Divine simplicity and divine freedom, Part xn

The topic named in my title is one that I've written about before, for an academic journal, on this blog, and in the course of combox defenses of Catholic doctrine. At his blog Just Thomism, philosopher James Chastek offers a new insight and a new mistake about the relationship between divine simplicity and divine freedom.

The insight is that God's freedom is not that of "indetermination," which is the sort we have in via and, to a lesser extent, even in patria. That's because

If we consider the indetermination of the freedom so far as it does not possess some determinate good, then freedom is not a perfection or a good. The lack of good is not a good. So far as we take freedom in this way, we don’t call God free; and so far as freedom is taken as a perfection, and therefore said of God, we throw out the idea of indetermination-in-the-sense-of lacking-good and keep only the more central perfection (say, self- possession, or being the Lord of ones action.) We might even keep the idea of indetermination so far as we mean that God’s action is not forced by another, or so far as he is responsible for it.

Quite so. But orthodox theology affirms that God is free in some sense. So Chastek says:

Again, the divine freedom, so far as there is a thing, cannot be defined without bringing in the notion of creation. The Son, for example, does not proceed from the Father’s will, but if this is the case, the divine freedom cannot be defined without relation to the imperfection of creation, and divine freedom is not taken as an absolute perfection, as though the possibility of freedom would remain if the imperfect (that is, creation) were not possible.

Now God needn't have created, yet would have been fully free if he had not. Chastek knows that, which why he says that divine freedom entails only the "possibility" of "imperfection,"—a possibility which, given God's absolute perfection, is logically equivalent to the possibility of creation. So God is free just in case he can produce something imperfect, i.e., not fully determined, whether or not he actually does so. And of course, the fact that he has actually done so doesn't make him any more, or less, free.

From the standpoint of natural theology alone, that argument seems attractive. But even at that level, there's a Thomistic worry: since God cannot stand in a "real relation" to actual creation, it isn't even meaningful to say that he stands in a real relation to the possibility of creation, such that one of his essential attributes depends on that relation. That difficulty might be overcome with felicitous distinctions; but from the standpoint of Christian revelation, Chastek's argument surely contains a false premise, namely that God in se, being fully perfect and thus fully determinate, would lack freedom unless he were able to bring about imperfection ad extra.

Although the coming-forth of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the Father is by natural necessity, not by a choice that could have been otherwise, the love shared by the Persons with each other must in some sense arise from free choice, else it would not be love. One might say that such freedom is only the absence of coercion; but then it would be very hard to explain why natural necessity relevantly differs from absence of coercion.

To make such a criticism stick, I needn't give an account of just how the Persons love each other with free choice. I claim no special insight into the inner life of the Trinity, and neither should anybody else reading this. But I do know that our capacities are but faint analogies of God's, and that for us, love entails freedom of the will. It must entail at least that within the Godhead, prescinding from the question of creation.

This time, they came first for the Catholics

Only an outrage combining religion and politics has managed to rouse me from a self-imposed silence over the past several months. I am furious. As an RPG-toting Chuck Norris announced in the closing scene of one of his classically bad movies: "It's time."

Most of my erstwhile readers know by now that the Obama Administration has issued an "interim final rule" requiring employers to cover all forms of contraception and sterilization in their health-care plans at no cost to the user. In an access of generosity, expressed by President Obama in a phone call to Archbishop Timothy Dolan, faith-based employers not classified as "religious" have been given one year to comply. Now according to the Administration's unprecedentedly narrow definition of "religious," only organizations that exclusively serve believers, and are staffed exclusively by believers, count as religious. The implications of such a definition are by far the greatest for Catholic charities, hospitals, and schools, most of which serve and/or employ many non-Catholics. Those Catholic organizations must soon pay to violate the teaching of the Church. And so, those who lead and work for such organizations will soon be forced to pay for the privilege of violating their consciences.

