Sober Inebriation

"Church and State"

2010-02-28T08:59:00.002-05:00

Reason, we're often told, is something opposed to religion, and therefore anything which falls beneath the banner of the latter has no place in public discourse and should remain an object of purely private interest. Secularists tell us this, atheists tell us this, and sometimes even people of faith tell us this -- there's to be no establishment of religion after all, which seems a reasonable compromise. This formula, however, contains a now subtle but historically glaring fallacy, which is simply the assumption that religion is solely a matter of faith to the exclusion of reason.

When Thomas Jefferson spoke - and in a public capacity - about things like liberty as the "gift of God", was he, to his mind, speaking in the language of faith? Absolutely not. He was, instead, making a philosophical point. To Thomas Jefferson, to Thomas Paine, to Benjamin Franklin, etc., philosophy was a mode of rational inquiry, and reason applied to the data of the senses concluded in a "Law of Nature and of Nature's God."

Consult, for example, the diatribe against faith called the Age of Reason and you'll find its author, Thomas Paine, making a distinction that in fact Christendom used to make - and Catholics still do. Giving a commentary in the First Part of his book on a passage from the book of Job, Paine makes the point that reason can discover God's existence, but is incapable of revealing the whole of His attributes. In this all but forgotten distinction, the first "object" (God's existence) falls under the heading of natural theology, a subject of rational inquiry - reason; the second (God's attributes) under revealed theology, as articles believed by faith - the Incarnation and the Trinity are instances of the second. This distinction, however, seems to have vanished from our discourse; thus we now have gross misunderstanding, propagandist redefinitions, and, frankly, the wrongful tipping of the scales in disfavor of religion - wrongful at least to the extent a religion is natural.

This faded distinction applies also to ethics and to a particular view of man's nature. Why, for instance, won't schools teach the cardinal (natural) virtues? The supernatural virtues of faith, hope and love certainly fall to a given student's church to inculcate, but temperance, fortitude, justice and prudence are well within the purview of natural reason, thus of a teachable universal ethic. No less important, the Western conception of man's nature, the view that man is a "rational animal" - the only view upon which to predicate the conviction that "all men are created equal" - seems a curiously antiquated notion. Though this view may supplement the Christian view that man, through adoption, can become divinized, it also sets him apart at a philosophical level from mere animal impulses, granting him some degree of freedom and dignity from mere material causation; that fact is not an article of faith, it's potential compatibility with a given religion should not make a difference.

However, to some people compatibilities, which are favorable to religion, do make a difference. From ethics to a particular view of man's nature to the existence of God, secularists, atheists, and even some Christians have pulled out their broad brush; they've broad brushed all talk of God and morality with the colors of faith. Thus, in effect, they've camouflaged the fact that some religions claim to be grounded in reason, upon certain rational pillars; and camouflaged, moreover, the fact that these same rational pillars were established as the very bulwark of a free Republic, the blessings of which, at least to this day, we as a nation have inherited.

Pull out your copy of the Declaration of Independence -- our Founders used the golden pillars of natural theology, natural ethics, and a rational view of man's nature to erect a philosophy of freedom. We have great precedent, therefore, for reclaiming these preambles to freedom in the public domain, even if they happen to be preambles to faith in the private.

Five Faulty Arguments Against (Orthodox) Christianity (A Repost)

2010-01-30T13:01:00.002-05:00

1. “Miracles are, by definition, impossible, so Christians will believe 1+1=3 if ‘God’ tells them to.”

Reply: Miracles are not, by definition, impossible. There’s a distinction between the Ideal Order and the Existential Order. The first deals with thought laws, like the principle of non-contradiction (a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way), and mathematical propositions; the second deals with physical matters of fact, like rocks, water, insects, plants, planets, and human beings. The Ideal Order deals with why causes that are self evident, they cannot be denied. The Existential Order deals with that causes, causes we see that occur (we see that rocks fall according to what we call gravity), but the why of which we do not see, and can therefore see no reason they should continue to hold. The Christian miracles concern the Existential Order, and contain no inherent “why” cause contradictions in the Ideal Order. (For more on the difference between orders see David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, SECTION IV PART 1: http://www.etext.leeds.ac.uk/hume/ehu/ehupbsb.htm#index-div2-N943628287 .
See also G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter IV--The Ethics of Elfland, beginning at the ninth paragraph: http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html )

2. “If the Universe needs God as a cause, then why doesn’t God need a cause?”

Peter Kreeft points out “the argument does not use the premise that everything needs a cause… Everything in motion needs a cause, everything dependent needs a cause, everything imperfect needs a cause.” (See http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/first-cause.htm , near the bottom of the page, with a dot by it, starting out “Third, it is sometimes argued…”)

3. “Asking me to prove the non-existence of God is forcing me to prove a universal negative, which is like me asking you to prove that unicorns don’t exist when you’re not looking, or that the spaghetti monster isn’t flying about on some distant planet.”

First, you CAN prove a universal negative if it contains an inherent contradiction, but that’s beside the point. The comparison between God as the logical conclusion of various proofs (like the Cosmological Argument, the Argument From Desire, and the Argument From Reason) and the randomly devised spaghetti monster, Santa Clause or Easter Bunny, is a comparison of apples and oranges. The former conclusion is a construct of the intellect, a concept, which is
inherently un-picture-able (unimaginable), like the concept of a triangle, which contains the un-picture-able essence of all imaginable triangles, or, in the realm of the existential order, like the concepts of a black hole and a quark, both of which are inferred by effects, yet are none the less unimaginable. (See William Buckley’s interview with philosopher Mortimer Adler for more on intellect vs. imagination: http://radicalacademy.com/adlerinterview2.htm ).

4. “Faith is blind, irrational; it is believing without evidence.”

A.) Faith is trust in reliable authority. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York… The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority-because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority… A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.” (Full quote from Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 5, third paragraph: http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt )

B.) Christianity has what are called preambles to faith, also called motives of faith; for instance, God is knowable by reason with the attributes of goodness and truth; and Jesus, who was crucified for claiming to be God (for blasphemy) was indeed what he said he was. A reliable authority is one who has knowledge and veracity (moral integrity): God known by reason together with Jesus of Nazareth who claimed to be God provides us a reliable authority.

C.)“It is only in the waiting, thirsting spirit that revelation can find a reply.” --George Brantl

The need for faith in the Christian God is the result of an attempt to live according to conscience, according to what one knows is right, and the subsequent failure to do so -- in other words, it involves the recognition that one needs a savior who has a direct relationship to his will, not his abstract intellect alone (i.e., not to mental assent to propositions alone). Christianity, says Lewis, "is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law… [i]t offers forgiveness for having broken, and supernatural help towards keeping, that law."

5. “The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin didn’t see God anywhere, nor does the Hubble; so show me scientific proof that God exists -- till then I’m a skeptic…”

God is known by His effects, and in two different realms.

First, in the descriptive realm, the realm with which science deals where we describe what is, not what ought to be, we can come to a philosophical understanding of God. One way we (the traditional "we") rationally come to the intellectual construct "God," is a posteriori (after experience). It's method is no different than that by which we arrive at scientific "constructs," the only difference is the particular explanation of observable phenomena for which it is used to account. We start with the empirical world, and see a necessity to explain it's various aspects: science deals with becoming, with what philosophers term secondary causes; philosophy deals with existence, with ontology and metaphysics. It's either bias or misunderstanding, which would discount the one, arrived at by the same method as the other, for the mere fact that it is used to explain a different aspect of observable phenomena. Therefore, if you ask for empirically discoverable evidence for God's existence in favor of the scientific method to the exclusion of the philosophical, you are simply asking to affirm and deny the same method at the same time. In other words neither Yuri Gagarin nor the Hubble can, in principle, see a black hole, and we shouldn’t expect them to – the same goes for God.

Second, in the prescriptive realm, with which personal relations and morality deal; this is the realm of the will, and is really the more important and, as it concerns the existence of God, the relevant realm. Peter Kreeft notes that science operates on the principle of mistrust, but personal relations are just the opposite. If God is not a being with whom we can have a personal relationship, then He’s largely irrelevant in our practical lives; if He is then we need, like all relationships, to trust. But what idea of God do we trust? First, if God exists He is all good, and we must do our best to follow the moral law, which we can never completely uphold. Second, there is only one claim that God has actually come to us and we need to trust Him, and that we need his help to keep the law, and to transcend it in order to find ultimate fulfillment – that claim is made by Jesus Christ. Therefore, when you understand the Christian God to be the only source of the forgiveness and help we need, then it's quite clear that it’s our desperation stemming from the most important and basic attribute of our humanity -- our moral and relational experience, that drives us towards trust, towards a relationship with that "source"; a relationship which beckons: "taste and see," for the evidence will be a transformation of that deepest and most important part of yourself.

(For more on the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive, visit: http://radicalacademy.com/adlermoral.htm )

What Are Ghosts? By Peter Kreeft

2010-01-13T21:13:00.002-05:00

Something a little different... What Are Ghosts?

Response to Mike

2010-01-07T16:15:00.005-05:00

(I posted this to Mike - see last blog post - about a week ago, I'm posting it here because he hasn't ok'd it yet so it's not showing up on his blog, to which I have a link in the last post)

Mike, sorry for the long delay. Let me begin by addressing what I think are some misunderstandings that need clarification.

1.) The approach I take, the angle at which proponents of the AfD see the issue, is not to say, just because I can imagine something and desire it (speaking with deceased loved ones, for example) means that desire can be fulfilled; it is, rather, to note that desires have a cause (loved ones that were once alive). Yes, I can imagine speaking with loved ones again, and though that might be impossible, it is explainable - it has a cause in an object, which caused it. Likewise, with any desire you can name: To see a flying unicorn? Horses, horns and flight exist. To live forever? Life and time exist. To see the Indians win the World Series? The Indians and the World Series exist. In this sense, therefore, all desire is a type of knowledge.

2.) Desires are natural desires if they correspond to the needs of human nature (which everyone has), not according to whether or not everyone has them (as felt desires) - as I pointed out with the fact that human nature needs nourishment; that doesn't mean everyone desires to nourish themselves properly. The implication here is that one doesn't need to be aware of a felt desire in order for a need actually to exist within his nature as a desire in potency - I'm certain that Kreeft would agree with me here.

Now, you and others, basically, argue that the desire for God is a projection of things like wanting to live forever, seeing our loved ones again, and looking to some form of Cosmic Justice. Though I believe this all may point to other arguments, I agree that if this is all it is then the AfD doesn't have the impact its proponents think it does. However, I think the beauty of Lewis' particular illustrations of this argument is that they show there's some "mysterious x" that we cannot account for in our spatio-temporal experience as we can for everlasting life, justice, etc. But before I get to some of his illustrations, I'd like to re-visit one more thing, which actually splits into two related arguments.

A.) Just as we can point out that a person who feels no desire to eat still has a need to eat, and such a person can know that negatively (since he doesn't have a positive desire), so can we have the negative knowledge of the AfD by formulating, as Aristotle did, a fact of our inner, first person experience: We desire something purely as an end in itself, and that something we call happiness, or supreme contentment. We can then go through and examine all the things within our experience and see that, by their very nature they cannot be that thing we desire, which will give us supreme contentment, a.k.a., happiness we need, and which we desire in every desire (we know we desire it in every desire because every other desire, though an end, is also a means). This thing, by its very nature, would have to transcend time, and be worthy of fulfilling us for eternity, otherwise it could not be an end in itself.

B.) Moreover, since this happiness principle is a concrete principle of our conscious existence, a principle which we cannot deny; since, as Ralph Cudworth put it, "this love and desire of good, as good in general, and of happiness, traversing the soul continually, and actuating and provoking it continually, is not a mere passion…but a settled resolved principle, and the very source, and fountain, and center of life", then to deny its root in an eternal reality is to contradict a self-evident principle. In other words, to affirm a position which denies an eternal (transcending time) existence in which this desire is rooted is to say this principle, which we cannot deny, is deniable. Such a position - like atheism - is therefore untenable.

But back to the AfD itself. Here are some observations from Lewis, which I'll follow up with those of other well known men:

"The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject which excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy." -CS Lewis

"Other grand ideas-homecoming, reunion with a beloved-similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment; even so-well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?" --Lewis

"You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words . . . Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction . . . - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires . . . you are looking for, watching for, listening for?" --Lewis

"In speaking of this desire…which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you -- the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot tell because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience." --Lewis

"...for I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any states of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired." -Lewis

“...the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of spatiotemporal experience.” -Lewis

“The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain-a curious wild pain-a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite-the beatific vision-God.” -Bertrand Russell (was an atheist and philosopher)

“The origin of poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder beauty than earth supplies.” --Edgar Allan Poe

“…certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy Earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at it's best and least corrupted, it's gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of 'exile'.” -J.R.R. Tolkien

“We are exiled from our homeland - but it's memories haunt us.” --St. Augustine

Here then we have a longing, a desire, for something for which our experience cannot account. Like I said before, any other desire or longing you can account for – in your example your loved ones whom you wish to speak to again have caused your longing. But here no finite thing will suffice, so that the only other route besides affirming the AfD is to say it’s a desire for nothing. That, however, is to say we desire nothing, which, logically, is to say we have no desire! This is completely different than an imaginary desire, for though Santa doesn’t exist the things of which he’s composed do, thus it is a desire for certain things in a certain relation – not for nothing, which is the absence of something.

You wrote:
::Finally, I still don’t see why you assume that this desire is for something outside of space and time. If there is such a natural desire, I doubt it’s that specific. Due to society, we may come to see it as a desire for the non-spatial and non-temporal, but I don’t see any reason to think that this is natural, especially given the many societies that have conceived of gods that were within both time and space.

Of course the Christian response is that’s precisely why they were idols! And precisely why images were not to be associated with God.

Again, you’re understanding the word “natural” here in a way it’s not intended to be used. I mean, it is natural for man to seek to know about the universe, isn’t it? But simply because he’s been wrong most of the time doesn’t mean everything we’ve learned, will learn, or can learn is wrong – nor does it mean science is not natural. It’s quite reasonable to expect that just as Democritus was wrong with his particular theory of atoms so others were and are wrong in their particular ideas of God. Or should we not believe in atoms :-) ?

Lastly, concerning why this desire is for something outside space and time, Lewis writes, “All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, ‘Is it this you want? Is it this?’ Last of all I had asked if Joy itself is what I wanted; and, labeling it ‘aesthetic experience,’ had pretended I could answer Yes. But that answer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, ‘You want—I myself am your want of—something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.’”

Conversing with Mike, the "Inquiring Infidel", on his Critque of the Argument from Desire

2009-11-28T12:10:00.002-05:00

Your Opinion

2009-11-21T08:49:00.002-05:00

If absolute morality exists then Atheism, since it denies an Absolute Ground for absolute morality, is therefore false.

1.) Do you agree?

2.) Why?

3.) Are you a Theist, Atheist, Agnostic, etc.?

The Euthyphro Dilemma

2009-11-01T09:11:00.000-05:00

Last year I started a conversation on an Amazon blog under the topic “Religion” called God and Morality. At the end of a brief introduction I asked, "is the nature of morality purely subjective, or is it objective in some sense?" It was my intention to give my answer along with a demonstration in a follow-up post. One particular atheist, however, who had dealt with plenty of people like me, ehem, insisted that we must ask the same question of God, supposing He exists, and kept referring to the "Euthyphro dilemma" (Is something good because God says it is, or does he say it is because it is good; or, God must either create or obey the good); I therefore took the opportunity of this debate to demonstrate my point.

I said, first of all, that we have to be clear about the nature of the God we're supposing to exist. On the one hand, if we're to conceive "God" as like the things of our experience -- finite, mutable, corporeal, and imperfect -- then clearly "God adds nothing to" morality. On the other hand, if we're to conceive "God" as theists and deists have traditionally conceived of Him, as unlike the things of our experience -- not finite, not sensible, not mutable, and not imperfect -- with the positive exception that He's like the things of our experience in so far that He has existence, and is the source and goal of all other, limited existences; that I was then in a better position to answer his point.

Surprisingly, he agreed on supposing the second view of God's nature, said he assumed it all along, but that it made no difference. Now, I say "surprisingly" because it makes all the difference in the world, and anyone familiar with the central observation of Lewis' Argument from Desire ("the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of spatiotemporal experience") is in perfect position to understand why.

If God contains all perfections, as my atheist friend and I agreed in our hypothetical, then that certainly includes eternal joy. Therefore, if participating in God's eternal joy IS the reward, the means to which includes morality, then we can say, with C.S. Lewis, "that God neither obeys nor creates the moral law. The good is uncreated; it could never have been otherwise; it has in it no shadow of contingency; it lies, as Plato said, on the other side of existence. God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God."

The fellow I was debating continued to insist that even if God gave us eternal joy this wouldn't tell us why we ought to seek it, why it wouldn't be mere preference to call it good. Our arguments, therefore, would conversely rise and fall depending on what he termed the "optional character" of goodness; that is, depending on whether oughts can only be hypothetical, or whether some can be, in fact, categorical. I had only, then, to reiterate a point from Aristotle: it is happiness alone which no one chooses for the sake of anything other than itself. There is no "optional character" to the fact that we seek happiness as THE end in itself. This fact is a fact of our will, of our own first person experience. It is, however, general -- as are all first principles.

My friend then said this had no more significance than one's preference for one alcoholic drink over another, to which I responded there's a difference in kind. One is (a) a perceived means, desired for the sake of something else; one is (b) the end, desired only for the sake of itself. Yet, I said, there's a further distinction in (a): some means flow from the essence of the end and are necessary, and some are merely accidental -- that is, some are needs, some are wants (preferences).
When it comes to choosing necessary means to that end we can therefore say, in some cases, that, as properties of happiness, we ought to choose them; to say otherwise is literally irrational.

For the Good is that which gives us the one thing we seek for itself and nothing else, which is happiness, and the necessary means to that end are therefore good. To go on and ask why we call that Good which gives us happiness, would be to ask why we desire happiness as the end in itself; that is akin to asking why something exists instead of nothing, or why the principle of non-contradiction is a principle, in other words, it’s irrelevant because it’s an undeniable, brute fact. By a brute fact of our first person experience, then, we can literally say -- So much for the Euthyphro dilemma!

If you take the fact that we ought to seek what is really good for us (what is part of happiness), and at the same time keep before your mind that God’s existence is understood from the standpoint of the via negative (which my friend agreed to “for sake of discussion”), then we’ve merely added one more negative, "that God neither obeys nor creates the moral law,” and the argument boils down to saying “we can’t understand God’s nature”, of which no one professes to have a *positive* understanding anyway – yet, nor do we of our own existence!

Objective Morality and the Categorical "ought"

2009-07-03T11:13:00.005-04:00

Here's another example of misunderstanding objective morality: The Is-Ought False Dichotomy, by Francois Tremblay .

Mr. Tremblay writes:

In short, we can refute the is-ought false dichotomy in this way: (1) Actions have consequences.
(2) These consequences are within the province of causality, since they are material.
(3) Therefore, the relation between actions and consequences is objective.

To be sure, this doesn’t refute anything, it leaves it hypothetical and begs the question: given that certain actions lead to certain consequences, why ought I to desire a given consequence, and thus choose to perform a given action? For instance, Mr. Tremblay says, “If we eat and drink proper foods and in moderate quantity, we will survive”, but why ought we want to survive? Survival is not an end in itself (people die for higher ends, so survival is a means), thus, as it stands, we are confined to the subjunctive mood, and must begin, “*if* we want to survive, then we ought to ‘eat and drink in moderate quantity.’” As C.S. Lewis said, you cannot go from, “this will preserve society… to [you ought to] do this,”; as I said, you can only say *if*, which is hypothetical.

Objective morality, however, must be premised on a categorical *since*, thus leading to a categorical ought, not a hypothetical *if* producing a hypothetical ought. To be imperative it must be indicative, and since we cannot find anything in “observation attached from desire” to make it so, then we must find it in desire itself – or bust. This means, therefore, that there must be an end in itself that we desire, to which certain actions and consequences are then a necessary means. But where is this end in itself to be found? It is found in the intuition of the good. Since this is an intuition, it is therefore the basis of demonstration; it cannot itself directly be demonstrated. However, like any other intuition (for instance, the law of contradiction) we can indirectly demonstrate its truth; in this case we can do so by noting, as Mortimer Adler put it, our inability to finish the proposition, we want happiness because… The fact is, we simply do, and for no other reason than itself, so that that which really, as opposed to apparently, leads to it is what we’d call the really good. That being the case we can go on to say, *since* I desire happiness for the sake of itself alone therefore I ought to choose only what is really good, that is, really the means to happiness.

