Sacramentum Vitae

Moving to NYC!

2009-08-28T18:39:00.003-05:00

I got the job I interviewed for last Wednesday in New York, and am very excited about it. Since I don't know yet whether my boss would approve my publicizing the job here, or even my continuing to blog on my own, I shall say no more for the time being. But I want to thank my "vast readership," both here and at What's Wrong with the World, for their encouragement and support. God bless you all!

An important trip

2009-08-25T09:44:00.002-05:00

I'll be offline for a few days as I travel to New York City for an important job interview. Please keep me in your prayers.

Bad arguments against the Magisterium: Part II

2009-08-23T19:41:00.002-05:00

In Part I of this series, I rebutted the argument that the Catholic Magisterium is "accountable" to nobody and nothing but itself. In this part, I shall rebut the argument that adherence to the Magisterium puts a Christian in no better a position to know the content of the deposit of faith than the major Christian alternatives

There are actually four main versions of that argument. The first runs roughly as follows:

Scripture and/or Tradition are fully public and materially contain the full content of the deposit of faith. The Magisterium claims to "infallibly" hand on and clarify the doctrinal content of those two "sources" of transmission of divine revelation. But whether infallible or not, the Magisterium only does the sort of thing that any Spirit-guided Christian could in principle do, given the publicity and material sufficiency of the sources. Therefore, such a magisterium is in principle dispensable.

The problem with that argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. To get it to follow, one needs at least the following, additional premise:

(i) Some methodology other than binding and (allegedly) infallible interpretation by ecclesiastical authority enables the Spirit-guided Christian, at least in principle, to attain sufficient knowledge of the deposit of faith from Scripture and/or Tradition.

Many people, mostly Protestants, believe (i) either because their personal religious experience leads them to believe they've attained such knowledge without the Church, or because they believe that otherwise there would be no way to assess the orthodoxy of any self-proclaimed magisterium, Catholic or otherwise. But the problem with (i) is that there is no good reason to believe it.

The only good reason to believe (i) would be to hit upon a methodology, ecclesiologically neutral in itself, which objectively suffices to render a particular hermeneutic of Scripture and/or Tradition doctrinally comprehensive and rationally compelling. But if nearly two millennia of exegesis and theology show anything at all, they show that there is no such methodology. Eastern Orthodoxy, for example, has never claimed there is such a methodology; it has always insisted, like Catholicism, that authentic interpretation of the sources can only be conducted in conformity with the mind of "the Church." And Protestants who claim there is such a methodology often disagree about which doctrinal results are thereby secured. That's why there are Protestant "denominations." Rather few of the Protestant participants in that debate can be charged with outright irrationality; with more or less plausibility, they just disagree among themselves as well as with Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Absent appeal to an infallible interpreter, that leaves the question who is right as a matter of opinion rather than of binding doctrine. But that does not suffice for identifying the entire content of the deposit of faith as an object of the assent, precisely, of faith in God the infallible Revealer. All it does is present Scripture (and a fortiori Tradition, of which Scripture is the uniquely normative written record) as raw material for the forming of more or less plausible opinions. Many such opinions are doubtless logically equivalent to doctrines that are of faith; but as opinions, they neither constitute nor express assent by faith.

That points up the fundamental difficulty with the argument in question: there is no ecclesiologically neutral methodology for determining who interprets Scripture correctly, and who thus knows their interpretations to be binding and irreformable for the whole Church's assent of faith as distinct from tentative opinions. Some Christians appeal to a "burning in the bosom" or to their holy people of choice to confirm their interpretations; but such inherently subjective arguments can yield nothing that is rationally compelling and authoritative for the Church as a whole, without an ad hoc and doctrinally front-loaded limitation on who counts as "the Church."

In view of such difficulties, some people argue against the Magisterium's claims in a narrower way. Thus:

The Magisterium enables Christians to know the full content of the deposit of faith as an object for the assent of faith only if the doctrines it presents as binding and irreformable can be demonstrated to belong to the apostolic faith. But the most distinctively Catholic doctrines, including the Magisterium's claims for itself, are precisely those which cannot be thus demonstrated. Therefore, the Magisterium does not help Christians know the full content of the deposit of faith as an object for the assent of faith.

The difficulty with that argument is that it begs the question at the outset. How? If the first sentence is true, then we can assess the Magisterium's claims for itself only if we can reliably know the content of the deposit of faith "given once for all to the holy ones" without recourse to the Magisterium's claims for itself. Hence, the Magisterium as it understands itself is justifiable only if superfluous for knowing the rest of the deposit of faith. But if the Magisterium is superfluous in that way, then its claim to be the sole "authentic" interpreter of the sources is false. An argument that begs the question at the outset need not be taken seriously as an argument.

That's probably why many non-Catholic Christians prefer a more philosophical approach. For purposes of a blog post, a good example is the argument made by a commentator over at Called to Communion:

What good Protestant theologians actually believe is that a sincere believer, aided by the Holy Spirit, who approaches the Scripture with humility in the context of a living community of faith and the Christian Tradition will be able to find great confidence about those truths necessary to salvation and to grow, however slowly and fallibly, closer to the truth on more doubtful matters. This fallibility is inherent to our situation as human beings and is in no way mitigated by your Catholic position since you have fallibly determined that organizational and doctrinal continuity with the Apostles is a guide to doctrinal reliability, and you have fallibly determined that the Church of Rome exhibits such continuity. Finally, you fallibly interpret the Roman Church’s doctrinal proclamations. Adding the infallibility of the Church generally or the Pope specifically will not get you into a significantly better epistemic state than the agreed upon doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture.

In other words: since the assent of faith is up to each individual, and each individual is fallible, then the assent of faith is itself fallible; and if so, then proposing some set of doctrines S with alleged infallibility gives people no more certainty of the truth of S than would holding S as a set of human opinions only.

John Henry Newman's well-known rejection of "private judgement" in religion is often criticized in such a manner. Thus if the assent of faith as an epistemic stance is fallible, given the fallibility of each of the assenters, then ultimately there is no reliable way to distinguish the objective content of the irreformable deposit of faith, as revealed by God, from fallible opinions, held collectively by members of "the Church," about the data handed down to us. If the purpose of the self-styled Magisterium is to afford us a reliable way to make that distinction, then the Magisterium is wasting its own and everybody else's time. For what it's after is something that cannot be had and therefore should not be sought.

Now if the Magisterium were offering its definitive judgments merely as products of academic research, or even of special religious experiences, that criticism would be perfectly justified. And such factors often play a important role in forming magisterial judgments, as well as an even more important role in defending them. Yet no matter how well they serve, they could not themselves be decisive without the Magisterium's claims for itself succumbing to the objection at hand. What's decisive among and for the Magisterium's claims is its claim that it is divinely authorized, to the same degree as the Apostles themselves, to teach doctrine which irreformably binds the whole Church and is, by that same divine authority, protected from teaching what is false when it does so. If that is true, then the inherent fallibility of believers who take the Magisterium at its word does not infect the truth of what they assent to when they make the assent of faith; it infects only their degree of understanding that truth. Assuming Christianity is true, the fact remains that no particular believer, not even the pope, can ever be absolutely certain that their own understanding of a particular doctrine is as free from error as the doctrine itself. Rather, and as a matter of fact, they trust implicitly that the doctrine is true and seek to conform their mind ever more closely with that of the Church, for which the Magisterium speaks, on the doctrine's subject matter. Of course, if the Magisterium's particular claims for itself are true, then "the Church" as a whole will enjoy, or in due course attain, as sound an understanding of the doctrine as the subject matter permits. But that doesn't guarantee that any believer in particular will do so. That is one reason why the Catholic Church tolerates a great deal of what is, objectively speaking, material heresy in her ranks. It is often humanly impossible to tell which errors are being made in good faith, by people who (mistakenly) believe they are conforming their minds to that of the Church, from those which arise from culpable refusal to so conform oneself. Although the content of the deposit of faith is not a journey, most of us know that the life of faith is very much a journey. Accordingly, the position of the believing, intelligent Catholic is rather similar to that which our CtoC commenter attributed to "good Protestant theologians." The only difference is that the Catholic acknowledges a living authority not merely for identifying the deposit of faith—for which inspired Scripture indubitably serves—but for definitively resolving, as they arise, certain questions that the sources either occasion or fail to address explicitly.

Nevertheless, the journey would be not just unavoidable, but irremediably deficient, if the fourth and final common argument against the Magisterium were sound. Thus:

The Magisterium claims to be the sole "authentic" interpreter of Scripture and Tradition, meaning that only its interpretations are divinely authorized for the assent and profession of the whole Church. But all language requires interpretation, especially when it's about such lofty subject matter; so, the Magisterium's interpretations, in the form of dogmas or other definitive teachings, themselves require interpretation by both individual believers equipped to conduct it and the Magisterium itself. But if that is the case, then given the subject matter, there's no reason to believe that magisterial judgments, offered as interpretations of the "sources," are any more perspicuous than what they interpret. That is why heresies are so frequent, even recurring in new forms, despite conciliar and papal definitions; and that's how the interpretation of certain doctrines, such as extra ecclesiam nulla salus, can changes over time. But if magisterial judgments set forth with alleged infallibility leave so much unclarity, then the Magisterium's claims for itself are idle.

Fortunately, that is the easiest argument to rebut. Magisterial judgments rarely answer all important questions about their subject matter, any more than Scripture does; they answer only the questions that are, or were, pressing in their historical context. Hence, such judgments are ordinarily not the last word for understanding what they're about; they are merely interpretive steps deemed necessary for dispelling particular misunderstandings. Ordinarily they do that job well, even though sometimes they do not, and can even raise serious questions of their own—as, I believe, was the case with the filioque, whose que admits of heterodox interpretations as well as an orthodox one. The point is this: even though the Church's collective meditation on the deposit of faith does not exhaust the cognitive content of the subject, and could never come close to doing so, the words in which magisterial judgments are framed are typically clear enough, in the broader context of Tradition and history, to exclude problematic interpretations as they arise. The Magisterium itself is on a faith journey of sorts, and the history of doctrine may be seen as that of an ongoing conversation about which direction the journey should take. But once a certain direction is taken definitively, interpretive clarity is thus gained to some degree.

Jeffrey Steel is back

2009-08-24T18:04:00.003-05:00

According to Fr. Tom Finigan, formerly Fr. Jeffrey Steel of the CofE is returning to blogging, but now "as a Catholic layman." Last June I took theological note of Steel's decision to become a Roman Catholic; he and his family were duly received into the Church on July 18. It will be a pleasure to have him back in the blogosphere.

There's "good" personal and "bad" personal

2009-08-16T13:44:00.016-05:00

Anybody involved with blogs, whether as author, commentator, or reader, knows how common it is for personal static to drown out what's worth hearing. That's what I call the "bad"personal." Since it's long been my policy to avoid indulging in that sort of thing, I am rarely a target of it myself. But there's also a way of getting personal that, while still critical of the person, is also intellectually illuminating. I now find myself the target of such "good personal." I shall explain what that means and how my readers can learn from it.

I've been following Arturo Vasquez's four-part series "The Hollow Victory over Jansenism" (here's the link to Part IV, the most interesting) with considerable interest that is reflected in my combox contributions. I call my readers' attention to the issues involved because they go a long way toward explaining the sad division between Catholic "traditionalists" on the one hand and Catholic "neo-conservatives," among whom I am often numbered, on the other. Thanks largely to the Vatican's ongoing efforts to reconcile the Lefebvrite "Society of St. Pius X" with the Church at large, it has become well-known that trads and neo-cons differ with each other on a range of issues as much as (or, at least, as bitterly as) they both differ with progressives. The most contentious have to do with ecclesiology: ecumenism, religious liberty, limbo, the meaning of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus (EENS), and the relative authority of various magisterial but non-dogmatic doctrines. In the combox to the above-linked post, Arturo refers to me to several recent posts of his on the topics in question. But as he implicitly recognized in one of the posts in question, a given Catholic's stance on the pertinent issues depends on where he stands on a more fundamental theological question: that of how nature and grace relate to each other.

That foundational issue had become a huge bone of contention among Catholic theologians between the two Vatican councils. Though I don't agree by any means with everything in the 20th-century nouvelle theologie that so influenced Vatican II, I do agree with such representative figures as Maurice Blondel and Henri de Lubac on at least one point: there has never been a state of "pure nature." All human reality, from our first parents onward, has been penetrated by and oriented to grace. A state of pure nature is of course hypothetically possible, given divine power and goodness; but that is not in fact the case; and given the actual oikonomia, it never has been or will be the case. That means, among other things, that how humans choose to use their "natural" powers and order "natural" realities always has supernatural implications, either for better or for worse. Accordingly, and for reasons given by Ratzinger and others, every human being will end up, forever, either fully united with or fully alienated from God. If that is so, then (as Fr. Al Kimel and I argued in a series of articles a few years ago), no limbus infantium could be permanent; and the non-existence of pure nature has larger ecclesiological and political implications too.

The essence of the matter is that, on a non-extrinsicist picture of the nature/grace relation, the visible Church herself, not merely the "seven" sacraments, must be seen as "sacramental" in the sense intended by Vatican II in Lumen Gentium. Thus, although the Church is the visible, ordinary means of transmitting to humanity that "grace and truth" of which the crucified-and-risen Christ is the source, the reality of such grace and truth in the world is far wider than its explicit manifestation in the Church. It suffuses all humanity to a degree sufficient for the salvation of each and every human being, and indeed suffuses the cosmos itself. Within the context of such a sacramental vision of reality, the Church's visible reality and witness is necessary for each and for all; for in the divine economy, she is indispensable for bringing about what she signifies. But people of good will who are inculpably ignorant of that very fact can still belong to the Church implicitly. Of course, and for obvious reasons, many trads are at best uncomfortable with such an affirmation. But they can't reject the idea of "imperfect communion" with the Church without rejecting the magisterial interpretation of EENS that has been steadily developing since Pius IX's Singulari Quidem and that became clear with Pius XII's 1949 condemnation of Feeneyism. Only the Feeneyites, and a smattering of other rad-trads, seem willing to go that far.

Accordingly, I believe the general trad dislike of modern ecclesiology to be radically misplaced. Trads understandably lament the "disenchantment of the world" that has accelerated since the 16th century, and which they blame the modern Catholic Church for worsening by a descent into a kind of ultramontanist rationalism; but they disagree with me and the "nuptial-mystery" theologians about how theology can contribute to the world's re-enchantment. And we're not going to resolve the disagreement here or anytime soon. But our disagreement on this score tends to mask a yet more fundamental disagreement about how such disagreements are to be resolved. That is what brings in the "good personal."

I have noticed that, in the combox to Arturo's above-linked post, none of the criticisms directed (explicitly or implicitly) toward me engage any of my actual arguments on the specific points at issue, despite my having developed and publicized such arguments for several years. As I've often seen before, my critics simply disparage my general "development-and-negation" approach by suggesting that I proceed like a "lawyer" who, though he might or might not be using philosophy, is certainly not doing theology. One commenter doesn't even bother with that much professional respect, suggesting instead that I suffer from a hitherto-unheard-of mental handicap: "I think some of these highly apologetics-focused professorial Catholics deserve some sort of neoscholastic asperger diagnosis." I would find all this rather baffling if I had not already come to recognize that the underlying theological difference here is of such a kind that it simply cannot be addressed in terms held in common by all sides. The only terms left are essentially aesthetic and personal.

That's what I mean the "good personal." The good personal is good inasmuch as it signifies that the intellectual gulf is not perceived for what it really is, so that one side can only explain it in essentially personal terms. I shall explain the gulf here by starting with a bit of intellectual autobiography.