This naked, cynical attack on religious liberty has of course been approved by the "liberal" establishment, including the New York  Times.  Worst of all, it was announced and enthusiastically endorsed by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a former governor of Kansas accustomed to wearing her Catholicism proudly. Such as it is. The worst enemy is the one within.

One is reminded of another power grab many decades ago. Not long after World War II, a German Lutheran pastor composed a poem about how Nazi oppression proceeded once Hitler took power:

First they came for the communists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

 Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

 Democrats who prefer to call themselves "progressive" aren't Nazis, of course, but they resemble the Nazis in one respect: now in power, they are moving from toleration to persecution of faith-based opposition. And this time they've come for the Catholics first. Why the Catholics? Because among faith-based organizations which serve people not of the pertinent faith, only Catholic ones are sponsored by a church that officially opposes contraception and sterilization. "Progressives" these days are authoritarian about everything except sexuality, in which the individual is to be accorded total autonomy within the bounds of mutual "consent." But of course, the legal protection and promotion of sexual autonomy eventually entails intolerance of those who oppose contraception and sterilization, both of which are necessary for the exercise of such autonomy. And that's what's started to happen.

Within the Church, even some "Obama Catholics" have protested the new regulation: e.g., Michael Sean Winters and E.J. Dionne. If the U.S. bishops have their way, the matter will almost certainly reach the Supreme Court in due course. And some Republicans fondly speculate that this regulation will cost Obama something called "the Catholic vote." But that's dubious at best. Catholics who care deeply about this issue aren't the sort who voted, or would vote, for Obama anyway. They're a distinct minority of self-designated Catholics to begin with. Among nominal Catholics, liberal Catholics will fall into line behind the Democrats this fall, as they always do at election time.

Our defense against the erosion of religious liberty, then, will have to count not on the bulk of Catholics but on the bishops, the clergy, and the committed minority of faithful laity. We now have the advantage of clarity where before there was ambiguity and wiggle room. To join the battle, I urge all such laity to go here, sign the petition, and keep the ball rolling. And all faithful Catholic bloggers should keep on this matter.

Lars Vilks, "Gay Muhammad" and "Freedom of Expression"

This past week brings news of yet another fracas involving Swedish cartoon artist Lars Vilks (CNN.com):

When Vilks entered a classroom where he was to deliver a lecture to about 250 people -- all of whom had passed through a security checkpoint to gain admission -- about five people started protesting loudly, Eronen said.

After Uppsala uniformed and non-uniformed police calmed the protesters, the lecture got under way at about 5:15 p.m. (11:15 a.m. ET), Eronen said.

But as Vilks was showing audiovisual material, 15 to 20 audience members became loud and tried to attack Vilks, he said.

As police stepped in, a commotion started and Vilks was taken to a nearby room; police used pepper spray and batons to fend off the protesters, Eronen said. Vilks did not return to the lecture. [Video footage of the event].

Last March, an American woman who called herself "Jihad Jane," Colleen LaRose, was indicted in the United States for allegedly conspiring to support terrorists and kill Vilks.

In a 2007 interview with CNN he had drawn the cartoon of Mohammed with a dog's body in order to take a stand.

" "I don't think it should not be a problem to insult a religion, because it should be possible to insult all religions in a democratic way, " says Vilks from his home in rural Sweden.

"If you insult one, then you should insult the other ones."

His crude, sketched caricature shows the head of Prophet Mohammed on the body of a dog. Dogs are considered unclean by conservative Muslims, and any depiction of the prophet is strictly forbidden.

Vilks, who has been a controversial artist for more than three decades in Sweden, says his drawing was a calculated move, and he wanted it to elicit a reaction.

"That's a way of expressing things. If you don't like it, don't look at it. And if you look at it, don't take it too seriously. No harm done, really," he says.

When it's suggested that might prove an arrogant -- if not insulting -- way to engage Muslims, he is unrelenting, even defiant.

"No one actually loves the truth, but someone has to say it," he says.

Vilks, a self-described atheist, points out he's an equal opportunity offender who in the past sketched a depiction of Jesus as a pedophile.

