Dawn Eden on the Theology of the Body

I've obtained the revised version of Dawn Eden's recent master's thesis at "the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies" in Washington, DC:  "Towards a 'Climate of Chastity': Bringing Catechesis on the Theology of the Body into the Hermeneutic of Continuity". Some will remember her: ex-rock-journalist, Catholic convert, and author of the countercultural 2006 book The Thrill of the Chaste—a title reflecting her talent as an erstwhile headline writer. Eden can write very well for a general audience.

That's why potential readers should not be put off by the theological jargon in the title of the present, more academic work. For one thing, people motivated enough to tackle the topic in depth will already have a good enough idea of what terms such as 'catechesis', 'the theology of the body', and 'the hermeneutic of continuity' mean. And making the usual allowances for academic ritual, the work itself is a clearly written critique of the popularizing approach of Christopher West. That's important because West has guided the thinking of more American Catholics today than anybody else who talks about human sexuality from a Catholic standpoint. Exposing his theological and catechetical weaknesses, and proposing improvements, would be a real service to the American Church. Eden's thesis is a big step in that direction.

In due acknowledgement of my prejudices, I admit that I both like and dislike Pope John Paul II's theology of the body ('the TOB'). The Pope developed it most explicitly in a series of catechetical talks from 1979-83, which I recall reading as soon as they were published in English. I like the TOB because it continued the Roman Magisterium's efforts, starting with Pius XI and taking off with the sections on marriage in Vatican II's Gaudium et spes, to develop the Church's traditional teachings about sexuality in its mystical, biblical, and psychological dimensions. Indeed, the TOB was originally intended to defend, by way of creative explication, Pope Paul VI's widely execrated 1968 encyclical on birth control, to whose composition which Karol Wojtyla himself had contributed. Like other contemporary defenders of Humanae Vitae's teaching, I have mined some of Wojtyla's themes myself. That kind of project was and remains worthwhile. But I dislike the TOB talks because they are often obscurely expressed and suffer, at least to my philosophical mind, many gaps in argument. So the TOB itself cries out for explanation and defense, which it was originally meant to supply.

That is the main reason why the TOB hasn't yet fulfilled its promise. The progressives resist it because it's a rationale for teachings they want jettisoned; the traditionalists resist it because it doesn't just repeat the Same Old Thing they know. But most Catholics just lack the intellectual background to appreciate it in the terms JP2 used. To overcome such obstacles, clarity as well as depth of presentation is desperately needed.

West is the best-known person in the Anglosphere to attempt that at a popular level. His intentions are good, his style is arresting, and his influence has generally been positive. Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia, among other prelates, has backed him consistently. But there are problems. Most of them were brought to light by a few theologians in the aftermath of a rather unfortunate Nightline segment with West in May 2009. I suppose there are always problems with popularizers—just as there are always problems with real scholars—who tackle important and controversial subjects. But until David Schindler, dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, delivered himself of a brief but pointed critique of his ex-student Christopher West last summer, I hadn't realized the extent of the problems.

Eden does a good, nay surgical job of getting at their conceptual basis. Rather than summarize her entire case, I shall focus on her most important criticism and on what I see as her most constructive suggestion. The rest I leave to the reader.

Eden's most telling criticism is that West's explication of the TOB explicitly presents it as "revolutionary," in such a way as to constitute an actual rupture with the broad tradition of Church teaching. I'm convinced she's right about that. For example, she shows in almost painful detail how West's account of the pre-virtue of "continence," and the full virtue of "chastity" of which continence forms a part, is actually contrary to John Paul II's (largely Thomistic) meaning.

West also thinks that the TOB is revolutionary as an antidote to the sexual "repression" from which "generations of Catholics" have suffered. That may well have been true of many Catholics prior to Vatican II, but as Eden notes, it can hardly be said about the majority of Catholics since then. The vision of human sexuality that Humanae Vitae presented has been widely rejected in favor of a contraceptive mentality among Catholics themselves. In view of that, it's a real problem that West virtually ignores HV's exhortation to "self-mastery," which it was an important part of the TOB to explicate. As a whole, West's presentation violates the "hermeneutic of continuity" that must be pursued if progressive and traditionalist critiques of Humanae Vitae, which represent their own hermeneutics of discontinuity, are not to be justified. That's not what West intended, but that's what his execution entails.