Ultimately, I reject Protestantism in all its forms because I don't think any form of Protestantism can supply a consistent and non-arbitrary way to distinguish the content of the deposit of faith itself from theological opinions about the data of divine revelation. Of course there's always Orthodoxy; but after a lengthy flirtation with Orthodoxy in college, motivated by hard personal experience with several aspects of post-Vatican-II American Catholicism, I ultimately stuck with the Catholic Church because her way of applying the needed distinction struck me as clearer and more consistent than Orthodoxy's. But having educated myself about Catholicism's way of applying that distinction, I found by the mid-1980s that I could align myself neither with the progressives nor with the traditionalists.

I could not align myself with the progs because they wanted to jettison a number of important doctrines which, unlike limbo or the desirability of a confessional state, the Church had taught consistently for as far back as we have records. That attitude struck me then, as now, as incompatible with being self-consistently Catholic; and the way progressive Catholicism has developed since Vatican II confirms for me that it is fundamentally incompatible with "the Catholic thing" itself. But I could not align myself with the trads either. I could see neither how certain past teachings they preferred are more inherently plausible than, nor how such teachings were supposedly more authoritative than, those which Vatican II, an ecumenical council, had embraced in the course of reversing or sharply modifying past teachings. The options for trads, it seemed to me, were either (a) to reject the Council's distinctive doctrinal developments as heretical, which is what Archbishop Lefebvre did; or, less radically, (b) to treat those developments are mere opinions of lesser weight than those which they had supplanted. Option (a) seemed plainly schismatic—an impression confirmed by my personal experience with rad-trads. And that alone made it unacceptable to me. But option (b) raised another question: Were the issues in contention really just matters of opinion about which Catholics were free to differ, or did the distinctive teachings of the Council call for at least the "religious assent" of Catholics—to use the Council's own phrase?

Unless and until that question is clearly answered, one cannot know whether option (b) is ultimately acceptable for loyal, self-consistent Catholics or not. And if one cannot know that, then one cannot know whether (b), the less-radical trad option, is theologically tenable or not. That's one of the two major theological reasons why, despite my disgust with the prog "culture of dissent" and the widespread debasing of the liturgy, I was leery of post-Vatican-II Catholic traditionalism. My other reason was this: unless and until the question in question is given a clear answer by the Church, one cannot even explain clearly why the progs are wrong to believe that the Church could radically change her teaching on their pet issues (which mostly come down to sex and power). In the final analysis, it was my consideration of that hard fact which led me to reject post-Vatican-II Catholic traditionalism as well as progressivism. To borrow a phrase from the present pope, which the late Richard John Neuhaus was among the first to take up, I came to see both progressivism and traditionalism as hermeneutics of discontinuity, when what is so desperately needed is a "hermeneutic of continuity."

If a clear answer to the above-posed question is to be had, it must be given by "the Church." But who speaks definitively for the Church on doctrines not formally defined? There is not, because there could not be, a clear consensus fidelium on that issue; for this is simply not the sort of issue on which such a consensus could even be formulated without the intervention of the Magisterium. That's why I came to see the meta-magisterial moves made by Wojtyla and Ratzinger during the 1990s as so important: Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and the CDF responsum thereon; the formal confirmations, in Evangelium Vitae, of certain teachings of the "ordinary and universal magisterium" (OUM); and the further specifications in Ad Tuendam Fidem and Ratzinger’s “Doctrinal Commentary” thereon. By making more explicit the general criteria by which to distinguish definitive from non-definitive teachings of the OUM, they made clearer why the progs are wrong. But by the same token, they also caused me to believe that the distinctive doctrinal developments of Vatican II are weightier than trads typically believe. That the Council defined no dogmas—as a "pastoral" council, it pronounced no anathemas on those who dissented from its distinctive doctrinal developments—did not and could not mean that said developments were mere theological opinions that Catholics could safely reject or ignore. The Council taught that the teaching of the OUM commanded "religious assent" from Catholics even when not presented as definitive tendendam; and that tenet applied both to itself and to the other distinctive teachings of the Council, precisely because the dogmatic constitutions of the Council were clear instances of the teaching of the OUM by any criterion. To deny that the Council's distinctive doctrinal developments command religious assent, as the trads seemed to me committed to doing, placed them in the same position as the progs: holding that only dogmas defined by the extraordinary magisterium require assent from Catholics as a moral obligation. That position is untenable for several reasons, all of which I have expounded at length on this blog.

Most trads would not go so far as to claim that my position, which they often call the "neo-con" position, is actually heterodox. As I said in the combox to Arturo's post, the dispute is really about whose approach, i.e. that of the trads or that of the neo-cons, plays into the hands of the progs. I hold that, if one rejects the above-described meta-magisterial developments, or at least brushes them aside as irrelevant, then the progs win willy-nilly. For that's just what the progs themselves do to create space for their dissent. Trads, in my experience, counter that argument of mine not by addressing the specific ways I apply those developments, but by insisting that the very appeal to such developments is mere legalism, or ultramontanism, or otherwise misplaced rationalism. Or something like that. The irony, of course, is that that is just what many progs accuse trads of.

What's really needed is a way for trads and neo-cons to converge on a hermeneutic of continuity. Given the current gulf, I suspect that will only happen organically, by a slow return to the permanently valid riches of Catholic tradition, rather than by disputation. But that process has begun to accelerate under this pontificate. As it gathers momentum, the gulf signified by the "good personal" will gradually close toward unity.

Transfigured by—consequentialism?

2009-08-06T14:57:00.006-05:00

August the 6th is a spiritually important date in two ways. In the Catholic Church, it is the Feast of the Transfiguration (cf. Matthew 17: 1-8), which I celebrated by attending Mass this morning. The Transfiguration was a sign of who Jesus really is and what those who love him are destined, in our own smaller ways, to become; in Eastern Christianity, some people are alleged to have exhibited and/or seen the Uncreated Light that Peter, James, and John saw on Mount Tabor; in the West, some living folks who have undergone "near-death" experiences are certain they have seen it too. In American history, today is the 54th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That day manifested, concretely, the then-new fact that humanity had developed the capacity to destroy itself by its own artifice. The spiritual stakes of history had been raised; the question is whether the gamble, now unavoidable, will turn out disastrously before the Second Coming. That question is spiritual because it turns, in large part, on that of what sort of morality will prevail.

As a point of departure for framing the moral issue, an article in today's Wall Street Journal does rather nicely. The author, military historian Walter Kozak, notes that most Americans toward the end of World War II favored dropping The Bomb as a means of saving (mostly American) lives; whereas, as time goes by, fewer and fewer Americans find the act justifiable. So as to forestall much pointless wrangling, I shall concede that, in the circumstances, dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many more lives than the several hundred thousand civilian casualties in the vicinity of the explosions. Given our war aim of "unconditional surrender," the practical necessity of invading the Japanese home islands as a means of achieving that aim, and the fanatical dedication of the Japanese people to their Emperor, no other calculation was or is credible. But the question remains: was the act morally permissible all the same? The affirmative answer may have been obvious to most Americans, especially combat-weary veterans, at the time. But that doesn't make it so; nor do many thoughtful Americans think it does.

Consequentialists, of course, for whom utilitarian-style calculation just is the model for any and all moral judgment, almost invariably believe Hiroshima was justifiable. For as I've implied, the relevant utility calculation could hardly be more obvious. But the Catholic Church, along with most other major Christian churches, answers in the negative. Thus Vatican II:

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.

Such an apodictic statement was made in the context of a moral tradition that is the very antithesis of consequentialism. And it is by no means idiosyncratic. But who is right?

The very term 'consequentialist', now a well-known term of art in moral philosophy, was coined decades ago by the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe for the purpose of dispelling the misimpression that utilitarianism is limited to moral philosophers called utilitarians. In modern times, it has in fact become the default moral philosophy of the common man in the West. That's worth noting in this context because, in a well-known post-war pamphlet entitled "Mr. Truman's Degree" (republished online by a libertarian consequentialist criticizing it) Anscombe argued that dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima (as well as the earlier firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden) was immoral. Admitting that the utility calculation in the Japanese case was obvious, she concluded, in effect, "so much the worse for unconditional surrender as a war aim." I believe she was right. If unconditional surrender had not been our aim, and if we had instead made certain assurances to the Japanese people about the Emperor and other matters, then many innocent lives could have been spared by demonstrating The Bomb in open country, establishing a naval blockade, grabbing bits of mainland territory by piecemeal invasion, and negotiating a surrender. The way the Pacific war was actually ended only served to demonstrate a tragic fact in many lives since time immemorial: once people adopt a broadly wrongful course of action, they often maneuver themselves into a position that can only be escaped by committing a still-greater wrong.

That consequentialism has become the default moral philosophy in the West, and in other places too, only entrenches that tragic fact on a large scale. The impending demographic suicide of the West is the result of calculating, absurdly, that maintaining our preferred lifestyles is more valuable than replacing ourselves. That is why the holocaust of abortion doesn't strike most people as the mass human sacrifice it truly is. Severing the link between sex and procreation, in the forms of contraception and artificial reproduction, is taken for granted as a needed condition for "freedom" even as it continues to undermine the family and thus eat away at the basis of civil society. Ironically, if we wish to survive and promote the sort of human flourishing that Western science and political institutions have made possible, we must cease to be consequentialists. If we remain consequentialists, we may go out with a demographic whimper, too few and spiritually exhausted to resist conquest by a religiously backward civilization. Or, even before that happens, we could end civilized life itself by accident with a bang of the sort that ended the greatest war in human history. Either way, we will go out—unless we recover a sense of "the laws of nature and of nature's God" that is increasingly forbidden open expression in our public life. What we need is a new Transfiguration.

Health care: getting clear on the premises

2009-07-25T12:09:00.003-05:00

For the past several days, I've watched the debate at What's Wrong with the World about Obamacare in particular, and the economics of health care in general, with growing frustration. I am frustrated because, to my mind, there's little use in debating such questions without achieving some clarity about what the pertinent moral premises ought to be. So much is, or ought to be, obvious; and many of the participants have indeed expressed their moral premises. But I see no agreement on what it would take to resolve the disagreements at that level, or even an awareness that reaching such an agreement is important. Since I believe it is important, I shall suggest a way of reaching, or attempting to reach, such an agreement.

To that end, the point of departure is the question is how we would reach agreement about formulating the goal of a national health-care policy. Personally, I see the goal as ensuring quality health-care for everyone at a cost the nation can both afford and accept. But making that our goal makes sense only if some level of health care must be treated as a politically enforceable right, not just as a market-priced commodity. Libertarians would not agree that health care should be treated as such a right at all, and non-libertarians do not agree on the extent to which health care should be treated as such a right. So the next question to be addressed is how resolve such disagreements.

I believe that question can and ought to be resolved in contemporary America. To that end, there are two points to consider: what citizens in general actually believe, and how their beliefs need to be modified in order to make possible a political resolution.

Americans in general believe that nobody should be forced, just by their inability to pay, to go without the health care they need for living life with a modicum of human dignity. Both our political policies and our private practices reflect that belief. It follows that Americans in general agree that health care should be treated as a right to some extent. So the libertarians have already lost the debate. The main point of contention is just how that extent can be defined and respected in a manner consistent with what I claimed is the goal: "quality health-care for everyone at a cost the nation can both afford and accept." That is largely a question of politics and economics: specifically, what politically feasible means of delivery would best attain the stated goal. Like most conservatives, I believe that Obamacare would fail miserably on that score, even aside from such intractable moral issues as abortion and euthanasia. But more importantly, not even conservatives can answer the main question without first gaining more clarity about our moral premises.

To that end, the chief moral question is what it means to "live life with a modicum of human dignity." That in turn requires that we get clear about our philosophical anthropology; for we cannot resolve major disagreements about what "a modicum of human dignity" entails without a clear, self-consistent answer to two other questions: what is the human person, and what is the human person for? In a blog post, of course, nobody can answer such questions to the satisfaction of all. What I suggest for general consideration, however, is the proposition that the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, as expounded in Catholic social teaching, are those best suited to addressing the health-care debate in contemporary America as well as many other domestic-policy debates.

I say so because most Americans would agree that both principles are valid and mutually compatible. I say "would" agree because most Americans are unfamiliar with the terms, and still fewer know the philosophical and theological background for the corresponding concepts, but nonetheless hold beliefs that are fairly close to each. Accordingly, I suggest that the empirical debate about the economics of health care be conducted as a debate about how to balance solidarity and subsidiarity in heath-care provision. What I propose thus far is of course a framework for the debate, not a particular resolution of the debate.

I also propose clarifying that framework in one crucial respect: the morality of rationing. In a world of finite resources, any system of health-care delivery—be it purely market-oriented, socialized, or some hybrid of the two—is going to allocate health-care resources in such a way that some people get less care than they believe they need for living life with a modicum of human dignity. So the rationing question boils down to the question on what basis some people will have to get what they believe to be "the shaft." This seems to be the most morally and politically contentious question in the health-care debate.

Consider the fact that, under the current system, Medicare is variously estimated to spend 40-60%—i.e., roughly half—of its budget on care for people in their last three months of life. No doubt some of that expense is justified; but there should also be no doubt that some of it is not. Much of it is driven by the unwillingness of elderly patients and/or their families to accept the impending fact of death. Unless and until that attitude changes, no large-scale reform of our national health-care system will be both attainable and affordable. People who can afford to buy a bit of time for themselves or their loved ones, however wretched that time may be, should of course have every right to do so. But should their fellow citizens be forced to subsidize such choices? If we're going to achieve national health-care reform at all, the answer has to be no. That is not only a self-consistent but an inevitable way of balancing solidarity and subsidiarity.

This suggests that our national health-care policy should be a hybrid: socialized care for those who cannot pay for what they truly need "for living life with a modicum of human dignity," and free-market solutions for those who can. It is at that point, and only at that point, that debating economics becomes central. But we will not be able to reach that point unless the reality and necessity of rationing is generally accepted. And no such acceptance will become general unless we get our philosophical anthropology—i.e., the basis for solidarity and subsidiarity—straighter than we've got it.

Cross-posted at What's Wrong with the World.

Bad arguments against the Magisterium: Part I

2009-07-11T19:53:00.020-05:00

Much has been going on in the Vatican lately, and I plan a series of posts on those events. The one which most interests me is the publication of the Pope's new encyclical Caritas in Veritate. Both Left and Right have, unsurprisingly, been spinning it to suit themselves. I've already given my preliminary take on CV at What's Wrong with the World, and will have more to say after I've pondered CV more carefully than the spin doctors have. To me, though, the most interesting questions raised by any doctrinally significant Roman document concern how they affect the credibility of the claims the Catholic Magisterium makes for itself. I've often discussed those claims before, and I shall resume doing so here.

First, two caveats. I shall not attempt here to produce a good argument for the aforesaid claims. One can only do so much at once; and in any case I do not believe that any article of faith, precisely as such, can be established by an intellectually compelling argument—by which I mean an argument that, in addition to being (deductively or inductively) valid, contains only premises it would be irrational to reject. The best one can do is construct a cumulative-case argument showing that a given article of faith, including and especially one concerning the Magisterium, is logically consistent with the rest, coheres with the larger, pertinent body of received data, and illuminates both. Some have undertaken that project, but it is way beyond the scope of a blog—and given my need to earn a living, way beyond my book-writing capacity at the moment. More within my scope are the bad arguments against the claims the Magisterium makes for itself. There are plenty of those; but in my experience, the most challenging ones boil down to three types. In this post, I shall state and rebut the first type, as I understand it.