Why don't we care more about freedom?

As a young man, I was a Republican of the libertarian sort. I believed that the sole duties of government were to defend the borders, enforce contracts, and punish those who victimized others by force or fraud. Once government went beyond those duties, I believed, it would inevitably swallow up more and more of our liberties until freedom meant little or nothing. That is exactly the path that government in America has been following—with popular consent to be sure—since the New Deal. I shall say a bit at the end why I'm no longer a libertarian; but I still think one can and must protest against the steady erosion of freedom in our country. What really scares me is why more people don't do just that.

The latest example of what I decry is this set of subtle moves. They're part of a trend that is all the more insidious for being bipartisan. It's about forcing people to do what's right. Thus, another part of the trend is taxes: more and more of people's earned income goes to paying taxes, which are extracted by the not-so-implicit threat of force. All for the public good, right? The needs of "the people" are enormous, right? Yet in the form of income tax, sales tax, Social Security tax, gasoline tax, and car tax, at least a third of my own quite modest wages go to the government—not counting child support, of course, which is only slightly less. I'm supposed to believe that such a rate of taxation is for my own good, which I don't believe at all. Yet many people pay much more, and not a few of them think we should be paying out at this rate, if only because we can't think of a more creative and humane way to satisfy the apparently insatiable demand that things be made right. Meanwhile it's the little things that often rankle, and reveal, the most.

The sales tax is particularly noisome to me not because it exists—consumption taxes, in my view, should be government's main source of revenue, with income taxes reserved for the wealthy—but because of how it's collected. Nearly every day I have to fiddle with pennies, which cost more to produce than they're worth and are useful for no other purpose, just to pay the sales tax "to the penny," because merchants are forbidden by law to include said tax in the price of what's sold. The system is enormously inefficient, but it persists because it allows people to maintain the illusion that they're being ripped off less than they would be otherwise. Totally irrational—just like what's happened with family law, which I've discussed before but see fit to bring up again.

Because of the divorce culture, government is now in the business of regulating the family lives of countless people. Non-custodial parents, mostly fathers, are often reduced to peonage; single parents, mostly mothers, often and also need this or that government service to get by. Fatherless children are much more likely to become crime statistics than those from intact homes. What's astonishing and frightening to me is that most people don't seem to see enough wrong with such a state of affairs to want to take concrete steps to change it. Sure, most people say divorce is a Bad Thing, especially for children—but most also say that a bad marriage is worse. So, most of us want the freedom to replace our spouses but see nothing wrong with the ceding of family authority to government that this often entails. Apparently, such a loss of freedom is considered a worthwhile price for the preservation of freedom to pursue the often-receding prospect of sexual and emotional self-fulfillment. The irrationality of it ought to be, but apparently is not, widely perceived. Hope triumphs over experience, indeed; too bad it's the wrong sort of hope.

People seem to think they enhance their freedom if they "pursue happiness" unfettered in some private sphere while "the government" takes care of the rest. Yet the more we grasp at personal freedom so understood, the less of it we end up with. Such is the logic of sin. Starting with Eve, Satan has always made disobeying God seem like an exercise of godlike freedom; yet the more alienated we become from God in how we live, the greater slaves to sin, and thus to Satan, we become. That's why I'm no longer a libertarian: I now believe the government must uphold the entire natural law, else people will stop caring about it. The only way to preserve our freedom is to obey God. Then there will be less need to try to force each other to do what's right. But then we'd have to give up the illusion of control. Maybe that's why we don't care more about freedom.

Next time I fly, I'll wear my Crocs to the airport. For some reason, the TSA hates it when I doff those things.

The issues behind the issues

In an article on the First Things blog last week, Prof. Robert P. George wrote (emphasis added):

There are many profound respects in which our culture is in need of transformation. Work is needed in every sphere. There are two issues, however, that are so central to our future and, indeed, to the future of mankind that they must, surely, be given a certain priority. Both are on the table now and will be resolved—for better or for worse—in the next decade or so. Critical (possibly irreversible) decisions will be made in the next year or two. I speak of the issue of marriage and the complex set of issues sometimes referred to compendiously as “bioethics.” In respect of both matters, things will go one way or the other depending on the posture and actions of Catholics.

