It's simple, really

Even some liberals wonder what Obama's been thinking with this HHS contraception mandate. So I'll lay it out simply.

When a church-sponsored organization provides "social services," that's good religion. When the church in question forbids abortion, contraception, and sterilization, that's bad religion. But we don't want to discriminate between types of religiosity. So we just say that church-sponsored organizations that do both good religion and bad religion aren't religious.

Simple, isn't it? But if you want to understand the contradiction thus resolved, go here.

God's doing OK in the polls!!!

You read that right. According to William E. Carroll—a Catholic philosopher currently ensconced as a good old Fellow at Blackfriars, Oxford—a respectable organization conducted a national poll a month ago showing that

...if God exists, voters are prepared to give it good marks. Voters approve of God’s performance by a 52% to 9% margin . . . When asked to evaluate God on some of the issues it is responsible for, voters give God its best rating on creating the universe, 71% to 5%. They also approve of its handling of the animal kingdom 56% to 11%, and even its handling of natural disasters 50% to 13%. Young voters are prepared to be more critical of God on natural disasters with those between 18 and 29 rating it 59% to 26%, compared to 47% to 12% among those over 65.

If such trends continue, God would be a shoo-in to beat Barack Obama next year. At any rate, nobody's confusing the latter with the former anymore.

Now Carroll does say much of what I'd say about this sort of thing, starting with the report's use of the impersonal pronoun 'it' for God. Even on that score, though, his critique should have gone further. How, I'd ask, can an 'it' be evaluated for its performance unless it's a machine (or perhaps a lower form of life), which very few people think God is? Even pollsters need to think through questions like that before asking people about their theological beliefs. Unlike the polling company's writeup, though, Carroll does get the very project's inherent irony. Surely, if there is a personal God, then he (yes, he; but that's another debate) is worthy of worship; granted such an analytic truth, it is God who should be evaluating our performance, not we his. Withal, the mere conduct of a poll asking people their opinion of God's job performance puts us in Monty-Python territory: entertainment, not theology. Our consumerist, democratic selves are ready grist for parody. Self-parody, one supposes, would be too much to expect; I'd be pleasantly surprised if that's what the pollsters were up to.

Yet the still-greater irony here is that, among a people still describing itself in the main as Christian, neither pollsters nor polled seemed to suspect irony.

The late theologian Herbert McCabe, OP, once pointed out: "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 it is not megalomania to suppose that God has set himself the job of preserving the innocent from ultimate harm, whether the harm be from other people's bad choices or from the forces of nature. In fact, according to Christianity, our first parents were innocent and preserved from harm before their Fall, and we, their unfortunate descendants, are all meant to be blessed forever, free of death and all other harms. But in this in-between time, there is no reliable correlation between virtue and good fortune. The minority who admit to giving God bad marks give them largely for that reason. That may not be megalomaniacal, but I believe it manifests what the psychoanalysts term "infantile narcissism" in people of an age to know better. They're like seven-year-olds complaining "It's not fair!"

Well, so what if it isn't? If it hasn't dawned on you by the age of majority that life is not fair and never will be, then you haven't outgrown your infantile narcissism. The more sensitive and thoughtful narcissists just invest it, on humanity's behalf, in a bitter cosmic complaint against the Almighty. I for one have found that to be the most common cause of atheism. But the problem manifest in the complaint is not God's problem. If you think it is, the joke is on you and the complaint is your problem.

Creation and redemption are about gratuitous love. Hence life in this vale of tears is about mercy, not fairness—even granted that, in the age to come, the two qualities will be as one. When we who are ostensibly Christian fail to recognize that, we neither see nor appreciate the real ironies of life. We just stay angry with God—even when we call ourselves atheists. So long as we think we're in a position to evaluate God's performance, we expose ourselves to that and worse ironies.