The other caveat is that, when I speak of 'the Magisterium', I do not mean only or even primarily the papal magisterium. In Catholic doctrine, certainly, at least the free consent of the pope is indispensable for the purpose of certifying conciliar definitions of dogma as binding on the whole Church; and if he sees fit, the pope can issue a dogmatic definition, and make it binding on the whole Church, unilaterally. But the latter is rare, and rightly so. The more common case is that of "general" councils defining dogmas; and more common still is the case of the episcopal college as a whole, in communion with the papacy, teaching a given doctrine with diachronic consensus from the beginning. According to Lumen Gentium §25, those too are instances of binding and irreformable teaching inasmuch as, when a given teaching is a case of either sort, it is infallibly set forth. So my account is meant to cover the "ordinary and universal" magisterium as well as the "extraordinary" magisterium of councils and popes. With that caveat understood, I move on to the first of the standard argument-types.

"Those who exercise the Magisterium are men. As such and thus to a man, they are fallible. Many have held and taught propositions which the Magisterium itself has later given up. And some have behaved abominably. Therefore, it is just common sense to insist they be held accountable in making their doctrinal judgments. But if the claims the Magisterium makes for itself are true, no such accountability is needed or called for. Therefore, said claims are incompatible with common sense."

Let's dispose of the easy points first. Since infallibility has never been said to entail impeccability, the fact that some bishops and popes have been quite peccable indeed is irrelevant as an objection to the doctrine that they are infallible under certain conditions. By the same token, infallibility is not a prerogative that men enjoy as men. Since only God is infallible by nature, infallibility is a divine gift to the Church that nobody deserves or can attain by their own efforts. Such a gift is also negative rather than positive: it does not entail that the irreformable pronouncements of the Magisterium are divinely inspired, or opportune, or even particularly well-formulated; it entails only that the Magisterium will never bind the Church definitively to a statement that is false.

With that out of the way, consider the objector's premise that "many have held and taught propositions which the Magisterium itself has later given up." That is true. But its relevance is too limited to serve the objectors' purpose. For the Magisterium has never claimed to be protected from error in everything it teaches; it claims infallibility only under certain conditions. The question the critics need to consider is whether the Magisterium has ever revoked or contradicted any doctrine which it understood to be irreformable because it met the conditions for having been infallibly taught; if there is even one such a case, that would be a decisive counterexample to the claims the Magisterium makes for itself.

Now by tradition, irreformability is said to apply only to what certain doctrines actually say, to what logically follows therefrom, and to the received understanding coextensive with those. As a Catholic, I am committed to holding that there is no case in which the Magisterium has repudiated such a doctrine. So I do—and I usually find that people concede that point. One can only generate a counter-example if one supposes that all doctrines must be interpreted to mean not merely what they say, and what logically follows therefrom, and how they are received as such, but also what some who exercise the Magisterium have meant beyond all that. For some such "interpretations" have indeed been revoked or contradicted; a good example is the historical development of the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus. But interpretations of doctrines which are not logically equivalent to what the doctrines actually say have never been said to be irreformable. Hence the cases in which such interpretations have been revoked or contradicted are not counterexamples to what the Magisterium claims.

But that's hardly the end of the objection. The most common reply to the defense just offered is to say that it renders the Catholic system plausible only as a self-enclosed "hermeneutical circle" without giving one a cogent reason to enter into the circle. That statement is true. But it has force as an objection only if the defense in question be offered as sufficient reason to accept the claims the Magisterium makes for itself: so offered, the "defense" would patently beg the question. But the aim of such a defense is more modest. It indicates that the Magisterium meets one condition it must meet if it is to be credible: that of self-consistency. It is surely necessary and worthwhile to show, for the sake of defending a given body of propositions, that it is internally consistent.

A bigger problem with the objection is how its advocates are supposed to answer two questions which, taken together, are by no means easy to answer: how is such "accountability" to be satisfactorily manifested, and in whose estimation?

Take the latter question first. If it be claimed that the Magisterium must be accountable to "the whole Church's" estimation of its claims, who relevantly counts as members of such a collectivity? All the baptized? Notoriously, that large group agrees on very little theologically, never mind the Magisterium; hardly anybody suggests that the sure reception of the deposit of faith rest on such a thin reed. The pastors of the faithful? Very well: the pastors of which church(es) other than the Catholic—and how can one answer that without begging the question? The consensus of scholars? Such a thing exists only concerning the question what, in many cases, the data are; but there is no consensus about the theological significance of such data, or at least none secure and perduring enough to make such a consensus a criterion of scholarly orthodoxy to which the Magisterium can, let alone should, be held "accountable." Nor, given the nature of scholars, is such a consensus likely to develop.

Which brings me to the first question. The most common and rhetorically convenient way of insisting that the Magisterium be accountable is to cite Scripture and Tradition as "sources" of divine revelation to which the Magisterium must be subordinate. Of course the Magisterium insists that it is subordinate to Scripture and Tradition (cf. Dei Verbum §8-§10); but it also claims that it is the sole "authentic" interpreter thereof. This does not mean that others cannot correctly interpret Scripture and/or Tradition; others often do, and the Magisterium often considers that. It means that only the Magisterium is divinely authorized to make any particular interpretation binding on all the faithful, and thus an article of faith as distinct from a sound opinion. To this, the objectors typically reply that Catholicism's rule of faith is, in effect, solum Magisterium rather than Scripture alone or in combination with Tradition: for the orthodox Catholic, Scripture and/or Tradition mean only what the Magisterium says they mean. And that in turn is supposed to mean that the Magisterium is unaccountable. But that objection is rather easily answered.

The Magisterium is limited by, and thus "accountable to," Scripture and Tradition in several ways. First, the latter circumscribe the subject-matter of the Magisterium's competence. The Magisterium does not claim competence to pronounce on matters other than the deposit of faith and morals, and which thus are not already addressed by either Scripture or Tradition. The latter are understood to contain the entire deposit of faith given "once for all to the holy ones." Second, and accordingly, the Magisterium does not see its "authentic" interpretations of Scripture and Tradition as supplying any information that Scripture and Tradition do not somehow and already contain. What the Magisterium does claim is that it is the normative heir to Christ's promise to send the Holy Spirit to "lead you into all truth" (John 16:13). That indeed is why we have Scripture, understood as the Old and New Testament together. The writings comprising the New Testament are products of the Church: they rely on Tradition for their very composition and content, and it is by Tradition at later stages that the authorities of the Church determined that only such-and-such writings, not others, are to be regarded as divinely inspired and inerrant. Only the ignorant dispute that. Accordingly, and third, on the Catholic understanding there can be no separating Scripture, Tradition, and the definitive judgments of the Magisterium. Both historically and in principle, the three stand or fall together as means of transmitting divine revelation; for according to the Magisterium, Scripture and Tradition together present "the Church"—i.e., the authorities of the Church—as the authentic interpreter of the truth handed on from the Apostles. Finally, and in the way indicated above, the Magisterium is bound to what it has definitively taught in the past as binding interpretations of Scripture and/or Tradition. Taken together, the four considerations above leave us with much more than solum Magisterium. Even by its own criteria, the Magisterium is far from free to say whatever it likes; and much of what it does say, by way of adjudicating disputes about interpreting Scripture and Tradition, depends on discernment of the sensus fidelium manifest through a variety of means.

That ought to be the end of the objection, but alas it is not. In my long experience debating this matter with educated folk of all three major Christian traditions, as well as of none at all, I have generally found that they want the impossible. Thus they argue that the Catholic doctrine of the Magisterium is credible only if it can be established on the basis of a rationally compelling argument from authorities independent of itself. But of course, if there were such independent authorities, then the Magisterium's understanding of its own relation to Scripture and Tradition would be unjustifiable. So if the present form of the objection were sound, the Magisterium would be justifiable only if unnecessary—and if it's unnecessary, then its claims for itself are false. Nifty. To be sure, calling out such a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" argument for what it is does not establish the Magisterium's credibility; but it does show that what the objectors require in this case would logically entail its suicide. The polite way of characterizing that would be to say that it begs the question.

That said, I am far from done with bad types of argument against the Magisterium. Another common one is that the Catholic, as an adherent of the Magisterium, is in no better an epistemic position than even the Protestant adherent of sola scriptura. Rebutting that argument will be the topic of my next post.

Independence Day

2009-07-04T16:43:00.005-05:00

Paul Cella and Lydia McGrew have posted excellent observations for today at W4. I have only one thing to add.

As Lydia implied, the United States remains the West's last best hope for preserving what makes Western civilization worth preserving. That would be recognizing, in Jefferson's phrase, "the laws of nature and of nature's God." What Peter Berger termed "ethical monotheism" is the basis for recognizing certain human rights as inherent and inalienable rather than bestowed by cultural evolution or political fiat. That recognition is essential for the preservation of liberty without sectarianism. We have struck a fine balance between ethical monotheism and sectarianism. As we confront the twin challenges of secular liberalism and jihad, let us not imperil our liberty by losing that balance.

That group thing again

2009-07-03T23:06:00.002-05:00

Many of my readers know that I used to be a co-author of the blog Pontifications, founded and edited by Fr. Al Kimel, which shut down in the summer of 2007. I loved that role for many reasons, one of which was that writing for a well-trafficked group blog afforded me the kind of visibility I need if I am to regain the professional status I once had. Last October, I founded Philosophia Perennis as a group blog for Catholic philosophers; yet, for spiritual reasons, I found I had to reduce my blogging in general for the next several months, posting occasionally only here. For the last few months I've been able to pick up my pace, mainly here, while making a few major posts at PP. Now, by divine providence, I have been accepted to become a co-author at the conservative-Christian blog What's Wrong with the World, which gets several times the traffic of either this blog or PP. So, for the time being, my posting will be mostly there, with cross-posts here and at PP.

My first major post at W4 went up this evening and is entitled "ID, the God of the gaps, and Metaphysics." I will cross-post it at PP tomorrow.

Petitionary prayer and miracles

2009-06-28T13:54:00.010-05:00

Today's Gospel reading in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite is about miraculous healings Jesus did in response to faith-filled requests. Most people react to such stories by asking why the divine and risen Lord doesn't do the same for the countless others who ask, in apparent faith, for the same sort of thing on behalf of themselves or loved ones. And I know firsthand that many have lost faith precisely because, after fervent and persistent prayers for such miracles, what they request does not happen. Atheists beat us over the head with that often. The latest instance in the blogosphere is this post by Heather McDonald of the "Secular Right" (H/T to Andrew Sullivan).

She writes:

I take it that believers do not ascribe such inconsistent results to capriciousness on God’s part, but rather to their own limited capacities to understand God’s ways: “Thy Will be done.” But why continue directing any psychic energy to a being so lacking in sympathetic correspondence to human needs and values. It will not do to say: “God does respond to our prayers, but in ways that we cannot fathom.” Saving a child from cancer and letting a child die from cancer cannot both be a sympathetic response to prayer; if we had wanted a stricken child to die in order to secure an earlier entry to heaven, we would have said so. And if premature death from cancer is such a boon, why doesn’t a loving God provide it to one and all?

Now believers can answer those questions in a self-consistent way. Before they can address McDonald's first and quite common question, they should begin with acknowledging the obvious.

Almost by definition, miracles involving tangible exceptions to the natural order must be rare. The very term 'miracle' comes from the Latin miraculum, meaning 'a marvel', and we don't marvel when things happen as the natural order would lead us to expect. We marvel only at the favorable exceptions. Second and more substantively, we cannot expect regular exceptions to the natural order, whether favorable or unfavorable. If we could, the natural order would cease to be the natural order; and not even the most fervent religious believers claim that God will destroy the natural order before Kingdom Come. Hence, not even believers really expect God to answer most prayers for miracles in the way the petitioners explicitly ask. Of course, many unbelievers object: "So much the worse for the natural order." That's really a way of posing the so-called "problem of evil" as an objection to classical theism. But such an objection has force only if it be assumed that our utility calculations are better than God's. Believers need not take that assumption seriously.

Nevertheless, defenders of the faith are not done demonstrating their self-consistency. For the most common rebuttal to the argument I've offered so far is to cite biblical passages such as today's Gospel. Jesus not only did healing miracles in response to faith-filled requests; he is generally taken to have assured believers that if our own requests are faith-filled, we can expect marvels from God in response. But not even the most devout petitioners are usually answered with the marvels they're actually seeking. So, if we take Jesus at his word, then the fact that the vast majority of such requests go unfulfilled should be taken as evidence that they weren't filled enough with faith. Or so the argument goes—and it isn't an argument offered only by skeptics. In some Christian quarters, mostly evangelical and pentecostal, people really believe that if they just believed hard enough, they'd get what they're asking for. So if they don't get it, they conclude that they didn't believe hard enough. That may well be true in this or that case; but if my argument in the previous paragraph is correct, it could not be true in the generality of cases. To believe it's true in the generality of cases is, I think, silly and destructive. For the most part, we cannot "believe" God into doing such things for us. That would be magic, and Christians are not supposed to be magicians. It could hardly be otherwise. How, then, is a believer to show that her faith is at least consistent with what Jesus is recorded as having said and done?

Not a few Christians, mostly mainline or conservative Protestants, believe that "the age of miracles" pretty much ended with the death of the last of the Apostles. For the purpose of such miracles was to signify the occurrence and meaning of the central event of divine self-disclosure: what theologians often call "the Christ-event." Now that divine revelation is definitive and complete, there is no need for a proliferation of healing miracles. The "ordinary means" of faith and personal conversion are enough for appreciating what Jesus' miracles signified: the tangible presence of the God-Man and the meaning of his main message, which is God's merciful and healing love for us. Once that message was got across by the Christ-event as recorded in the New Testament, the natural order could and should be left undisturbed.

There is some element of truth in that view—which I shall call the "cessationist" view (CV)—but I don't think it will ultimately do. For one thing, it is not the traditional Christian answer. For 1,500 years before the Protestant Reformation, Christians took for granted that healing and other miracles occurred surprisingly often in response to prayer—usually, petitions for the intercession of the saints with God. Devout Catholics and Orthodox still take that for granted. Indeed, by no means all Protestants today accept CV: the fastest-growing segments of Protestantism are just those whose adherents seek and expect miracles. It's easy to chalk that up to wishful thinking; but the fact is that CV has never been the prevailing view among Christians. The relative dearth of miracles today can be explained by the same reasons which explain the relative dearth of miracles generally. Of course CV is not entirely without merit. If Christianity is true, then we would expect more miracles from Jesus and the Apostles then in latter times. But it doesn't follow that we can expect none; nor do Christians in general believe there are none.

The only way, I believe, to preserve the traditional view's self-consistency is to show why the relative and necessary rarity of healing miracles since the time of Christ should not be taken as evidence against what Jesus promised to those with "faith." And one can do that only by pointing out that, assuming that Jesus' promise applies to his latter-day followers, he cannot usually answer prayers made today, in the spirit of the centurion or the woman with the hemorrhage, in the way that the petitioners want—at least not with anything like the frequency with which he found it expedient to do them with while still on earth. To do so would be to destroy the natural order that he himself wills to continue, and thus to "immanentize the Eschaton" before he's ready. So, if he does answer them favorably, that must be in some way other than what the petitioners are explicitly seeking.