Having once briefly worked under Robby, and having continued to follow his work with stupefied admiration, I am obliged to agree with him that the political difference will be made by Catholics—if, that is, a difference is going to be made. But I am far from convinced that there is still time to make a difference. That is because the issues behind the ones he identifies as top-priority seem largely to have been decided—and decided wrongly.

In the case of marriage, the "developed" world as a whole has firmly adopted the premise that marriage is only what people collectively decide it is. That holds of the Anglosphere, which includes the United States, in particular. What is still understood to be "traditional" marriage—a lifelong union between a man and a woman, ordered to the transmission and maintenance of new life—is no longer assumed by our legal and cultural norms to be divinely instituted. To be sure, many tradition-minded believers of all major religions still maintain that assumption. Some even act accordingly. But in the public square, traditional marriage is now treated as just one option among others, just like one's choice of religion. Marriage as an institution is thus becoming something we may adapt at will, on the basis of ideas, preferences, and goals that make no necessary reference to a divine or even a natural law. That is the main reason why intentionally sterile marriages, no-fault divorce, serial divorce-and-remarriage, and even cohabitation without the formality of marriage are now more widespread than at any time since the pagan Roman Empire. That is why same-sex "marriage," currently opposed by the majority of Americans—who are, after all, still formed by the residual sentiments of tradition—is slowly spreading among nations and states. Ineluctably, it will gain well-nigh universal acceptance. So long as our legal and cultural norms assume that it is human choice, not "the laws of nature and of nature's God," that determines what marriage is to be, then what is called "marriage" will become more and more elastic, stretched to fit more and more forms of moral and spiritual absurdity defended by the buzzwords of "freedom" and "equal rights."

As for the array of bioethical issues that keep arising with the advance of science and technology, we can raise all the "ethical" objections we like to this-or-that practice made newly possible; but in the end, such objections cannot of themselves make much difference. I need not discuss specifics, such as pre-natal screening or human cloning; for the underlying problem is that there is no longer any common religious or philosophical framework in which to discuss such issues, and to which appeal could successfully be made to resolve them. The very terms of discussion reinforce the default impression that this array of issues is a matter of adjudicating democratically among competing ideas and beliefs—many of which have a certain plausibility, but none of which are ultimately more than just matters of opinion. So, amid the cacophony of competing opinions and Weltanschauungen, the irrefragable fact of what can be done ensures that all of it, eventually, will be done. And once such things are done, they develop too much of a constituency to make banning them politically realistic. Just look at what's happened with IVF.

All of this is the fruit of what I call "autonomism": the idea that human freedom entails the freedom to decide what the most fundamental norms of life are to be, a freedom constrained only by obvious considerations of physical reality and social utility. Now if autonomism could still be effectively reversed, Catholics would indeed be best placed to do the job. The pope and the bishops say all the right things, in theory; and they do have allies among the Orthodox, conservative Protestants, observant Jews, even Muslims. The Catholic Church is certainly pivotal here. But as Robby seems implicitly to recognize, the most the Catholic bishops can realistically do is "encourage, exhort, and cajole." That is not just because the political sphere is the province of the laity, which of course is true; it is because the bishops confront, among the Catholic laity themselves, the same autonomism that has gained purchase in the culture at large.