This is not to say that I think Eden herself gets that broader issue quite right either. She writes:

In the long run, perhaps the most damaging aspect of West’s presentation may be his
assertion that John Paul II’s teachings are “revolutionary,” thereby teaching that the Church’s
sacred deposit of faith is not fully contained in Scripture and Tradition, but, rather, progresses
with the passage of time—like a pubescent child that “still has a good deal of maturing ahead ...and a good deal of ‘growing pains.’” The memory of the dissent from Humanae Vitae, which was prompted largely by contraception advocates’ dashed expectations that the encyclical would alter official teachings, should serve as a warning against suggesting to the faithful that the Church’s doctrine keeps pace with changing times (p 73).

I don't hear West saying, and I don't think his arguments commit him to saying, that the TOB was introducing truths that were not at least materially contained in the deposit of faith from the beginning. Properly understood, authentic development of doctrine merely makes formally explicit what has always been materially present in the deposit. That's what I believe the TOB was doing, and I see no evidence that West would deny that. The difficulty is not with his general idea about the development of doctrine, but rather with his imperfect understanding of the TOB's content. West makes JP2 appear to say things contrary to the tradition of the Church, even though neither man intended that. But West's metaphor of the Church moving from childhood to adolescence on the matter of sexuality, though perhaps sloppily applied, can be understood to apply to the Church's understanding of the deposit rather than to the deposit itself.

Unfortunately, West does not concern himself with such subtleties. Worse, his vision of the TOB is blinkered in comparison with that of JP2 himself. The wider context of the Pope's voluminous output shows that he makes far more allowance for the role of redemptive suffering in marriage, including conjugal sexuality, than does West, who virtually ignores the issue in favor of arguing that our relationship with Christ is "always" mediated through "sexual desire" and "intercourse." The charge that he oversexualizes spirituality is justified. In fact, a healthy conjugal sexuality should be seen as a real symbol of God's relationship with his people, but that entails self-restraint at least as often as it entails intercourse.

Accordingly, Eden's most constructive suggestion is to urge that West's approach incorporate "Mystical Body theology" especially in the "experience of brokenness," about which West says very little. There has to be a via media between seeing sex primarily as a danger to the soul and seeing it as the preferred medium for our divinization in Christ. Sexual desire, intercourse, and continence, each in their proper circumstances and order, need to be seen as expressions of a married couple's mutual self-gift, i.e. their sacramental love.

The issues raised by the TOB require more profound meditation than West has given them. That kind of meditation has been seen hitherto only in a rather narrow academic circle of Catholics. Once Eden's thesis is re-written as a book aimed at a general audience, the meditation can spread in earnest.

Redeeming secularity

When I'm feeling more desperate than usual, I like to re-read Jean-Pierre de Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence, a spiritual classic available in a range of editions and translations. In one of them, the work is entitled The Sacrament of the Present Moment. I cannot recommend that volume highly enough; on me, a careful reading has the effect of calming my silly fears and inducing me to rest in God's love. Beyond circumstances, what's brought it to my mind again is a marvelous post of the same title by Fr. Steven Freeman. That post has also set me pondering anew a seemingly intractable problem I've always had with being a layman in the world. The problem has a simple solution, to be sure. But the simple solution is by no means easy.

Ever since I made a more-or-less adult commitment of faith, I haven't wanted in my heart to be a layman at all. As a high-school senior, I resolved internally to become a philosophy major in college as preparation for the seminary. Of course I didn't tell that to my parents or teachers, because I didn't think the resistance I could expect if I did would be a price worth paying. It was the Catholic Church in the 1970s, after all. I had been sexually abused by a priest a few years earlier; still more to the point, priests and religious had been bolting in droves, and the faithful remnant was openly indisposed to encourage the young to plunge themselves into the mess. It didn't get any better once I got to Columbia. Most of the priests I met were progs who didn't think me prog enough; the rest were either trads who didn't think me trad enough, or just plain didn't care. My disgust caused me to flirt seriously with Orthodoxy before I fell in with a crowd of older, lay Catholic intellectuals. As I neared graduation, the few vocation directors willing to hear me on the merits neither offered nor suggested spiritual direction to help me with the discipline of celibacy. They were rather keen, however, on reminding me that I had to repay my college debt before any of them would consider me. I ended up getting married. I had concluded that that was what God wanted for me, as distinct from what I had wanted for myself. And who was I to complain? I now had a wife who loved me; and I loved her back, in my own immature way.