This is where McDonald's first question becomes not just directly pertinent, but also applicable to petitionary prayer generally. She asks: "[W]hy continue directing any psychic energy to a being so lacking in sympathetic correspondence to human needs and values[?]" The answer is that God is not lacking in "sympathetic correspondence" to our needs, but wills to re-orient our values to align more closely with our needs—the chief of which is redemption, which requires faith. After the Christ-event and before the Eschaton, redemption does not usually consist in miraculous physical healing and, for reasons I've already given, could not. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen on occasion. It happens just often enough to constitute a ratio credendi for those already moved by grace to grasp the main point of such miracles. That point is, as Jesus said in response to a question raised about his restoring sight to the man blind from birth (John 9: 1-41): "to show forth God's mercy." But that is shown forth in other ways too: chiefly by the lives of those who have truly accepted divine mercy by means of repentance and faith.

Needless to say, that invites another objection implicit in McDonald's last question: if what God does, or fails to do, for one person is what's good for that person, why not for that other person too, who might well "need" it as much if not more? I shall call that the "arbitrariness" objection, or 'AO' for short.

The Christian answer to AO can only be that God's perspective is more unlike than like the one we naturally adopt. We cannot always or even often know how each of us as individuals will serve best as signs and instruments of God's redemption of the world. If we did, we would enjoy a perspective that we could not fully share even in heaven—even though the blessed in heaven presumably share more of it than anybody still in via. Accordingly, AO is a sign of lack of faith. But notice that miracles were never promised to those who lack faith. So, AO is not only misguided but self-defeating. By implicitly tasking God or believers with explaining God's methods, it precludes the very state of mind necessary for getting an answer that might otherwise be satisfactory. That is the lesson of Job.

Of course that leaves open a final, perennially vexing question: how do petitionary prayers influence God? According to classical theism, God's actions are eternal and unalterable, so that we cannot literally "change his mind." To that question, the only reasonable answer is this: God eternally and unalterably chooses, by lights infinitely greater than ours, how he will favorably answer prayer that he eternally and unalterably knows is offered in genuine faith. And in most cases since his appearance on earth, that will mean that people are "healed" in ways knowable only to the eyes of faith.

Archdiocese of Boston drops abortion-providing deal

2009-06-27T18:47:00.003-05:00

That's the story the Catholic blogosphere is abuzz about. I wrote about the impending scandal two weeks ago. At that time, there was no evidence that Cardinal O'Malley was going to back out. Now he has. What a relief to see that he has stopped trying to square a circle.

Thanks to people like Carol McKinley and Julie Brown for holding his feet to the fire. McKinley complains that O'Malley was "outsourcing his conscience" by referring the matter to the National Catholic Bioethics Center. But I think it more likely that he knew the correct decision already, and was simply using the NCBC as political cover for what will surely be a firestorm from the Left within his ranks.

Why the arguments for atheism are moral arguments, and why that matters

2009-06-20T12:02:00.011-05:00

At ST Ia Q2 A3, where Aquinas offers his well-known "five ways" of proving God's existence, he notes and replies to two objections. To paraphrase, the first is that "infinite goodness" is incompatible with the existence of "evil"; the second, that citing God is "superfluous" as an explanation for the world's existence. It's pretty evident that the problem of evil and the superfluity of God qua explanation are posed as the most common objections even today to classical theism. Aquinas presents them, in effect, as metaphysical objections and answers them accordingly. But I shall argue instead that they are, at bottom, moral objections. If I'm right, that has great significance for natural theology and apologetics.

My claim that people pose the problem of evil as a basically moral objection to classical theism ought to be uncontroversial. The most common way of pressing the objection is to argue that God's permitting some people to suffer horribly beyond their deserts, when he could prevent it, is immoral. That is taken to be incompatible with God's being perfectly good, a quality classical theists ascribe to God. Of course, another way to pose the problem of evil as an objection is to argue that, although a perfectly good God might well want to prevent such suffering, he is powerless to do so. That is taken to be incompatible with omnipotence, another attribute classical theists ascribe to God. But that way of pressing the objection is fairly easy to answer. Although an omnipotent God could well have created a world in which suffering does not far outstrip deserts, God has not done so; given the natural order God has willed, it is logically impossible to prevent such presumptively disproportionate suffering without divine intervention so regular as to destroy the natural order of things. And omnipotence neither need nor should be thought to include the ability to do the logically impossible. So much is, or ought to be, obvious. Of course, the standard reply to that defense is to argue that God is immoral for creating and sustaining such a natural order of things in the first place when, as granted, God have done otherwise. But that's essentially the same as the first way of pressing the problem of evil as an objection to classical theism.

My claim that the superfluity objection is also, at bottom, a moral one is much more controversial. Most of what follows provides my argument for it.

Metaphysical (as distinct from methodological) naturalists typically hold that the sorts of explanation of the world's existence proffered by classical theists—chiefly, by means of a posteriori cosmological and teleological reasoning—cannot do the sort of work that explanations in general are supposed to do. If so, then citing God as creator and/or designer of the world fails to explain anything; therefore, there is no reason to hold that God as explicans exists. But what does it mean to say that theistic explanation of the world's existence doesn't do the sort of work that explanations are supposed to do?

Classical theists should not, and the most intelligent among them do not, argue that presenting God as creator and/or designer does better explanatory work than the natural sciences. Those sciences have their own explanatory aims and canons which, though not immune to revision, remain exactly as they are whether or not classical theism is true. The theistic argument is, rather, that citing God as explicans does a different sort of explanatory work than natural science. The naturalist reply is that no such alleged "explanation" should be counted as explanation. What is the argument for that reply?

To explain something is to account for why it thus and not otherwise. In order do that, one must show that the explicandum would have been different if the explicans had been different. But classical theism does not claim that the world would have been different if God did not exist; the claim is that the world would not exist at all if God did not exist. That requires holding, among other things, that the world can and should be conceived as a certain totality which counts as an explicandum, such that only the action of something not comprised by that totality could account, in some non-trivial way, for why just that totality exists. But it will not do to characterize said totality simply as the physical universe studied by natural science, even at some hypothetical state before the Big Bang. For all we know, the primordial universe might have been the product of something else which could not qualify as the God of classical theism, but which might turn out to be identifiable by means of natural science—if not our science, then somebody else's. No, the totality that divine activity supposedly explains must be the totality-of-things-that-happen. Call that 'T'. Granted we do not know its full extent, T certainly exists. But such a totality, the naturalist would say, cannot admit of non-trivial explanation. We can explain its existence simply by noting that each of its constituents exist; but that would be trivial, and certainly not what the classical theist is after. And the reason we cannot have what the theist is after is that the theist cannot say what would have been different about T if God did not exist. T remains just as it is, whatever it is, whether or not God exists. Hence, goes the argument, citing divine activity to explain T's existence does not and could not really explain anything. There is no non-trivial explanation of T's existence. As Laplace said, there is no need of the God-hypothesis. It is superfluous.

From this point of view, it will not do to cite some version of "the principle of sufficent reason" as a premise in an argument for the claim that something not comprised by T accounts for T's existence as a totality. There's already "reason enough" for T's existence as a totality: that of each of its constitutents. But that is hardly germane. What the theist must do instead is show that T is the sort of entity whose existence calls for another sort of explanation altogether. Yet how is the theist to do that? The only way he can do it is to show that, whatever the extent of T as a totality, its constituents cannot, either individually or collectively, account for the general causal regularities that must be cited in some explanation of how things happen as they do—i.e., the constituents of T cannot account for the "laws of nature." But that sort of explanation would have to show that such laws would have been different if God as creator and/or designer did not exist. And that in turn would have to cite some sort of causal regularity. But given that such regularities are supposed to be part of what's being explained, such an explanation cannot qualify as an explanation at all.

It might seem that the way for the theist to begin countering that line is to point out that it premises scientism: the thesis that only what can be known scientifically can be known at all. He can then go on to argue that there is no good reason to believe scientism. And he would be quite right. Humans have always known various things non-scientifically, and no scientific argument for scientism can be given. But that will not suffice by itself. For the naturalist can always argue that, even if scientism is false, his point about explanation remains untouched. Even if there are things natural science cannot explain, and thus cannot know, that's no reason to believe that T's existence can be explained in some other way. Unless and until the theist can show that his "explanation" of T's existence does what explanations do, he hasn't explained anything.

As I've suggested, the debate is really about the nature of explanation. It is evident that there are successful explanations in the contexts of ordinary life and natural science, but it is by no means evident that there can be a kind of explanation which doesn't tell us how things would have gone differently if the explicans did not exist. To be sure, the theist must say that, if God did not exist, then T would not either—a conditional statement which, if true, would be a non-trivial truth. But that doesn't tell us that things would have been different if God did not exist; it only tells us that there would have been no "things" to be either the same or different if God did not exist. Absent some account of explanation which shows that such a peculiar result can function as explanations do, the theist has not established that he's explained anything. Nor will it do for the theist to insist that T is the sort of thing whose existence is explicable; for the only "sorts" of things we are familiar with are the sorts of things already comprised by T.

The only honest way for the theist to proceed is to argue that the question "Why does T exist?" is meaningful in such a way that one could reasonably entertain a non-trivial answer to it. That would show that we cannot rule out T's existence being explicable in terms of something which T does not comprise. And the only way to develop such an argument is to show that (a) one cannot rule out that T's existence embodies an intention, because (b) intentional explanations need not be thought reducible to causal explanations, which perforce cite natural regularities. That kind of argument has been given from time to time. In my hoary PhD thesis, I developed along such lines a book-length argument that it's more reasonable to allow for a unitary explicans of T's existence than to rule out the possibility of such an explicans on epistemological grounds. I still would argue to that effect.

As I've discovered over the years, however, the naturalist objection to that move is an essentially moral one. In ordinary life, natural science, and especially in formal disciplines such as logic and mathematics, there are reliable, agreed-upon methods for evaluating explanations as successful or unsuccessful. Prima facie at least, there are no such methods in natural theology—a discipline that not even the majority of religious believers find helpful. Given as much, naturalists typically argue that one ought not to expect people to find any of the putative explanations of natural theology cogent as explanations. Expecting people to do so is, in fact, morally defective. For such "explanations" necessarily transcend the sorts of considerations that it's reasonable to count as evidence; expecting people to go beyond the evidence in forming their beliefs is expecting what's unreasonable; and expecting from people what's unreasonable is a sign of disreputable motives that are themselves all too evident in the history of religion.

To judge from the recent literature of the "new atheism," which is really the old atheism with shoddier arguments, that's the kind of objection, other than that from the problem of evil, which motivates people to be atheists. I have no doubt, of course, that some atheists are such because they very much don't want to consider the implications for their lives if Christianity or some other form of classical theism is true. But that only serves to supply theists with a moral argument against atheism that is too ad hominem to be worth pressing. The real interest of the moral arguments against theism is that they steer the debate into a channel where the theist is on firmer ground. What is that ground?

Regarding the problem of evil, the theist can and ought to argue that the atheist has no moral legs to stand on. If a given atheist is an emotivist or some other sort of non-cognitivist in moral philosophy, he has no reason to believe that there are objectively binding moral norms which God fails to satisfy. If a given atheist is a utilitarian or some other sort of consequentialist in moral philosophy, he has no reason to believe that God's utility calculations, if there is a God, are inferior to his own. If a given atheist is some sort of deontologist in moral philosophy, he must show several things: that the moral norms he believes bind humans absolutely do so even though there is no God; that even if there were a God, those norms would bind God in pretty much the same fashion as us; and that God, if there were a God, cannot be said to observe them. All that is, at the very least, a tall order.

Regarding explanation and evidence, the atheist needs to show more than merely that it's unreasonable to expect people in general to find classical-theist natural theology persuasive. That people in general do not find such theology persuasive is easily accounted for by factors other than the objective quality of its arguments. Most people lack the happy combination of time, talent, and education to study and evaluate such arguments, so that whatever the reasons this-or-that person might have for believing in God, they cannot be faulted for leaving natural theology alone. For that reason, classical-theist philosophers don't expect most people to follow and evaluate their arguments. So the debate is really among philosophers, and the question whether one ought to go beyond what's generally recognized as evidence is a debate in moral philosophy and psychology.

About that debate, I shall conclude by noting that the atheist has a lot more work to do than simply pointing out that something called "religion" violates his moral norms. There are many different forms of religion, and some are more capable of moral self-reformation than others. But what is such "moral self-reformation" supposed to amount to? Before a charge of immorality can be made to stick, there has to be antecedent and common agreement about what morality requires. A person who wants to press a moral argument against theism, but who believes that the universe is morally indifferent and that no transcendent lawgiver underwrites morality, is burdened with showing that the moral norms he upholds are objectively binding as such. For unless and until he can do that, his moral arguments against theism can do no more than beg the question.

Patching up the seamless garment

2009-06-12T15:56:00.009-05:00

With the appointment of Alexia Kelley, until now executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG) to a Department of Health and Human Services headed by the shameless Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama Administration is not merely paying off prominent Catholic supporters. It is seeking systematically to co-opt those Catholics who still buy into the "seamless-garment" approach to social issues named as such, and pioneered, by the late, widely loved Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of...ahem, Chicago. For the moment it's working politically; but intellectually, there has been regress not progress among Catholics.

Since the late 1990s, the US bishops have on the whole been abandoning the seamless-garment approach. With increasing clarity, they have insisted on assigning greater weight to combating certain practices called "intrinsic evils" by the Magisterium, such as abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage, than on promoting certain social goods, such as universal health care and humane immigration policy, which reasonable Catholics can differ about how and how much to promote. That shift of emphasis is only logical given the clear content of Church teaching. But President Obama's having won the election with almost 54% of the Catholic vote has re-energized Catholic progressives to patch up a seamless garment that's become rather tattered. If only to vary my intellectual exercise routine, I had been hoping to hear fresh arguments from them. But the patching process exhibits precisely the same shoddy reasoning so long characteristic of the Catholic left. Herein I shall discuss two examples.

The first is the performance of Pepperdine University law professor Douglas Kmiec, a prominent Obama supporter, at a recent debate with Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and founder of the American Principles Project. (You can watch the Windows Media video here; at about an hour and twenty minutes, it's long for those who don't enjoy this sort of thing, and too short for those who do.) For a Catholic intellectual who once sported conservative credentials, Kmiec's arguments are remarkably weak. The following account by attendee Michael J. New, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama and a visiting fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, sums up the debate accurately:

...the best word to describe Doug Kmiec would be evasive. He tried to argue that other issues trumped sanctity of life issues when voting. He tried to make the case that the new stem cell regulations were part of a reasonable compromise. He said that denying holy communion to Catholic politicians who support legal abortion was counterproductive. Finally, he argued that science has not come to a consensus about the sanctity of human life. He was all over the place and on no issue was he particularly persuasive.

Interestingly, Kmiec did not spend much time talking about abortion trends. He briefly claimed (wrongly) that abortions increased during the presidency of the first President Bush. He briefly cited the decline in the abortion rate that occurred during the Clinton administration. But he gave credit to the strong economy. While this is partly true, he did not mention state level pro-life laws. At least he did not claim welfare spending caused the 1990s abortion decline.

Professor George, on the other hand succeeded in describing vivid contrasts between President Obama and the pro-life movement. Professor George described in great detail Obama's refusal to support incremental pro-life laws and his administration's efforts to fund abortion both in DC and in other countries. He also found it telling that while the Obama administration wants to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, they never express an interest in lowering the number of abortions. Overall the Obama administration does not think that fetal life is worthy of legal protection which makes finding common ground very difficult, if not impossible.

Overall, Professor George was concise, hard hiting and made his points well throughout the course of the debate.

Kmiec's position is the same I have heard from many Catholic progressives over the years: given political and scientific reality, the best Catholics can do in the public square by way of promoting the sanctity of life is to cease trying to prohibit the killing of embryos and fetuses, and instead back public policies which will presumably reduce people's motivation for violating the sanctity of life. Those policies turn out, of course, to be remarkably similar to those of the Democratic Party on the full range of relevant issues. But political opportunism is natural. What's unnatural is how many people are taken in by the rationalizations for it.

