Catholic Humanity

While reading William Carlos Williams's Imaginations a parallel of Catholic humanity struck me between his piece of criticism of James Joyce's style and Carl Jung's addressing the Holy Ghost of Protestantism in Answer to Job. Here Williams and Jung are quoted, repectively:

"Joyce is to be discovered a catholic in his style then in something because of its divine humanity. Down, down it goes from priesthood into the slime as the church goes. The Catholic Church has always been unclean in its fingers and aloof in the head. Joyce's style consonant with this has nowhere the inhumanity of the scientific or protestant or pagan essayist. There is nowhere the coldly dressed formal language, the correct collar of such gentlemen seeking perhaps an English reputation."

"It[Protestantism] is obviously out of touch with the tremendous archetypal happenings in the psyche of the individual and the masses, and with the symbols which are intended to compensate the truly apocalyptic world situation today. It seems to have succumbed to a species of rationalistic historicism and to have lost any understanding of the Holy Ghost who works in the hidden places of the soul. It can therefore neither understand nor admit a further revalation of the divine drama."

They are both making point that Catholicism approaches the spirit or soul with humanity than Protestantism and irreligious. Williams says this to at least artistic thinking while Jung points out this to at least ethics. However, the commonality here is that Protestants and the irreligous use science to kind of THINK their way through the human soul rather than to FEEL their way through, and to support their way of thinking systematically with historical facts by deduced theory rather than feeling sporadically what they know to be right and true, that is, that faith is more rooted in the heart than in the mind. THINKING your way is a typical old-style German ethos drawn from perhaps the historicly rich German philosphers. It is drab yet rational, like an inornate yet tasteful Luthern church in the Midwest.

T.S.