The question for me then became: how could I do some sort of "ministry," my chief and indeed only abiding occupational interest, as a married Catholic man? I had committed myself to a state in life in which earning a certain level of income was likely to be far more important than how I earned that income. I did not relish that part of marriage and family. Still, I was fortunate in being married to a woman who understood me and facilitated, in every way, my arduous trek through the doctoral program in philosophy at Penn. And despite using NFP to conceive a child, we did not conceive, only adopting a baby privately after ten years of marriage. For that decade, I had had the luxury of avoiding the question how to earn a respectable living. I taught part-time as an adjunct and did some paid freelance writing. My scope for self-indulgence was such that I even got to run for Congress in 1988. The downside was that I also got to remain a superannuated adolescent. Some of that resolved itself naturally after I got my PhD and began teaching full-time in Catholic institutions. But soon enough, choices I made in response to stressful events destroyed all that. I'm now twice-divorced, tethered to paying child support. That has only raised the question of "ministry" anew for me. And I have yet to resolve that question. I still don't want a secular "career" any more than I ever did. I want a vocation focused on the only matters in which I have an abiding interest for their own sake: those having directly and explicitly to do with the truths about God derivable from both natural reason and his own self-revelation. Indeed, I'm such a Catholic nerd that I have a very hard time understanding why most intelligent, orthodox Catholics don't want the same for themselves.

When I've discussed this with people close to me, including the occasional spiritual director, the responses I've gotten are remarkably similar. They point out that most Christians, including most good and holy Christians, are neither clergy nor theologians. They point out what that entails: most of us can and ought to serve God well in the course of ordinary human life, without being clergy or theologians. They cite the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to remind me that I can be a "priest" in that generic sense in which all Christians are called to be priests. They gently remind me that I have no good reason to think myself too good or special for that. And of course they are right. I have no rebuttal to offer. But my heart does not change; my real interests and aspirations remain as they are, which is what they have always been. I pursue my real interests in my spare time; this blog is a part of that. I look on my unfulfilled aspirations as a sign from God that his work-in-progress known as Mike Liccione needs a lot more work in order to be credible again in something called "ministry."

But, the voices ask, what if I'm just still not "getting it?" Fr. Freeman's meditation poses the challenge starkly:

The Eucharist reveals Christ to us. But as Fr. Alexander Schmemann always noted, the Eucharist not only reveals Christ to us, it also reveals the true nature of creation to us. Bread can no longer be the same if Christ has taken it and made it His body. It is always possible, indeed it has already happened, that we build a fence around that sacred moment and confine it to the liturgy itself. Outside the service, everything returns to “normal and ordinary,” and the Orthodox become as secular as every Christian around them. This is a denial of the Orthodox faith. God is “everywhere present and filling all things,” thus there is no “normal and ordinary,” no “secular.” Everything is changed. There is no eating of bread that is not a communion with God. There is no encounter with a tree that is not an encounter with the hard wood of the cross, the “weapon of peace.” In Jeremiah (23:23-24) we read:

Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the LORD. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the LORD.

We do not have a “neutral zone” where we live apart from God. Instead, we have zones of ignorance, where believing Christians live as unbelievers, awaiting their next attendance at a “God permitted” zone. No, the truth is that God has united Himself not only to humanity in the incarnation, but to matter itself. Man is the “microcosm” according to the Fathers, a “little cosmos” in himself. This is most fully and completely true in Christ, who has truly summed up the cosmos within Himself. Thus we look forward to the redemption and resurrection of the whole created order and not just man (Romans 8).