Much of the progressives' case consists in arguments from alleged empirical fact. It is constantly asserted, for example, that reducing poverty by means of social programs will reduce abortion, so that, given how entrenched the Roe regime is likely to remain, the most effective means of reducing abortion is to reduce poverty. Now it stands to reason that reducing poverty would reduce some women's motivation for having abortions; the abortion rate did go down during the Clinton years, when the economy was strong. But so did teenage pregnancy; and it might be that whatever explained that development also explained the abortion reduction. Moreover, there is no evidence that laws restricting or discouraging abortion, which many states have, would not reduce abortion at least as much if not more than poverty reduction. Kmiec failed to address such considerations. Moreover, he offered no defense of the Administration's desire to repeal the long-standing Hyde Amendment forbidding the use of federal funds for abortion. It stands to reason that subsidizing abortion only encourages abortion; so, even if reducing poverty reduces abortion, making abortion a standard feature of subsidized health care is all too liable to cancel out the reduction as well as violate the consciences of many health-care workers. Kmiec did not address that issue either. Indeed, he had no answer to George's amply documented charge that Obama, who has alluded on occasion to the worthiness of reducing the "need" (!) for abortion, lacks genuine interest in actually reducing abortions.

What Kmiec said about the lack of scientific consensus is trivially true and substantively false. Of course there is no scientific consensus about the sanctity of life; for science never has and never will have anything to say about such matters. But that doesn't affect what science can and does tell us: that human embryos are individuals genetically distinct from their parents. In conjunction with Prof. Patrick Lee, Prof. George has made abundantly clear how that fact is relevant to both the abortion and the embryonic-stem-cell debate; see here and here. The question is not whether the embryo is a human being; science establishes that it is. The question is whether human beings who have not yet developed a certain kind and degree of consciousness are persons, and thus subjects of rights, beginning with the right not to be killed for the convenience of others. That is an essentially philosophical question, which one needn't profess any particular religion in order to advocate answering in the affirmative. So, while the pro-life position cannot be deduced from scientific knowledge, such knowledge can and should be used as evidence to support it.

From a strictly Catholic standpoint, Kmiec's argument for allowing pro-Roe Catholic politicians to receive the Eucharist did not engage the actual canon-law argument for denying them the Eucharist. Given his profession, that is unconscionable. Before he became Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the Catholic Church's supreme court, Archbishop Raymond Burke made an airtight case that Canon 915 calls for bishops to do just what Kmiec says they should not do about this matter. That's probably a major reason why the Pope made him prefect. Unfortunately, only a minority of American bishops agree; but even the most influential representative of the majority, Cardinal Donald Weurl of Washington, doesn't really address Burke's argument. The position Wuerl defends is simply this: "the canonical approach" doesn't "change hearts," so canon law be damned. Now for one thing, that would serve just as well as an argument against excommunication for any offense whatsoever, thus undermining the very concept of worthiness to receive the Eucharist. And aside from the impropriety of such a position for an archbishop, Wuerl's is an empirically-based argument unsupported by evidence—for the perfectly obvious reason that the approach it rejects hasn't been widely adopted. Even if being denied communion didn't turn out to change many politicians' hearts, it could be a powerful witness to many others at a time when the bishops' moral credibility has not recovered from the sex-abuse scandal. Perhaps that's partly why support for the hard-line position has been slowly increasing; the latest to back Burke's stance is his newly-installed successor in the See of St. Louis.

The second example of seamless-garment patching I want to discuss is this post by Stephen Schneck on the CACG website, which criticizes more general arguments from Prof. George and Justice Antonin Scalia. It is a classic instance of political obfuscation.

During a speech at Villanova in the fall of 2007, Scalia remarked: “Just as there is no ‘Catholic’ way to cook a hamburger, I am hard pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would come out differently if I were not Catholic.” In a speech given at CUA a few weeks ago, George "proposed that [the] institutional Church should refrain from promoting public policies except when the issue at hand is a matter of intrinsic evil." Schneck criticizes such remarks as instances of an attitude he sees in Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who concluded his widely-read 1984 book After Virtue with the following, even more widely quoted passage:

And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of the predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

Schneck calls that conclusion "silly," an instance of arguing for a "retreat into sects of so-called pure Christianity." To hear him tell it, conservative Catholic intellectuals are now thinking in the same vein:

If progressives are in charge in America, the thinking goes, then the truly faithful should withdraw from everyday political life, so as to deny any legitimacy to “immoral” opponents. Instead of cooperating where there is common ground, we should rather hunker in faithful Catholic bastions, catapulting morality at barbarians beyond the gate and firing up the inquisition for apostates found within the walls. Let’s name this mood “After Virtue Retreatism..."

Such thinking, says Schneck, is opposed to the constant teaching of the Church about the need for political engagement, especially as developed in Gaudium et spes.

Now I can't speak with confidence about MacIntyre's interest, or lack thereof, in political engagement. Given his age and temperament, I doubt he's all that interested. But Schneck's criticism of Scalia and George is as silly as he believes MacIntyre's thoughtful conclusion to be.

Scalia's remark was never intended to suggest that the Catholic faith should not affect the values and priorities of Catholic politicians. If only as an ardent pro-lifer, Scalia does let his personal beliefs affect what he believes ought to be the law. We all let our personal moral beliefs do that. Rather, his remark was intended to suggest that the Catholic faith should not affect his understanding, as a SCOTUS justice, of what the Constitution actually says and means. Insofar as it presents universal values and norms which can be seen as such by human reason, the Catholic faith cannot but influence a thinking Catholic's view of what legislation and policy ought to be. But that is perfectly compatible with Scalia's view that constitutional jurisprudence should not consist in determining what the Constitution, and a fortiori legislation or policy, ought to be, as distinct from what the Constitution actually says and means. In effect, Scalia has bent over backwards not to adopt sectarian assumptions in his approach to jurisprudence. That is quintessentially American, not slyly Benedictine.

On the other hand, Catholic progressives insist that some tenets of Catholic social teaching ought to influence the interpretations of Catholic jurists. Some, but not of course others—such as those on procreation and marriage. What Schneck is doing, in effect, is depicting Scalia as a sectarian and a bad Catholic for being a constitutional strict-constructionist, when in fact Schneck is more sectarian than Scalia and at least as selective in the political weight he assigns to various tenets of Catholic social teaching. Such performative self-contradiction sells well in today's Washington, precisely because it is a classic case of political ideology displacing theology. But that is Schneck's problem, not Scalia's.

Schneck's treatment of Prof. George misconstrues the latter's point so thoroughly that one suspects disingenuousness. George holds that the political role of the Catholic hierarchy should be restricted to efforts to restrain what all Catholics are bound to believe are not only heinous but intrinsic social evils—for example, abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem-cell research. That's because, according to Catholic teaching, there is no room for reasonable disagreement among Catholics that such practices are grave social evils in themselves, and should never be cooperated with regardless of any good consequences that might be thought to come from doing so. On the other hand, progressives want "the institutional Church" (i.e., the hierarchy) to push for laws and public policies that, while quite possibly promoting certain broad goods emphasized in Catholic social teaching, are really particular means of promoting those goods. And they want the hierarchy to do that while forgoing direct efforts to limit the grave social evils mentioned above. But Catholics can reasonably disagree about the wisdom of adopting this or that means of attaining what they should agree are social goods; as John Paul II made clear in Evangelium Vitae and Veritatis Splendor, there is no similar room for disagreement about the need to use all available political means to prevent what is intrinsically and heinously evil.

Schenk argues that George, in adopting such a position, is calling for a retreat into world-escaping sectarianism. But George's point is not that Catholics should refrain from political and personal action to help the poor, the sick, and the outcast, or to limit war and capital punishment (even though those latter two are not intrinsic evils). Many Catholics do engage in such action; many should; and George never suggested that they should not. His point is that the Catholic hierarchy should avoid pronouncing on policy questions on which it lacks special competence, and focus instead on doing what they can to limit practices whose intrinsic moral evil they are competent as clerics to know and proclaim. That leaves debatable questions of policy to competent laity while upholding moral norms which, from the standpoint of Catholic doctrine, are non-negotiable.

One argument for that position is strictly "in-house" and pastoral. If the bishops' political statements stayed within their true competence, political polarization among Catholics would not be as great as it is after several generations of the bishops' addressing what's truly debatable with as much emphasis as what isn't. But the other argument arises from understanding the objective importance of the non-negotiables for society at large.

Catholics can endlessly debate, for example, how reconcile the need to treat immigrants humanely with the need to control our borders and do justice to taxpayers. We can endlessly debate how much military expenditure is necessary for our security, whether this-or-that intervention meets just-war criteria, or whether there can be conditions under which the death penalty is justified. We can endlessly debate what are the most efficient and just means of ensuring access to adequate health-care for all citizens. But it's usually unclear how much our society's future hinges on the precise way in which such questions are resolved politically. By contrast, there can be no debate among Catholics about whether abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, or same-sex "marriage" form striking features of the "culture of death." They do and we know it. As the impending demographic winter of the West indicates, it is the culture of death as a whole which poses the gravest threat to our civilization's future. Hence, George is right to stress their overriding political importance from the Church's viewpoint. Without prejudice to the need of bishops in some other countries to address different conditions, the American hierarchy best serves our polity, as well as the Church, by generally limiting its public-policy statements to combating the culture of death. That position is not a "retreat" into an enclave of purity. It casts no doubt on the need for Catholics to act as morally responsible citizens across the full range of issues. It simply recognizes the ecclesial and social desirability of the hierarchy's stressing only what it's best suited to stress.

There are only two possible explanations why a Catholic would call that stance "After-Virtue Retreatism." One would be that he simply disagrees with the Magisterium about the relative weight to assign various tenets of her social teaching. From that point of view, the problem with conservative Catholics is simply that they agree with the pope and the bishops about the social importance of the points in contention. But thinking with the pope and the bishops on such points is only sectarian if the doctrines themselves are sustainable only in light of divine revelation rather than of human reason. That's not a consistent position for a Catholic to take; for the pro-life and pro-marriage points in contention are presented as items of the natural law. Thus, unlike laws meant to apply to Catholics as such, they apply universally if at all and can be supported in non-Catholic terms. Moreover, if progressive Catholics insist they are free qua Catholics to dissent from the teaching of the Church on such matters, then they have deprived themselves of any logical basis for criticizing conservatives as bad Catholics for dissenting on other matters.

The other explanation would be that progressives, while agreeing with the Magisterium about the intrinsic evil of abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and same-sex "marriage," see such issues as lost causes in contemporary society and hence not worth the energy needed for the political opposition that the hierarchy and conservative Catholics present. That view is fairly common, and not just among progressives. If it's correct, then people like Prof. George are just tilting at windmills, which is more about self-satisfaction and group solidarity than genuine political engagement. But such a criticism calls, in effect, for retreating into a sectarian enclave about culture-of-death issues, and only engaging politically on other social issues about which the Church has no distinctive contribution to make anyhow. That would call for a bifurcation between faith and social action—which is precisely what is supposed to be wrong with "retreatism," and which is precisely what progressives see themselves as avoiding. So, such an explanation would be at best paradoxical.

Regardless of which explanation holds in Schenck's case, therefore, he has no effective argument that conservative Catholics such as Scalia and George are sectarian "retreatists." But I suspect that the first explanation is the operative one. Progressives such as Schenck just don't think they need to heed the hierarchy about the nature and importance of the culture-of-death issues. They see concern with such issues as sectarian because they regard the Church's position on them, unlike her position on their issues of choice, as justifiable only in theological terms they would reject. So the debate is not really about the desirability of Catholic political engagement in general; it's about which issues are worthy of political engagement. And that debate reflects a more fundamental one in moral theology about the truth of the Church's teaching on the culture-of-death issues. If progressive Catholics would simply admit that and proceed accordingly, we could avoid the sort of political posturing Schenck permits himself and address the real issue.

Without presuming to assess the late Cardinal Bernardin's original motives for the seamless-garment approach, which are no longer relevant anyhow, I have long suspected that said approach, as adopted by most progressive Catholics, is simply a cover for theological dissent and political ideology. When it comes to moral questions of political significance, most progressive Catholics are leftists first and Catholics second. The teaching of the Church is thus assessed in terms of a prior ideological agenda: when that teaching supports the agenda, it is believed; when it doesn't, it isn't. The Catholic right is sometimes guilty of that too, but not to quite the same extent. That's the reality American Catholics need to confront and purge; for that, we need fasting and prayer, which would foster the humility needed to put the Faith before ideology. Unfortunately, the ascent of Catholic progressives under the Obama Administration is already causing them to present a tattered, poorly patched garment as seamless. And so instead of a common pursuit of the truth, we will have more polarization and posturing.

An archbishop in the abortion business

2009-06-09T17:10:00.005-05:00

According to Carol McKinley, a Catholic blogger from Boston, Cardinal Seán O'Malley, the Archbishop of that city, is now in the abortion business. Her evidence consists mostly of extensive quotations from the website of Celticare, a new "joint venture" in which the Archdiocese's own health-care agency, Caritas Christi, is one of the two partners, the other being Centene Corporation. The facts seem pretty damning.

Since O'Malley must surely know of this, either he doesn't care or he does care and has some plausible defense to offer. Of course, that's assuming he cares enough to offer such a defense. I am willing to make that assumption because my impressions of him, from both news stories and Boston-area friends, have been positive until now. It's easy to think the worst of a man in charge of a diocese that was the epicenter of a decades-long scandal, has been hemorrhaging members and parishes, and belongs to what is arguably the most liberal state in the Union. I am not yet ready to think the worst. So I await the defense.

Carol, on the other hand, is awaiting a disciplinary response from the Vatican. I'm not sure that will come, at least not publicly, in a way that will have visible effect. Caritas' contract with Centene may be written in such a way that the Archdiocese cannot bow out without huge loss at a time when it's already reeling financially. If so, then the Vatican may just accept such defense as O'Malley is willing to offer. But maybe there is no defense. In that case, the Vatican may just end up forcing O'Malley's hand and making the Archdiocese bite the financial bullet. That would probably be O'Malley's downfall, paving the way for a successor to preside over the ensuing disaster. Boston's penance is far from over in any case.

This is going to be interesting. I'd appreciate any updates.

Living the Trinity and swimming the Tiber

2009-06-07T17:53:00.006-05:00

Among Westerners these days, it has become commonplace to identify oneself as "spiritual but not religious." When people repeat that slogan, they generally mean to affirm some sort of relationship with a Higher Power apart from, and often in contradistinction to, institutionally embodied religion. Thus it is assumed that something called "the Church" obscures more than it transmits the most important truths about the scheme of things. But of course, if there is such a thing as divine revelation, as each of the Abrahamic religions claim, then its content cannot be merely a matter of personal opinion. Either it is reliably and publicly identifiable in authoritative terms, or it is not identifiable as divine revelation at all, but only as a set of data—legendary, historical, and speculative—about which various opinions can be entertained. Even Hindus recognize that much. After a long eclipse of dogma, many educated Christians are rediscovering it too. The latest to catch my attention is C of E priest Fr. Jeffrey Steel, who has just announced that he is "swimming the Tiber." I want to connect what he's done with my favorite dogma of the Faith: the Trinity.