Among those Catholics who care enough to even understand Church teachings about marriage and bioethics—and such Catholics, in my observation, are not the majority—many regard such teachings as reformable, and thus as "take-it-or-leave-it." In other words, the teachings are treated as matters of opinion. That, I believe, is the most likely reason why why more American bishops do not withhold the Eucharist from Catholic politicians who support a so-called "right" to abortion. If they were to get tough about that particular matter, the ensuing storm of controversy would rightly raise the question why they don't get equally tough about other moral issues on which many Catholics, in theory or in practice, treat settled Church teaching as a matter of opinion and thus as optional. Marriage is quite high on that list of other moral issues: the divorce rate among Catholics roughly matches that of the general population, and many divorced-and-remarried Catholics receive the Eucharist without qualm or question. And of course there's contraception, a matter on which the vast majority of Catholics reject, in both theory and practice, a teaching of the Church which has not varied for as far back as we have records on the subject. I don't hear any bishops suggesting that loyalty to such teaching be made a litmus test of good standing with the Church. So, if they can't crack down on those issues, how are they going to energize Catholics who aren't already loyal to join forces with other religous believers about the issues Robby sees as so crucial? Even leaving aside the aftershocks of the sex-abuse scandal, the de facto moral authority—the street cred, if you will—just isn't there.

None of this is to say that I wouldn't want to join forces with people like Robby on such matters. I'd be on the side of light and truth, after all; in fact, this blog is my own small way of doing it. And if, in careerist fashion, I got a job out of the whole business, I'd have an interesting life to boot. But I believe that, in the end, only radical divine intervention will make much difference. Things have to happen that will shock people back into a sense of spiritual reality. I hope it won't have to be a combination of natural disasters, wars, and economic dislocations that would reduce us to a peasant-style existence; but I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's what it takes. In the meantime, let us keep saying what needs to be said; but above all, let us pray, do penance, and love one another. Drawing people back to God depends above all on his grace, light, and joy shining in our hearts and faces. In short: on our holiness.

The two new fronts in the global war for freedom

Some Americans know, and all should know, something said by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." When passed, what that meant to people was that the Congress may not regulate or abolish established state churches, may not make any particular religion illegal, and may not require anybody to be religious. Since World War II, of course, the Supreme Court has made utter hash of the two quoted clauses, so that American jurisprudence has no coherently applicable criteria for balancing freedom of religion with freedom from religion. But that is, one hopes and prays, a temporary problem. The fact remains that both freedom of religion and freedom from religion are inherent human rights respected in principle by basic American and international law. They are so respected in virtue of that acknowledged dignity of the human person which makes it intrinsically immoral to force people to act against their consciences. Such rights constitute an irreducible element of human freedom. And it is just that freedom which is now under threat from both the religious and the irreligious in today's world.

During the Cold War, most people could and did recognize worldwide Communism as a threat to freedom. Despite the protests of pacifists and some major lapses along the way, U.S. policy toward Communist countries was designed to protect the freedom of our way of life. The verdict of history is that we succeeded. Nowadays, many recognize the so-called "war on terrorism" as another protracted effort to protect the same from violent Islamic extremists, who seem to be growing more numerous by the year. What many fail to recognize, however, is that we have but are failing to exploit the moral high ground in our war with the Islamists.

In most Muslim countries, non-Muslims do not have the same freedom of religion as Muslims. The world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia, extends considerable freedom to non-Muslims inasmuch as the country's size and diversity has bred a culture of relative tolerance between religions. But in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the public practice of non-Muslim religions is not tolerated; conversion from Islam to any other religion is punishable and often punished by death. And the majority of countries in which Muslims comprise a majority lie closer to the Saudi/Iranian end of the spectrum than to Indonesia's. Even in Egypt and Syria, where ancient Christian communities still exist and are tolerated to a degree, Christians are dhimmi: they live with certain legal, educational, and economic disadvantages making them second-class citizens. And in Palestine and Iraq, Christians are finding themselves having to emigrate in droves if they want to have decent lives at all.