Thus we are never separated from God who is freely with us, but also giving Himself to us in everything around us. This is no profession of pantheism. God has not become everything else. But everything else holds the possibility of encounter with God as surely as the holy water within the Church or every sacrament He has given us. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

In the combox to another post, Fr. Steven tells one reader something that he could just as well tell me:

The church doesn’t miss out on having any of us as priests. If I die tomorrow the Kingdom of God will continue to exist. The only priesthood is that of Christ. My merely human talents add nothing to the Church whatsoever. The treasure within us is the gift of God. Seek God first, don’t worry about the priesthood. It is the priesthood of Christ you need to encounter.

Well, yes. There is no "neutral zone" for a Christian. For those who stay the course of sanctification, all is holy, all is redeemed. So, the challenge I confront is to encounter the "priesthood of Christ," and join myself to it, without being able to spend the bulk of my time dealing explicitly with the things that priests and theologians, as such, deal with. I really don't experience that encounter subjectively, but I acknowledge it happens whenever I offer myself, my actions, and my sufferings to the Lord in complete detachment from everything but him and his commandments of love. Perhaps that's all there is to becoming his priestlings once we leave the church building with the Body of Christ in our bellies. I suppose there isn't much alternative anyhow, if I am to be immersed in our world's secularity, spending the bulk of my time and energy pretty much as most people do.

But that's still not my heart. I still have to force myself to thank him for being put on such a path. Which means I'm not really grateful. Which means I'm not really offering my heart. And what does that do to my own priesthood as a believer? I'd rather not think about that. Of course the solution is simple: "Say yes, joyfully." Alas, easier said than done. My prayer this Triduum is to be shown a way out of the box I'm in. I can only hope that's the right prayer.

On Evil and Omnipotence

Many moons ago my undergraduate philosophy-of-religion professor, Jonathan Malino (now at Guilford College), assigned as the course's main text an anthology that is still in print today. One of the essays in that anthology was J.L. Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence" (Mind 64, No. 244 [1955])—a classic restatement of the problem of evil still so much in academic circulation that, fifty-three years after its initial publication and twenty-eight years after its author's death, there is no way even to see the text online without paying somebody for the privilege. (Check out this Google search page for it.) It is no exaggeration to say that nearly all subsequent work on the problem of evil by philosophers writing in English addresses the problem as Mackie formulated it. What is not yet widely known, however, is that the English Dominican Herbert McCabe, who died in 2001, came up with a reply that, in my opinion, is the best so far.

That essay, "On Evil and Omnipotence," is contained in a posthumous collection of previously unpublished work entitled Faith Within Reason, published a year ago. My aim here to is describe McCabe's argumentative strategy well enough to bring out its importance for readers interested in this sort of thing. You might even buy the anthologies.

Since I'm too lazy to type out Mackie's description of the problem, I shall content myself with that of (now ex-) atheist Antony Flew, who wrote in the same year as Mackie: "Either God cannot abolish evil or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not then he is not all-good." McCabe also quotes that, which is good enough for his own purposes. What is the theist to reply?

The most common reply is the so-called "Free Will Defense," whose main proponent among philosophers for the past generation has been Alvin Plantinga. The main thesis of the FWD is that it is logically impossible for God to create beings who make free choices while ensuring that such creatures make no evil choices; hence, God cannot be blamed for the evil that we freely do, or for its having the natural consequences it does. Now rather than review Plantinga's intricate version, or other versions of the FWD, I point out that, like Mackie and Flew, McCabe considers the whole idea "worthless." I agree. What's his argument?

As is its wont, one of the best theology blogs out there reviewed FWR as soon as it came out. The reviewer, Protestant pastor Kim Fabricius, is somebody with whose views I am often unsympathetic; but in this case, he's right on target. Thus:

McCabe says RIP to the theodicist’s free-will defence, agreeing with Antony Flew that it is “worthless”, but disagreeing why. It is not, as Flew argues, because freedom is not incompatible with determinism – it is, insists McCabe – but rather because there is a mistaken understanding of freedom at work here, namely that God’s activity and ours are in competition, as if (as I would put it) freedom were a zero-sum game. But as McCabe states: “The idea that God’s causality could interfere with my freedom can only arise from an idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful creature – a part of the world.”