The dogma of the Trinity expresses that infinite, bedrock Reality from which everything else, even the Incarnation, is derived: a communion of persons who are each the same God. To us, that can only seem paradoxical; we cannot expect ever to "comprehend" it, to "wrap our minds round" it, in terms of something else; like St. Patrick or St. Augustine, we can only approach it cognitively with analogies whose inadequacy quickly becomes apparent. That's because there is no more fundamental reality in terms of which the Trinity can be explained; rather, its activity explains everything else. But its life, timeless yet dynamic, is what we are called to live as, verily, "partakers of the divine nature." So the best path to the Trinity is to accept its reality by humble submission to the Church founded by Christ; to worship it in awe, which also requires humility; and to live as Christ the Lord would have us live: loving ourselves and one another as we are loved, which requires suffering. As the New Testament indicates, we are to do so as members of that communion of persons called the Church: the Mystical Body of Christ. And so the question becomes: what is "the" Church founded by Christ? Only when we have found the Church and joined her do the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit abide in us as fully as they will. It is thus that we are "saved," drawn out of darkness into God's marvelous light.

Yet for the reason already adumbrated, many would reject the question: What is "the" Church? They think of churches as essentially political associations of the like-minded; hence, there are only churches one might find, or fail to find, congenial as loci of opinion and mutual support. On the purely human level, such a view is all too plausible. But judging by what Fr. Jeffrey has said in his post, that's exactly the operative ecclesiology that he is fleeing. As I understand his journey, it had become apparent to him that there is such a thing as "the" Church and that the Anglican Communion, as an umbrella over conflicting views on fundamental points of doctrine, could not credibly claim to be a true, particular church within the larger communion of "the" Church. As as another Tiber-swimmer, Fr. Al Kimel, once wrote: "A church which does not claim to be the Church, outside of which there is no salvation, is not the Church founded by Jesus Christ." The Anglican Communion has, historically, understood itself to be at most a "branch" of the Church; but for Fr. Jeffrey and many others, the recent history of that communion calls even that claim into question. A church which recognizes no doctrinal authority other than a "consensus" identifiable by scholarship and subject to reversal by allegedly new things done by the Spirit cannot reliably transmit the "faith once given" to the saints—nor, indeed, eternal life. It cannot present divine revelation as anything more than a set of data about which various opinions can be entertained and should be tolerated. Such a church is not an authoritative vessel and teacher of truth, the Mystical Body of Christ which shares in his authority as her Head.

The Apostles understood Jesus to say: "All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth" (Matthew 28:18). That authority came from the Father. Before he ascended back to the Father, Jesus gave a share in that authority to the Church (John 20:22) by breathing the Holy Spirit on the Apostles. That is why he could say to them and their successors: "Whoever hears you, hears me" (Luke 10:16). The Trinity is thus what gives the Church her auctoritas and her potestas. The life of the Trinity is what the Church exists to insert us into. As we celebrate bedrock reality as loving communion, let us celebrate all who, like Fr. Jeffrey, come to recognize and celebrate the Church as that Body through which we are invited to share that communion.

Gloria Patri, per Filium, in Spiritu Sancto!

The suicide of the West: a proposition

2009-06-01T19:41:00.001-05:00

That's the title of a book published by National Review co-founder James Burnham in 1964. I read it when I was in high school; and though it was primarily about the Cold War, the idea that anti-anti-Communism represented the hatred of left-wing intellectuals for their own, Western civilization stuck with me. Of course Communism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own irrationality; with my exquisite timing, I wrote a few modest pieces for NR just before that happened. But I now think Burnham was more prescient than even he realized.

With Communism all but gone as a viable system, the essence of hard-leftism has emerged as hatred of all that is necessary to foster and sustain a healthy, free society. The feminist branch of hard-leftism, with its disparagement of men in general and, in particular, of accomplished women who don't toe the leftist line, is all about destroying the family. If the statistics on divorce, single parenthood, and birth rates are any indication, it has had considerable success,. The economic branch of hard leftism is all about rewarding the feckless with money forced out of those who produce real wealth. The foreign-policy branch of hard leftism is all about appeasing our sworn enemies rather then fighting them implacably and defeating them. Such tendencies, if allowed to intensify, are incompatible with the survival of any civilization that harbors them, let alone Western civilization.

Why would the most politically and scientifically advanced civilization in history, one with Judaeo-Christian roots, do that to itself? The irrationality of it leads me to think that only a spiritual explanation will do. The spiritual vacuum left by secularism is being filled with Satan, who desires our destruction. It's that simple. He has his dupes on the hard right too, but they are thoroughly disreputable and hence aren't much cause for worry. The real problem is the hard-left dupes.

They oppose racism and sexism, all the while becoming reverse racists and sexists themselves. They champion "science" while ostracizing scientists who come to politically incorrect conclusions. They champion the little guy while insisting on leaving the littlest guys of all helpless before the violence of mothers who do not want them. They champion sexual autonomy, with "consent" the only moral criterion, while forging an ever-more intrusive nanny state in almost every other area. They uphold an abstract moral relativism while dogmatizing their own transient values as universal and self-evident. Such contradictions signify the confusion of hell itself, and they are becoming increasingly prevalent.

Barring forceful divine intervention, the suicide of the West is inevitable.

Must thinking about sex be an oxymoron?

2009-05-18T16:16:00.020-05:00

No, but sometimes it seems so. There's usually little sound thinking on the topic, and even when there is, it gets drowned out by gaffes, sound bites, kvetching, and plain old embarassment.

At the moment, Poland and the United States seem to have something in common beyond their geopolitical alliance: Catholics who feel the need to glorify conjugal sex. Many Americans have now become aware of Pope John Paul the Great's "theology of the body" through the recent, double-edged Nightline interview with TOB's chief popularizer, Christopher West. Until now, TOB has been the preserve of a small minority of American Catholics who are theologically orthodox but cannot be classified as "traditionalists." Their opponents usually describe them derisively as "neo-Caths." Across the pond, the small minority of European Catholics who take official Church teaching about sexuality seriously have been made familiar with TOB by the Rev. Ksawery Knotz's new guide entitled Sex As You Don't Know It: For married couples who love God. That book, which I had time only to leaf through in the library, seems to me a much-needed updating of the old "marriage manuals" sometimes given to couples of my parents' generation. On the other hand, the best thing I can say about the West interview is that all publicity is good publicity. I agree with the critiques of his presentation offered here and here by unquestionably sound Catholic thinkers. The curious thing, though, is that both West and Knotz have sparked misunderstanding and therefore criticism of TOB from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. That is rather typical of all things Catholic these days. I think it opportune to defend TOB while, at the same time, giving the critics their due.

The basic problem TOB advocates face is a prejudice common to both ecclesial and secular culture in the West: that wanting good sex does not mix with authentic Christian spirituality. The general assumption seems to be that pursuing sexual pleasure, even within marriage, runs counter to the love of God as understood by the Great Tradition of Christianity. Unbelievers have no more trouble than some believers in seeing that "the flesh" wars against "the spirit" (Gal 5:17). This topic is one of the central salients in spiritual combat, as priests who hear the confessions of males know all too well. Its also being the most widely discussed is not altogether unreasonable from any standpoint. If only because of the effects of original sin, the deadly sin of lust is common and even manifests itself in marriages. Like any other deadly sin, lust is incompatible with the love of God and neighbor, even if the neighbor happens to be one's spouse. It doesn't even take faith to know that the line between lust and healthy sexual desire is quite porous. So the notion that one should strive to be both good in bed and an orthodox Catholic seems ludicrous to unbelievers and disaffected Catholics as well as to many traditional believers.

But all that only tells us what is the case. The purpose of TOB is to discern more fully God's original plan for human sexuality, and thus to tell us what can and ought to be the case. It can and ought to be the case that sexual relations between spouses both express and foster their genuine, spiritual love for one another, what the late pope called their "complete, mutual self-gift." In that context, their sexual pleasure becomes a medium for, rather than an obstacle to, the love of a God who has given us the great gift of sexuality for the sake of profound interpersonal communion. That such a message will fall mostly on deaf ears is only to be expected of secularists, both explicit and de facto. Among educated Catholics, however, resistance to that message does not arise simply from awareness of the dangers of lust. If that were the only difficulty, it could be chalked to up to cynicism, an attitude always called "realism" by its true victims. Such pessimism was pretty much St. Augustine's—unsurprising in a man who had fathered an illegitimate child in his oat-sowing days, and was inspired to a kind of asceticism by reading about St. Antony of Egypt. But TOB distinguishes healthy sexual desire from the sin of lust rather realistically, and that distinction is not in any case what occasions the most basic objection—save from people who, given their experience and level of spiritual development, are inclined to believe that sexual desire is always lust. I'm afraid that the main basis for objection is, once again, the hermeneutic of discontinuity.

As I've often said before, most progressives and traditionalists assume that some of the doctrinal developments rightly associated with the documents of Vatican II are innovations discontinuous with prior, definitive teachings of the Church. TOB is seen by progs and trads alike as one of those developments. What makes TOB a special case, though, is that both progs and trads dislike it; typically, progs like innovations as much as trads dislike them. To give some idea of the context for this unique situation, I shall begin with an ostensibly arcane but actually quite crucial point: the difference between the definitions of the object of matrimonial consent given in the 1917 and 1983 codes of canon law respectively.

The older code says that the object of matrimonial consent is "a right to the body, a right both perpetual and exclusive, for the purpose of performing the actions apt by their nature to procreate children" (c. 1081 §2). That arose from the long-standing theological doctrine that the primary purpose of marriage is procreation, a purpose which could only be carried out adequately by a couple's mutual conferral of a "perpetual and exclusive" right to sex of the procreative sort. But the newer code defines getting married as "an act of will by which a man and a woman, by an irrevocable covenant, mutually give and accept one another for the purpose of establishing a marriage” (c.1057, §2; emphasis added). On this showing, the object of matrimonial consent is logically equivalent to a theologically expansive definition of marriage: a "covenant by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring" (c. 1055 §1).

That "covenantal" definition of marriage for juridical purposes, as distinct from the older, thinner "contractual" view, was occasioned by the words of Vatican II:

The intimate partnership of married life and love has been established by the Creator and qualified by His laws, and is rooted in the jugal covenant of irrevocable personal consent. Hence by that human act whereby spouses mutually bestow and accept each other a relationship arises which by divine will and in the eyes of society too is a lasting one. For the good of the spouses and their off-springs as well as of society, the existence of the sacred bond no longer depends on human decisions alone. For, God Himself is the author of matrimony, endowed as it is with various benefits and purposes. All of these have a very decisive bearing on the continuation of the human race, on the personal development and eternal destiny of the individual members of a family, and on the dignity, stability, peace and prosperity of the family itself and of human society as a whole. By their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate crown. Thus a man and a woman, who by their compact of conjugal love “are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19:ff), render mutual help and service to each other through an intimate union of their persons and of their actions. Through this union they experience the meaning of their oneness and attain to it with growing perfection day by day. As a mutual gift of two persons, this intimate union and the good of the children impose total fidelity on the spouses and argue for an unbreakable oneness between them (Gaudium et spes §48; emphasis added).

Notice that the GS account pointedly omits the old teaching that the primary purpose of marriage is procreation. Instead, it says that marriage is "ordained" thereto and that children are the "ultimate crown" of marriage, because they are a gift which God typically, but not always, chooses to bestow on a couple within a relationship naturally ordered to spiritual not merely physical fruitfulness. Accordingly, the indissolubility of marriage is a spiritual exigency arising not merely from its necessity for the proper upbringing of children, but also from the "intimate union" of the "persons" of spouses in their "mutual gift" of themselves. Such a union is in fact constitutive of the marital "covenant." It is a spiritual reality first established, regularly expressed, and hopefully solidified by conjugal intercourse, and thus makes the couple fit not merely to reproduce, which any animal can do, but to procreate. That is why "having sex" is meant to be "making love" and, mirabile dictu, sometimes is. In my experience, women tend to get that much more readily than men. Despite my oft-expressed rejection of much contemporary feminism, they don't say men are dogs for nothing.

All the same, the first thing to be said about this theological development is that it is not discontinuous with prior, definitive doctrine. Rather, it is perfectly consonant with the vision of marriage laid out in Ephesians 5: 21ff, where spouses are urged to "be subordinate to one another" in such wise that their relationship signifies, and helps to make concrete, the loving union between Christ and the Church. That is what makes marriage "a great mystery," a musterion (5:32)—or, what is called in Latin a sacramentum, the term with which the Vulgate translates musterion. Thus the sacramentality of marriage, which the Lord himself sought to restore by insisting on indissoluble monogamy, consists in how the physical union of sexual intercourse establishes, expresses, and facilitates a fundamentally spiritual union. This is not to deny, of course, that the fundamental natural purpose of sex and marriage is procreation. Nor is it to deny that matrimonial consent involves what the 1917 Code said it does. It is simply to bring out explicitly what is sacramental and thus supernatural about matrimony. True as far as it went, the older juridical definition of marriage did not do that.

On the eve of the "sexual revolution," and for reasons I needn't belabor, progressive Catholics enthusiastically welcomed the aforesaid development. What they didn't count on, though, was how the papal magisterium employed it to reiterate an ancient teaching which, within living memory, had become extremely unpopular: the ban on contraception.

In Humanae Vitae (1968), Pope Paul VI asserted that the "conjugal act" has both unitive and procreative "significance," and that its purpose is accordingly dual: spiritual as well as physical, with the latter reflecting and enhancing the former. But that is also the main reason he gave for reiterating that "direct [intentional--ML] interruption of the generative process," i.e. contraception, is gravely wrong. He argued, in effect, that actively blocking procreation unavoidably entails corrupting the "unitive" or spiritual quality of the conjugal relationship, and confidently projected a general lowering of morals and of respect for women if a contraceptive mentality set in. The forty years since have proved him to be perfectly right. But at the time, not many people bought the projection or the argument. That is why, toward the end of his "catechesis" on TOB in 1984 (cf. #119 and ff), Pope John Paul endeavored to bolster the argument. According to TOB, a couple's withholding the gift of their own fertility from each other amounted to rendering their mutual self-gift less than complete, thus reducing their degree of union, opening the way to lust, and obscuring what is sacramental about marriage. Needless to say, progs have not bought that argument either. To this day, they do not at all concede that Vatican II's personalistic account of marriage requires upholding the traditional ban on contraception.

Progs continue to uphold the personalism, however, and it's not hard to understand why. If marriage is what Vatican II said it is, and the object of matrimonial consent is accordingly what the current Code implies it is, then the juridical grounds for nullity emerge as broader than in the past. Most people, at the time of their wedding, are quite capable of understanding and freely consenting to "marriage" as the old Code defines it; that is mainly why annulments were so hard to get prior to Vatican II. But nowadays it is unrealistic to hold that most Catholics, let alone most people, understand and freely consent to marriage as the new Code defines it. Hence, in the English-speaking countries at least, divorced Catholics who desire to remarry in the Church can, and often do, get annulments for the purpose of doing so. That ever-shrinking minority of theological progressives who still uphold the doctrine of the indissolubility of sacramental marriage approve of such relative liberality. I do too.

It goes without saying, however, that most trads do not. Their attitude is not hard to understand either. Many Catholic couples marrying these days, within as well as outside the Church, are indisposed to understand, let alone embrace, exactly what is meant by marriage as a sacramental covenant going beyond a mere contract for "perpetual and exclusive right" to sex of the procreative sort. Understood as such a right, indissolubility makes perfect juridical sense; but "covenant"? Explicitly or implicitly, most couples think of the marital covenant as a fuzzy, optional ideal rather than as a clear and binding norm: as long as we "love" each other, we're in covenant, whatever that means; but when we don't anymore, we (probably?) aren't. Human nature and the state of our culture alone would be enough to explain, if not exonerate, that attitude. And in many marriage tribunals until quite recently, marital failure was often taken, just in itself, as strong evidence of the sacramental invalidity of the failed marriages. That was, and to some extent still is, a pastoral abuse. But the theological problem actually runs deeper.

