The Nuance Required Reading Historical Texts

Peter Kwasniewski recently kicked up a hornet's nest with two articles on his substack Tradition and Sanity lauding well-ordered social dances as a wholesome past time for Catholic youth (see "Why Catholics Should Learn to Dance" and "The Great Good of Social Dancing"). This innocuous suggestion was met with fierce pushback from people who insisted that dancing is sinful.

I am not particularly interested in weighing in on the argument about dancing, which Dr. Kwasniewski has discussed thoroughly in his two articles quoted above and which I concur with. I am more concerned with the hermeneutics of the contrarians arguing against dancing, because I think it illustrates an important lesson about how not to read Church documents. In following the discussion on social media, I noticed the contrarians typically argued their point by posting a slur of quotations from popes and saints, insisting that "the Magisterium has condemned dances." Now, I personally learned long ago that strings of quotations mean little without supporting context; many statements that seem to say one thing actually say something different when read in historical context. Or a statement that seems absolute turns out to not be as universal as initially assumed. Context is everything; as Scott Hahn says, a text without a context is a pretext.

Peter Kwasniewski makes this point in relation to dancing in his Substack piece "The Great Good of Social Dancing," which I will quote—although in reading this, remember, the point is not dancing, but rather how citations from Church history are managed. Kwasniewski wrote:

The biggest argument against my position is that “the saints have condemned dancing, and so has the Magisterium.” But we need to be careful here. If by “the Magisterium has condemned dances” we mean that at this or that moment a regional council or Vatican department has outlawed dancing for reasons known to the people at that time (and not necessarily correct reasons), this has no more timelessly binding authority than the Fourth Lateran Ecumenical Council’s prohibition of secular work, plays, taverns, and games of chance for all clerics and its requirement that they wear a tonsure and linen clothes, or its decree that Jews and Muslims in Catholic societies must wear special clothing to mark them off and must stay confined in their houses during the Triduum. None of this was ever rescinded, but it’s been ignored for centuries...

The regional Council of Laodicea (c. 363) condemned dancing—but it also condemned eating with unbelievers, clerics entering taverns, and anyone singing in church except the appointed cantors. Those who invoke a council for one provision ought, out of consistency, to invoke it for the others too; or else they should admit that provisions like this are susceptible to change.

Prudential judgments are, of necessity, fitted to a given set of circumstances; even so, they can be wrong sometimes; and certainly their applicability can change over time. What is permitted or encouraged in one age may be discouraged or forbidden in another, and vice versa. This is not modernism; it’s just the way practical judgments about contingent affairs work.

I recently came across an excellent example of this in relation to the Council of Jerusalem and the Church's interpretation of its prescriptions. In the Book of Acts we read that the Apostles gathered at Jerusalem to address the question of Gentiles' obligations to Mosaic Law. After hearing the testimony of St. Paul and Barnabas, St. James, speaking for the Council, issued the following decree:

For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell. (Acts 15:28-29)

I'd like to draw attention to the prohibitions against eating blood and the flesh of beasts that have been strangled. What are we to make of these prohibitions? Are they to be understood in an absolute sense, such that Christians today cannot eat what is strangled or bloody? Am I actually sinning if I eat a rare steak or venison from a deer that died by strangulation in a snare? 

A straightforward reading of Jerusalem's decree would suggest it is universal and absolute, for four reasons:

(1) There is nothing in the text suggesting it is anything other than absolute.
(2) We do not read anywhere else that this decree was either contested, limited, or revoked.
(3) Christians today are still to avoid unchastity and things (knowingly) sacrificed to idols; if these prescriptions are still in force, we may assume the prescriptions against eating blood and strangled things, which are mentioned beside them, are still in force as well.

(4) St. James says that this decree is issued on the authority of the Holy Spirit Himself speaking through the apostolic college, which would seem to grant it an authority supreme, universal, and absolute.

We might, therefore, reasonably assume that Christians are prohibited from eating blood or animals killed by strangulation. This, in fact, was assumed by certain Christian communities, such as the Copts, who to this day do not eat strangled animals specifically because of the text of Acts 15.

Yet, were we to do read this text absolutely, we would be entirely wrong.

The Catholic Church does not consider this decree to be absolute. In fact, the Council of Florence taught that the Council of Jerusalem's decrees about blood and stranlged animals were merely provisional, relating to circumstances of a specific place and time. In 1442, the Council of Florence issued Cantate Domino, the Bull of Union with the Copts. (1) One of the sticking points between the Latins and Copts was the issue of eating blood and strangled animals. The Copts, as we mentioned, considered the decree of Jersualem binding. The Roman Church, however, held that this decree was provisional and had fallen into abeyance. The Council, therefore, required the Copts to abjure their interpretation of Acts 15. This abjuration was written into the Bull of Union, and Abbot Andrew of St. Anthony, representing the Copts, had to swear to the following formulary:

...the apostolic prohibition, to abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled (cf. Acts 15:29) was suited to that time when a single church was rising from Jews and gentiles, who previously lived with different ceremonies and customs. This was so that the gentiles should have some observances in common with Jews, and occasion would be offered of coming together in one worship and faith of God and a cause of dissension might be removed, since by ancient custom blood and strangled things seemed abominable to Jews, and gentiles could be thought to be returning to idolatry if they ate sacrificial food.  In places, however, where the Christian religion has been promulgated to such an extent that no Jew is to be met with and all have joined the Church, uniformly practising the same rites and ceremonies of the Gospel and believing that to the clean all things are clean (cf. Tit. 1:15), since the cause of that apostolic prohibition has ceased, so its effect has ceased. It condemns, then, no kind of food that human society accepts and nobody at all, neither man nor woman, should make a distinction between animals, no matter how they died; although for the health of the body, for the practice of virtue, or for the sake of regular and ecclesiastical discipline many things that are not proscribed can and should be omitted, as the apostle says, all things are lawful, but not all are helpful. (1 Cor. 6:12, 10:22)

The text from Cantate Domino bolded above highlights how the Council of Florence said Jerusalem's decree was suited to unique circumstances in a specific era, and that since these circumstances no longer exist, the prohibition is no longer considered binding. It's important to note that there is nothing in the text of the ancient decree that lends itself to this interpreration; Florence deduces this not from the text of Acts, nor from the presumed intention of St. James, but from a common-sense analysis of the rationale behind the original prohibition, coupled with some clarifying texts from the Scriptures for added perspective. 

Unfortuanately, the union was not enduring. The Copts would renege on Cantate Domino. To this day the Coptic Orthodox still do not eat the flesh of animals killed by strangulation.

In reading Church history, one often comes across decrees or prohibitions that are phrased in absolute terms; at times, they may even be intended to be read absolutely by their authors—but nevertheless, a common-sense reading of such texts and the circumstances behind them can make it clear that they are no longer binding. This sort of thing has to be discerned by attention to context, historical circumstance, custom, and just plain common sense.
___________

(1) The text of Cantate Domino is taken from Norman P. Tanner's Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. I (online edition). I also consulted the text Laetentur Caeli: Bulls of Union with the Greek, Armenian, Coptic, and Ethiopian Churches, ed. D.P. Curtin (Dalcassian Publishing: Philadelphia, 2007)