Quite so. My freedom of action varies inversely with the causal influence other creatures have on me; but God is not a creature, and the relation between his causal activity and mine is not a zero-sum game. God's general causal activity does not consist in making creatures act thus and not otherwise in any particular instance; rather, he creates them both as beings of such-and-such sorts and in their actuality, which includes their activity. God actively and continuously bestows being-as-actuality on us, and in that sense causes even what we do freely. (From the standpoint of theology strictly so-called, a big advantage of McCabe's view, which is essentially that of Aquinas, is how it undergirds "synergism.") Accordingly, the question whether we exercise free will does not, in general, have anything to do with God's degree of causal influence on us, as if it made sense to measure such a thing like we do in the case of creatures. In his general governance of the world, God causes us and our actions in the same way and to the same extent, even granted that some of our actions are free. (Of course that claim depends on the assumption that, as a conceptual matter, causation need not always consist in necessitation—but I don't think such an idea is as controversial today as it was fifty years ago, when Elizabeth Anscombe re-introduced it.) And so it is just wrongheaded to say that it's impossible for God to create a world in which rational creatures always but freely choose what's good. It is perfectly compatible with human freedom that God create such a world, even though he has not in fact created most of us like that.

Such an account does not have freedom being compatible with determinism—the thesis that whatever we do is necessitated, and thus determined, by factors outside our control. For to act freely is, among other things, to have determined for oneself at least one of one's motives for acting thus-and-such. But it does make human freedom compatible with our being predestined to do only what's good; for in such a scheme, free will is exercised only within the ambit of what's good, and not as a choice between doing good and doing evil. Such, after all, is the freedom of God, both in himself and as incarnate in Christ; and that's the kind of freedom in which the blessed in heaven participate. Such indeed is an indispensable component of the very goal of the Christian life, even if those of us in via haven't got there yet and enjoy only that immature freedom for which sin is still very much a possibility. Hence the FWD, which entails the claim that freedom is incompatible with predestination to the good alone, won't do.

What, then, is McCabe's defense against the problem of evil? It comes in three parts.

The first is to narrow down the problem. In discussing the problem of evil, it is common to distinguish between "natural" and "moral" evil. McCabe simplifies that by labeling it the distinction between "evil suffered" and "evil done." And he says that evil suffered does not pose a "problem" of evil at all. That's because it is in the very nature of physical reality that evil suffered be strictly relative: evil is suffered by some creatures as the good of others or of the whole. To use McCabe's examples: it's bad for the lamb to be eaten and thus die, but it sure is good for the lion doing the eating; getting sick from an infection, which is bad for us, is positive fulfillment for the little pathogens. That's how it is with Nature, including evolution. To suppose that the material world is evil just for being like that, inferring therefrom that the creator of such a world is evil, is to agree with the Manichees that biological life, merely as such, is evil. McCabe says that the Manichean thesis would be "very difficult to show." I would go further: St. Augustine showed why it's untenable.

For McCabe, the problem is not with evil suffered but with evil done. He poses the question thus (FWR, p. 82; I've added the bullets):

If we can reconcile human wickedness with the goodness of God, then the explanation will certainly cover pain as well. If it is true, as I have maintained, that my free acts are due to God, what about my sins? If God has planned and arranged everything, then it is unfair to make me sin and then send me to hell. I am now going to offer the following propositions:

• Although God acts in all my activity, free and unfree, he does not make me sin
• He does not send me to hell, although he does send people to heaven
• He could prevent me from sinning, and hence prevent me from going to hell, but does not always do so; yet this does not make him guilty.

The second stage of McCabe's defense is his argument for those propositions. Therein he relies on the Augustinian idea of evil as privatio boni, as an absence of what ought to be there. As Rev. Fabricius notes:

McCabe is...excellent on evil as a privatio boni – and at his best with the funny example. Some people, he writes, assume that when we have described evil as a negation we are saying that evil isn’t real. “But we (or I anyway) do not mean this at all. If I have a hole in my sock, the badness of this consists in the absence of wool where there ought to be some. This does not mean that the badness is illusory or unreal. If I jump out of a plane and discover that I have not got a parachute, it is of no comfort at all to be told that the absence of the parachute is not a real thing at all.”