The larger passage about marriage in Gaudium et spes, a selection from which I quoted above, contains many syntactically indicative statements about marriage. E.g., a married couple provide mutual help and service to each other through an intimate union of their persons and of their actions. Through this union they experience the meaning of their oneness and attain to it with growing perfection day by day. Now I once heard the late Elizabeth Anscombe react to that by asking: "And what if they don't?" The point is well taken—for they often don't. One might put the point as a question: if the ideal is the norm, then what is to preclude saying that those who find they cannot attain the ideal are no longer bound by the norm? The Fathers of Vatican II clearly sought to preclude that conclusion, but it still isn't clear how to induce people to "get it." Marriage-preparation classes usually aren't much help.

As I've suggested, progs approve the wiggle-room for annulments provided willy-nilly in the new code, to the extent they uphold "indissolubility" at all. That wiggle-room disturbed John Paul II, who sought to reduce it by using TOB to argue that the baptized really are capable, as a rule and with divine help, of consenting to and living out marriage as defined under the new code. So, in addition to the use of TOB to bolster the traditional teaching on contraception, its use to support the dominical and formally defined doctrine of marital indissolubility also disturbed progs. But the trads, by and large, have not been mollified. That, I believe, is essentially because the prog and trad objections to TOB are mirror images of each other.

The prog objection is that the moral teaching TOB was meant to bolster remains too objectivistic: it doesn't give enough weight to the actual experience of the faithful, but disappoints by upholding rigid moral norms that used to be explained in purely natural-law terms. TOB, in this view, still presents a narrow and unrealistic ideal as the norm, thus making the teaching of the Church about sexuality and marriage as pastorally destructive as it was once theologically paltry. In other words, the abstract has been made the enemy of the concrete. The trad objection is also that Church teaching has become pastorally destructive, but for the opposite reason: the personalism which has so influenced Catholic development of doctrine about marriage is too subjectivistic. By making "love" essential to rather than merely desirable within marriage, it allows people who claim not to "love" each other to rationalize ditching their spouses and seeking sexual fulfillment in new spouses. In other words, the mystical has been made the enemy of the attainable. In both cases, the developed teaching of the Church on sexuality is seen as unrealistic.

Some critics from both ends of the spectrum have extended that critique to "nuptial-mystery theology" in general, of which TOB is the best-known application. NMT is a theological paradigm which, as I explained here , impinges as much on ecclesiology and even triadology as on sexuality. Essentially, the criticism is that TOB in particular and NMT in general are forms of "realized eschatology." What that means may be explained as follows.

The key to understanding eschatology is that it seeks to explain both the relationship and the distance between the "already" manifest reality of the Kingdom—i.e. the Church, and all who are drawn by the grace she mediates—and the "not yet" of the Kingdom whose definitive establishment awaits the Second Coming. Hence the Church, for example, is both the spotless Bride of Christ, one body with him in a mystical marriage—the "already" part—and a pilgrim Church of sinners, on the way to the consummation of that mystical marriage in the fully realized Kingdom—the "not-yet" part. So, the charge of "realized eschatology" is just a rather portentous-sounding way of saying that TOB and NMT emphasize the "already" at the expense of the "not yet." Or, if you like, it's a way of saying that they present a yet-to-be-attained ideal as the norm.

The charge is spurious. It reflects the same sort of despair about which Chesterton observed that "the problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has not been tried at all." Consider that is precisely the relationship between the already and the not-yet which explains how sinners can become saints while, in a real sense, remaining sinners as long as they remain with the Church Militant. Regarding conjugal sexuality, it is precisely that relationship which explains how a human faculty corrupted by original sin can nonetheless function as an important occasion of grace for the mutual sanctification of spouses. But neither progs nor trads seem to grasp that. They seem to believe that the ideal of holiness within marriage that TOB presents is so unrealistic as to undermine willingness to embrace it. But that's the main problem Christians have with Christianity in general. If that's not a reason to ditch Christianity, it's not a reason to ditch TOB.

To my mind, that's evidence of TOB's soundness. It's too bad that advocates like Christopher West obscure that with grandstanding. But it's good that priests like Fr. Knotz soldier on anyhow. Somebody's got to show that thinking about sex needn't be either lustful or prudish, and thus oxymoronic.

The politics of the charge of "politics"

2009-05-14T17:38:00.004-05:00

The University of Notre Dame's intention to bestow, this weekend, an honorary Doctor of Laws on the most radically pro-abortion president in our country's history has taken the polarization in the American Catholic Church to a new level. On that much, I can agree with Peter Steinfels of the New York Times and the editors of America magazine. But a popular defense of ND that liberal Catholics have been offering uses an essentially ecclesiological argument that reeks of hypocrisy—a fact that itself suggests which pole is in firmer moral territory.

One night over drinks about twenty years ago, when he was editor of Commonweal, I debated Steinfels on the question of his support for Roe v. Wade. Following then-Governor Mario Cuomo, who had given a lengthy "pro-choice" speech at ND in 1984, Steinfels argued that abortion should not be outlawed so long as there was no social consensus for doing so. I pointed out that the question was moot so long as Roe was in place. For that decision took the abortion issue out of the hands of legislatures and elevated it to the status of a constitutional right, thereby making it impossible to limit abortion significantly by using the normal means of political suasion in a democratic society. I agreed that, as a purely practical matter, consensus first had to be forged by persuasion; but I argued that overturning Roe was a logical step toward doing precisely that. It made no sense to insist on consensus while, at the same time, keeping the issue out of the hands of the people. Of course Steinfels was unpersuaded. He insisted that the putative "right to privacy" trumped all merely political considerations, and that Roe could not be overturned without violating the Constitution. He then accused me of confusing a radical right-wing political agenda with the teaching of the Church. I was "playing politics" with my religion.

Reel forward seven or eight years. In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II wrote as follows:

Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection. From the very beginnings of the Church, the apostolic preaching reminded Christians of their duty to obey legitimately constituted public authorities (cf. Rom 13:1-7; 1 Pet 2:13-14), but at the same time it firmly warned that "we must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). In the Old Testament, precisely in regard to threats against life, we find a significant example of resistance to the unjust command of those in authority. After Pharaoh ordered the killing of all newborn males, the Hebrew midwives refused. "They did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live" (Ex 1:17). But the ultimate reason for their action should be noted: "the midwives feared God" (ibid.). It is precisely from obedience to God—to whom alone is due that fear which is acknowledgment of his absolute sovereignty—that the strength and the courage to resist unjust human laws are born. It is the strength and the courage of those prepared even to be imprisoned or put to the sword, in the certainty that this is what makes for "the endurance and faith of the saints" (Rev 13:10). In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to "take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it."

So, not only must Catholics oppose legitimizing abortion under civil law; they must not even obey any enactment that does so. Of course, the prog response was that it was now a Polish conservative, not just American conservatives, who were playing politics with religious principles.

It's taken the American bishops a while to absorb the papal message and actually lead on this issue; but they've gradually been doing so since EV. In 2004, soon after the controversy about whether John Kerry should receive the Eucharist, they issued a directive called "Catholics in Political Life" which included the following statement:

The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.

The boldfaced phrase is in the original. As the local ordinary pointed out when explaining why he would boycott the ceremony honoring Obama, this is the exactly the directive that ND's board and president have defied. Dozens of bishops have publicly said the same. But pointing that out is also denounced by the Catholic Left as using religion for political purposes. And that's what's supposed to be unduly "polarizing."

One wonders why the obvious questions are so rarely considered. If the Church's agenda on abortion is "political" in an objectionable sense, why is it not political in an objectionable sense to promote the Church's agenda on capital punishment, which she opposes but the vast majority of Americans favor? Why are we not supposed to wait for consensus before trying to have the death penalty abolished, even though SCOTUS has upheld its constitutionality? Or, why should Catholics have followed the Vatican in opposing the invasion of Iraq, but not in trying to outlaw abortion? Why should we oppose "domestic violence" against women (such violence against men is never mentioned) but not violence against the most innocent and vulnerable human persons of all: those in the womb of women who are their mothers? The only answer to such questions I can think of is painfully obvious: "pro-choice," liberal Catholics are convinced that the Church is right on issues where her position coincides with that of the political Left, but are not convinced the Church is right on issues where it does not.

That's what makes their charge against the Right of "playing politics" so hypocritical. Politics is exactly what they are engaged in: so much so, that they evaluate and apply the Church's social teachings selectively in terms of a set of values deriving from an essentially secular agenda. Of course the Catholic Right is sometimes guilty of that too. Beyond the death penalty and other violence-related issues, the Church has consistently taught that, in countries that can provide it, basic health care should be treated as a right rather than as a commodity. Many American Catholic conservatives reject that position, but I can find no Catholic defense for doing so. A Catholic can reasonably oppose government-administered health care as inefficient and iniquitous; but that's a question of means, not ends. Surely there are other, better means of ensuring that nobody has to go without a necessity of life just because they cannot pay for it. But for the most part, the hypocrisies of the Catholic Right at least have a basis in Catholic teaching itself.

The Church, including the present pope, has clearly distinguished between actions of a sort that are intrinsically evil, such as abortion and euthanasia, and acts which are merely wrong for the most part, such as war or capital punishment. It is therefore quite self-consistent, logically speaking, to oppose keeping the former legal but sometimes to support the latter. Of course, it is possible to be wrong about when the latter meet the conditions necessary for justifying them. And sometimes, being wrong in that sort of way can and ought to be attributed to political motives. But error of that sort is empirical: people who support this-or-that war, or capital punishment under such-and-such conditions, are sometimes wrong about the facts, perhaps because they find it convenient to delude themselves about the facts. But they needn't be and typically are not wrong about the principles of Catholic teaching. On the other hand, there is simply no credible way to claim that wanting to keep abortion and related evils legal is consistent with Catholic teaching. So there is no credible way for the Catholic Left to claim that they are not playing politics with issues on which, citing Church teaching, they oppose American law or actions. They are inconsistent in the sort of way that only a politically motivated position can be. Accordingly, the charge that the Catholic Right is "playing politics" on abortion is—well, playing politics.

For good sense on the ND-Obama issue, see the following:

The keynote address of Archbishop Raymond Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura in Rome, at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on May 8.
The YouTube video of a talk by Fr. John Corapi, S.O.L.T. He's one of my favorite preachers.
Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, on "God and Obama at Notre Dame."

Pansexualism—and what to do about it

2007-02-19T12:35:00.001-05:00

I'm pleased to note that one of the best Orthodox bloggers, The Ochlophobist, has lately been shifting his concern to the sexual front in the culture war. Last week he began a promised series about Orthodoxy and contraception, and quickly expanded that into a larger discussion about our "pansexual" time. So far, the latter could have been written just as well by a neoCath; I concur entirely with his assessment of both issues' importance, and mostly with his moral intuitions. But at the outset, I'd like to contribute to the discussion with an observation and a brief bibliography.

The observation is that there is a problem with the lack of consensus, both within and outside Orthodoxy, about the immorality of barrier as distinct from abortifacient methods of contraception. It seems to me that, once one allows the possible liceity of actively and deliberately suppressing the procreative aspect of conjugal intercourse, one undercuts the case against sodomy. One is reduced to saying that, while inherently non-procreative sorts of sexual act are intrinsically evil, making sterile an act that might otherwise be fertile can sometimes be OK. That's a distinction which has always left me scratching my head; ever since it was widely accepted among Christians, including Catholics, back in the 1960s, the effects on our culture have been inevitable. And they were predicted with chilling accuracy by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae. One often encounters the distinction in conservative Protestant circles, of course; indeed it's no accident that I've never been able to find an argument for it that does not appeal, in the end, to sola Scriptura. But that option is not and should not be open to Orthodoxy. Catholicism has a magisterial understanding of natural law that, in John Paul II's "theology of the body," is effectively integrated with biblical personalism. But the Orthodox seems averse to those ideas too. And so I don't see an effective theological underpinning for the distinction in question.

The bibliography is two books written by Catholic women in response to the culture of casual sex, a culture referred to among young people as "hooking up." Since males are less victimized by said culture than females, it's both inevitable and important that the majority of authors directly critiquing it be women, and that such women offer positive alternatives.

One such book is by Catholic convert Dawn Eden: The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On. I've referred to it before on this blog, and it's gotten some modest attention in the secular MSM. Now, the book which has informed Och's most recent post is Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which is also worth reading; it's serendipitous that, at her own blog last Saturday, Eden notes how one college senior quoted by Stepp has apparently taken her cue from Eden's wisdom if not from Eden's book itself. Let's hope the serendipity is a sign of synergy.

My other book recommendation is Jennifer Roback Morse's Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love In A Hook-up World. It's somewhat less personal and more academic than Eden's and, for that reason, will probably sell less. But it has the distinct advantage of utilizing unassailable research. Morse's site can be found here.

Even if you don't agree with my "observation," you must surely agree with The Ochlophobist and the authors cited that the pansexual culture, especially among young people, is hugely destructive. It erodes and, in many cases, destroys the capacity for the kind of self-giving love that cements lasting marriages. The cultural wreckage is all around us, and the secularists are absolutely clueless. Just as in Roman times, the impetus for repair must come from Christians united by an inspiring vision of sexuality that is also firmly grounded in Tradition.

The Prayer and the Fool

2009-04-21T18:56:00.005-05:00

I thought I'd observe the feast of St. Anselm today by pointing readers to a truly remarkable little essay by Brandon Watson on Anselm's argument for God's existence in Chapter 2 of the Proslogion. Though written three years ago, and garnering zero comment, it's well worth discussing. I'd like to initiate discussion of it here.

To that end, I'll just post the heart of it; but I caution those interested to read it all before commenting.

....the Fool either understands what he says does not exist, in which case he contradicts himself, or he does not contradict himself because he does not understand what he is saying does not exist. As Anselm says, "Even though he may say those words in his heart he will give them some other meaning or no meaning at all." So what is to be made of this?

I myself take Klima's view that the argument is sound. However, most of what I will say here does not require agreeing with me on this point. All it requires is that we ask, "Even supposing it is sound, what then?"

A sound argument is one that is logically valid and has true premises. But not all sound arguments are particularly helpful for coming to a conclusion. For instance, it is fairly easy to create arguments that are sound but that beg the question -- that is, arguments that are logically valid and have true premises, but whose premises can only be known to be true if we already accept the conclusion. When our interest is persuasion, the discovery of the truth, or anything else that relies on going from the unknown to the known or from the not-believed to the believed, we need something more than soundness. Klima argues, and I think that he's right, that the problem Anselm's argument faces is precisely at this level. Despite the fact that it is a sound argument, and shows that the atheist (the one who denies there is a God because that than which no greater can be thought does not exist) would be contradicting himself if he were seriously to reflect on that than which no greater can be thought, nonetheless it's possible to rationally reject the argument. As Anselm himself recognizes, understanding the words "that than which no greater can be thought" is not the same as having that than which no greater can be thought as an object of the understanding.

Quaestio disputanda

2009-04-18T15:19:00.003-05:00

Divine mercy does not entail an act on God's part different from divine justice. For God offers to every human person a share in his nature (2 Peter 1:4), which we do not deserve. That is mercy inasmuch as it takes away sin, which we could never do for ourselves. The saved are those who freely and definitively accept that offer on his terms; the damned are those who freely and definitively choose to suffer rather than accept it on his terms. Both outcomes are just, but God does nothing different for the damned than for the saved. Hence on God's part, mercy and justice are the same act. But they constitute outcomes different from each other, the difference being dependent on how we choose to react to the one divine act.