Even more significantly, you won't find most Muslim scholars willing to accept what the Pope calls "reciprocity." They don't think that Muslims should grant non-Muslims the same degree of religious freedom that Muslims generally enjoy in countries where non-Muslims are the majority. This is why, for example, they take for granted that they may, can, and should build mosques in Rome, but at the same time it is unthinkable to them that Christians be allowed to build churches in Mecca or even that the Jews rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, it is in the very nature of Islam to reject the idea of religious freedom as understood not only by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—to which many nominally subscribe—but by Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae. And that is probably the major reason why we must fight the war on "terrorism," which is really a war with those Muslims who take jihad to entail violent as well as non-violent means of spreading Islam. There is virtually zero chance that Muslims will, as a whole and as a matter of principle, accept the principle of reciprocity even as they demand religious freedom for themselves.

We have ample historical precedent for this fight. Thanks to the courage of countless knights, peasants, and churchmen, most of Western Europe was never conquered by Muslim armies. The Crusaders simply went on the offensive, taking the battle to the Holy Land even though their greed and divisions eventually made their conquests unviable. Spain, which had endured some measure of Muslim rule for centuries, fought for centuries to drive Muslim satraps out of Spain and eventually succeeded. When the Ottoman sultans tried later to grab big bites out of Western Europe, they were repeatedly and sometimes miraculously defeated. At nearly every stage in the millennium-long struggle, everybody who was anybody knew the stakes and did what had to be done—even if they also did some things that needn't and shouldn't have been done. But I don't see that kind of insight and resolve today. Westerners on the whole do not understand that Muslims on the whole, while enjoying the benefit of Western ideas about religious freedom, will never subscribe to those ideas fully and hence will never be placated by the sort of "tolerance" that presumes a willingness to reciprocate. True, the so-called "terrorists" are not terribly popular among Muslims; but that is because of their means, not their ends. And there will always be Muslims willing to use those means.

That is why our politicians need to have the cojones to let people publicly say whatever they think about Islam, no matter how negative, even as absolutely anybody may now publicly say what they think about Christianity, no matter how negative. But only a few even in America have those cojones, and it gets them into trouble. In several European countries, saying such things about Islam will land you in jail—but not, of course, saying similarly nasty things about Christianity. Indeed and conversely, actively professing traditional Christianity on certain points, such as following the Bible in denouncing sodomy as an "abomination" before God, will get you prosecuted for a "hate crime" even if you win in the end. Even in my home town, New York, it is illegal to display Christian symbols on public property during Christmas but legal to display Muslim symbols during Ramadan and Jewish during Hannukah. We are in danger of becoming dhimmi by virtue of that "tolerance" which is intolerant of the majority.

Indeed, that trend reflects what's been happening among our secular, cultural élites. Recently the atheism industry has got more aggressive: there's been a spate of propaganda denouncing "religion" as evil largely on the ground that its "intolerance" causes violence and social stagnation. (See, e.g., Sam Harris' book The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins' TV series The Root of All Evil?) On the popular level, even Elton John has got into the act, insisting that "organized religion" has "always bred hatred against gays." Presumably he supports suppressing the freedom of his fellow citizens to profess publicly what the Bible and the natural law say about sodomy. So, religious freedom is also threatened by those who are only willing to tolerate forms of religion they deem sufficiently tolerant. At the same time, however, they seem willing to tolerate Islam, which is a minority religion in the West and therefore, in the liberal mythos, a fit object of tolerance. Hence the New York decision, made by secular-minded jurists. But apparently no form of traditional Christianity, even ones that renounce religious violence, is to enjoy the same degree of tolerance.

In the case of both Islamists and secularists, then, we confront a double standard that threatens the basic and inherent right to religious freedom: Islam is to be tolerated even when it is intolerant, and traditional Christianity is not to be tolerated even when it is tolerant. I can understand the double standard on the part of Muslims; they do not, after all, even pretend that they ought not to have one. At least they're consistent. But in the West, the double standard not only accelerates the erosion of morality in general and of the family in particular, thus weakening the moral basis of our society, but also weakens our resolve to resist the violent adherents of a religion that really is objectionably intolerant. Accordingly, one front in the new, global war for freedom is external: the war against Islamist violence; but the other is internal, against our own secularists. If we lose, the fifth columnists will have the society they deserve.