Evolutionary theology

Yes, it feels like a so-bad-it's-good Chuck Norris movie. At the climax of yet another such flick, the words of the steely-eyed hero played by Chuck resounded in the villain’s head: “It’s time…to die.” The poor fellow promptly turned around to see Chuck fire a live RPG into him. In tackling the subject to which my title alludes, I feel like that villain. I can sense some combat-hardened defender of orthodoxy behind me, ready to fire his overkill and watch me blow up. The time has come to address the subject; indeed, that time is overdue in the Church. But at least I’m not the villain of the piece, and the conversation will continue regardless.

I do, after all, have a legion of well-intentioned company. A few weeks ago, as my radio droned over my chores, I heard Barbara Bradley Hagerty conducting an NPR piece that their webmaster entitles “Evangelicals Question the Existence of Adam and Eve.” At first, I rolled my mind’s eyes: Since when is it news that not all evangelicals, never mind other sorts of Christian, are fundamentalists?  Of course it’s possible for a faithful Christian to doubt that the first several chapters of Genesis are literal history. E.g., the chronological order of creation described in the first chapter does not square with that of the second—a fact that surely cannot have escaped the notice of whoever first put these stories together in a single written text. And many scholars, including one Joseph Ratzinger, have pointed out the similarities between Genesis and Babylonian myth. As a Catholic, I tend to think of the first eleven chapters of Genesis as myths and legends given a distinctive theological interpretation in their divinely inspired, written form. What’s important is not that they be history as the modern mind understands that genre, but that their theological interpretation be—well, divinely revealed truth. That, to be sure, must bear some relationship to what literally happened in the past. But it’s not clear exactly what that is, and it’s doubtful that we can ever get clear enough about it to satisfy intellectual curiosity. I’m far from alone in that attitude, not only among Catholics but among Christians generally.

But despite my inclination to let the matter rest there, other Catholics won’t. I’ve noticed over the years that whenever the question of humanity’s origins comes up, many thoughtful Catholics will take the evolution of the body for granted (as did Pope John Paul II), but all will zero in on the question of monogenism.

Last week, e.g., science writer John Farrell observed on his blog at Forbes.com:

The question arises: Can theology adapt to the findings of science? Can the strict monogenism of the human race as traditionally understood by Christians, be modified to the scientific consensus that the human species originated in a small population, not a single couple? In famous cases, of course, such as the trial of Galileo, and acceptance of the reality of heliocentrism, the answer is yes, though it took the Catholic Church a long time to officially come around. But as Coyne points out, the erosion of the idea that the human race descended from a single couple is something that is much more necessary to the theology of salvation in Christian tradition than is the issue of, say, whether God really made the sun stand still for Joshua and the Israelites. Christians have for centuries adapted to a more allegorical interpretation of many books in the Old Testament. But not the Book of Genesis and its account of the Fall and Expulsion from Eden.

The question at issue here is really dual: Did the human race today descend from a single couple? And: Is an affirmative answer to that question necessary for preserving Catholic soteriology? From a scientific standpoint, the first question seems to be settled in the negative. Many faithful Catholics think the second is settled in the affirmative. So, to that extent, we have a conflict. Farrell worries that the Catholic Church has not tried to resolve the conflict. He’s right to worry, for the conflict is a serious test of faith for many educated Catholics.

At the magisterial level, the only explicit treatment of the matter we find is Pope Pius XII’s  1950 encyclical Humani Generis. Here’s the passage Farrell quotes, like many others before him:

For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

That came partly in response to the speculations of Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who indeed had little compunction about coloring outside the lines of orthodoxy. The Vatican, needless to say, was not pleased. Even today, most champions of orthodoxy believe that Pius XII settled the matter in favor of monogenism, “science” be damned. But I’m not so sure about that.

Since I’m not a scientist, and my academic credentials are not in theology, I’m not the one to solve the problem. But I suggest that, to make progress, we should first ask whether the conflict is real or apparent, temporary or permanent. For answers, there are three basic options:

1. The conflict is real and permanent: the “surrender” option.
2. The conflict is real but temporary: the “truce” option.
3. The conflict is only apparent: the “creative” option.