Once this categorical ought is established, which requires the inclusion of our subjective point of view (as does knowledge), then we can go on to include objective facts about human nature that can give us a “moral system,” that is, a system of consequences based on given actions. Now, precisely because this ought is categorical - as I cannot think it’s opposite - then I know it applies, universally, to all rational beings; because it applies to all rational beings then I must include all rational human beings as ends in themselves (a Kingdom of ends, as Kant called it), meaning our ends include each other. This interrelation between myself and all other rational beings forms the relation called justice, and answers the Ring of Gyges dilemma posed by Plato so long ago - A magic ring cannot erase your rational and personal relationship to others, the infringement of which frustrates the fulfillment of a potential our nature needs as a means to the attainment of happiness.

How does God relate to all of this? In two ways. First, he meets a transcendent desire (described so well by C.S. Lewis), which is a descriptive property inherent to happiness (the fulfillment of all desire). Second, He serves as the Ground “saving the appearances” by preventing a contradiction for the scientific method. In other words, the self-evident fact of first person experience that, as subjects, we cannot deny we desire an end for the sake of itself and nothing else is contradicted by a third person account of those same subjects which views them apart from an eternal Ground (as the cause of that unchanging end). Moreover, a pure third person account is a pure fiction, for it's always the subject in the first person using the third person; that is, you cannot escape the rational "I", with it's basic intuitions (including goodness), to view it "from nowhere", it is a precondition, it is logically prior, to any and all perspectives.

Check Mate

2009-06-13T10:54:00.002-04:00

There are a multitude of reasons why I converted to Catholicism (from many forms of Protestantism). Incidentally, the reasons I would use presently to defend Catholicism aren't necessarily the reasons I found it convincing, so I was thinking to myself how I would best sum up the reasons that personally swayed me. Keeping in mind that for me the big move was not from Protestantism to Catholicism, but "clear" Christianity to "thick" -- and from there I followed what I saw to be the natural progression into Catholicism --, the general reason was put best by C.S. Lewis:

"There isn't really... this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may divide... religions... into 'thick' and 'clear'... If there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear ['Clear' practices involving intellect, reason, and conscience vs. 'Thick,' being imaginative and sensual]: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly... Christianity... takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth century academic prig...and tells [him] to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be clear: [the academic has to be] Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the true religion."

What else dies with Christ?

2009-04-11T16:42:00.000-04:00

Several years back, I overheard a fellow making light of the Easter event. Speaking on the phone to another, he rhetorically asked, “isn’t that [Easter] the day you celebrate when your god popped out of the ground?” Now, I’m sure the person on the other end was no learned theologian, and I have no idea what he thought or how he responded, but in my mind was almost instantly conceived the other side of my irreverent friends’ logic, which a-priori allows for no such miracle. For I immediately thought, well, then, what else has just popped out of the ground, so to speak, which my friend would have us bury beneath the dirt of trivialization? If a God does not exist - who, in principle, is able to do such a thing - then what of worth and value is there left not to shovel into meaninglessness?

Indeed, the choices seem simple to me. Either, (1) God exists, therefore purpose exists, or (2) God does not exist, and therefore life is meaningless. If the first option is the case, then why would we restrict God’s right possibly to act in such a way as Christians believe He has through Christ? But let me not stray too far from the main point, which must be a defense of what I said are the two simple choices; for all too often the reaction to this black and white statement is that the reader thinks it’s too black and white. Here, then is my reply.

As rational beings, our first-person perspective is governed by the laws of logic, which are universal. We know, therefore, that another person, who violates logic, is wrong – we can thus, at times, speak universally. If there are two apples on the table, two on the chair, and two on the floor, we know there are six apples in the room, and that anyone and everyone who says there are five is wrong. Well, we can likewise speak universally about the connection between moral acts, universally, but only if the object, or goal, is the same for all people. For moral acts are always made with some end in mind; as Aristotle said,

[W]e call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.

He then goes on,

Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for itself and never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.

But if there is no actual, eternal end, or goal, which is the cause of our desire for happiness, and which will grant us happiness once we’ve attained it, then this moral relationship to others, which is a perception of a logical connection based on this goal of our rational existence, is all meaningless illusion.

If choices, and courses of action, cannot be judged by reason according to an actual standard to which all are bound, and are, instead, a matter of individual taste, or what we call preference, then no one can say a choice or a course of action is really right or wrong, only that, based on feelings, one prefers this or that choice or course of action. This would mean, in real terms, that a sick-o child molester is no more wrong in his acts than you are for not wanting the child molested, or, put conversely, that you are no more right in not wanting the child molested than he is in his acts.

It seems, therefore, that my friend would bury more than just a belief in Christ, and that meaning itself depends upon his rising from death – and from the dirt of trivialization.

Who killed Christ?

2009-04-10T11:11:00.005-04:00

When watching a movie like the Passion of Christ, or reading the gospel stories of the Passion, some people miss the personal dimension, thus the personal impact, and instead blame the Jews. Be we have to remember Aristotle's four causes here. The four causes are the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause, and the final cause. In short, the matter involved, the performers involved, the plan involved, and the purpose involved. Related to our subject, the material cause of Jesus' death is things like the cross, nails, and such. The efficient cause of Jesus death were, indeed, the Jews involved (whom Christ forgave as he died) -- and the Romans. The plan involved was God's plan. However, every single individual being is the final cause, for the purpose was to enable Christ to save us from sin; since we engage in sin, then WE are the very purpose for all the rest. We, therefore, have crucified Christ. I weep as I watch the Passion of Christ because I am doing those things to Jesus.

Intro to Distributism Series, #2

2009-03-08T14:36:00.002-04:00

Brave New Alternative: Modern Distributism

The United States of America, at the time of its founding, was to be a nation governed by the rule of law -- by the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution’s Preamble, naturally, articulated its goals, among which was to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. Set in stone, therefore, were certain indispensable means to this end: a limited federal government with powers both clearly defined and which acted to check and balance. Somewhere along the way, however, something went wrong. When states and big businesses are vying for “their share” of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, when they are groveling at the feet of a federal government, which can set any condition it wants upon them, can it any longer be said that the federal government works within the parameters originally intended to “secure the blessings of liberty”?

Many people point the finger of blame at Fabian socialists (modern Democrats), rightly decrying redistribution of wealth. What many of these people forget, however, is that welfare is welfare by any name, thus corporate welfare, money to big farms, and all sorts of Republican earmarks “redistribute wealth” just as effectively as any liberal scheme. But even aside from this type of redistribution, big business globalists (modern Republicans) wind up enabling the very ideology they claim to detest. When only a fraction of the already tiny percentage of capitalists are “too big to fail,” then government has no real choice: it’s either “bail out” or let civilization as we know it sink. To many, our current predicament is an absolute surprise. But to some, it is really no surprise at all. For a while now, in fact, there have been “voices crying out in the wilderness”, and it may be time to listen to what they have to say.

The title for this article was inspired, as a case in point, by Aldous Huxley’s work, though not so much by his classic novel “Brave New World” as by an alternative he subsequently offered. From works like “Brave New World Revisited” and a forward he later added to “Brave New World,” one will find Huxley speaking of the need for economic decentralization and distributing property as widely as possible in order to remedy the oppressive partnership between big business and big government; in connection to these remedies he draws upon names like Hilaire Belloc, Mortimer Adler, and Henry George.

Though none of these men are any longer with us, their ideas are still very much alive. Belloc, for instance, along with well-known author G.K. Chesterton, popularized a theory known as Distributism, and a simple Google search will turn up pages worth of modern Distributist theories, practices, and demonstrated successes. Among the successors of Belloc and Chesterton, John Médaille, who writes for a blog called The Distributist Review, is playing a part in advancing Distributism both by his insightful writing and by drawing upon allied elements -- like (Henry) Georgism, strategies evolved from Mortimer Adler by CESJ, and, in addition to Huxley’s references, E. F. Schumacher’s work (among others).

All of these men, incidentally, would agree with President Obama that change was long overdue; still, neither elitist socialists nor monopolistic capitalists, that is, neither Democrats nor Republicans have given, nor will give us anything but an insatiably power hungry “Servile State”. The answer may be, as the song goes, “blowing in the wind,” but, then again, perhaps the “winds of change” and a brave new alternative, are only a few more Google clicks away.

Intro to Distributism Series, #1

2009-03-07T16:16:00.002-05:00

What is distributism?
by Thomas Storck

Much of the history of the Western world since the middle of the nineteenth century has been the history of the clash of competing economic systems. Ever since the Communist Manifesto of 1848, when it was claimed that a "specter is haunting Europe," a specter indeed has been haunting not only Europe, but the whole world. This is the specter not just of communism, but of rival economic and social systems which many times since then have convulsed mankind. But in the minds of many this rivalry of economic systems has come to an end: communism and socialism have both been defeated, and therefore only capitalism is left to reign triumphantly throughout the entire world. However, this is not the case. In a neglected passage of the encyclical Centesimus Annus, John Paul II points out that mankind's choices are not restricted to capitalism and the now discredited socialism. "We have seen that it is unacceptable to say that the defeat of so-called `Real Socialism' leaves capitalism as the only model of economic organization" (no. 35). If this is the case, then it behooves Catholics to take a look at distributism, an economic system championed by many of the best minds in the Church in the first part of the twentieth century, men such as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Fr. Vincent McNabb and many others. Let us see exactly what distributism is and why many Catholics see it as more akin to Catholic thought than capitalism.

In the first place, we would do well to make a few definitions of the chief terms we will be using, and especially of capitalism. Too often this word is left undefined, and each person gives it some sort of connotation in his mind, good or bad, depending on his own beliefs, but never clearly defined. Now first, what is capitalism not? Capitalism is not private ownership of property, even of productive property, for such ownership has existed in most of the world at most times, and capitalism is generally held to have come into existence only toward the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. Perhaps the best way to proceed is to take our definition from a very weighty source, and then we will see how that definition does indeed fit the facts of history. We will turn, then, to the encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931), in which capitalism is defined or characterized as "that economic system in which were provided by different people the capital and labor jointly needed for production" (no. 100). In other words, under capitalism normally people work for someone else. Someone, the capitalist, pays others, the workers, to work for him, and receives the profits of this enterprise, that is, whatever is left over after he has paid for his labor, his raw materials, his overhead, any debt he owes, etc.

Now is there anything wrong with capitalism, with the separation of ownership and work? In itself there is nothing unjust about my owning a factory or a farm and employing others to work for me, as long as I pay them a just and living wage. But nonetheless, the capitalistic system is dangerous and unwise, its fruits have been harmful for mankind, and the supreme pontiffs have often called for changes which would, in effect, eliminate capitalism, or at least reduce its scope and power.

Let me explain and justify the assertions I have just made. And in order to do so, I must first make a brief detour to talk about the purpose of economic activity. Why has God given to men the possibility and need for producing and using economic goods? The answer to this is obvious: we need these goods and services in order to live a human life. Thus economic activity produces goods and services for the sake of serving all of mankind, and any economic arrangements must be judged by how well they fulfill that purpose.

Now when ownership and work are separated there necessarily exists a class of men, capitalists, who are one step removed from the production process itself. Stockholders, for example, typically do not care about what the company they are formal owners of actually makes or does, but only whether its stock price is rising or how large a dividend it pays. In fact, on the stock exchange, shares change hands thousands of times a day, that is, different individuals or entities, such as pension funds, are part owners of companies for a few minutes or hours or days, and then the stock is sold to someone else and they become owners of some new entity. Thus this class of capitalists naturally comes to see the economic system as a mechanism by which money, stocks, bonds, futures, and other surrogates for real wealth, can be manipulated in order to enrich themselves, instead of serving society by producing needed goods and services. As a result, men have made fortunes by hostile takeovers, mergers, shutting down factories, etc., in other words, by taking advantage of private property rights, not in order to engage in productive economic activity, but to enrich themselves regardless of its effect on consumers or workers.

The popes have indeed justified the ownership of private property, but if we examine how and why they have done so, we will see that the logic of their position is far from the logic of capitalism. Let us look, for example, at a famous passage from the encyclical of Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891).

Men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which is their own; nay, they learn to love the very soil which yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of the good things for themselves and those that are dear to them. (no. 35)

But what happens under capitalism? Do men learn to love the very stock certificates which yield cold cash, in response to the labor of someone else's hands? The justification of private property that the popes have made is always tied, at least as an ideal, to ownership and work being joined. Thus Leo XIII: "The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many people as possible to become owners" (Rerum Novarum, no. 35), and this teaching is repeated by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (nos. 59-62, 65), by John XXIII in Mater et Magistra (nos. 85-89, 91-93, 111-115), and by John Paul II in Laborem Exercens (no. 14). If "as many people as possible...become owners," then that fatal separation of ownership and work will be, if not removed, at least its extent and influence will be lessened. It will no longer be the hallmark of our economic system, even if it still exists to some extent. And this brings us directly to distributism. For distributism is nothing more than an economic system in which private property is well distributed, in which "as many people as possible" are in fact owners. Probably the most complete statement of distributism can be found in Hilaire Belloc's book, The Restoration of Property (1936). Note the title, The Restoration of Property. For the distributists argued that under capitalism property, certainly productive property, was the preserve of the rich, and that this gave them an influence and power in society far beyond what they had any right to. Yes, the formal right to private property exists for all under capitalism, but in practice it is restricted to the rich.

A further feature of distributism that follows from this, is that in a distributist economy, the amassing of property will have limits placed on it. Before one objects that this sounds like socialism, he would do well to remember Chesterton's remark (in What's Wrong With the World, chap. 6), that the institution of private property no more means the right to unlimited property than the institution of marriage means the right to unlimited wives!

In the Middle Ages those quintessential Catholic institutions, the craft guilds, very often limited the amount of property each owner/worker could have (for example, by limiting the number of his employees), precisely in the interest of preventing anyone from expanding his own workshop so much that he was likely to drive others out of business. For if private property has a purpose and end, as Aristotle and St. Thomas would insist, it surely is to allow a man to make a decent living for himself and his family by serving society. But one living, not two or three. If my business supports myself and my family, then what right do I have to expand that business so as to deprive others of the means of supporting themselves and their families? For the medievals saw those in the same line of work, not as rivals or competitors, but as brothers, brothers engaged in the very important work of providing the public with a needed good or service. And as brothers they joined together into guilds, engaged priests to pray for their dead, supported their widows and orphans with insurance funds, and generally looked after one another. Who would not admit that this conception of economic activity is more akin to the Catholic faith than the dog eat dog ethic of capitalism?

I realize that much of what I say here must sound strange to many readers. Most Americans are acquainted only with capitalism and socialism. But a little knowledge of Catholic economic history and of traditional Catholic economic thought will be enough to convince any fair minded reader that there is an entire world out there of genuine Catholic thought on this subject nearly unknown in the United States. And if the current "science" of economics contradicts this thought, then ask yourself, what authority does that "science" have? It arose from the deistic philosophy of the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and it is curious that some Catholics, while condemning (rightly) the philosophy of that unfortunate century, warmly embrace its economic theories, not realizing that those economic theories arise from the same poisoned well as Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. But it is not too late to remake our thinking after the very pattern of Jesus Christ and his Church--if we are willing to banish from our lives the idols that are worshipped in our own country and embark on the fascinating journey of discovering Catholic economic thinking.

Thomas Storck is the author of Foundations of a Catholic Political Order and The Catholic Milieu. He is a contributing editor of New Oxford Review and a member of the editorial board of The Chesterton Review.

Jaki’s Theses

2009-01-25T07:47:00.002-05:00

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., in How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, talks about Stanley Jaki’s “theses” (Science and Creation); that in all the great cultures (Arabic, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya) “science suffered a stillbirth” due to a “burden of conceptual frameworks”, and that it was only in a Christian culture that science could, as indeed it did, flourish. Just as the secularist can witness evolution clashing with “conceptual frameworks” of many Christians, and the consequent numbing of the will when it concerns the specific desire for its development in such circles, so can we identify the sudden general halt which the technological advances in each of the aforementioned cultures met as the result of a similar clash; a clash of the scientific will with accepted metaphysical assumptions of a culture.

Galileo’s case, which is often used against Christianity, is actually instructive here. The Church’s opposition was not erected against Galileo’s theory, but against his general treatment of theory as fact. He suspected he was right, but he did not, yet, have the evidence to affirm it as fact. The Church, in this instance, was defending common sense and reason -- though I’m certainly not arguing that the way they defended it was proper. I say this case is instructive because Galileo had an intuition, a feeling, which he sought to explore; in scientific terms, he had a hypothesis, which he sought to verify; in theological terms he had faith seeking understanding. Whichever way you wish to term it, the scientific will precedes the intellect; once scientific presumptions become more intellectually explicit, once they catch up to the accepted metaphysical assumptions -- be they explicit or still implicit – we will find either a “numbing of the scientific will”, or, as in the case of Christian culture, a nurtured one.

Christianity in Light of Some General Misunderstandings

2009-01-24T09:09:00.003-05:00

1. Christianity is existential, it appeals to our will, and is thus anchored to human nature; it is not a test to which we have to give the right answer if we just happened to be lucky enough to find it.

"[Christianity]... is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law… [i]t offers forgiveness for having broken, and supernatural help towards keeping, that law." --Lewis

When someone says that they cannot believe in Christianity they often seem to presuppose that Christianity is primarily an assent to propositions put before the intellect, so that the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, the Incarnation and the like (which in themselves cannot be understood by our intellect) almost axiomatically lack any compelling force and appeal whatsoever in terms of moving one to make the choice to believe. This lack of appeal is to be expected given this understanding, for clearly a bunch of static propositions which are inherently beyond comprehension, detached from the only motive to which Christianity finds them directly related, is going to be less than even mildly appealing. Christianity, however, begins by relating not to a detached intellect, but to an ailing will. It offers medicine to the will, so that the will must begin to partake in order to heal and find itself healing.

Aldous Huxley, himself not a Christian, once wrote, "In traditional Christianity…it was axiomatic that contemplation is the end and purpose of action." Now, by "contemplation" is meant the last stage of faith, union with God even here on Earth, a union so potentially close that, as Brother Lawrence noted, "faith becomes so penetrating… it could almost say, "I no longer believe; I see and I experience." This is the happiness which our ailing wills seek, the goal or purpose for which rational beings are made; the lack of this happiness is the symptom of our need for a savior. Jesus Christ claimed to be the shape of our need, the bridge to happiness, the Savior of man. Therefore faith does not begin in empty intellectual propositions, but is personal trust stemming from a very real human need; a need which is the rock bottom condition of man when all his false objects of happiness are stripped away: a need to which the voice of history answers by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, crucified under Pontius Pilate. That leads me to the second point I'd like to make.

2. God is not just another thing or object, but is both the source and goal of all things and objects.

Any "thing" is a limitation of existence; Joseph Conti, quoting W.N. Clarke, tells us to think about the fact of existence that it exists in different ways; existence can be horsey, or evergreeny, or elmy, or sparrowy, or… you name it. The way things exist is called their “essence.” So things exist in different ways, they are limited existences, or existence limited. We know that a horse is not a bird, and that neither are human beings; we know that existence is limited, here, to a horse essence, a bird essence, and a human essence. But is there something that is pure existence without limitation? In other words, is there a being whose essence is existence? Well, taking what we know is common to each and every thing, namely, existence, we can investigate its properties and come to the grandest, most noble conclusion of human reason: God, the being whose essence is existence, exists! Or, as was revealed to Moses, I AM WHO AM (the being whose essence is existence), actually is. But more than a conclusion of reason, more than, as Huxley said, being "content to know about the unmoving mover from the outside and theoretically," the goal and purpose of life is to come to know God "directly", unitively".

3. God is the objective ground of goodness and worth, which our ideas reflect and thus give to our minds that relation called truth.

"God, to be God, must transcend what is. He must be the maker of what ought to be." - Rufus M. Jones

Given number two, that we are, so to speak, invariably attracted to God, that he is what our will strives for as the object of happiness, as THE end in itself for all human beings -- and all creation --, it's quite easy to see that by the phrase "maker of what ought to be," Jones means the cause or reason (in the sense of final cause) for the path, which includes the intertwining paths of all other human beings, which we ought to take in order to achieve our end. This means, to put it bluntly, that because there is a goal which we seek strictly for itself, and since the path to this goal implicitly involves doing what we can to help others reach it as well, therefore we're able to combine a prescriptive statement (we necessarily seek happiness) with a descriptive statement ((God as the object of happiness) IS) to conclude that we ought to seek God by loving Him, and by loving our neighbors as ourselves (i.e., your perception of your loved ones' infinite worth is not just a projection of your own fantasy, it is a perception which everyone ought to respect -- it is real!). The Christian claim closes the deal, insisting that only Jesus, who is this goal Incarnated in human flesh, can help us achieve such a love.

Hey Bill Maher, St Augustine On The Trinity...

2009-01-01T13:13:00.001-05:00

“For I remember that I have memory and understanding, and will; and I understand that I understand, and will, and remember; and I will that I will, and remember, and understand; and I remember together my whole memory, and understanding, and will… And, therefore, while all are mutually comprehended by each, and as wholes, each as a whole is equal to each as a whole, and each as a whole at the same time to all as wholes; and these three are one, one life, one mind, one essence.”