So evil as privation is quite real. But God does not cause the "absence" in an evil action, which absence McCabe calls the "failure" of something to be there that, for the sake of the rational agent's humanity, ought to be there. He goes on:

Now my sins may involve a great deal of activity, but it is never the activity that makes us call them sins. What makes them sins is that this activity amounts to a failure in human living...a failure to behave in the way that human beings ought to behave. Now we can certainly say that God is acting in all the activity that is involved in sinning, but he is equally certainly not acting in the failure which constitutes the sin itself.

McCabe recognizes, of course, that some people charge God with "neglect" in permitting such failures when he could prevent them. McCabe's reply to that charge is the third main stage of his argument, and the part of his paper that most interests me.

After a page or so of explanation and argument, which it's important to read, he says:

When, therefore, I act in a less-than-human way, this is a failure on my part because acting in a human way is what I am for. But the fact that God has not made me act in a human way is not a failure on his part because this is not what he is for. It needs a kind of cosmic megalomania to suppose that God has the job of saving my soul and is to be given bad marks if he does not do that. Whatever he does for us, like creating us in the first place, is an act of gratuitous love, not something that is demanded of him.

Now such a view of God naturally elicits the further question what it could mean that God is good, if that does not mean that he acts as he ought by doing what he is for. McCabe's answer seems unassailable to me. But as this post is too long already, you'll have to read that for yourself.

As Fabricius points out:

...McCabe concludes modestly. He hopes to have “disentangled a puzzle,” but “When all is said and done, we are left with an irrational but strong feeling that if we were God we would have acted differently. Perhaps one of his reasons for acting as he did is to warn us not to try to make him in our own image.”

I believe that the modesty of such a result is actually a virtue. As I argued in my own paper The Problems of Evil, the best the philosopher or theologian can and should do with the problem of evil is to come up with a "defense": to show that the problem is not a logical one of inconsistency among the propositions held by the classical theist. That's a defense against the Mackies of the world. But a theodicy, which would mean showing why God is actually justified in permitting most of us to do evil and all of us to suffer it, is neither possible from any standpoint nor desirable from the standpoint of divine revelation. All we can do is glory in the person and action of Christ as the greatest conceivable manifestation of divine love. No doubt many of us, including yours truly, are inclined to say that, if they were God, they would have acted differently. Yet the very oddity of such a statement is evidence, as if we needed it, that we are out of our depth before God.

Harry Potter: basta!

I've seen one Harry Potter movie and haven't read any of the books. I'm not buying the present one which, alas, appears to be the fastest-selling in the history of publishing. Unless I get to work with teens and/or pre-teens fairly soon, I don't plan to. I agree with the Pope and with this author about the phenomenon.

If that makes me a stick-in-the-mud, I don't care.

The Pope's new book

I've seen several complaints in the Catholic blogosphere, most notably here, that the Catholic blogosphere is largely ignoring the Pope's new book Jesus of Nazareth. Well, I can't speak for others, but I for one one have not been ignoring it. I ordered it last month, received it a few weeks ago, and have actually been reading it. I am impressed. It resolves several intellectual puzzles I've had about the question how the "Jesus of history" relates to the "Christ of faith."

When I've finished it over the weekend, I'll have a lot more to say about two sets of issues: the ones that most concern me, and the ones that seem to exercise the critics the most. In the meantime, I look forward to receiving comments on this post that might enrich my next one.

The Thrill of the Chaste

OK, I admit it: I think Dawn Eden is ab fab. (I also admit I'm so uncool that I don't even try to update my slang; but I'm sure Dawn would understand if she knew.) She has now written what, as far as I know, is the only book for single females past the age of majority explaining why it's good for them to avoid premarital sex.

Of course I tend to love whatever apostolate Jewish converts to Catholicism take up. Especially if they're New Yorkers.