Comments?

Cutting to the bone

2009-04-17T20:05:00.019-05:00

So much has been happening lately in the spheres which interest me that I have hardly known where to begin writing. I'll just start with three of the most egregious events as the set-up act for the big one.

I'm amused by Homeland Security's classification of pro-life activists as "right-wing extremists" and of returning combat veterans as potential "terrorists." Only dogmatic liberals could view that as more than ideological boilerplate. But I'm sickened by Notre Dame's bestowing an honorary J.D. on a president who thinks that outlawing even partial-birth abortion is incompatible with what the Supreme Court has said the Constitution means. This is the newest low since The Vagina Monologues was allowed to be performed on campus for what used to be called Valentine's Day, a holiday whose politically-correct designation is now 'V-Day'. With Ralph McInerny retiring from the philosophy department after 54 years, I have even less use for the place. By all means read his little jeremiad Is Obama Worth a Mass? Indeed we know what Jesus said about salt which has lost its savor.

I'm actually less sickened by the hue and cry over the Pope's remarks about the perennial AIDS-condom issue. Every few years or so, the media broadcast the charge that the Vatican is guilty of mass murder for opposing the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV infection in Africa. Now even if condom use were generally effective for that purpose, it takes only a moment's reflection to expose the recurring charge as ludicrous. Surely anybody can figure out that the number of AIDS-infected people who take Catholic teaching seriously enough to avoid using condoms, but not seriously enough to avoid sex with uninfected partners, has got to be pretty close to nil. In any case, all the Pope said was that passing out condoms en masse is more likely to be part of the problem than of the solution. Even the research from Harvard agrees—much to its author's chagrin, I'm told. What is the freakin' problem here? It's not that hard to understand. People who believe in what was called, during the 60s and 70s, "the sexual revolution" can't imagine that abstinence is a more humane and effective prophylactic than latex. That's because they can't imagine truly voluntary abstinence at all. Thus, if somebody capable of sexual activity and attractive enough to have a partner is abstinent, that must be because some malign force—such as mental illness, a controlling paterfamilias, or a religious hierarchy—is coercing them to avoid sex. That view is a prejudice which explains a lot of other attitudes as well. The latest hue and cry about the Pope, and the outrage against the Harvard report, only confirms the liveliness of the prejudice. But I'm more amused than sickened. And I thank God the salt's savor is likely to increase in quarters such as in the Archdiocese of New York under the newly installed Timothy Dolan.

Yet all the nasty things happening in society and the Church come down, I believe, to a culpably ignorant repetition of the sin committed at the very dawn of humanity. And I can't help feeling that the day of judgment is at hand.

The bone I want to cut to is described in the following few lines from an otherwise pedestrian article on pastoral strategy by an earnest Paulist priest:

We have to use tools that respond to the criterion that most people, de facto, use for religion today (whether we like it or not) -- experience. What people see, feel and get involved with constitutes the criterion of faith today. Faith (as modern Americans construe it) is not some objective reality into which they feel they should fit; rather, faith is the way people choose to assemble their ideals, in accord with the force or thrust of those ideals.

Again, we may wish this was not so, but it is. Just look at the proliferation of so-called ''non denominational'' churches -- they are a Rorschach for the multiple kinds of expressions of faith we Americans keep inventing for ourselves. The criterion for all of this? Experience. ''This is what I (want to) feel or think.''

That, my friends, presents the basic spiritual problem from which all of America's ecclesial and social ills flow. I wonder whether the author knew that when he wrote those words. I rather doubt he did, but I hope he comes to see it's so.

Think more deeply for a moment about the sentence I've bolded. Now think of Eve in the Garden as the serpent slithers and glitters before her. He tells Eve that she will not die if she eats the fruit of the "tree of knowledge of good and evil"; instead he asserts that God made such a false threat so as to keep her from becoming like God, "knowing good and evil." Eve sees that the fruit is a delight the eyes and fit for gaining wisdom. She concludes that eating it would be good for her; thus, she believes the serpent and disbelieves God. And so "faith is no longer an objective reality" into which she feels she must "fit," namely the objective reality of God and his will. She eats the fruit and induces her spineless husband, who should have prevented her from doing so, to eat it too. Faith has now become "the way people choose to assemble their ideals, in accord with the force or thrust of those ideals." And indeed the couple don't die: not physically, not right away. But they see they are naked and cover themselves in shame. Meant to be one body, in complete harmony with God and each other, they have lost their innocence. Now they are something of a threat to each other, and they experience God as a threat to them both. They fear and hide from him who made them and provided for them. For they know they have disobeyed him. They have died spiritually, and they will soon learn what that means.

Although the names 'Adam' and 'Eve' are obviously mythical, and the literal time and place of the Fall impossible to discover by research, such has always been the condition of fallen humanity. It is the condition from which God the Son came to redeem us. Christendom used to know that. But Christendom no longer exists. So, we are forgetting what the Fall was and, instead, are elevating the serpent's original falsehood to the status of principle.

That is why SCOTUS said in 1992, and was believed almost without question when it repeated in 2003: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." That's exactly the right our first parents claimed for themselves. Satan would have us think that makes them heroes, and many who call themselves Christians agree with him. But their Fall is the root of our problems. Given freedom for love—love of God, of each other, of the rest of creation—the first couple grasped freedom from the guideposts of love. The world has been full of lies and murder ever since.

For our day and hour, the above is why Barack Obama can blithely say that the question of the fetus' humanity is "above my pay grade" as he awaits the opportunity to sign FOCA into law. That is why marriage has become, under civil law, the only important contract that can be broken unilaterally with impunity, even reward. Now that marriage is such a legal monster, more and more people think it possible, even necessary, to make it an absolute farce: to redefine marriage so as to make the sex of the spouses irrelevant. That conceit has a common cause with what explains why the birth rate is falling below replacement level in almost all "developed" countries. Freedom from real love is also why we think we may produce human beings in vitro while discarding many of them as useless. And I'm omitting here a lot of other, apparently unrelated evils that bother more people than the ones I've cited. It's all about the imperial self in each of us. But we don't see that because, like Adam and Eve, we'd rather blame those other imperial selves over there.

So, I don't just see original sin anymore. Original sin is a state we inherit, not an act we commit. It is the state of deprivation of that divine grace we were given primordially. That state has the effect of physical death for us all and spiritual death for those who are not in some degree of communion with the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. But what I also see now is actual, collective repetition of the first sin. That is only to be expected of the world at large; but we see it even in the Church, in the form described by that good, "pastoral" Paulist priest. It's why "cafeteria Catholicism" is now the rule not the exception. It's why only a remnant will survive the next great chastisement spiritually intact. The Church's flesh will have been cut to the bone.

If Christ be not risen...

2009-04-13T18:59:00.005-05:00

In this year of St. Paul, it's worth noting for the Easter season something he says about the Resurrection: "If Christ be not risen, our faith is vain and we are the most pitiable of men" (1 Cor 15: 14). That statement is just as fitting today as when Paul made it. The Western world as a whole is sliding into a new paganism as hopeless as that of late antiquity. Even the U.S., still a "religous" country, is headed down the same path as Europe and Canada; we're just not as far along yet, but the secularist rot is clearly setting in. Many "theologians"—i.e., professors of various academic disciplines pursued within theology departments—treat the Resurrection as theory not history. In such a cynical, sterile environment, it is fitting that the Pope transmits Paul's message in the following paragraphs from his urbi et orbi address last week:

The resurrection, then, is not a theory, but a historical reality revealed by the man Jesus Christ by means of his “Passover”, his “passage”, that has opened a “new way” between heaven and earth (cf. Heb 10:20). It is neither a myth nor a dream, it is not a vision or a utopia, it is not a fairy tale, but it is a singular and unrepeatable event: Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, who at dusk on Friday was taken down from the Cross and buried, has victoriously left the tomb. In fact, at dawn on the first day after the Sabbath, Peter and John found the tomb empty. Mary Magdalene and the other women encountered the risen Jesus. On the way to Emmaus the two disciples recognized him at the breaking of the bread. The Risen One appeared to the Apostles that evening in the Upper Room and then to many other disciples in Galilee.

The proclamation of the Lord’s Resurrection lightens up the dark regions of the world in which we live. I am referring particularly to materialism and nihilism, to a vision of the world that is unable to move beyond what is scientifically verifiable, and retreats cheerlessly into a sense of emptiness which is thought to be the definitive destiny of human life. It is a fact that if Christ had not risen, the “emptiness” would be set to prevail. If we take away Christ and his resurrection, there is no escape for man, and every one of his hopes remains an illusion. Yet today is the day when the proclamation of the Lord’s resurrection vigorously bursts forth, and it is the answer to the recurring question of the sceptics, that we also find in the book of Ecclesiastes: “Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’?” (Ec 1:10). We answer, yes: on Easter morning, everything was renewed. “Mors et vita, duello conflixere mirando: dux vitae mortuus, regnat vivus – Death and life have come face to face in a tremendous duel: the Lord of life was dead, but now he lives triumphant.” This is what is new! A newness that changes the lives of those who accept it, as in the case of the saints. This, for example, is what happened to Saint Paul.

Most of us are not saints and do not experience what Paul did. We get knocked off our horses and blinded, but we do not hear the risen Lord himself asking us why we persecute him or telling us which Christian house will be the place where we come to our senses. To be sure, it is a commonplace of preaching and spiritual writing to claim that committed disciples will and ought to undergo much "dying and rising" in the course of their journeys of faith. And that is true. But without faith, it will not serve either to hear that or undergo it; for "without faith one cannot be saved." And that faith would be vain if the Lord did not rise as the Apostles and the current pontiff say.

The Resurrection has everything to do with history, even with evolution, on which the "new atheists" stake their worldview. In his Easter-Vigil homily three years ago, the Pope preached:

Of what exactly does this "rising" consist? What does it mean for us, for the whole world and the whole of history? A German theologian once said ironically that the miracle of a corpse returning to life - if it really happened, which he did not actually believe - would be ultimately irrelevant precisely because it would not concern us. In fact, if it were simply that somebody was once brought back to life, and no more than that, in what way should this concern us? But the point is that Christ’s Resurrection is something more, something different. If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution, it is the greatest "mutation", absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history.

The Resurrection is the "great mutation" pointing to what we are destined for and making it possible. We are animals destined to become gods; but God himself had to make the transition so that we can. It is up to each of us to choose whether to hitch that ride or not. We can choose to see ourselves merely as animals with a better computer in the cranium, or we can treat that status as the biological base for a great transformation that animals and computers cannot make.

If we choose the former, we will eventually destroy ourselves: we will effect, as CS Lewis said, the "abolition of man." For our power over Nature will increasingly become that of "some men over others with Nature as its instrument," and those wielding such power will acknowledge no higher norms than their own appetites. We will have "evolved" into a particularly savage animal hierarchy. If we choose the latter, we will be spared none of the difficulties of life. But we will be able to bear them as instruments for being taken up, obediently, into the life of infinite love himself.

Our hope, then, lies in receiving divinity as a gift rather than striving to be gods while denying God. Even the God-man received it as such, from all eternity and by being raised. He is thus "the source of eternal life for all who obey him" (Heb 5:9). To obey him, though, we need to believe he lives as a transformed man even now. Otherwise he is an abstraction, the kind of god who leaves us alone, the kind many seem to want. But of abstractions the world has more than enough.

Descending into hell

2009-04-11T13:05:00.003-05:00

Today is a good day to meditate on two kinds of descent into hell: the kind some people undergo by refusing to repent of serious sin, and the unique one that Jesus undertook after his death. The key is to remember that the latter is part of the remedy for the former.

Commenting on earlier sources, Ephesians 4:8-9 does after all read: "Therefore, it says: "He ascended on high and took prisoners captive; he gave gifts to men." What does "he ascended" mean except that he also descended into the lower (regions) of the earth?"(NAB translation). The idea is that the ascent and descent are all part of the same process of redemption. Many Christians don't seem to know what to make of that. What little we can make of it, indeed of the very nature of the Atonement, is mysterious enough. But that doesn't mean we can't benefit from meditating on the mystery.

The Apostles' Creed echoes Ephesians in saying that Jesus descended into the underworld. In English, said destination is often translated as 'hell', from the Latin infernum, the same word used in the Western tradition for the place of sempiternal punishment. But, I am told, the Greek text is the original and echoes the scripture verse just cited. Thus the earliest extant "creed," itself an expansion of a still-earlier baptismal formula, metaphorically describes a complex reality which most modern Christians barely pause to consider. The received doctrine, no doubt true as far as it goes, is that the place in question of "the limbo of the fathers," i.e. of our fathers in faith who lived before the time of Christ. An ancient homily even has Jesus, having descended to the underworld after his death, preaching to and liberating Adam himself. That's in keeping with John 12: 32's reference to the Crucifixion: "When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself." His "lifting up" on the Cross—an event which, to the ancient mind, was supremely humiliating—is also the first stage of his "glorification." That glorification continues with Jesus' descent after his death. But that should tell us that the further descent ad infernum is not just glory and triumph. It is descent and dereliction, for it is part of the Passion as a whole: and the glory consists in a love willing to reach down to us even as far as that. In fact, the descent into hell is the completion of the Son's loving descent on our behalf: the very descent by which he "became sin" (2 Cor 5:21) for us so that we might be freed from slavery to sin.

I came to think that way by reading Hans Urs von Balthasar. As far as I know, only he among major theologians has thought hard about all this. According to my own interpretation (which, along with several dollars, will get you a latté), his argument was that, in order to complete our redemption, Jesus had to experience what it's like to be alienated from God even though he could not, objectively speaking, ever have ceased being in communion with the Father. Given the patristic dictum "whatever is not assumed is not redeemed," Jesus had to "assume" all the effects of sin while being sinless. That's how he could "become sin" without sinning. So it wasn't enough that our Immortal King became sin by dying, in a supremely humiliating way, as a condemned criminal. He had to become sin by going to the furthest place from heaven one could go: "the lower reaches" where the souls of the dead were imprisoned. But because his is an unconquerable love, Jesus's presence in such an apparently desperate place was a victory for him and for the souls of the just abiding there. They greeted Jesus with joy and were liberated. Tradition does not say how the souls of the unjust greeted him. It doesn't have to. They are there to stay. But that is not for want of divine love manifested to them. The same, I believe, has been true ever since.

Some who pride themselves on their orthodoxy suspect that von Balthasar's speculation about the descent into hell is heretical. There was a dustup about that in First Things last year, calmly and judiciously reviewed by Richard Reno, who provides links to it. In my own view, such a suspicion overlooks the pattern of descent-as-ascent that is so clear in St. John. There is no contradiction in saying that Jesus achieved the best by experiencing the worst, even emotionally. He didn't just quote Psalm 22 in saying on the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He felt that. But in due course he got his answer because, in the economy of salvation, the two go hand in hand.

And so it is for us, to the extent we get serious about following him. It is as much in our weaknesses and failures, our sufferings deserved and undeserved, as in our virtues and successes that our loving Savior abides with us. His power is most manifest when we are powerless. I cannot always remember that when I contemplate the great failures and disappointments of my life. I feel very far from God at such times, when I am not even grateful for the gift of life. Sometimes, in my impatience with reality, I don't even remember it amid my lesser weaknesses and disappointments. The least I can do tonight, whens I enter the church in darkness for the Easter Vigil service, is to offer such failures with the petition that I remember to remember that He has been through it all, and worse.