Evolution? Intelligent Design? – A Tight Rope Between Two Extremes?

2008-12-29T11:32:00.002-05:00

Is there intelligent design to the universe? Is the universe like a giant clock, requiring, like our own watches, an intelligent maker? Are there developments in living beings that are "irreducibly complex", and thus require an explanation at the level of intelligence? On the other hand, is evolution through the mechanism of natural selection sufficient to account for the complexities of human nature? And isn’t the latter strictly a question for science, as opposed to the former? The answers to these types of questions form the center of a debate, which touches on matters of practical import; matters both political and educational. Should we teach evolution AND intelligent design in public schools? For that matter, should we teach either one, and how does either fall into the highly contested Church/State debate? I, for one, think all of these questions gloss over something very important.

Perhaps I should disclose a number of things at the outset. First, I am a Catholic, and I believe that part of our soul (soul in the Aristotelian sense) is purely immaterial, thus naturally immortal. Second, I believe that evolution is a theory, which is useful in describing how our material being has developed to its present point. Third, I am not a scientist, just a layman who finds himself intrigued by the exchange of powerful ideas in the midst of man’s Great Conversation, and who, to be clear, agrees with various points from both sides of the debate. Fourth, I think I should give a little personal history about why this topic is important to me, which will require a short digression.

I was raised as a Christian, but it wasn’t until my teens that I started to take my beliefs seriously. Thus, it was in my junior-high school years that I quickly gravitated to a fundamentalist mindset; a mindset through which I interpreted the Bible, including Genesis, in as literal of terms as possible. Fast forward a bit – I’m now into high school, my parents have divorced, I’m in and out of depression, and the one strong support in my life is my church. My church beliefs, it must be understood, are connected, rising or falling on the question of the accuracy of the Bible as I then was taught to interpret it. Therefore, taking a biology class in which the theory of evolution is treated as historical fact in a history spanning millions of years, and at the same time attending a church which is teaching me that history only stretches back three-thousand years; well, suffice it to say that the contradiction opened the door for a creeping nihilism and despair.

It’s been sixteen years since high school. Now, as a Catholic, I take a bit of a different approach to interpreting Scripture, which I mention primarily to point out that, even though I disagree with the fundamentalist interpretation, I still have a certain sympathy, in one important regard, for the fundamentalist motive. You see, the fundamentalist, right or wrong, sees the scientist promoting evolution in a way that threatens to dismiss the need for God, destroy transcendent goodness, and undermine human dignity; that, in a word, threatens to render his most cherished beliefs superfluous. I think it’s important to understand this motive, and I think there’s something noble and truthful about it; I’ll return to this in a moment.

The argument that Intelligent Design is not science, but more akin to philosophy, is a strong argument for keeping it out of the mandatory public-school curriculum. But what about a lecture in Biology class, or a biology text book, or a PBS broadcast, which begins, “Man has evolved…”, and which concludes as if evolution accounts for man’s existence in a way that leaves a difference only of degree between he and his animal ancestors, not one in kind? In this case, there’s an implicit clash of philosophy, by which I mean reason, not faith; and, though this clash is subtle, it is, I think, still very much detectable, especially at a sensitive age. I’ve already pointed out where I stand on man’s (immaterial) soul, and I don’t intend to debate the point in this article; my real purpose, to be clear, is to point out that there is a clash, there is a debate, there is a problem -- and I’m sure I‘m not the only one who’s been affected by its implications.

So, what are we to do about this conflict? Well, as someone who’s a Christian and who provisionally holds to the theory of evolution, I suggest perhaps teaching some form of ethics, though one, which specifically proceeds from the conviction that man is more than an animal, that he is, in fact, a rational animal. This was the classical view of man, held by our Founding Fathers, and by both the medieval Christians and the ancient Greeks who influenced them; its propagation does nothing less than form the logical basis for establishing the equality of man firmly in the mind of society, from which it may then issue politically. This is not an article of faith, i.e. a strictly religious proposition, but a subject of rational inquiry; it is for that reason that it serves as a point where religion and science can meet. Thus, certain religions, like my own, can supplement public school curriculum with their particular benefits, not contradict it with whatever unfortunate consequences to which one may be sensitive.

In conclusion, I would say this: though reason can be opposed to some people’s faith, for others it need not be; not, that is, unless reason be prescribed, implicitly or otherwise, to the workings of an irrationally dogmatic materialism. Walking the tightrope between two extremes often seems to be the road less traveled; I think, as the greatest pioneers and martyrs of truth, neither Socrates nor Jesus would disagree with me here. Neither men, however, were pessimists; thus neither would give up hope.

The gods on the DC Buses

2008-12-13T08:58:00.001-05:00

Buses in Washington DC will now carry the "humanist" slogan, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake." But what does that honestly mean? To me it's no different from asking, Why believe in goodness? Just be good for goodness sake. Or, Why believe in God? Just be good for God's sake. Nor can I consider that people who sing this song have seriously taken the music of goodness to heart; otherwise, I believe they would have discovered the desperate need to call upon a muse for divine help, for the art of morality and our inevitable failures to be good are, according to great men like St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and C.S. Lewis, the very motive for seeking revelation from God. Moreover, I'd argue that part of "being good for goodness sake" involves believing in God for people's sake; humanists who were good for people's sake wouldn't slight their deepest convictions, and spurn the hope, which attends their faith. To me, the "humanist" slogan is an oxymoron, I see nothing fundamentally humane about it.

The very slogan itself, really, is an embarrassing tribute to its own authors. I'm sorry to say, it shows they either lack an awareness of, or refuse to acknowledge, the fact that God is not just a being religion holds exists, but philosophy does as well; that He's not only an object of faith, but of reason too; and, in either case, that it's traditionally posited that God is distinguished from all else by having no limitations, so that the slogan reading "a god" is confused from the start. There is and can only be one God, THE God; another "god" would have to be distinguished in some way, which would involve a limitation, thus would not BE God. In a country founded by Christians and deists, who believed in a basic idea of God, which served as the foundation of human ethics, is there, then, perhaps more to this inaccuracy than meets the eye? It's an ever-present temptation for those who want dramatically to alter the present to blur the past, even, I would think, if it starts with the most subtle propaganda (like inaccurate and uncharitable bus slogans).

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?" Apparently, Thomas Jefferson would seriously doubt that a nation "can be good for goodness sake", that is, if goodness is deprived of an eternal context, i.e., divorced from the notion of God. This philosophical deism of a Jefferson or a Franklin, however, is, in itself, practically dead, and only really survives into the present through living forms of Christianity (like Evangelical and Conservative Catholic Christianity). The rub for certain people is that these active forms of Christianity are, in large part, the primary forces behind things like saving traditional marriage, banning embryonic stem cell research, and attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade. In other words, belief in a God of "justice" and "wrath" currently translates politically, so that political reaction, I'd suggest, is what drives things like "humanist" bus ads.

I hear and read all of the time that people motivated by faith should keep their religion out of the political arena. To an extent I believe this principle is correct, but I think it helps to define that extent, which is really only to reclaim what I believe was understood by our founders, and by those in their succession, like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'd like to do this, to define that extent, with the help of one more quote from Jefferson, "A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature." For many, that quote might understandably bring to mind the phrase in the Declaration of Independence reading, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God", especially in light of Jefferson's earlier quote. But the point is that no one that I'm aware of wants to introduce articles of faith into the political arena -- no one, for instance, wants to force public schools to recite the Nicene Creed or, perhaps instead of fluoride, to take Holy Communion wine. Instead, the controversial issues rest, and should be discussed, at the level of "natural law"; that is, as subjects of reason, not faith. Whether or not one's reason is motivated by faith should be of nobody's concern, but that, I'm afraid, is what really angers people.

Indeed, it's religious motivation, I believe, that "humanist" reactionaries attempt to undermine through things like inaccurate and uncharitable bus slogans. To be sure, humanists have their own motives. The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche knew that the death of belief in God would mean the rise of our own selfish motives as gods in His place. Humanist slogans, in that case, might ultimately and more accurately read, "Why believe in God? Trust in OUR gods for goodness sake."

Toward A Right Understanding Of The Catholic Church (Part I)

2008-12-07T08:32:00.002-05:00

Denial of the truth claims of the Catholic Church take on the form of numerous arguments. For instance, some argue that the Church holds creeds that are irrational; some argue that the Church is not biblical; and some argue that the Church's history of scandal and abuse disqualify Her claims. The first is often argued by atheists and agnostics, the second by Protestants, and the third by a broad consensus, sometimes including Catholics themselves!

Bishop Fulton Sheen once said, "There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing." Whatever form an argument against the Catholic Church takes, if it's not the third argument above, I think it's safe to say that that third argument is still looming large in the mental background of the arguer, and working as a strong motive. What I'd like to do, therefore, is offer some clarity on the matter of how to think about the Catholic Church, specifically, about her claims to truth in the face of scandals and abuse.

To begin, I'd like to use a tool from Aristotle, called the Four Causes. The Four Causes are involved in any type of change, and, since the Catholic Church professes to bring the kingdom of God to human beings, to preserve the message of Christ as the instrument of the Holy Spirit, and since this can only occur through time, then it requires development, which is a type of change, thus involves the Four Causes.

The Four Causes are 1) the material cause, 2) the efficient cause, 3) the formal cause, and 4) the final cause. Let's say we want to built a shed. The material cause is the wood. The efficient cause is the builder. The formal cause is the plan for the shed. And the final cause is the purpose: "for storage." Now, let's say God wants to establish a Church. In this case the material cause is a sinful world, sinful human beings with free will. The efficient cause is God. The formal cause is the Kingdom of God. And the final cause is God's glory: the salvation of man. We could say, therefore, that the definition of the Church in light of the Four Causes is this:

The Church is the Kingdom of God made by God working on a sinful world for His own glory, man's salvation.

This, of course, SOUNDS just fine; however, one might object, so does Communism. Therefore, what we want to find out is how the formal and final causes, which are good in themselves, are brought by the efficient cause, God, to materialize in a world of sinful human beings. In other words, the means is always from the efficient cause to the material cause, so, just as we ask how the builder will build the shed (by hammering nails, and putting in the wiring) we have to ask HOW God is going to establish His Kingdom. We'll cover this question in Part II.

An Open Invitation (To A Carry Over Conversation)

2008-12-03T06:10:00.001-05:00

Discussion about the Catholic Church?

The Atheism of "God's Will"

2008-11-28T09:02:00.005-05:00

Have you ever, in the face of tragedy or some sad circumstance, heard someone say, almost casually, perhaps even stoically, "we just have to accept that it's God's will"? Apparently there are atheists out there who have rejected God in part because they've had such an experience, an experience which instantly and with clarity caused them to deny any such notion as manifestly absurd. My sister just died of an agonizing bout of cancer, and for no apparent reason, and "this is God's will?" You can almost instinctually respond, along with our now-atheist, to hell with such a god. Indeed, but there's more than one way to put it, and more than one way to go from there.

First of all, we have to recognize that such a reaction, if indeed legitmate (not just a rationalization, or worse, a fabrication), stems from the conviction that human beings really are precious, and that suffering and death really are tragedies. But this all implies that, therefore, there is a real good as the source of our conviction; otherwise it's all in our head, the logic of which means the loved who just died of cancer really wasn't precious, and her death really wasn't a tragedy -- the universe could just as well have caused one to delight in such circumstances. In other words, to reject God is to reject any meaning (meaning is about something else), which led to the rejection of God in the first place.

But more to the point, I think that the person who utters the bit about "God's will" implicitly has in mind, or at least he should, some things which qualify his statement, and which are evidently lost on our now-atheist hearers. For example, can anyone really imagine that our unwitting offender does not have in mind something like Romans 8: "18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us...28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose"?

You see, it is only in the face of an atheistic assumption in the first place that tragedy and human worth cannot be taken up and viewed in a broader context, which includes the reward of eternal joy to which "the sufferings of this present time" cannot be compared. The now-atheist all along assumed what C.S. Lewis called "a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils." In short, the now-atheist is reacting to his own limited assumptions. But these assumptions, unfortunately, are found in certain Christian worldviews as well.

Protestant Christians are often incurable Cartesians. They'll appeal, for instance, to God as the clock maker of the universe; this appeal is in perfect keeping with a Cartesian denial of secondary causes, or substances, in the philosophical sense (see the blog entry before the present one). In such a view it logically follows that God directly acts on the world, and thus is the direct cause of pain and suffering. Let me contrast this to the Catholic worldview, which is, quite literally, the common sense worldview.

Whenever I perceive something with my senses, I then understand it with my intellect, or what we'll loosely call mind. For instance, my senses tell me there's something round, and red, but it's my mind that tells me what that something is; we cannot say, there's a red, or there's a round -- those are incomplete sentences. There must be a noun, thus our intellects furnish us with an abstract concept, so that we can say there is a red apple, there is a round apple; or, at it's most indefinte, there is a red thing, or a round thing. Our minds know that apple abstractly, but what they know abstractly is called substance.

Substance is that in which the qualities (accidents, like redness and roundness) we perceive inhere. In Catholic philosophy, God has created substances, or natures, to act on their own. He sustains them in existence, but they directly cause the effects, which we then perceive in the sense world. What this means, simply put, is that God doesn't cause pain and suffering, He allows it through secondary causes, which ultimately has it's origin in human wills. God's original will, His 'antecedent will', which did not depend on the existence of pain and suffering, became His permissive, or 'consequent will', once man chose to take things into his own hands, i.e., after the fall.

In sum, therefore, the sentiment which caused us to find contempt in ascribing God's will to real pain and suffering of real people we know, and then to utter, to hell with such a god, is really a sentiment not directed at the true, living God, the God of Jesus Christ, but at certain false understandings of God; understandings which would have us a) reject His existence in the first place, consequently rejecting real human dignity, and b) reject our common sense in favor of idealism, and, consequently, accept a God of pure will, that is, whim, not one of reason and will. To put it bluntly, the rational foundations of our sentiment, logically expressed, should cause the now-atheist to say, rather, to hell with my now-atheism and any form of Christianity which leads me to it.

Descartes’ Mathematical Method

2008-11-08T07:23:00.004-05:00

Most people think that reality consists of objects existing apart from our minds, which we manipulate, in part, by the application of mathematics: I quite agree. But not all philosophers would be so quiescent: at least their logic, if it could speak for itself, would certainly beg to differ. The ideas of the great philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes present a perfect case in point.

The widely accepted philosophy up to Descartes’ time was primarily Aristotelian--polished up and expounded upon by Thomas Aquinas—which was diffused into the cultural atmosphere by the Catholic Church, and eventually acquired the name Realism. This philosophy considered physical realities to be composed of substance and accidents, or, “secret energies” and appearances (Gilson 163).

The substances, or “secret energies”, were considered the very hearts of things. For example, an olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane has accidental appearances which make us aware of it through our senses—it’s shape, color, texture, smell, and relation to it’s environment. But, according to this philosophy the appearances must “inhere” in something (Rizzi 365). That in which they “inhere”, the primary nature of the olive tree, is quite obviously not open to sense perception but known abstractly, by the intellect. Thus the substance, or nature, of the olive tree is a cause of the appearances, itself not visible.

The appearances, or in technical terms, accidents, were grouped into two main categories: quantity, or extension, and qualities. Quantity was considered fundamental, for every quality is an extended quality: redness, smoothness, square-ness -- all of these qualities exist quantified, as extended – even sound can be measured by periods of time. Thinking about extension in the abstract is, according to Realism, the basis of mathematics.

Enter Descartes. Descartes was a philosopher deeply impressed by the clarity of mathematics. In mathematics he could find “the certainty of its demonstrations and the evidence of it’s reasoning”, as Etienne Gilson quotes him (106). Gilson also notes Descartes’ increasing dissatisfaction with other types of knowledge; his Jesuit teacher Clavius had once written, in Gilson’s words, “There are innumerable sects in philosophy, there are no sects in mathematics” (104). This sentiment was likely to have helped Descartes combat the “complete skepticism” he found in the heavy influence (as Gilson contends) of the philosopher Montaigne (Gilson 110). “[Montaigne] had not found the key to universal knowledge” (Gilson 110). Such a clash between total philosophical skepticism and mathematical certainty can be easily seen to have birthed the brain child of Descartes’ “Universal Mathematics”, which, says Gilson, he would endeavor to apply to all fields of knowledge (Gilson 113). This philosophy will use as it’s “first principle” the method of clear (definitive) and distinct ideas (Gilson 122):

“all that can be clearly and distinctly known as belonging to the idea of a thing can be said of the thing itself… But what is it, to know something distinctly? When a mathematician knows a circle, he knows not only what it is [it’s definition]`, but, at the same time, what it is not. Because a circle is a circle, it has all the properties of the circle, and none of those that make a triangle a triangle, or a square a square. Philosophers should therefore proceed on the same assumption” (Gilson 122).

Gilson says that this principle would be the basis of all subsequent idealistic philosophies, for the idea of a thing was to be taken for the thing itself (122).

Up to this point quantity dealt with an aspect of a substance, the abstract consideration of which was called mathematics. Now the abstract definition was, in effect, to be the substance, and it’s “extension in three dimensions” it’s only attribute—it’s only physical property (Gilson 159). This was a move, says Gilson in so many words, that went no longer from physical substances to ideas, but from substantial ideas to physical attributes. (121)

The immediate result of this method in the physical world is, says Gilson, the deflation of all qualities, “such as weight, hardness, colour, and so on” thought to exist in extended things; this in addition to emptying the various words we use for “things” (tree, dog, flower) of any real meaning (160). Realists affirm that, at the very least, the primary qualities (known by touch and, incidentally, in some cases by sight) are necessary to experience the extension of a substance, such qualities being mathematically measurable: shape, weight, size, feel, relation to other objects. One would be inclined to think Decartes, as a mathematician, would be content with this affirmation. However, reversing the order of knowledge and starting from ideas, he could not be. Using the method of clear and distinct ideas you must find these qualities in the idea of extension, not extension by the sensible existence of these qualities (as the Realists say). Further, you must find a reason to think that the idea of extension corresponds to actual extension outside of your mind—including that of your own body. Such an application led to the well known dichotomy still prevalent today in many discussions of mind and matter: the idea of the “ghost in the machine.”

Decartes found justification for positing the idea that extension exists by appealing to the idea of God. These three ideas: “thought, extension, and God” -- no longer inferred from a given, substantial physical reality known first through the senses but, instead, existing as “distinct ideas”-- can be seen (if I may take some liberty with Gilson’s conclusions, 139, 148) winding off as three distinct philosophical paths (Gilson 115). Why? Here’s one major reason Gilson gives: Hume would say “if we have no adequate (clear and distinct) idea of ‘causality’ that can apply to matter, where could we get one to apply to God?” thereby detaching the idea of God from the idea of a reality outside the mind and from the mind itself (Gilson 174). Depending on which way, which idea you’re predisposed to assume, you could find yourself either an Idealist (“thought”—ideas are all that exist), an Empiricist (“extension”-- bodily sensations are all that exist), or an Ontologist (“God”—relying on the idea of God to secure the belief in a physical world). Either way you’re left trapped within your mind, and mathematics becomes confined--not to things, not to external reality, but to the relationships between ideas in our minds.

Works Cited

Gilson, Etienne. The Unity of Philosophical Experience. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999.

Rizzi, Anthony. The Science Before Science: A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century. Baton Rouge, LA: IAP Press, 2004.

Salvation Through The Purgative, Illuminative and Unitive Ways

2008-11-05T20:00:00.005-05:00

The Purgative way encompasses an initial conversion to Christ -- a turn from serious sin, a profession of faith (see below), and devotion and obedience to Christ through baptism, prayer, Scripture reading, attending church, confession of sins, practicing forgiveness, volunteering to help others, etc --; this conversion is often accompanied by various emotions and delights called “consolations.” This first stage, the Purgative Way, is often what Evangelical Christians call a “personal relationship with Christ.” Yet, quite often a person will meet with what is called a “dark night” (of the senses or the soul) where the good feelings leave for a while, and God may feel distant. It is at this point the soul is being called to more, but, unfortunately, many churches lack a depth of spiritual teaching about the ongoing path to God. Consequently, many people may fail to advance, or relapse into pre-conversion habits. It is here the works and lives of the Saints, in light of the ancient understanding of the three-stage path to God, can serve to enliven our faith and expand our hope.

In the Illuminative and Unitive ways, through which the Saints have advanced, persons can experience “dark nights” heroically, remaining faithful. Persons can also experience imaginative and intellectual visions of Christ, illuminations of some mystery of God, experiences of rapture, flights of ecstasy, spiritual consolations, and other such phenomena -- but most important is the conformity of the persons will and character to the perfection of God’s will, and the steady contentment it brings. Some persons who’ve attained a high degree of union with God, as reported by those who knew them best, have, as a result, also experienced things like the stigmata, bi-location, and incorruptibility (meaning their body does not decay after death, at least, not at the normal rate). The mere fact of these remarkable experiences can certainly awe us, but they also can be profoundly edifying as we grow increasingly unsettled in a world that is not meant to satisfy where only God can.