WWhich option is the faithful Catholic to take?  Clearly not (1). Since the Church has long insisted that “reason” and “faith” complement rather than contradict each other, surrendering the confirmed results of natural science to theological dogma on this point is not an option. So the debate among thoughtful Catholics is really about whether to embrace (2) or (3). Do we settle for a temporary truce, waiting science out a while longer? Or do we take the present results of science for granted as a point of departure for some creative theological re-thinking?

It’s tempting to go for (2). Science does develop and change, after all. Prima facie, waiting science out still seems to be the Vatican’s preferred route. Largely for that reason, it is the preferred route of orthodoxy’s champions. But after six decades of scientific progress since Humani Generis, continued silence on their part is a theological and apologetical embarrassment. What, then, can be done with the creative option while remaining within the bounds of orthodoxy?

As a philosopher, my instinct is to look for the logical wiggle-room. And in Pius XII’s words, that’s what we find. To be sure, it is irreformable dogma that an individual couple committed the first sin and transmitted the resulting loss of grace to their descendants as “original” sin. With the usual two exceptions understood, those descendants are all of us. But a conflict with current science arises only if we assume that the “generation” by which original sin is transmitted logically entails that a first couple, Adam and Eve, were the first humans in a purely natural sense, i.e. the genetic sense. Nothing in magisterial documents requires adopting that assumption. So it is no more theologically irreformable than scientifically defensible. We may and should dispense with it.

Why not hold instead that Adam and Eve—whoever they really were, and wherever they really lived—were the first humans in a supernatural sense? As a couple, they were the first people to be called and elevated by grace to a state of fellowship with God meant to culminate in a greater union with him. That doesn’t entail that they were genetically the first humans. It entails only that they were the first humans God gave a destiny beyond Nature. So when they sinned and lost his grace, they largely reverted to Nature, which is the state all of us since then find ourselves in until we are somehow incorporated into Christ.

Of course such a proposal raises many questions. There are always questions, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But centuries ago, the Church slowly came to see that affirming biblical inerrancy did not entail rejecting heliocentrism. It is not unreasonable to imagine her coming to see that affirming monogenism need not entail rejecting evolutionary biology.

OK, time to duck the RPGs….

The argument from desire

As I waded this morning through my overwhelming social-network streams—all of which now integrate into my single Google+ stream—I managed to notice somebody quoting C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." Both in context and in general, that is the nucleus of an argument for the existence of God. Seeing a token of it revived my memory of having found the argument persuasive when I read the book in my teens. I still believe the argument has potential: more than even theists generally acknowledge.

Of course modern and post-modern Western minds scoff.  The only difference between the modern and post-modern minds is that the latter is more consistently cynical, and even that difference does not obtain here. And for good reason: If only for maturation's sake, we are taught not to assume that desiring X is evidence that X exists to satisfy the desire. I desire freedom from death, or failing that, freedom from the natural consequences of sexual license; yet as they're fond of saying in the South, that ain't gonna happen. (The South has some wonderful sayings, such as "Y'cain't win fer losin'...") I desire that the tree in my yard grow money, but that ain't gonna happen either—and if it did, the government and my ex would find a way to get most of it anyhow. We all know that we can and why we should outgrow desires we know cannot be satisfied.

But can we or should we outgrow what the Germans call sehnsucht?  I mean what Lewis meant:

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.

We've all experienced that. But most of us can't name the desire itself, still less its object; and as we age, most of us tend to forget it. We assume it's the fantasy of children and poets, and fear that dwelling on it would inhibit the "real" business of life. Indeed, as Lewis taught us, even the experience of it cannot be summoned up by wishing or seeking. And so it would seem that sehnsucht tells us nothing about any "beyond." For many of those capable of even discussing the matter, sehnsucht is just part of our makeup, full stop. