stand alone right we're social beings and we have to receive we receive from above but we also receive horizontally through history we didn't talk about this at all before because we didn't we didn't talk much at all before but not in your study of art and this continuity and the meaning of did you get into we're looking from a Western standpoint when we get into the Eastern I can agra at all in your studies you know that the the way that art is expressed in the eastern monster orthodox oh yeah yeah oh yeah so there it's much stronger so they have a much and so they look at catholic tradition that's having lost nights i don't think it's true but but sure in the I kind of grab in the icon tradition it's such a beautiful sense that the making I mean just just even the fact that they had to suffer so much as in especially east for icons and how it goes to I mean again the icon being I mean God wanted to become visible in the Incarnation and so if he wanted to become visible he wanted to be represented but we can't just represent him anyhow right he has to be represented in in a tradition you know in a tradition that keeps a reverence by those of us from the Western standpoint we look at an Eastern icon and I don't know we don't get it you know there's so much more to there than merely a realistic painting of the father and the prodigal son in an Eastern a graffiti different perspective I don't I'm not very familiar with I was thinking as you've been describing it that it seems like a discovery of iconography for yourself would express a bit of that heart that you were looking for yeah just that and yeah so I think the that's such a beautiful tradition right they don't yet tradition of the icon and and what's really its Christological ultimately that's behind it and but a beautiful thing about the Catholic tradition is that there's room for a couple of maternity and so that's maybe where I might differ from an Eastern Orthodox who would say you have to do it this way right and that the Western kind of development more naturalistically was a decadence or a deviation I would want to say that I mean the beauty of the capitalist city is that and there's room for a complementarity of every culture I mean that's the right Christ is bigger than any cultural expression can represent talk about you know artwork and scope rent I know I discovered that myself that when I came into the church an image like the infant of Prague it was very difficult for me to appreciate as a lifelong American but once I realized that the Catholic Church involved all these cultures coming together bringing with them their great treasures then we see it through their eyes you know these great treasures of the artwork that we're so deep deeply meaningful in their perspective they brought together yeah the prophets so prophet Isaiah in the later chapter speaks about the wealth of the nations right coming to Jerusalem and that that nations that Arabian and giving gifts and so one way to interpret that is that that's the cultures of the world giving their own expressions to Christ until all focused on Christ no more so we just got a couple minutes left your newest book the Eucharist mystery of presents sacrifice and communion talk a bit about what you you know the reason for that book and related to your own conversion discovery the Eucharist yeah so I teach in a seminary okay and so and teaching a class year after year I and yeah so I have all these course notes and sermon trying to make them into books but what the book it is a the goal in the book is that the study of theology what not to be a merely academic thing all right so the study of the I and therefore the writing of a book on theology ought to be something that moves to prayer and if it doesn't do that I've failed and if it doesn't deepen the spiritual life all right what better subject then the Eucharist to do that and so the the idea of the book is that the Eucharist I mean it's we've been talking about beauty the Eucharist is the most I mean that is the greatest beauty in earth because it's Jesus Christ but it's a hidden beauty right so the Eucharist is the beauty the first of the sons of men but he's veiled himself in a hidden way and and so it's the Eucharist is a mystery of a beauty of presence but they a greater beauty of sacrifice right so we were talking before the most beautiful thing is the human heart right and therefore the most beautiful thing is the human heart in love that gives itself to the end and so the Eucharist is yes I miss your presence real presence but even more importantly it's the mystery of Christ's sacrifice which is the most beautiful thing on earth and he sacrificed himself for us giving himself to his father and then giving himself to us and that would be so that's the reason for the title the mystery of presence sacrifice and then communion I always think of that whenever I think of of the mystery of the Eucharist especially if you're kneeling before you know a Blessed Sacrament there's just so much there but our senses we're not acting and I think of that simple prayer in Scripture where the man says I believe but help my aunt I mean what you're asking for is a deeper appreciation for this beautiful Christ before me that my senses just stopped me dead right here right so it's it's the hidden beauty and so we do have a mission though to make a visible beauty that's what that would be the mission of Christian sacred art right to represent something but of course it's gonna fail right it's a can't do justice to the hidden beauty but you so even though you can only stammer it's still better sometimes to stammer than to that's right then our lives are our beauty mm-hmm in our lives as a result of Christ in our life so that we are an image for others to draw them closer to our Lord dr. Feingold thank you very much thank you I know some are our prayers are with you as you continue to teach it to seminary with an excellent opportunity to do that to convey your ideas I also pray that your book is helps draw people to see the beauty and the Eucharist and in their own lives thank you very much thank you so much and thank you for joining us on the episode of the journey home once again I just want to remind you that if you like this conversion story there's a bazillion other concerns good conversion stories like dr. Feingold's both at EWTN on their website but also at coming home networks websites eh network.org and if there's a way we can help you on your journey that's what we're here for please connect with us god bless you see you again next week [Music] you

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Length: 56min 11sec (3371 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2019