Initiation In The Purgative Way

The Purgative way, of course, begins with an initial conversion. Scripture is clear that following Christ involves being united to him and other believers through baptism; a baptism which requires faith that, as the Son of God, Christ lived, died, and was restored to a new, immortal life; it is this new life he then offers us to take part in through baptismal waters, continued repentance, obedience, and devotion.

*The first step I’d therefore suggest to begin in the Purgative way is to make a profession of faith, which Christianity has best summed up in what she calls the Nicene Creed (I’ve replaced the “we” with “I”).

I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.

I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us (men) and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures, he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, And his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father (and the Son) With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified, He has spoken through the Prophets. I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

*The next thing to do is to get into contact with a priest or pastor about being baptized, perhaps with the help of someone – a friend or family member -- who is familiar with the process. In Catholicism, if you’ve already been baptized then the next step is to be confirmed. If you’ve already been confirmed then the next step, if you’ve been away from practicing your faith for a while, is to go to confession so you can be, as they say, restored to full communion.

*Finally (this last step is actually involved in all the steps, and continues on until we reach the Beatific Vision) begin to develop a prayer life, grow in virtue and devotion – such things as adoration, reading Sacred Scripture, learning more about your faith, going to church regularly.

These steps, then, begin the Purgative stage, which involves, as the name implies, purging our selves from those things that are not of God. It entails a conversion of faith, what some people refer to as a born-again experience, which is often accompanied by emotions of gratitude, zeal, the feeling of newness, hope and the like. This experience flows over into the will, and naturally leads one to leave behind serious sin – what Catholics call mortal sin.

Psalm 103

15As for mortals, their days are like grass;
they flourish like a flower of the field;
16for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.
17But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting
on those who fear him…

A Short Credo

2008-11-05T18:01:00.002-05:00

The two great self-evident propositions - the descriptive principle of non-contradiction, and the prescriptive imperative: we ought to seek the good - compel our rationality, in their respective arenas, to the initial acceptance of a basic Monotheism. Not, I say, with the force of self-evidence; yet, most certainly, with a compulsion beyond a reasonable doubt. In the descriptive arena, Pure Existence (God) is posited in order to "adequately explain observed phenomena." In the Prescriptive arena, God represents the object of our "human desire for something more than nature-which nature cannot explain, because nature cannot satisfy it." In the history of philosophy, no non-self-refuting philosophy has legitimately questioned either the perennial reasoning of a basic philosophical Deism, or the practical spontaneity of religious Mysticism.

Between the dry rationalism of Deism, working on the hypothesis of clear and distinct ideas -- despite it's acknowledgement of God's unfathomable attributes - and the wild speculation and untamed compassion of Mysticism, lies the beautiful structure which finds "grace built upon nature," finds the speculative and practical virtues in tact: lies the Christian Church. And this is a great comfort to the intellectually honest who know the "two facts (which) are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in": We "know the Law of Nature; (we) break it." The intellectually honest know that the bridge to the object of our deepest desire cannot be crossed by our own mortal effort, and it is to these that the words of John the Baptist are directed, pointing the way to a Savior.

The fullness of time sees this Savior come forth, out of Nazareth. Jesus the Christ, comes forth, telling us to follow him, to love God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves. This he does in word and deed, enduring rejection, agonizing suffering and eventual death - at the hands of the very neighbors he loved till the end -- and loves even now.

In light of His life, suffering and death; his death, resurrection and ascension, the human purpose has been illuminated: "We were made to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next." --Paraphrase from the Baltimore Cathechism.

From the particulars of Scripture, interpreted by the Church and Tradition, are fashioned the Creeds -- namely the Apostles and the Nicene Creeds -- which serve as the most general, revealed principles which enable us to actually "know, love and serve." Instead of being content with mere subjective "sincerity," we can truly live to objectively "advanc(e)…(others)…to the Vision of God." For these generalities breath life into our concrete world of experience through "religion itself -- prayer and sacrament and repentance and adoration" - all done with the aim to trust Christ and obey his command to love our neighbor, having in mind "a concept of neighbor that knows no bounds…even extend(ing) to enemies," in the words of Pope John Paul II.

The Christian apologetic is thus beautifully expressed by Etienne Gilson, summarizing the approach of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, "[He] posited an infinite God at the beginning and end of…theology; (to) …act both as a general qualification applying to all theological statements, and as an invitation to transcend theology…by entering the depths of mystical life," where "reason gives way to love."

Love is the means to man's final end: union with God. "In this life," that union can be sought through the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways. To be sure, meaning in life must be concrete -- a point well noted by the existential psychotherapy of Victor Frankl. Moreover, the answer to that need begins in the Catholic call to a vocation, a call which starts to reconcile the paradoxes and supra-rational implications our intellects find in God, man, and immortality -- letting us find, concretely, that "conceptually irreconcilable propositions, in being lived, are one."

Thank You Mr. Powell

2008-11-02T19:27:00.003-05:00

Listening to Colin Powell a few weeks ago, I found myself thinking, at first, how reasonable it actually sounds to vote for Barack Obama, especially in light of certain ideas I already agreed with -- like stopping tax breaks to companies shipping their jobs over seas; indeed, Mr. Powell seemed to be knocking every objection I had to voting for a Democrat out of the park -- conincingly; that was, until a very definite point in his interview where he started talking about the importance of Supreme Court nominations, and (I believe in reference to that subject) the feared "narrowing" of the party.

To be sure, Mr. Powell, speaking largely in code, was saying it's primarily because John McCain has embraced people like faithful Catholics, who wish to see Roe overturned, and the prevention of the application of the Comity Clause to the homosexual marriage issue, that he is fleeing the party by way of his support for Mr. Obama. Now, it may be that McCain will ultimately betray people like me when it comes to choosing Supreme Court Justices -- I can only take his word that he won't. However, and regardless of "what ifs," we should all keep in mind that Powell HAS taken McCain's word as one major reason to support Obama -- thus, for people like me who find Colin Powell to be insightful, straight forward, and credible, just as large of a reason not to.

From Natural Law To Liberty For All

2008-11-02T05:46:00.004-05:00

Objectivity
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.” Note, Jefferson did not say a free people claim their rights as derived from a Constitution, for the rights enumerated in the Constitution must be a reflection of the rights found in natural law. When you ask people about equality, they often reply, “we’re equal before the law,” and they’re right, we are equal before the law according to the Constitution. However, the real question is, are we equal in reality, as a law of nature, which the Constitution then reflects and secures as law?

Subjectivity
A negative answer to the latter question lands morality in subjectivity. Subjectivity is the basis for might makes right, which runs counter to a rationally based ethic; an ethic which all persons are rationally obligated to uphold, and which forms the basis for freedom and true happiness. The logic of subjectivity goes like this, If value and morality are purely subjective, that is, exist only in your head and not as a reflection of reality, then when you say that such and such is wrong you are really saying you feel or imagine such and such is wrong *even though it's really not*. The 'really not' logically accompanies every expression of your subjective moral view *if value and morality are purely subjective.* Now, when I say 'really' I mean 'in truth', and I accept the classic definition of truth: 'the conformity of the mind to reality.' Therefore, to take the subjectivist line looks like this, in real terms: Think of an atrocity -- take the holocaust for example; most likely, you believe it's appalling and just plain wrong. However, if you take the line [subjectivist x] takes, you will be saying, "I feel the holocaust was wrong, but it really wasn't." Or, "I think dragging homosexuals behind my car is wrong, but it's really not." This is monstrous thinking, and it’s patently false.

Natural law
Invariably, discussions about the natural law produce some form of this common response, “but desire x IS natural because people are born with the inclination; plus, such desires exist in the animal kingdom”. However, if natural law is to mean anything, then clearly we cannot say that just because a person is born with a certain tendency that therefore it is natural; likewise, we cannot point to animals and say that what is natural for them is natural for us – clearly, we cannot do this. No, the meaning of natural law -- what Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Aquinas, and other great proponents of natural law knew it to mean -- starts from the premise that man is a rational animal, that it is part of our nature to rationally govern our mere animal desires according to an outline, an over-all goal. The rational part, if you’ll notice, allows us a certain insight into the skin, so to speak, of other rational animals – we can speak for other people, for our rationality is in some way common. For instance, according to the self-evident principles of rational thought, we can say that any given person is in error if they state that a finite part is greater than the whole of which it is a part; likewise, if another person affirms that two and two equal six we can speak for them and say that they are wrong.

However, many people want to treat morality as if it somehow escapes our ability to speak from within each other’s skin; but this is simply nonsense. There are certain things we can say with certainty about other human beings concerning moral choices. We can say, for instance, that acting on the anorexic aversion (not acting to eat normally) is bad for human beings, but we can also say it is wrong. It is wrong for you to starve yourself, because it is wrong for me to do so; since we share the same essential nature I cannot say that something, which adversely affects what is essential to my being, is ok for you, since it effects what is conceptually indistinguishable from my own nature (your essence). We’ll return to this a bit later.

Equality
When the Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, this is a statement -- concerning equality (not creation) -- of Natural Law: objective fact. But what does it mean? How is each individual who differs in appearance, talent, ability, contribution, sex, etc.; how are we all *equal? Simple, we're equal in essence*, in WHAT we are: "rational animals." Again we turn to Jefferson, "We believe that man (is) a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice." The "rational" part of "rational animal" places us above mere animal instincts, and allows us to govern our actions and form habits according to an outline, or plan, based on what we know is good and basic to our human nature. This "governance" of our desires and actions, forming firm dispositions, or habits, is called virtue. It’s interesting, and probably no strange coincidence, that Jefferson mentions “justice” in his quote; indeed, for the entire grand edifice of objective morality rests squarely upon the question of the nature of justice -- a problem which was formulated by Plato some two-thousand-plus years ago, and to which there is only one solution.

Justice – A Problem
“If I can get away with anything – even by the help of a magic ring which can make me invisible – , why should I be just towards other people?” That is Plato’s Ring of Gyges dilemma, and Mortimer Adler says it is one of the “most difficult questions about justice that have ever been raised” (http://radicalacademy.com/adleronjustice.htm ). Mr. Adler also goes on, in the aforementioned link, to present an answer, one I’m going to paraphrase, a bit later, in light of what preceded in this essay, and with the addition of an important concept, which flows from equality and natural law: the common good. But first:

Defining Liberty
I think most people have at least a vague understanding of the difference between liberty and license. I think most people tend to think of “liberty” and equality at least implicitly in these terms:

“Liberty to act on one’s behalf must be fenced off by the equal liberty of others, so that freedom for one individual doesn’t become oppression for a second.” – M. Stanton Evans

I left off earlier speaking about our rationality -- our intellect and our will; that herein lies the basis for discovering the difference between what’s natural for man and what’s natural for animals. The difference is that man not only has instincts and inclinations, he knows about them, and can arrange them according to an outline, according to a “pursuit.” But this “pursuit” is not spontaneous, we have warring tendencies within us, tendencies which have to be disciplined, which take a tremendous effort to tame. Here’s an illustration:

Let’s imagine millions of people suddenly transported to an undiscovered country -- the result would be chaos; this raw state would need a governing body to establish and maintain peace, or harmony. In order for this government to be a fair government, it would have to “fence off liberty to act with the equal liberty of others.” It would have to tame, so to speak, those “tendencies” which would oppress others, in order to have peace.

Likewise, this taming is precisely what man has to do at an individual level with the inner disharmony of his soul: we have to fence off the liberty of warring tendencies within ourselves, which would otherwise oppress us, would keep us from attaining what is truly good for us. In a word, we have to practice Prudence, Moderation and Courage, and do so to the extent that there is harmony within the soul, that there is contentment regardless of external circumstances. Such harmony, or inner liberty, naturally results in the recognition of another human being as an end in himself, and of humanity as, in Kant’s words, a “Kingdom of Ends.” Good will is the logical consequence of the recognition of all human beings as “ends in themselves”, and is what we call Justice. Our solution to the problem of Justice is almost at hand, we need only consider one more objection.

Moral Imperatives -- Categorical Vs. Hypothetical
In our earlier discussion under Natural Law, we touched on a fascinating characteristic of rationality; it allows us a perspective that all rational beings ought to share, otherwise their minds are in error. This perspective is, in fact, an absolute perspective, that is, it is universally true. We used the example of a self-evident principle -- that a finite whole is greater than the parts of which it is composed -- and said we could do the same with morality. To a subjectivist, however, we’ve entirely begged the question.

A subjectivist will say that all “oughts” are dependent on ifs, and will add that you cannot make any outside observations that will produce a (rationally) imperative “ought.” In other words, they’ll say that no matter how often you observe people relating to other people in a way we consider good, you can never say that therefore people ought to act in such a way; to do so, they say, is merely expressing your own preference. Let me put this another way.

The philosopher Hume pointed out that you cannot say the sun ought to rise tomorrow because there’s no contradiction in saying the opposite, thus no rational imperative not to. For Hume, and most philosopher’s after him, it followed that if you could not find an ought in the descriptive world – the world you could observe, thus describe – you certainly could not find one in the prescriptive world, which involves a person’s will, and how he ought to act. The most you can say is that if you want this or that outcome, then you ought to act this or that way; the “if”, however, is, according to them, entirely hypothetical -- as opposed to necessary (imperative). This being the case, you cannot speak for anyone else and say that what he or she is doing is right or wrong.

The problem with Hume -- as with the new atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, etc., and, I might add, with the economists and business owners of our day -- is that he takes up a purely hypothetical perspective to begin with. Hume doesn’t exist in a purely third person point of view; neither, obviously, do we. If we’re going to take up a purely hypothetical position to begin with then obviously, any firm basis we look for within it can be no less hypothetical. But even when we attempt to speak “from the perspective of nowhere”, it is we who are taking up that perspective, it is we who are bringing our faculties of knowledge to the equation, so it quite reasonably follows that we must include this fact, and all it entails, in our equation.

The Common Good
By now, if I’ve succeeded, there should be a basic image materializing in your mind -- a sort of alignment or focus, which is come to by the whittling away of non-essentials. So far, I’ve attempted to communicate this image in three different ways.

1.) From the fact that we are rational animals we see that an essential equality exists between all such members of our class, which excludes non-essentials (For the sake of illustration, let’s pretend we can create perfect triangles in reality, triangles of all manner of sizes and colors at either right angles or various degrees of acute or obtuse angles. They would all be different yet each would share the same essential nature with every other -- the same essential nature would define each as a triangle. Therefore if I said all such triangles are created equal when clearly some are larger and/or more to our liking in shape and color, then in what way could I possibly assert that all triangles are created equal? Well, if I went on to define their essential nature and said "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all triangles are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inherent properties, that among these is the property that the sum of angles is always 180 degrees"; if I put it that way it would make perfect sense to talk about equality. We’ve whittled away “non-essentials”).

2.) We saw that, both in society and in our own conflicting desires, true liberty comes by fencing off (whittling away) unbridled liberties (licenses) in conformity with a purpose.

3.) We’ve also intimated that there’s a fixed perspective, which, when you strip away all non-essential colorings, all preferential, purely subjective shadings, is, for every rational being, inescapably furnished with its own facts and laws.

Picking up where I left off in my criticism of Hume, and with the point of #3 in mind, it’s important to understand that there’s an essential and unchanging degree of first person perspective in any objective truth claim or observation – this holds for everyone, regardless of their field. This means that, in addition to facts we arrive at by observing them from the outside, there are also facts that are just as real, which, in fact, are conditions for the former, which we arrive at by experiencing them from the inside. Seeing logical connections, having universal ideas; these we know are identical in other minds, which have truth. A mind, which does not see that a finite whole is greater than its parts, does not have truth; this I can say absolutely, for its’ opposite is unthinkable.

So, is there another principle, whose opposite is unthinkable, and which we can find from the inside of experience in regard to the question of morality? We’ve already established that justice unites us in good will to every other rational being by virtue of our equality, the only thing that remains is to remove the hypothetical if, so that we say not “if we wish to have good will towards ourselves then we ought to have good will towards others,” but “since we are rationally obligated to have good will towards ourselves, therefore we ought to have good will towards others.” This we can do by, as you’ve guessed, finding a principle, a fact, from the inside of experience, whose opposite is unthinkable; namely, the fact that our will desires one thing for the sake of itself and nothing else: happiness (defined as "that state of human well-being which leaves nothing more to be desired”). As Mortimer Adler put it, "try finishing the question, I want happiness because...": it cannot be done. Our will necessarily desires happiness, but is free to choose the means; yet only the means, which are true properties of happiness (the good), ought to be chosen -- to deny this is to deny that our will desires happiness for the sake of itself alone.

From the fact of our common first person perspective that we desire happiness for the sake of itself alone, it follows that the true properties of happiness are, in essence, the same for everyone – that there is a common good; that I cannot claim a non-essential, which violates the common good, as part of my obligation to myself and to others.

Liberty For All
In conclusion, I hope to have shown that it is only from this progression -- Natural law, to equality, to justice, to the common good, that we can finally end at liberty for all, and that we can rationally oppose that philosophy, which runs counter to true liberty: might makes right.

"If I Can't See It Then I Won't Believe It"

2008-10-31T13:13:00.002-04:00

I think my short answer to this would take the form of this question: what if we were unable to see in the first place, what if we were born blind? Would any amount of visual description, from someone who could see, make any sense to us? And wouldn’t we be limiting our own understanding of reality if we did not accept what others related to us on faith?

Now, this question takes on even more significance in relation to the question of God’s existence because, as the Saints attest, it’s also directly related to our will; related to morality, consequently to the way we perceive and experience reality, and, in turn, to the attending degrees of happiness we can attain.

So, here’s the point. There are two worlds we know. We know the outer world we perceive with our senses and interpret through our intellects. We also know the inner world which is related to the outer through desire. The best we can do by examining the outer world is come to know about God’s existence through logical inference. But unless this “about” knowledge of God’s existence is connected to the inner world of human desire then it is, for all intents and purposes, practically useless -- thus irrelevant. However, to think of God purely as an intellectual object is to really miss not only the point of religious experience, of religion itself, but also the most fascinating fact about ourselves: "All [our] life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of [our] consciousness.”

To Jews before the time of Jesus God answered to the thirst for justice and righteousness, to the promise of a kingdom which would establish these realities. To Christians, not long after Jesus’ time, inheriting the Greek notion of God as the Good, God thus answered, in addition to the need for a kingdom of justice and righteousness, to the human desire for an “unattainable ecstasy”, which not even God’s earthly kingdom could grant. God, then, according to the most holy saints, is directly related to us as an object of desire which is acquired by virtue and grace; an acquisition, a union, from which, once had, flows the unshakable happiness which only a being, existing above space and time in the eternal now, could induce.

The Mystic Perspective

2008-10-04T08:13:00.001-04:00

C.S. Lewis and, in a round-a-bout way, Aldous Huxley brought to my attention a dimension of depth to Christianity that I did not know existed by introducing me to the timeless and profound ideas and practices of the ancient Christians; ideas and practices which, incidentally, sometimes incorporated wisdom from non-Christian sources -- baptized them, as Lewis might say.

Looking back on it all I think my discovery can be generally summarized by the words of George Brantl:

The roots of religion must be sought in human need, its fruit in a personal response. It is only from the matrix of human need that reason can move, as it is only in the waiting, thirsting spirit that revelation can find reply.

Both Lewis and Huxley helped me realize that God is related to us not just in abstract propositions, the content of which we’ll know only after death -- in Heaven; but here and now in our most favored experiences and in potential degrees of union by which we can come to know Him, even to the extent that we can achieve, along with Brother Lawrence, a "faith [that] becomes so penetrating… it could almost say, ‘I no longer believe; I see and I experience.’”

To begin, I’ve gathered a collection of C.S. Lewis quotes -- taken from his various works -- regarding our deepest longing, which express an insight that really had an impact on me:

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread... though you cannot put it into words . . . Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction . . . – something… always on the verge of breaking through… something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires . . . you are looking for, watching for, listening for…

The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject which excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy…”

Other grand ideas—homecoming, reunion with a beloved—similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment; even so—well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?

All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness... the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of spatiotemporal experience...

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

What C.S. Lewis has just expressed as a result of his own experiences compliments well what we may call the mystical perspective. At the heart of mystical theology is what theologians call the Beatific Vision, the purpose for which man is made; this spiritual vision, as traditional Christianity has maintained, is a result of the union of the human soul, through Christ, with Almighty God -- thus resulting in a direct vision of Him. Mystical theology conceives degrees of union with God before death, but, according to Christianity, the ultimate goal and purpose of human life – the Beatific Vision – can only be attained after death.

Whatever else Heaven entails – glorified bodies, new heavens and a new Earth, reunions, etc. – first and foremost salvation is the attainment of what Lewis called the “unattainable ecstasy… hover[ing] just beyond the grasp of [our] consciousness”: God. Understanding God in this way helps remove Him from the unimaginable and unappealing world of abstract propositions and places His reality at the very center of our deepest, most meaningful experiences. Many have voiced, in one way or another, their own introspective discoveries. From ancient Christians like Saint Augustine:

"Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new…Thou hast formed us
for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee."

To contemporary poets like Edgar Allan Poe:

The origin of poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder beauty than earth [this life] supplies.

To atheist philosophers like Bertrand Russell:

The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain-a curious wild pain-a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite-the beatific vision-God.

Each of us has a multitude of unique ways by which we’ve gained a “dim sense of something beyond [our] reach [which] far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth". It is this longing, this thirst, which, as Brantl elsewhere notes, is the very root of religion, and it is the only place we can really locate a common bond of all religions.

THREE PROPOSITIONS OF THE MYSTIC PERSPECTIVE

The mystic perspective understands God as the object of an experience too great for words, which (Christians would add), once had (in the Beatific Vision after death), will never end. Following Huxley, though taking some liberties, we can say there are three propositions at the heart of the mystic perspective. 1.) God is the source of all things, and cannot be known in the same way we know them. 2.) There are degrees of contact by which we may know God. 3.) The purpose of life is to achieve union with God, even here and now, through the Natural and Supernatural Virtues (Justice, Wisdom, Courage, and Moderation, and; Faith, Hope, and Love), understanding that ‘action is subordinate to contemplation’.

Concerning the first proposition, Christian mystics would agree, in a sense, with Huxley when he writes, “Let us consider these negative definitions of the transcendent and imminent Ground of being… God is equated with nothing. And in a certain sense the equation is exact…The Ground can be denoted as being there, but not defined as having qualities.” God is defined negatively, with the exception of his existence; in other words, He is unlike the things of our experience -- not finite, not sensible, not mutable, and not imperfect -- with the positive exception that He's like the things of our experience in so far that He has existence. Yet there are some colorful “metaphysical” angles, which add effect to viewing Christianity from this perspective. For instance, it’s inherent to this perspective that God is timeless, that He exists in an eternal Now, that He is self-sufficient, and that He is Pure Awareness, Being, and Bliss. C.S. Lewis comments,

Great prophets and saints have an intuition of God which is positive in the highest degree… they have seen that He is plenitude of life and energy and joy, therefore they have to pronounce that he transcends those limitations which we call personality, passion, change, materiality, and the like. The positive quality in Him…is their only ground for all the negatives… He is unspeakable… by being too definite. It would be safer to call His [reality] trans-corpreal, trans-personal.

The second proposition of the mystic perspective observes degrees of contact with God most generally known as the Purgative, Illuminative and Unitive ways. The Purgative way encompasses an initial conversion to Christ -- a turn from serious sin, a profession of faith, devotion and obedience to Him by baptism, prayer, Scripture reading, attending church, confession of sins, extending forgiveness, volunteering to help others, etc --; this conversion is often accompanied by various emotions and delights called “consolations.” In the Illuminative and Unitive ways persons can experience dark nights, visions of Christ, flights of ecstasy, and all manner of phenomena; but most important is the conformity of the persons will and character to the perfection of God’s will. Such persons who’ve attained a high degree of union with God, as reported by those who knew them best, have, as a result, also experienced things like the stigmata, bi-location, and incorruptibility after death (meaning their body does not decay, at least, not at the normal rate). The mere fact of these remarkable experiences can be edifying to us in the face of what may seem are never ending internal battles, as well as feeling distant from God’s reality.

I saw Him with the eyes of my soul more clearly than I could ever have seen Him with the eyes of the body…I was much harmed at the time by not knowing that one can see with other eyes than that of the body. –St Teresa of Avila

When we discover, perhaps only through second hand accounts, that the mere possibility exists for human beings to “see with other eyes than that of the body,” our Christian hope expands upon a whole new frontier. On the one hand, C.S. Lewis reminds us, in the face of dangerous esoteric mysticism, that first and foremost “[we were] born to adore and obey” -- taking his cue from the Scotch catechism which reads “man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever” (the old Catholic Baltimore catechism reads similarly: “we were made to know, love and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”) Yet on the other, Lewis was neither a Stoic nor a Puritan, and himself received otherworldly nourishment through the imagination. He writes, “…deception is… in that prosaic moralism… which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from ‘the land of righteousness,’”

There are two mutually opposing views about union with God. These two views equally effect how one views salvation, that is, the means or path by which we come to God in the Beatific Vision. The first view is that of the pantheist, who says God is equally present in everything; the second view is that of the Christian who would qualify that in words similar to Lewis’, “God is present in a great many different modes: not present in matter as He is present in man, not present in all men as in some, not present in any other man as in Jesus." Huxley takes the Eastern, esoteric view that there’s something in our soul identical to God, which means we are already God and we merely need to shed what is not Him. This view ultimately ends in the annihilation of our being. Christianity, on the other hand, says that we are not God but need to become adopted sons and daughters of God, become divinized, participate in God’s nature; yet we can do so only if God first became man. As Lewis put it:

[U]nfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all--to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die… But supposing God became man--suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person--then that person could help us.

This idea that God is related to us somehow within our soul, that there are degrees by which we are connected to Him, has another important implication. John 1:4-5, 9 says the following: “In Him (Christ) was life, and the life was the light of ALL men And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it That was the true Light which gives light to EVERY man who comes into the world.” This means that Christ speaks to every person in some way whether or not they’ve ever heard of the historical Christ who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and that their response to Christ’s voice determines whether or not they partake in the divine nature which Christ, by “paying our debt”, is able to offer. Christians believe that, ordinarily, salvation works through the normal means Christ gave us: baptism, belief, and obedience. However, God is not bound by those means so that we can have a firm hope that sincere people of other beliefs will indeed participate in Heaven; Lewis put it this way, "[t]hough all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that He cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted Him in this life."

Finally, the third proposition reverses what has rather recently become the accepted order of means and ends. The problem has a diagnosis--one fleshed out by many, including Mr. Huxley who puts it quite succinctly: “In traditional Christianity…it was axiomatic that contemplation is the end and purpose of action.” He later quotes St. Thomas, “Action…should be something added to the life of prayer, not something taken away from it.” Father Dubay has a complimentary insight, “Everywhere I meet sincere people who are hungering for something deeper than what they hear in the Sunday homily…men and women tell me that they never hear of contemplation.” The prayer of contemplation is an experience, which takes place beyond the senses, and beyond words and concepts; it is not the average laundry list type of prayer we all think of, it is, in fact, a deep union of spirit with Spirit.

There are constantly movements which seek to get back to the pure gospel and re-discover it’s power. All such efforts that I’ve seen are doomed to neglect the most historically obvious diagnosis of why we truly left it, and thus neglect the remedy: a countering of the effect which has confused ends and means. Since (contemplative) prayer has taken a peripheral role Christianity has consequently lost it’s inner depth—the contemplative dimension remains closed, the higher degrees of contact with God remain unknown, and the philosophical insights of the first proposition remain disconnected from any meaningful experience.

Where our fathers, peering into the future, saw gleams of gold, we see only the mist, white, featureless, cold and never moving. --Lewis

Can Atheists Be Happy?

2008-09-25T08:24:00.007-04:00

The renowned philosopher Mortimer J. Adler (at the time an Episcopalian) gave a sermon in 1991 at Christ Church on The Golden Rule. In it he raised a provocative question (which he proceeded to masterfully answer): how do we know what we should do unto our neighbor? What gives the Golden Rule it’s meaning? I’d like to provide a broader context for answering this question and raise some other questions and answers as well.

To begin, no consideration of Christianity can do justice to the facts without acknowledging one of it’s core assumptions: that man ultimately seeks the destruction of his sin--whether he knows it (and acts on that knowledge) or not--in order to attain true happiness. It follows from this tenet that man’s unhappiness necessarily reveals his condition, and that, conversely, the sinful are necessarily unhappy. At first glance we appear to face a paradox, for the man Christians call theanthropos (the God-man) cried, bled, faced an agonizing passion, and, among other horrible things, was eventually murdered. Could such a man be considered happy? Moreover, many non-Christians, including atheists, consider themselves quite happy--feelings and over-all impressions are something with which, when felt, cannot be argued. The answer to this paradox rests upon the definition of happiness, and ultimately upon the meaning of the word love.

Happiness and love, in the traditional Christian sense, are primarily concerned not with feelings and over-all optimism (or pessimism, as the case may be) of the moment, but with the purpose or end for which human beings have an innate desire and need. On the one hand we are creatures in time living from moment to moment, moving from one desire to the next. The extent to which the needs of our human nature are met, considering life as a whole, is the extent to which we can consider our lives to be good, thus happy. On the other hand we can never experience such a “life as a whole,” we can never experience the string of moments which make up our lifetime all at once, and this contradicts a very real desire of human nature for something beyond time, which would fulfill our nature completely—“the satisfaction of all our desires: extensive, in regard to their multiplicity; intensive, in regard to their degree; protensive, in regard to their duration”. The human desire and need for this timeless object, which Chesterton has called our mystic sense, is found in all cultures and times by religious and non-religious alike. Bertrand Russell, a well known atheistic philosopher, has vividly recorded his own experience of this desire:

I am strangely unhappy... The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain—a curious wild pain—a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite—the beatific vision—God—I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found—but the love of it is my life—it’s like passionate love for a ghost ...it is the actual spring of life within me.

Here we gain an insight into why it is the Christian says that Christianity is not about mere morality, or virtue. The virtues are, of course, inseparable from a Christian life, but they are not solely for the acquisition of the goods of this world. The well rounded Greek philosophy of life, which the Declaration of Independence implies by phrases such as “Laws of Nature” and “pursuit of happiness”, includes the Cardinal Virtues, as well as the lesser virtues. But the Christian life adds to those the three Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope and Love. The last virtue, Love, presupposes Faith and Hope, and has it’s greatest exposition in the Sermon on the Mount. It is this Love through which, the Saints tell us, we will achieve the attainment of our highest end: a remaking, a transfiguration, an apotheosis of our very nature which is a direct vision of God by which all our needs, in their height, width and depth, are directly fulfilled and sustained. The Beatific Vision-- the end result--is Peace, Joy and Love; Being, Bliss, Awareness. “Christ became man so that man may become gods”.

Both definitions (1.)life as a whole—the Greek well rounded life; and 2.) the experience of a completely fulfilled life—the supernatural life) of goodness, happiness, morality and love find their discernable basis in reason applied to human nature—to natural law. But there’s a remarkable difference which effects the very definition of virtue and morality, which in turn provides the basis for distinguishing the sense in which Christ’s life was truly good, or happy, as opposed to the person who does not have the Theological virtues but has everything else which provides Happiness in the Greek sense.

To highlight this difference we must regard the will. What we call “will” is a disposition, a habitual inclination, a potential to act and react in certain ways to given circumstances. Unlike an emotion or desire--known immediately in the present moment-- “will” is cumulative and is known to us by an abstraction from a period of time, a string of moments; it is known by looking back at a pattern of behavior made up of momentary decisions. At any given moment an Olympic marathon runner has the potential to run laps upon laps and miles upon miles around a track. Unlike someone who is out of shape and has not trained this habit, who has not developed this potential, the marathon runner has an immaterial power—it exists accumulated through time and is, now, accessible to the present as well as, to a limited degree, future moments. Thus man is more than his present appearance: he has powers made up of past decisions.

This power, as it concerns moral decisions, is one good which sits alongside three other “goods.” The Four Goods, as Mortimer Adler had categorized them, are the three "goods of fortune": 1.) "external goods...[moderate] wealth [etc.]"; 2.) "bodily goods...health [etc.]; and 3.) "social goods...friends and the society in which we live"; and, finally, the fourth, which is the “goods of the soul: knowledge, truth, wisdom and moral virtue.” The first three are separated from the last because the last is primarily a matter of will, not chance circumstances. The last in that list of the “goods of the soul,” the moral virtues, provide the knowledge, balance and discipline needed to pursue the other goods if circumstances allow them to come our way. Just like the runner’s potential power which exists for him at any given moment, cultivating virtue provides a person potential power by which to act appropriately in variously given situations.

The Greek idea of happiness, which we will call the “natural” idea of happiness, is exhausted by these four goods. A lifetime spent acquiring all of these goods is considered to be the natural happy life. The opposite of this idea of a happy life is a tragic life. But we can fall back on that distinction between the four goods in order to find a distinction in what we call a tragic life. A tragic life is one in which it’s time was cut short before it acquired all the goods it needed. Now, a person can have a certain well being of mind even in circumstances where their external goods are deprived, including, ultimately, their very physical life itself. This mental well being, if we call it happiness, will have as it’s opposite: neurosis.

How does this effect our dilemma? Our dilemma, if you’ll recall, is that of finding the basis for distinguishing the sense in which Christ’s life was truly good, or happy, as opposed to the person who does not have the Theological virtues but has everything else which provides Happiness in the Greek sense. Given the distinction between happiness and tragedy, Christ’s life was tragic. Given the distinction between happiness and neurosis, surely Christ’s life was happy. But this does not answer our dilemma because we would have to make the unfounded assertion – proven wrong by experience – that all non-Christians are therefore neurotics, and, conversely, no Christians are. This is simply untrue. Thus we cannot find the answer in the Greek idea of happiness as it stands, unless, according to logic, that idea is incomplete. The Christian answer to our dilemma is that it is incomplete, a point most clearly seen by the two differing definitions of “love.”

The altruistic desire of love for others is part of the “fourth good” of which we just spoke; it is rooted in the desire for a deeper union with the beloved, and the means to this end is to will the good of the beloved. Similarly with our neighbor. The good of our neighbor: "external goods...[moderate] wealth [etc.]"; "bodily goods...health [etc.]; and "social goods...friends and the society in which we live," offers our will the concrete data we should, to the extent we can, will for our neighbor--thus giving content to the term "love" (the fourth good is a matter for our neighbors own will). In short, love is founded on the definition of good, which is founded on the common needs of human nature--this “natural law” is, incidentally, the only basis for the establishment of a free, democratic society. But if one of those common needs of human nature is the need for something transcending time--the need to be united with eternity--then hope is the only home for man in which he can be truly free, truly natural, and truly happy. The initial reaction of a “happy” non-believer to this view is that he does not have this actual hope, yet is still happy. Two things must be remembered.

First, simply because one doesn’t feel a need in either it’s hopefulness or desperation doesn’t mean it has no existence: the anorexic has no desire to eat yet his nature has a need for nourishment. The unbeliever may feel happy, may have an optimistic outlook on life, but, like the miser or anorexic, it’s all a façade—his joy is not yet full. Those knowing only one side of the pursuit of happiness, pursuing lower goods, are potentially blind to the fact that they do not know the higher are higher, and it is only by leaving the lower that they can in fact know this. As Mill said, “…if the fool…(is) of a different opinion, it is because (he) only know(s) (his) own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.” Consider the power hungry rich man, he is a mad man, full of delusions about himself. He may say he’s satisfied, as one in a dream may be, but if woken of his delusion and given the quality of a good life, he would, like the person who is happy in the waking world though woken from a happy dream, choose the self evident, truly happy reality. It is the common consent of History, and most especially History’s Saints, to which we must turn if we want, in general, a working order of what notes to play along the scale of life in order to live harmoniously.

Second, the facade of happiness without supernatural hope can be made most apparent by the fact that the unbeliever immediately views the question selfishly, in terms of himself and what he feels, not in terms of the needs of his neighbor—terms in which, by the way, we can see through our own forms of spiritual anorexia; terms in which we catch a fuller reflection, in man at large, of our own common needs as individual human beings. Without humility how can we know what we cannot presently feel? It is the selfish, the elite, the prigs who look down upon their neighbors and the family history of man; it is the narrow intellectuals who have contempt for this common need which drives even atheists (see the Russell quote above), and which prevents the “good” person from calling himself truly good: true love must take this ultimate need into account.

It is, therefore, neither the distinction of happiness and tragedy, nor the distinction of happiness and neurosis, which parts the seas of incomplete and complete understandings of "love;" it is the further distinction between breathing the happiness of Hope and leaving our spiritual lungs to atrophy-in ourselves and others-which ultimately necessitates this contrast.

A Quote Constellation©

2008-09-21T08:31:00.012-04:00

There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.- G. K. Chesterton

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.- G. K. Chesterton

God, to be God, must transcend what is. He must be the maker of what ought to be.- Rufus M. Jones

No man hates God without first hating himself.- Fulton J. Sheen

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.- General Omar N. Bradley

*(A Quote Constellation© is a series of quotes, ideally five or seven brief quotes, which connect in descending order to outline and suggest a fuller, substantial theme, picture or point.)

Atheism And The Problem Of Evil (An Illustration)

2008-08-24T13:33:00.003-04:00

The Problem of Evil is not only a problem the theist must tackle, it also has implications for the atheist. In fact, it is one implication in particular, which instantly makes the atheist position suspect, and which, to a theist, disqualifies it as a ground from which one can even raise the question. The atheist holds a position that is, unfortunately, sub-human in regards to the problem. He says, basically, the problem exists so I will simply say good and evil don't really exist, thus it is no problem. He'll go on to say, of course, that there are moral atheists, that they personally think this action is right and that action wrong; but by saying they "personally think" it right or wrong they've relegated the rightness or wrongness of the action to mere preference, not to something that is really right and wrong for everyone. The logic of it looks like this: "I feel killing children is wrong, but it is not really wrong."

The logical conclusion is absurd in itself, at least if one lives according to what is most valuable in life. Here's an illustration:

Little Bobby atheist: "Mommy, we read in school today about the holocaust. I felt sick to my stomach."

Mommy atheist: "Yes Bobby, sometimes what humans do to other humans makes us feel that way."

LBA: "Well, why do I feel that way?"

MA: "Because you don't want that done to you."

LBA: "Not because it's wrong?"

MA: "Right and wrong are dead concepts, the thought you have is nothing but the rotten stench of a dead God which is finally wafting from our culture."

LBA: "But I feel it's wrong."

MA: "You may feel it's wrong, that's ok, but it is not wrong."

LBA: "Do you feel it's wrong, mommy?"

MA: "Yes, but I know it's not."

LBA: "Then it's really not, even though I feel it is?"

MA: "Well, yes."

LBA: "Are these feelings good to have?"

MA: "Yes, they help us get along in society."

LBA: "But you said good was a feeling."

MA: "Indeed, I should have said it's not good, but I feel it is."

LBA: "So should I do whatever I feel?"

MA: "Well, yes, I suppose so."

LBA: "Didn't the Nazi's do whatever they felt like doing?"

MA: "Well… yes… I suppose so."

LBA: "So my feelings are an illusion then, mommy."

MA: "Why do you say that son?"

LBA: "Because I feel killing Jews is wrong but the Nazi's felt it was right."

MA: "Go on."

LBA: "But there's no way to judge which I should feel."

MA: "Our philosophers taught us long ago: "ought" and "should" have no place in our vocabulary."

LBA: "What if I feel God exists?"

MA: "You should not… well… I mean… you may feel that way but it's not true."

LBA: "Do you feel that way?"

MA: "Certainly not!"

LBA: "Then you feel God does not exist?"

MA: "Absolutely."

LBA: "And you believe that's really true?"

MA: "Yes, my feelings correspond to reality."

LBA: "So you can feel something that is really true, and feel something that is really not?"

MA: "Yes, but only about matters of fact, not about matters of a prescriptive nature, matters that have to do with "ought."

LBA: "Mommy?"

MA: "Yes?"

LBA: "If God is not real then I don't want to feel that He is."

MA: "I feel that's noble, son."

LBA: "So I'm going to practice doing what I feel is wrong."

MA: "Hmm… why?"

LBA: "So I can control my feelings better, make them go away."

MA: "What do you have in mind?"

LBA: "I feel that hurting Jewish people is wrong. My friend Irwin is a Jew. Tomorrow I am going to punch his teeth out."

MA: "You mustn't do that son!"

LBA: "Why mom? You said prescriptive statements like "must not" have no place in our vocabulary."

MA: "Bobby, if you do not want to be punished by the authorities then do not punch Irwin tomorrow."

LBA: "But you say you feel it's bad to do things because of the threat of punishment. That's why you don't believe in hell - it's just a form of manipulation."

MA: "I don't believe hell is real, that is why I feel it's bad to use as a tool for controlling people."

LBA: "So it's only because the threat of authority is real that I should not punch Irwin?"

MA: "Partly. I also feel it's wrong."

LBA: "But your feeling doesn't correspond to reality."

MA: "True."

LBA: "And I want my feelings to more closely correspond to reality, so I do not want to feel what you feel because your feelings about punching Irwin do not correspond to reality."

MA: "I will punish you Bobby."

LBA: "You will act based on an illusion, mommy. If I don't act because you threatened me, then I am practicing acting on feelings which don't correspond to reality."

MA: "Ok, I can play that game Bobby. So you're going to act on what you feel about your feelings corresponding to reality?"

LBA: "Yes."

MA: "Why should you?"

LBA: "Should is an illusion, like God. So mommy, why shouldn't I?"

(Silence...)

Science, Realist Philosophy And God

2008-08-05T22:33:00.004-04:00

The argument for God's existence takes many forms, but I'd like to focus on the 'stuff exists' evidence. I realize the triviality intended when people use that phrase to talk about proofs for God’s existence, but I'm simply ignoring it for the simple reason that all of science itself could be similarly caricaturized: 'stuff changes so there must be a cause.' Yes, so why should that be a negative thing, it's the very motive of science. Likewise, the nature of the universe, more accurately characterized as "things undergoing change," is hardly something not worth looking at simply because someone may phrase it as a caricature. So, let me narrow the meaning of philosophy to virtually parallel that of science, and see what comes of it...

Science is respectable, it gets results, and coherently "saves the appearances," attempting to give a "logical explanation of observable phenomena." It's essentially a realist endeavor, that is, it starts with the senses and the outside world of the senses, then concludes in intellectual constructs which represent the reality behind those appearances. In short, it follows experience. Science is therefore respectable in the minds of most people, at least most westernized people.

Philosophy, however, means phantasy and triviality to most modern minds. Any discussion of philosophy quickly degenerates into talk of how one knows he exists, or a world exists, or whether 2+2 can equal 5. Since Descartes, philosophy has descended to this low point, precisely because philosophy up to that point was engaged in attempts to "save the appearances, to "follow experience," all the while assuming what needed to be assumed in order to know anything at all. But then philosophy became turned in upon itself, became engaged in questioning the very basis of questioning, which meant arbitrarily picking one's starting point in order to philosophize -- as did Descartes -- rather than beginning with reality as it is, as we are caught up in the flow of experience, as we ride upon the stream of self-evidence: unquestionable givens from which all knowledge proceeds. Let us therefore continue in the line of the perennial philosophy, which is identical to science in it's method, in it's starting point -- a method which no other philosophy can really claim to share. And let us call this philosophy realism, as opposed to the various types of empiricism and idealism -- empiricism says science deals with your own sensations, not with a reality outside of your senses; idealism says your dealing with your own ideas, not with objects outside your mind -- on a large psychological scale, these bring death to the motive behind doing science, they "numb the will," kill the wonder found in dealing with a mysterious world outside of our own minds.

Let us therefore understand the philosophical method as interchangeable with the scientific method, providing structure, common sense, and realism to the term philosophy -- stripping it of it's irrelevant, wildly speculative, phantastical connotations -- though focusing on a different aspect of reality to which certain minds find the logic of the universe demanding an answer.

And what are some of these questions the universe asks us to explore? some of the inherent problems it poses?

If the history of philosophy is any indication, it can be best put this way: things change. That is, there's relative permanence, as well as change. For instance, I was once a child and am now an adult. Part of me, part of my “I”, has not itself changed throughout the process of time which has seen part of me change. The same can be said of any natural object, “from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds.” The undeniable fact of permanence through change should guide any sane philosophical hypothesis.

From this facts a number of arguments can be made. I'll briefly introduce two.

1. The contingency of the universe depends upon a non-contingent factor. That is, the "cosmos is only one of a number of possible universes," which means that since it "can be otherwise (it) is capable of not being at all." If it is capable of not being at all, then it needs to find it's existence in something already and always existing, which is not capable of not being at all. This argument does not require a creator at the beginning of time, we can presume time stretches back to forever, but one who creates every single moment. This means, of course, that if He stopped creating then the universe would vanish into nothingness.

2. The steady existence or pattern of things. This is sometimes considered the argument from design, but that argument is usually superficial, the one I have in mind is not so, if one can really comprehend it's impact. Let me give an argument against the argument from design by William James in order to illustrate it's deeper aspect -- an aspect which will then refute Jame's argument against a superficial argument from design.

It must not be forgotten that any form of disorder in the world might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particular arrangement of debris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save it's beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The first is physical: Nature's forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture. This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for us is 'disorderly' can possibly have been an object of design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic Theism.

When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions....the world...is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance...Our dealings with nature is just like this...The facts of order...are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products...the argument...will be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him already." http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/vre/vre14.htm#fn_290

What I suggest in order to rebut this line of reasoning we may coin The Kaleidoscope Argument©. First let's examine where James is correct, then the two main fallacies he falls into from there. He is correct in noting, to a point, that order can be read into the universe, that no matter what events take place we can view them as orderly. The earthquake example is very well put. But then he makes two huge blunders, both stemming from the assertion that "(o)ur dealings with nature are just like this." The first error is the idealist implication that the substantial unities that meet us in nature are imposed on nature -- that is, that a tree, a dog, a man are patterns our minds impose upon the "beans" of reality, just like we impose geometrical shapes upon his spilled beans. It's all a subjective reading according to this conclusion. The second is failing to note that the deeper design, or intelligibility found in the substances of reality -- the trees, rocks, dogs and men -- is the basis of understanding anything at all, and these things which form the events which we artificially impose order upon (for example the history of events leading up to the earthquake) exist in time based on an orderly, consistent pattern. Otherwise reality could not be understandable, it would be a Kaleidoscope of substances in constant flux -- rocks appearing, turning into water, then metal, then air -- our rationality could never then be stirred to action -- our (momentary) bodies, of course, would be subject as well to this unintelligible flux, so even if we had a mind unable to be stirred to rationality, it's body could not exist long enough anyway. Thus design is the order, or pattern by which things exist -- in other words, the universe is understandable because a Mind imposes order upon it by which our minds are then stirred to rationality.

The two arguments I’ve presented can only be skirted by falling into implications that lead us directly to the philosophical realms of empiricism and idealism, and therefore have every practical right to be rejected as untenable. Ordinarily speaking, no sane person rejects science – at least not the obvious and established facts of science -- so that keeping our philosophical reasoning aligned with the scientific method (thus preventing us from the whimsical craziness so often associated with philosophy) logically raises the aforementioned philosophical proofs for God’s existence (if the reasoning is sound) to the same level of certainty as our scientific and practical convictions.

Meet the Human Mind... Part 1

2008-07-27T12:46:00.002-04:00

Knowledge is a curious thing, for it assumes that in some sense the mind is united with the thing known – “in knowledge the known and knower are made one.” In Surprised by Joy Lewis, borrowing from Alexander, notes a distinction between the contemplated and the enjoyed, and this is a profound observation. In essence, the contemplated is the object known, and the enjoyed is the knowledge itself – the experience. If we are to turn our attention to the knowledge itself, the experience, then it, in fact, becomes the object known, and we are simultaneously immersed in a new experience.

I’ll steal once again from Lewis, and take his illustration of a beam of light in a dark shed: If we step into our shed, we can look AT the beam and see a ray of light streaming by us. However, we can also step into the ray and look ALONG the beam as we look AT blue sky, waving trees and green leaves outside the shed. Likewise, we can say the experience of knowing is a looking ALONG affections, perceptions and concepts AT given objects. This means, however, that – assuming we’re conscious -- every time we step out of a “beam” we are stepping into another, and that, by the mental equivalent of a sleight of hand we can forget, ignore or mistake the fact that we are knowing for the known; or, to square with our illustration, we can neglect the beam of light along which we see -- solely for the trees.

There’s a relevant application of this observation to atheism, and any type of naturalism; for I think the current atheism/naturalism which is gaining some minor popularity is the offspring of a rotten philosophical heritage which, by the same mental slight of hand, insists that because it cannot see it’s own eyes, then it simply won’t believe that eyes exist; consequently it’s focus neglects the inner reality of our conscious existence and, at best, only allows this reality in so far as it looks AT the world it wants to see. It’s a remarkable irony that atheist “humanists” are far less impressed by the nature of humans than certain religious theists, who hold that man is actually fallen from his original stature and is in dire need of God to save him: It seems that when man is not made in the image of God, he is not even perceived in the image of man; when man has not fallen from the image of God, he falls, instead, from the image of man.

.

Much recent science tells us what realist philosophers have long maintained: that the universe is not spatially infinite, nor infinite in time. The universe outside our minds, though vast and enormously beautiful and intriguing, does not possess the ultimate property that our minds which grasp, that is, encompass, the universe actually do. The universe is not infinite, yet our minds, which possess the idea, in some way exceed its finitude. Therefore, we can really speak of two universes; and though it’s proper to speak of a universe outside our minds, it is not precisely correct to speak of that second universe inside our minds; it’s accurate, rather, to call it the universe of our minds. The outside universe -- the object seen through the lens of, say, the science of astronomy, with it’s beautiful nebula, like colorful cobwebs scattered about the farthest corners of unnamed galaxies; and with it’s curious ability to capture the past and brand it into the heavens even for the naked eye to behold; that wonderful, awe inspiring universe is truly remarkable – yet that universe with all it’s glory and majesty remains incomparable, a non-rival, to the miracle of the human mind. Indeed, for, unlike the universe of the mind, that universe has yet to birth a single concept by which it can grasp itself. Further, the human mind, with it’s ability to conceive a universal idea within it’s mystical and immaterial womb thus reveals the additional capacity to furnish a higher point of reference for the grammar of “spiritual realities” over and above the limited vocabulary to which the materialist would confine us -- though we must be leery of a new occasion inviting us to the opposite error -- idealism.

We may have long ago abandoned Plato and his theory of Forms, which posits universals shining above the sense world in some immaterial realm, and which, he maintained, are the actual knowledge of each individual mind; but is it any less miraculous and threatening to the materialist for us to note that each individual mind is furnished with it’s own immaterial, universal forms, thus a vast multitude of minds -- that is, a vast multitude of immaterial realms, “shines” above the spatiotemporal sense world? Perhaps not, perhaps we’ll be granted so much; even so, it may be asked, isn’t it ultimately just an academic exercise to insist we keep within our purview experienced and verifiable facts like, for instance, the fact that our minds contain concepts which are infinite (universal), yet which we know vary from each other -- like a triangle and a square? Why do such observations, along with other such concepts as the permanent “I” of Kant, and even the discovery of an (immaterial) intellectual stratosphere as inescapably ablaze with the idea of God as the land of the never-setting sun with light; why does the beam of light I’m asking us to step out of and examine, which includes these and other vast implications, have any practical importance for us? Or, to phrase it conversely, why is the true academic exercise the one taken up by the view, be it atheist or not, which steps into (what I somewhat hesitate to call) the epistemological light and pretends to forget all of its properties, including its very existence?

Catholic Insights

2008-07-06T07:43:00.002-04:00

My Catholic Study Bible (The New Catholic Answer Bible -- NAB) has a series of inserts which help explain the Catholic faith. One of these inserts is a response to whether or not Catholics preach the Gospel. The answer, of course, is that they do. Acts 2:22 and the verses following present St. Peter preaching what Catholics preach -- the Gospel. The Good News St. Peter preaches is Christ's "life, death, resurrection and ascension... [as well as] our response of repentance, baptism and obedience to God".

Now, there are some more things I've discovered that are good to know about the Catholic faith. The first is that Salvation is by grace-a free gift from God. That means God can give it to us under whatever conditions he sees fit. No matter what we do we cannot be good enough to deserve the death of His Son on our behalf, and the consequent life which flows from His actions; but God can infuse that grace in any way he sees fit. If He says you must normally be baptized in order to receive it, then so be it. Of course, then the charge naturally arises that babies do not assent to the gift (though neither did the circumcised babies of the Old Covenant). However, it's perfectly in keeping with the idea that we can lose our faith - a proposition with which even Protestants disagree amongst themselves -- to say we must maintain the gift given to us at birth (once we've hit the age of reason) by continually assenting in perseverance (starting with confirmation), and growing through devotion. In other words, we must choose to keep the gift of grace in perseverance. What does perseverance mean? It means staying out of mortal sin (grave sins like sexual sins, habitual pride, severe anger, greed, theft, denying God, among others), and sincerely repenting and being faithful to confess such sins to Jesus through a priest if and when we do commit them. It is all so very simple when we consider that that's all we have to do to stay out of hell!

In addition there are three more profound insights that I've gleaned about Catholic practice - by, incidentally, both Protestants and Catholics. The first is that our relationship with God has progressive stages and can culminate in mystical union even here and now. The second is that (and I'm borrowing heavily from N.T. Wright here) God's dimension interlocks with our world in various places and ways (Sacramental-ism), so that the primary focus of Christianity is to continue where early Judaism left off and bring Heaven's transformative energy to Earth in every dimension of our lives in order to begin the process of new creation "even here and now." The last is what I call a vital principle in defending Catholicism, which is an answer to all charges that the truth of Catholicism is nullified by the horrible sins of some of her children - it is a three-pronged principle: 1.) moral knowledge must progress from an "unchanging element", 2.) that unchanging element is the idea that man is a "rational animal" -- from which stems the logic that "all men are created equal with inalienable rights". 3.) The Catholic Church has this specific element at it's core and, by virtue of it's creeds, sacraments and saints, has fostered it's growth and unpacked it's implications -- though often slowly and in spite of it's members, even lending it to others outside it's fold -- up to the present. The Church's moral theology, from abortion to contraception to solidarity, delicately balances the vital conception of the dignity of man against the varied and continuous onslaught of man's disordered passions, especially as they materialize in the socio/political dimension.

Finally, Marriage Is For Everyone?

2008-06-29T06:51:00.001-04:00

On my AOL screen the other day I saw an image of a lady with a sign reading “Finally, Marriage Is For Everyone.” Her sign was a response to the recent decision of the California Supreme Court (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gaymarriage16-2008may16,0,6182317.story ), which overturned the state’s ban on “gay marriage.” There are a ton of issues and implications involved here but I want to be relatively brief.

First, this is only a matter for the States, a States rights issue, if it does not fall under the application of the Comity Clause of the U.S. Constitution. If it does, and I don’t see how it doesn’t, then it becomes a federal issue, and this is why some have moved for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage the traditional way.

Second, marriage is NOT for everyone, nor should it be. You cannot, for instance, marry your sister, nor for that matter can you marry more than one person – like, say, your brother and sister. Yet there are, no doubt, a small minority of people who would want these “rights”. Why do we deny them their rights (the incest produces deformed children argument not withstanding – the state could simply demand the two “lovers” be “fixed”)? The question points to the fact that marriage between a man and a women must be somehow different in kind from these other unions…

Third, there’s the inevitable “homophobia” charge. Most people who don’t support “gay marriage” are not homophobes – a phobia is an irrational fear. The fear of most of us is a rational fear, a fear legitimately grounded in the idea that objective morality exists, homosexual acts are objectively wrong, and supporting things, especially politically, that are objectively wrong undermines the principles, which ultimately support Constitutional safeguards and human rights.

Fourth, most of us who do not support “gay marriage” do support the full range of common human rights for those persons homosexually inclined, and also afford them the decency and civility which the dignity and value inherent to them, as human beings, rightly warrants. On the other hand, it is the very basis upon which the idea of equality, human dignity and value rests to which many of us feel the proponents of “gay marriage” are ultimately laying an axe -- I’ll explain why in a future post.

John Medaille, Distributivism, and the "Third Way"

2008-06-08T06:59:00.009-04:00

“(I)t is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible…(a)ll this is obvious today and, indeed, was obvious fifty years ago. From Hilaire Belloc to Mr. Mortimer Adler, from the early apostles of co-operative credit unions to the land reformers of modern Italy and Japan, men of good will have for generations been advocating the decentralization of economic power and the widespread distribution of property.” –Aldous Huxley, from Brave New World Revisited

Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton (who, of course, goes hand in hand with Belloc), Mortimer Adler, and even, in his Dr. Jekyll moments, Aldous Huxley (who seems to be throwing his weight behind the general solution); all intellectual powerhouses and distinct societal influences who affirm another “Way, a “Third Way” from that which leads to the dominance of Big Business and Big Government. Now, in full context Huxley states that these theories are obvious, but, falling within a chapter titled What Can Be Done?, he naturally states that the problem is in their specific application. Strangely, Huxley later writes a novel called Island, which abandons the collective wisdom he’s tacitly endorsed above; or perhaps it’s not so strange, for much of Brave New World Revisited is not in line with the perennial stream of wisdom in which Belloc, Chesterton and Adler were immersed (all, by no strange coincidence, Catholic – a religion Huxley is not shy about attacking). I call this all to your attention because there is an attempt afoot to meet Huxley’s challenge of application (incidentally, with similar Huxlian eloquence and wit) by an author named John Medaille, and, to boot, he’d like to do so with the helpful input of people like you and me http://distributism.blogspot.com/2008/05/come-let-us-reason-together.html .

Mr. Medaille is writing a book for the “non-specialist”, and is, before publication, posting the book chapter by chapter for us to read and comment on. I’m going to put a heading on the right side of the page beneath which I’ll post links to each chapter as he posts them. I’d also recommend, for a good introduction, his essay Practical Distributivism (to which I also have a link on the right side, under "Links"); to me, it offered refreshing insight, which began to take up where the solid and promising parts of (Jekyll) Huxley's work left off…

Also, for “A QUICK COMPARISON OF CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND THE "JUST THIRD WAY", see: http://www.cesj.org/thirdway/comparison3rdway.htm

Anne Rice And The "Christ The Lord" Series

2008-06-01T19:43:00.005-04:00

Anne Rice, the author of all those vampire novels, is a former atheist who found her way back to Catholicism, and wrote a book released in 2005 called Christ The Lord: Out Of Egypt. The book, a novel, is written in the first person (as Jesus), and it's an excellent book, well worth the read ( Go here for reviews at her site: http://www.annerice.com/ChristTheLord-OutOfEgypt-Reviews.html ). Anne has an Authors Note at the back of this book which recounts her journey; what she says, especially about history and the miracle of the Jews, can be a real boost to one's faith.

I just found out that Rice has recently released the second novel, of what will be a trilogy, entitled Christ The Lord: The Road To Cana. You can go here to read reviews, including an opening review by Peter Kreeft: http://www.annerice.com/ChristTheLord-RoadtoCana-Reviews.html . I'm looking forward reading this one...

Atheists On The Old Testament...

2008-05-28T17:07:00.003-04:00

Recently, on Dinesh D'Souza's blog, some anti-Christians were throwing around verses from the Old Testament -- like dashing babies against rocks -- and insisting that we have to interpret them the way they want us to. Now, any knowledgeable Christian is going to understand the basic principle that we interpret the Old in light of the New, that is, through the lens of Jesus Christ. Further, we, at least we Catholics, don't abandon the Preambles to Faith, which are rationally based prefaces that, in logic, precede faith -- yes, they're called "preambles" for a reason! Anyway, I tried to impress upon them that, like any field of knowledge, you start with first principles, which you have to keep before your mind, which you cannot violate -- this, of course, takes intellectual discipline, which many people just don't have. Now, these particular people also happened to be subjectivists, which made their insistence that we interpret such verses the way they want us to all the more absurd. Here's the reason I gave them:

"If value and morality are purely subjective, that is, exist only in your head and not as a reflection of reality, then when you say that such and such is wrong you are really saying you feel or imagine such and such is wrong *even though it's really not*. The 'really not' logically accompanies every expression of your subjective moral view *if value and morality are purely subjective.* Now, when I say 'really' I mean 'in truth', and I accept the classic definition of truth: 'the conformity of the mind to reality.'"

"I'll tell you why understanding all of this is important to me. First, you will not understand where people, theists who are like me, are really coming from [on interpreting atrocities in the Old Testament] unless you understand this basic idea, which I grant is often just a vague intuition in some theist's minds. You see, I admit the problem of morality in certain Biblical passages is a real one, but that is because I believe morality is a real reflection of reality. That is, I believe there IS inherent worth to an individual -- not that I project it on someone if I want to. As soon as [any subjectivist] starts attacking anything the Bible says or that Christians have done, I hear the logical echo attending their words "but nothing is really right or wrong", and their criticisms find no sympathy with me for they want to share a common ground which they've already denied a basis in reality -- in truth."

"Let's put this all into perspective. Think of an atrocity; take the holocaust for example. Most likely you believe it's appalling and just plain wrong. However, if you take the line [subjectivist x] takes, you will be saying, "I feel the holocaust was wrong, but it really wasn't." Or, "I think dragging homosexuals behind my car is wrong, but it's really not." Isn't that a shock to your humanity? So, no matter how worked up a given subjectivist gets about a Biblical passage, no matter how morally outraged they appear to be, the cold, inescapable logic completes their every outburst with "but it's not really wrong" -- and I can hardly take them seriously."

There are various things to keep in mind when considering the Old Testament, like Midrash, like the difference between inspiration and revelation, like the fact that God and some of His perfections can be known through reason (thus anthropomorphisms are not to be taken literally), and, also, like Jesus was the perfect revelation of God, and his Church through the Holy Spirit (and by Christ's authority) can decipher certain dogmas from mythological imagery like Genesis; but none of these things (and others), which are necessary to keep before our minds while considering the question, will make any difference to one who doesn't really want to hear you...

Christianity In Terms Of Odds?

2008-05-27T22:34:00.002-04:00

...Only as an intellectual proposition detached from reality, that is, unsupportable by evidence. However, Christianity does not claim to appeal to a detached intellect, as if all we know are ideas, but to the full person who has, in addition to an intellect, both a will, as well as bodily senses. Therefore, I can think of at least three things to say:

1.) it is from the data of the senses that the rational proof for God's existence are employed in what's called the Cosmological Argument -- it proceeds from experience. Here, in the C.A., God's existence and perfections are arrived at through our physical grounding (senses) in the physical universe (physical objects of senses) -- God's existence is a proposition attached to reality (Catholicism says rational proofs for God's existence are "preambles to faith", thus assuring the necessity of reason in religion), and;

2.) there's the will: As George Brantl eloquently said, “It is only in the waiting, thirsting spirit that revelation can find a reply”; thus, "Christianity," says C.S. Lewis, "is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law… [i]t offers forgiveness for having broken, and supernatural help towards keeping, that law." In other words, Jesus Christ speaks to an essential need of our human nature, which only God can meet, and which takes us to the third point;

3.) the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ, who was crucified for claiming to be God, combines one and two, and leaves us with a personal choice, a choice of trust, which cannot be quantified in terms of odds. Since it concerns our will, and choice, it would be like, as Peter Kreeft said, "Suppose you hear reports that your house is on fire and your children are inside. You do not know whether the reports are true or false. What is the reasonable thing to do—to ignore them or to take the time to run home or at least phone home just in case the reports are true?" ( http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/pascals-wager.htm )

Chapter Two: The Temptations Of Jesus

2008-05-27T22:04:00.001-04:00

Comments?

The Problem Of Pain -- A Submitted Amazon Review

2008-05-24T07:05:00.002-04:00

Pay No Attention To The Humbugs Behind The Curtain
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Lewis believed we should try to enter into the meaning, the intent of the authors we read, instead of bringing our own biases and immediately subjecting them to our own categories of thought. We cannot help but enrich our minds if "in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself." Therefore, if you’ve stumbled upon this book for whatever reason and feel inclined to read it then I’d urge -- pay no attention to the humbug critics, at least until after you’ve read what could be a life enriching book, as this was for me.

Ten years ago I began reading Lewis; the Problem of Pain was one of the first of his works, after Mere Christianity, I picked up. It wasn’t long after I read PoP that I was watching Schindler’s List. Scene by scene, the dilemma of evil in the face of a good God assaulted me till I was overcome with intense and sickening violence. I ended up falling to the ground, in anguish, crying “how”? I received no blinding insight, I’m sorry to say, into the mystery of evil; but Lewis’ logic had infected me, and suddenly an argument took hold of my mind, checked my despair, and gave me something to hold onto (incidentally, those critics who, in reading Lewis have immediately subjected him to their atheist framework have a-priori cut themselves off from understanding the ultimate logic of their own position – or they just don’t care, which is far worse).

The argument, in so many words, ran something like this: the proposition that God doesn’t exist amounts, at the same time, to the proposition that all this anguish at the injustice unfolding before me on my TV screen is not rooted in reality, that it’s all a purely subjective illusion, which reflects no eternal value, goodness or justice, and, logically, could just as well be delight and approval. In other words, the extent I thought evil truly evil and wrong – that was the extent to which I had to believe in a good God; to deny Him would be, at the same time, a denial of the reality of evil, which was driving me to deny Him in the first place. I simply refused to concede that the Nazis, slaughtering Jews, were no more morally culpable than if they were involuntarily swatting mosquitoes.

Many people are keen to respond something along these lines, “well, I personally feel this or that is wrong,” and seriously think they’ve resolved the matter. However, this “line” has a shocking corollary, which runs thusly: “…but it is not really wrong”. In it’s blunt, down to earth form, and applied to my experience above, it looks like this: “I feel the Nazi’s were wrong, but I cannot speak for them and say they were wrong, because they were not REALLY wrong.” When the mind reflects objective reality it has truth; if my mind isn’t reflecting the eternal reality of value, goodness, and justice, then my gut reactions and intense emotions are a response to nothing in reality, to no quality innate to human beings, which categorically warrants such a reaction – they’re a fictional response, a response to a pretended reality. We all know, deep down inside, that this cannot be true, and that evil really exists because there’s an eternal standard of goodness (God) by which to identify evil as evil…

Read this book – make your own judgments…

Chapter One: The Baptism Of Jesus

2008-05-22T21:24:00.000-04:00

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Jesus Of Nazareth Introduction

2008-05-20T21:14:00.000-04:00

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Jesus Of Nazareth Foreword

2008-05-17T08:42:00.003-04:00

Comments?

My Lay Witness Talk (last Sunday at Mass)

2008-05-10T07:57:00.003-04:00

Good morning, my name is Jesse... I've been a member of St. Mary parish now for a couple years, and serve as a Eucharistic Minister to the Homebound. The Parish Committee, along with Father..., has asked me to speak a little about my own conversion to a "Stewardship Way of Life," a way of life in which one tries more and more to give of one's "time, talent and treasure" in the service of God and neighbor.

I’d like to begin with some background. I began to follow Christ at an early age in the Protestant, Evangelical tradition; a tradition in which I was baptized and to which I'm greatly indebted for helping nurture my relationship with Christ. Years later, I became attracted to the Quaker understanding of God's relationship with man. However, as a devoted student of authors like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, it was only a matter of time before the sacredness of matter, and it's importance in theology and ethics, became an additional truth which I had to accept; thus I joined the more sacramental Episcopal Church. Finally, for a multitude of converging reasons, I was confirmed Catholic on April 10th 2004 (Easter Vigil), at Saint Helens in...

I'd like to generally summarize the many reasons for my confirmation in the Catholic Church with three related phrases, and note how they tie in with Stewardship.

The first phrase is unitive purpose. I found that every doctrine of theology, expression of worship, and moral teaching - as difficult as some are - as well as the ecclesial nature of the Church, is woven together with an internal aim and consistency, which bears all the marks of Divine Intent.

The second phrase is "fullness of faith." Throughout my Christian walk, my relationship with God through Jesus was able progressively to take on a fuller dimension, and to culminate in the fullness, which Catholicism offers.

Now, before I go on, I do not want to give the impression that my Christian walk was a steady, continuous path; to stay true to reality, the path should be dotted here and there at places where I've strayed, and failed to be a committed Christian. Therefore, I speak from experience when I say the support the Catholic Church gives through the Sacraments (especially Reconciliation and Eucharist), through Her teaching of the Cardinal Virtues and the distinction between mortal and venial sins, through recourse to the Communion of Saints, and strengthening devotions like Eucharistic Adoration, Divine Mercy, and the Rosary; all these supports, and many more, have become indispensable to me for living, to the degree to which I do, a committed Christian life. Moreover, and to the point, these "supports" are exactly what I mean when I talk about fullness, for they involve our personal, social and moral dimensions, the use of our senses and imagination, the proper use of our intellect and will; in short, they involve our whole being in our contact with God, and make us aware of the full range of our being with which we can seek the peace of God.

And that brings me to the third and final phrase, which is ongoing conversion, or deeper conversion. To my delight, I discovered that finding the "fullness of faith" is only the beginning, for Catholic spiritual teaching conceives stages of relationship through which we progress in order to ascend to the ultimate heights of union with God. Catholic spirituality, which is drawn largely from the experience of the Saints, tells us that by faithfully using the means of God's grace, and in loving God and our neighbor, we will pass through increasingly fulfilling stages traditionally called the Purgative, Illuminative and Unitive Ways - so we're to be always moving forward.

Stewardship, here at St. Mary's, offers unique, enriching, concrete opportunities to keep us moving forward: from being a Eucharistic minister, usher, member of the choir -- to helping with devotions, teaching opportunities, volunteer work for those in need; there are many such opportunities suited to each of our own unique talents and gifts. I can certainly say that being a Eucharistic Minister to the Homebound is an incredible privilege, and has helped me, in relation to God and neighbor, to grow -- at least somewhat -- in the virtues of Faith, Hope and Love. (By the way, my daughter Abby helps me every week by doing the Scripture readings, and it means a lot to me just to have her with me, so I'd like to take this opportunity to thank her)

In closing, I'd like to thank Father... and the Parish Committee for their work in organizing the Stewardship drive, and to extend my thanks to those of you who are in any way involved with Stewardship. I'd also encourage anyone interested to get a copy of the Ministry Catalog, it's an excellent resource for matching up talents to opportunities, and for beginning, or enhancing, your own "Stewardship Way of Life".

Thank you

The Discovery of A Muslim Convert

2008-05-03T08:49:00.001-04:00

The controversial Italian journalist Magdi Allam, born in Egypt and raised a Muslim (though he remained one only nominally), was baptized into the Catholic Church by Pope Benedict XVI this past Easter Vigil (‘08) (see story here:http://www.zenit.org/rssenglish-22151). One of the motives Mr. Allam gives for his conversion was his being led to understand, by the help of Benedict XVI, “the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization”. However, such a statement might leave some people scratching their heads. A “link between faith and reason”? Isn’t that like saying a link between a circle and a triangle? Since the definition of one excludes the other, there can be no “link.” Similarly, if faith means fancy or blind speculation, and reason equals empirical science, then a “link” between the two is just as unintelligible. “If”, however, is the operative word.

Here in the United States, one can sense a wearisome reaction to the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation; the fact is it depends in what sense the claim is made. Many of our Founders (like Jefferson and Franklin) and men of influence (like Paine) were actually deists; Washington was a Mason. But despite such differences, all the great men of the Revolutionary period were the beneficiaries of a philosophical succession reaching back through the scholastics of the Middle Ages to the Greeks of Antiquity. Indeed, they inherited an intellectual universe governed by first principles, which was vast enough to anchor all sorts of grand edifices (like the flowering of sciences, objective morality, the existence of God, the immortality of man, and the nature of revelation -- to name but a handful), and dynamic enough to unite and animate men in causes like declaring independence from a tyrannical king and establishing an unparalleled Constitutional Republic.

I think it accurate to call the view of reality, which our Founding Fathers inherited, a classical western view (one can become sufficiently acquainted with this view by following the ten-year reading plan outlined by Mortimer Adler in the first volume of The Great Books of Western Civilization, or at least by exploring the “Great Ideas” composing volumes 2+3 (Check your local library)). I think it also safe to say that an acquaintance with the classical western view will reveal, at its heart, a very definite philosophy, even, to borrow from Agostino Steuco, a perennial philosophy. An example of the importance of this philosophy lies in one of its core tenets: that “Man [is] a rational animal”. It is from this tenet that freedom’s indispensable proposition, the equality of man, derives. Consequently, it is from this tenet, and the worldview that supports it, that the political implications of man’s equality are born into action. Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration not for that but for its future use.” It’s “future use,” of course, manifested, slowly but surely, to the inclusion of blacks, women and non-land owners.

Unfortunately, however, the divide between the present and the intellectual and moral foundations of our past appears to be growing at an alarming rate. Prominent atheist professors lecture on the “abuse” of raising children in a religious atmosphere, Anglican bishops urge Sharia Law in Britain, courts challenge the inclusion of “God” in the pledge of allegiance, and the State censors long-standing Boy Scout policies and cuts funding to Catholic adoption agencies “on principle” – the list goes on and on. And what should we make of the list itself? The list, I’d submit, is nothing but a growing litany of consequences stemming from a largely polarized society. If I may take some liberty with a well-known physics axiom and apply it to the universe of these polarized worldviews, it would seem that every over-reaction has an equal and opposite over-reaction; thus, for instance, a Mr. Dawkins stands in relation to, say, an Archbishop Williams. These polarizing over-reactions, which really have taken place on many levels, have denuded words like faith and reason of their traditional meanings and relations (one need only read St. Thomas Aquinas to find that a link between the two is not an inherent contradiction).

In the mean time, many fair minded exiles wander aimlessly, feeling a disconnect from an animating, comprehensive, lost view of reality, and searching for some type of via media, some type of middle ground upon which to stand and by which to make sense of all the polarized madness. The convert Magdi Allam, in so many words, claims that he has found this lost view as an integral part of his religion; and, finding the same truth four years ago, I believe him. Still, though he and I, as Catholics, believe that the “gates of hell shall not [ultimately] prevail”; even so, “eternal vigilance…” says Andrew Jackson, “is the price of liberty,” and, if strategies from the Communist Manifesto are sure threats to our liberty, then a widespread break with our formative past -- whether through ignorance, apathy, or design -- must invariably pose a threat, in the words of our Preamble, “to ourselves and our posterity.”

Five Faulty Arguments Against (Orthodox) Christianity (More to Come...)

2008-04-27T18:03:00.004-04:00

Why I'm A Catholic Christian

2008-04-13T05:27:00.000-04:00

Why? Well, to begin, I am flat out humbled by the mystery of reality, the riddle of the One and the Many, which confronts my intellect; as Peter Kreeft said, "One… specifically Christian mood [is] of joy and wonder at the sheer fact of existence... I love a quotation by Kirkegaard. He said, ‘I am terrified by everything, from the smallest gnat to the mystery of the incarnation.’” I feel no need to reduce reality purely to my own limited number of “clear and distinct ideas”; this is a Cartesian criterion which has become synonymous with “rationalism”, but is in fact an arbitrary and truncated perspective.

In addition to the confrontation of my intellect with the “sheer fact of existence” I also find, thrust upon my experience, the longing for an heretofore “unattainable ecstasy” which, by it’s very nature, cannot be found in the reality given to my senses or any subjective state of my being, and which is the ultimate object of my will.

I consider these two facts of my conscious existence akin to “non-reductive primitives” of the physical world like space and time; that is, they form a fundamental context and general qualification to all other knowledge and action I may consider. I must therefore -- compelled by the undeniable nature of these facts -- live my life driven by a “thirst for a wilder beauty than earth supplies”, beyond the limited scope of my abstract intellect, in pursuit of the mystery at the heart of reality.

Any theory, philosophy or religion which conflicts with these primary data – data which, by the way, include their own implicit philosophies – will a-priori fail to do justice to all the given facts and are, for that reason, automatically suspect to my mind.

These facts taken alone might predispose me to seek Divine Revelation (supra-rational knowledge) as a sort of aesthetic capstone, a pleasant looking cherry on top to complete my worldview. However, I simply cannot take these facts alone, and, though I’ve so far given the impression that these data are convictions chronologically prior to my acceptance of Christianity, quite the opposite is in fact the case.

C.S Lewis, in Mere Christianity, writes, “[there are] two facts [which] are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in: We know the Law of Nature; (we) break it." He goes on to explain why, once given a God-who-is-perfectly-good exists, this “fact” -- which I consider the third “non-reductive primitive,” so to speak, of our conscious existence -- must lead us, in so many words, to either despair or revelatory hope.

When I look back at my experience, first becoming an Evangelical Christian, I see all of these elements implicitly present. My (intellectual) humility, beginning as a child, together with my admitted failure to appease the voice of my conscience and my longing to be happy made me ripe for the reception of – and subsequent and repeated rededications to -- the message of Jesus Christ. Everything else that I accept as revelation is tied to this existential need for a savior met by the factual, historical figure, actions and claims of Jesus Christ.

Now, as to the “why” of Catholicism in particular (from Evangelicalism, Quakerism and Episcopalian-ism – all routes I formerly traveled and from which I gained much)? There are many reasons I chose Catholicism among the various denominations of Christianity, but I can boil it down to one important reason: antinomies of revelation (contradictions in interpretation) need to be resolved by a first principle; a principle which I just touched on and which emphatically determines my choice.

Here’s the dilemma. The Catholic looks to Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium as vehicles of revelation and interpretation; as the ways in which, to put it in specifically Christian terms, the Holy Spirit speaks to us. The conservative Protestant looks to the Bible alone as the vehicle of revelation, which he then presumes to be able to interpret alone. These are both fine and good as far as they go, and both work – they prove what they want to prove -- if they are just assumed. However, just assuming them begs the question which can only be answered with circular reasoning, which only serves to infinitely beg the question. Neither one, therefore, can be the first principle for grounding revelation (revelation primarily consists of things about God and man we cannot know by experience and reason alone).

Now, all knowledge proceeds from first principles. Common-sense knowledge about matters of fact assumes continuity from the senses to the intellect as it's first principle. Moral knowledge takes the fact that we only desire happiness for itself, combined with the matter of fact knowledge concerning specific desires common to our human nature, as it’s first principle. But what about faith knowledge, that is, knowledge revealed to us (at least in principle)?

Well, to touch on what I mentioned earlier, the first principle, the principle for accepting any further authority (whether Tradition, the Magesterium, and Scripture together, or simply Scripture alone) can only be found in the personal conviction that Christ has offered you grace, you need it, you have received it in faith, and that part of what you have received from the assumed historical reliability of the words Christ spoke includes the promise of your respective authority. In other words this principle must be found reflected as an inherent need in human nature, anchored in our very nature, so that the degree to which the authority of the Good News of Christ speaks to one’s soul and meets this need is the degree to which one will accept the extension of authority given as part of that Good News. It is clear to my mind that the authority Christ extended resides in Catholicism.

On Anglo-Catholic Salvation

2008-03-30T15:19:00.003-04:00

I think it would be helpful to stress a distinction regarding salvation so that the non-Sacramental Protestant is clear that there is an agreement on a most essential point. This distinction is merely that of the Biblical paradox: "work out your salvation...for it is the Lord working in you." St. Bernard has beautifully expanded upon this, "grace is necessary to salvation, free will equally so -- but grace in order to give salvation, free will in order to receive it. Therefore we should not attribute part of the good to grace and part to free will; it is performed in its entirety by the common and inseparable action of both; entirely by grace, entirely by free will, but springing from the first in the second."

The official position of any Christian church of the Sacramental Tradition -- Catholic, Anglican, Episcopalian, Orthodox, etc. -- is that without grace, that is, without Christ's life, death, and resurrection, there would be no access to Heaven -- there would be no "first springing in the second." To put it another way, the door to the Father would be forever closed, the gulf forever impassible, if not for Christ -- this all churches hold as necessary to believe. This means, therefore, that no church preaches that "works" merit us Heavenly access -- only Christ won access for us. We are not, however, automatons -- we are not robots into whom God programs "grace". Indeed, God grants us the dignity of choosing, of participating in the grace He offers to us. There are, therefore, things given to us to do in order to appropriate this gift of grace, in order to make it effective in our lives. To put it plainly, we are to obey, and obedience requires faith -- faith is implicit, it's presupposed in any act of obedience: a faith without works is dead. Thus faith and obedience are inseparable.

Given the context of Sacramental Christianity, a faith which leads to works means that to trust that Christ has instituted Baptism to erase Original Sin, and that good works (found, primarily, in the Sermon on the Mount) and the other Sacraments are how His grace operates in us -- how we enter the door only Christ could open -- is not to say we get to Heaven by our own effort on our own merit. Obeying Christ in this way is merely to be consistent with the preservation of both sides of the Biblical paradox mentioned earlier. To ignore one side in favor of the other is to end in a disastrous conclusion -- either way. The Sacramental Tradition is thus both Biblical and reasonable, it just professes that Christ’s grace works, though in essence through faith and obedience – never the less through a faith and obedience which are manifested in a different way than that of the Protestant.

Despite theological disagreements, it is my hope that we can all agree that Christ's life, death, and resurrection unite us as common believers; that this essential belief unites us as brothers and sisters in Christ.

(A Version Of) The Cosmological Argument

2008-03-18T20:29:00.001-04:00

Ultimately a denial of the "Cosmological Argument" entails either 1.) a denial of one or both undeniable premises by which we know anything at all and by which we actually live, or 2.) a denial of the conclusion(s), which simply combine(s) these premises.

1. A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way - a thing is or is not (principle of non-contradiction). Simplified: If a thing exists it doesn't not exist.

2. Existing things change - things have potential to be or not be.

3. A thing which has potential, which can be or not be at a particular moment, a.) cannot determine itself to be or not be at a particular moment (or it is violating premise 1, both being and not being at the same time in the same way); it cannot choose it's own path, therefore something must determine it to be or not be or it hasn't been determined-which we know it has; b.) cannot be determined by nothing, for if nothing determined it, then it's the nature of nothing to make determinations; if nothing has a nature, then it's something, and something has determined it--that something must have no potential, it cannot not be; and c.) cannot be determined by another thing with potential, for at the same moment that thing also needs determination.

Additional Conclusion from 3:

4. The universe (a collection of things with potential) can be or not be at a particular moment, therefore it is determined by something which cannot not be (God is the name we give to a being which cannot not be).

OR

1. A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way - a thing is or is not (principle of non-contradiction). Simplified: If a thing exists it doesn't not exist.

2. Existing things change - things have potential to be or not be.

3. A thing which has potential, which can be or not be at a particular moment, needs a cause to determine whether it will be or not be *.

4. The cause itself (from #3) must not have potential to be or not be, otherwise it’s in the same undetermined state needing to be caused and cannot cause anything.

5. Since every thing with potential existing at a given moment (the universe) can be or not be, then everything (the universe) with potential to be or not be needs a cause at every moment of it’s existence.

6. Something exists which cannot not be, as the cause of existing things which change -- the universe.

*Something is self-evident when it’s opposite cannot be conceived. “Something which changes needs a cause”—this is self evident because it’s opposite -- nothing can cause something -- means the nature of nothing is to cause something, which is another way of saying nothing is something (we have to conceive of nothing as something (it’s nature is to cause)). Therefore we cannot conceive of nothing causing something without admitting it’s something. Thus it’s self evident that “things which change need a cause.”

Defining "God"

2008-03-09T06:35:00.004-04:00

I often find that in discussions about God, the concept of God is treated as if it’s an arbitrary mental construction; it’s treated as if it’s made up, imaginary. So, when it’s posited by the theist (a theist believes in a God who is, in part, known by revelation) it’s assumed, by the non-theist (I use this word to mean both agnostic and atheist), that it’s just an imaginary concept used to fill in various gaps in our knowledge, gaps which could be replaced just as arbitrarily -- which is to say equally as likely -- by the concept of the flying spaghetti monster, or the polka dotted magical unicorn, or any number of various absurdities.

Speaking for myself, if it were an arbitrary, imaginary concept, then the non-theist’s point would appear quite valid -- I would consequently find the position of the theist to be nothing but an unlikely guess. However, the theist does not give meaning to the word “God” from his own imagination; instead, the classical theist (i.e., Christian and Judaist) derives it from both reason and revelation – the deist from reason only, and, incidentally, the Muslim from revelation only. Now, non-theists regard revelation as imaginary, so the only common ground left between they and the theist is reason.

Reason, of course, must deal with facts, so it is only the facts with which our senses come into contact, and the realm of reason itself, that reason has to use. Thus, according to the theist the word “God” derives it’s meaning from the laws of being, of things we perceive through our senses and know through our intellects; these “things” reveal a separate, primordial ground of existence with a number of definable attributes – this we theists call “God.” It is this definition (or some vague intuition most common persons have of it) that impregnates the word “God” with meaning.

So it is out of the depths of reality itself that the meaning of the word “God,” for classical theists, is derived; to this extent the word “God” is an intellectual construct, not an imaginary idea. The difference is like that between the intellectual construct of a black hole, and the imaginary construct of Santa Clause. People, like Richard Dawkins, simply disregard the fact that “God” is a term which is also a conclusion of rational insight – like a black hole --; they are simply unaware of that fact, or they ignore it (someone like Dawkins, who speaks of Aquinas, should be aware of such a fact). When such people compare God to some made up, imaginary absurdity, it is like saying a black hole can have the properties of the sacred purple buffalo. Who could take such a person seriously? The next question is, what are the facts which lead to this “conclusion of rational insight,” and can they be put into layman’s terms? I’ll try to answer both questions simultaneously.

SOME PREREQUISITES (IN LAYMAN’S TERMS)

All knowledge originates from our senses -- to be more accurate, *through* our senses. Our senses come into contact with a three-dimensional spatial world, and our intellects provide us universal concepts through which we know about that world, through which we interpret the data of our senses. Now, it’s quite clear to our reason that we do not touch or taste or hear or smell or see God. We do not sense God. What do we sense? We sense physical objects, things. We sense rocks and trees and grass and dogs and people and stars and, though aided, we sense things like microorganisms and galaxies as well. So, we know we sense *things,* and we know we sense different kinds of things. However, though we sense different kinds of things we know something important about all of them: they all have being, or existence. Indeed, and we can say about existence that it exists in different ways. Joseph Conti points out that existence can be horsey, or evergreeny, or elmy, or sparrowy, or… you name it. The way things exist is called their “essence.” So things exist in different ways, they are limited existences, or existence limited. We know that a horse is not a bird, and that neither are human beings; we know that existence is limited, here, to a horse essence, a bird essence, and a human essence. But is there something that is pure existence without limitation? In other words, is there a being whose essence is existence? Well, taking what we know is common to each and every thing, namely, existence, we can investigate it’s properties and come to the grandest, most noble conclusion of human reason: God, the being whose essence is existence, exists! Or, as was revealed to Moses, I AM WHO AM (the being whose essence is existence), actually is.

First, we have to get it clear in our minds that proving God as the cause of the universe does not mean that He is moving along in time like we are, it does not mean that He ignited, so to speak, the Big Bang and then moved along in time as it progressed. What it does is look at any given moment in time, including the moment of the Big Bang itself, and finds that limited existences, things, need to be caused to exist at every moment. It doesn’t look backwards towards the beginning of time, it rather looks deep into the heart of every moment of time. We normally think of causes coming before their effects. A bowling ball, for instance, rolls down the lane and then crashes into the pins. Some people think of the proof for God as First Cause as something similar to the bowler who tossed the ball, as coming before the effect in time. They picture God doing something like winding up and tossing the ball. In this picture God is seen as moving along in time with the rest of the effects. But this picture is false. There’s another way to conceive of a cause, and that is, not coming before something in time, but coming before it logically, yet at the same moment. I’m going to steel an analogy from C.S. Lewis to explain this type of cause. Imagine two books on a desk, one with a red cover, one with a green cover. Now imagine that the book with the red cover is resting on the book with the green cover. The book with the green cover is causing the book with the red cover to rest about an inch from the desk. If this had been happening forever, without a beginning, the green book would still be causing the effect without ever coming before it in time. The cause does not come before the effect in time, only in logic. So, we have two things to remember regarding the proof that I will demonstrate. The first is that we are looking into the moments we experience as the present, not at the beginning of time. The second is that some causes come before their effects in logic, not time.

What I’m about to (attempt to) demonstrate is called the Cosmological Argument, it is an argument from the nature of the cosmos that we experience; it comes after experience and is therefore called, in fancy terms, a-posteriori. It was argued as far back as three-thousand years ago by Aristotle, right around the time Moses had a direct experience, or intuition, which brought forth to his mind, without discursive reasoning (that is, without stringing together premises in logical steps to produce a conclusion), the existence of a being called “I AM,” which is conceptually indistinguishable from Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. This argument is deductive, not inductive, so it starts from a universal and undeniable premise, moves to a second premise, the data of the senses, and eventually draws a conclusion based on these two major premises; it is a scientific proof in this regard. It is interesting to note that no philosopher, at least of relevance, has attacked this proof on it’s own grounds – they cannot. Instead they essentially deny science by either attacking reality itself, or our ability to know it. The scientist content to deal in science doesn’t worry himself about these absurd philosophies for he continues to get results, a fact which makes them completely irrelevant to him. Incidentally there are two types of results which come from accepting God’s existence as a rational conclusion. The first is that it gets us thinking as realists, which scientists are in practice, and which has important implications in the realm of ethics, of natural law. The second is that, for the theist at least, the results which make such philosophies irrelevant are the effects not in the world of descriptive facts with which science deals, but in the world of prescriptive facts with which our desires deal. In other words the quality of life the belief produces as an effect is it’s own justification and equally, if not more importantly, makes the skeptical philosophies as irrelevant to the believer as they are to the scientist.

THE PROOF

So, let’s take a look at this proof. We’ve already said that existence is shared by all things; what’s of note to us is that the one thing which existence gives to our minds is the first principle of knowledge: a thing that is, is; it cannot be and not be in the same way at the same time. This is called the principle of non-contradiction. G.K. Chesterton referred to it as the shadow following reality, it cannot be escaped. The second premise is that the cosmos, the world of our senses, is a collection of changing things – things moving, or changing, in time. These things, as we said, are types of existence, they are existence limited to specific essences. Another aspect of a limitation of existence, of a limited thing, is that it doesn’t have it’s reason for existence in itself, in other words, it doesn’t have to exist at the particular moment it does exist. We know this just by reflecting on possibilities. An atom which exists at a particular date and time could have been split at that particular date and time. You, as a human existence, could have never existed if the conditions that came together to produce your existence were slightly altered. We know, by the existence of free will – without which we cannot say we know anything, it’s a condition of rational knowledge – that conditions can be altered. We also know, by scientific research, that chance plays a role in evolution as well as particle physics; so, again, conditions can be altered. Therefore all limited things which exist at the same moment need, at that moment, something which is not limited, and which must exist in order to make them exist at that moment and all moments of their existence. Such an existence is an unchanging cause of the cosmos, is the I AM -- is what we call “God.”

Now, this proof may become more clear by looking at what results from denying it. So, what would result from denying it? Either 1.) that the principle of non-contradiction does not hold, or 2.) that the cosmos isn’t a collection of limited existences, or 3.) that limited things couldn’t be otherwise (there is no free-will, chance or potential), or 4.) that an unlimited existence, God, isn’t a necessary conclusion from the combination of 1,2, and 3, or 5.) some combination of 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Regarding number one, the principle of non-contradiction is self-evident and cannot be denied. This means we know that a thing cannot cause itself to exist, for it would be and not be at the same time in the same way. Regarding number two, the cosmos: well, it IS a collection of limited existences – that’s what a cosmos is, that’s how we know it exists. Regarding number three, if we deny that things can be otherwise then we deny free-will, chance, and we deny that things have potential; admitting just one of these things is fatal to our denial, and means we cannot deny it. So must we admit any of them? Well, free-will must exist or we are not free to know anything according to ground-consequent logic; chance is a scientific truth beyond a reasonable doubt; and potential is seen in the fact that a thing is a limited existence, which could have more existence -- in other words, there’s no reason why the toad you see hopping along could not be a rabbit instead. Something determined existence to exist as a toad, the toad you see, and nothing else; the series of logically prior causes, of simultaneous causes, which make up a moment must end in an unlimited existence – with no potential – which determines the existences of that moment, and all moments. This leads us to number four. Why must we admit that an unlimited existence is necessary? Because a.) the thing itself cannot cause itself, b.) another thing which itself is limited and needs caused at the same time cannot cause it, c.) it cannot be caused by nothing, for then it would be the nature of nothing to cause something, and only something can have a nature, which would make nothing something – either limited (b) or unlimited (d), d.) no other possible option remains except an unlimited existence, one with no potential. Therefore, God exists.

Equal Rights?

2008-03-02T13:03:00.005-05:00

The meaning of the equality of man is pivotal to any consideration of specific human rights, and with good precedent; its theme is a golden thread running through the American fabric, stitched over time by an unforgettable line of successors. The Framers “embalmed” the equality truth in The Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln hallowed it in his Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King Jr. reclaimed it in his I Have a Dream speech; in addition, the Constitution backs it with the consent of the governed and the full force of law -- specifically with the Fourteenth Amendment.

Many are keen to point out that equality is a status given to us by law, that we are “equal before the law.” In a certain and important sense this observation is correct; but the more important question is from what does the legal status of its truth derive? Is the Fourteenth Amendment solely a type of contract, or does it stem from immutable and inalienable rights? Is it something we grant only if we want, by some legal fiction, or something we ought to grant no matter what?

It is a sad fact that the truth “all men are created equal” was slow in developing its practical significance, but it is no less true for that reason. Lincoln wrote, “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration not for that but for its future use.” Unfortunately, however, the phrase “all men are created equal” has not maintained the meaning it had for Lincoln; nor has the Declaration's mutually important phrase “the pursuit of happiness.”

The Founding Fathers and their more immediate posterity, like Lincoln, were schooled in the tenets and animated by the spirit of the Perennial Philosophy; thus we can take the words of Boethius, summing up Plato and Aristotle, to exemplify what they understood to be the meaning of this particular tenet, [happiness is] “a life made perfect by the possession in aggregate of all good things."

It should be clear, on any account, that the conception of happiness found in the Declaration assumes no possible conflict between various pursuits of happiness, it assumes a common goal, or good, for everyone, which includes the potential happiness of everyone else. Naturally, this leads us to inquire about the meaning of equality, and the more specific nature of happiness.

To begin with an analogy, simply consider different types of triangles. Though different, each triangle we imagine yet shares the same essential nature with every other triangle. Therefore, if we said "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all triangles are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inherent properties, that among these is the property that the sum of angles is always 180 degrees"; if we put it that way it would make perfect sense to talk about equality.

In the same way, when we talk about man and the equality of man we are talking about man's essential nature. Thomas Aquinas observed that in addition to our fundamental desire for happiness, mankind has basic and essential needs for self-preservation, procreation, community and rationality. The Declaration, as noted, assumes a common goal; the fundamental human needs Aquinas lists are simply the properties of our common goal. To demonstrate this simply ask, can the common good, human happiness, be reached without the existence of human inclinations to preserve themselves, procreate, unite in community, and grow in moral and intellectual virtues?

Our fundamental equality, rooted in our nature as rational beings, inescapably binds us to the common good. Therefore, given the context of the aim of the common good, we understand that equality before the law is rooted in nature, not whim. In addition, we have a standard by which to judge particular claims to equal rights. For example, heterosexual marriage is an equal good, good for all; it is established in a natural need of the common good, thus its “special treatment” is consistent with the equality principle – the government merely recognizes it as a natural need and promotes its importance. Conversely, if the government were to sanction homosexual marriage it would be fabricating a right not in accord with the equality principle. In doing so, it would depart from natural law and effectively invoke the principle of chaos, whim, tyranny: might makes right.

Preparatio Evangelica and the Traditional Three Stage Path of Christianity

2008-02-24T21:10:00.008-05:00

No one familiar with the great literature of the world can fail to miss the immemorial expression of a deep hunger, an immortal longing which is unmistakably characteristic of man at large. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, “The origin of poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder beauty than earth supplies". The same can be said for all types of literature, art and religious expression. How can one not be moved in some strange way by the Greek mythos wherein the visitation of the starry and terrible gods was commonplace? How can one not feel the obscure radiance at the summit of the soul lighted from Oriental skies by the ineffable Absolute of Indian religion? More importantly, how can one be un-empathetic to one of the main themes of early Hebrew experience: the echo of the desperate cry for Justice, which served as the supreme backdrop upon which the expectation of the Messiah lingered for ages? Indeed, such “familiarity” works at a deep level of our being, it enriches our very capacity for experience, immerses us in the more noble attributes of our common humanity, and enlivens our own expectation for the coming of the Divine.

Ironically, modern man living in the “information age” has become less informed in the social, moral, imaginative and spiritual depths of his being. Having a personal relationship with Christ and God has a great appeal – and rightly so -- to many of us in an alienated culture running on the philosophy of an isolated and *impersonal* individualism. The “Evangelical” stress on such a relationship with God has its place; but its appeal, in so far as it stops there, is in much need of supplemental depth. The emotion of conversion, which is likely to eventually wear out -- as all emotions do --, needs to be supported by growth in understanding, by an enriching social environment, and, more importantly, by daily and weekly rituals involving the will (prayer, fasting, virtue, confession – all manner of devotions): most churches are good at providing and encouraging these basic necessities. But over and above these “supports”, we’d do well to consider a return to the more comprehensive program for lifelong conversion, and to the context in which it naturally arises. Let’s take a look at the latter first.

The early Christians saw in all regions of human religious experience what they called preparatio evangelica -- a preparation for the news of Christ in various beliefs, practices, customs and rituals which naturally inclined a culture to receive it. They noted that all good things were from God. But more than just pagan shadows awaiting the concrete form of Christianity there was, in turn, light streaming forth from the pagan backdrop which pieced together with the revelation of Hebrew Christianity arising from the Jewish historical background; in so doing it broadened the scope of Christ’s religion and made it, in a very real sense, catholic (universal): On the one hand tightly knit communities bound by a calendar of feasts, fasts, rituals and public worship as well as the sense of the sacred in matter -- in temples, in fire, in oil, in wine and even in blood –; all of these aspects of traditional Christianity are shared not only with ancient Judaism but also with polytheistic paganism. On the other hand, a systematized form of ethics and philosophical reasoning, in addition to the ascetic and mystical practices found in the East -- which trickled in from Plotinus -- were similarly baptized by the Church. All the essential expressions by which human nature is involved in it’s search and desired communion with the divine were brought together under one umbrella -- joined together by God, in and through his Church, in order to produce “rightly fashioned person[s]”, or what the Church calls Saints: men and women who attain a high degree of union with God -- some of whom fulfill Christ’s prediction that there would be those who would do even greater things than he’s reported to have done.

So, to summarize thus far: the context for a comprehensive program of lifelong conversion involves what we may call sacramental (sacredness of matter) and mystical (knowledge beyond reason) theology, which, together, touch on the deepest themes, excite the inexhaustible motives, which enrich human experience and spur us on in our adventure to God through Christ -- often sustaining us when our more immediate and fleeting emotions waste away.

Now, the adventure itself, the lifelong program – this has long been understood as the three stage ( http://www.renewthechurch.com/3%20stages.htm ) path to union with God through Christ: the Purgative, Illuminative and Unitive Ways.

The Purgative Way

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The Purgative way, of course, begins with an initial conversion. Scripture is clear that following Christ involves being united to him and other believers through baptism; a baptism which requires faith that, as the Son of God, Christ lived, died, and was restored to a new, immortal life; it is this new life he then offers us to take part in through baptismal waters, continued repentance, obedience, and devotion.

*The first step I’d therefore suggest to begin in the Purgative way is to make a profession of faith, which Christianity has best summed up in what she calls the Nicene Creed (just replace the “we” with “I”).

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty
Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us (men) and for our salvation he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures
he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
And his kingdom will have no end
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life,
Who proceeds from the Father (and the Son)
With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic [universal] and apostolic Church
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

*The next thing to do is to get into contact with a priest or pastor about being baptized, perhaps with the help of someone – a friend or family member -- who is familiar with the process. In Catholicism, if you’ve already been baptized then the next step is to be confirmed. If you’ve already been confirmed then the next step, if you’ve been away from practicing your faith for a while, is to go to confession so you can be, as they say, restored to full communion.

*Finally (this last step is actually involved in all the steps, and continues on until we reach the Beatific Vision) begin to develop a prayer life, grow in virtue and devotion – such things as adoration, reading Sacred Scripture, learning more about your faith, going to church regularly).

--These steps, then, begin the Purgative stage, which involves, as the name implies, purging our selves from those things that are not of God. It entails a conversion of faith, what some people refer to as a born-again experience, which is often accompanied by emotions of gratitude, zeal, the feeling of newness, hope and the like. This experience flows over into the will, and naturally leads one to leave behind serious sin – what Catholics call mortal sin.

Sober Inebriation

2008-02-24T17:15:00.000-05:00

Sober inebriation... comes not from drinking a new type of wine but from enjoying God (paraphrased). --St. Bernard

Sober inebriation: to “enjoy God”; the phrase in quotes may have an odd ring to modern ears. What, exactly, does it mean to “enjoy God”? Are we to see God with our eyes? Are we to embrace Him with our arms? Are we to drink Him in, like some new knowledge from an unknown book which excites and interests us? Or is He more like a cosmic bar tender, mystically releasing sensations within us, which normally only half a bottle of wine begins to do?

Christian mystics and philosophers of the orthodox past would immediately understand such a phrase as St. Bernard’s in a spiritual sense. In other words, they would say – and St. Bernard means – that sober inebriation comes from spiritually enjoying God. We will not perceive Him through our senses or through images, because our senses and imaginations can only perceive things with limitations; nor will we merely know about Him abstractly, like we know a science or like we know mathematics. We will, instead, know Him by an intellectual intuition, that is, by perceiving Him directly with our spirits. This, they say (by both reason and experience), is the ultimate Joy. Everything that brings us delight here in time -- all of our favorite things, the things we love most – have yet a lingering hint of something more within them, a something more which is the same in them all, illuminating them all in their variety, like the same sun illuminates the various planets of our solar system. But to face the source itself, to rise above all the partial delights we’re capable of experiencing and to touch God with our spirits, would be not only to bathe in all partial delights at once and forever, but to be immersed in a joy for which those partial delights are mere longings: a Joy of an entirely different and higher order altogether. Theologians call this experience the Beatific Vision, taken from among the list of beatitudes which Jesus left us: namely, “blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”

It is difficult to imagine this experience – it’s impossible, really. But, we do know that even describing normal vision to a person born blind is just as problematic. Unless someone has experienced vision himself, you can only excite longings within him by describing the world as green, a waterfall as crystal clear, or a women as beautiful. And so it is with mankind; we who are born spiritually blind, but who, according to the Unitive promise of Christ, can begin to see even here and now -- can begin to taste and see, walking by faith in Christ through the Purgative, Illuminative and Unitive Ways, the glory of God around, among and within us.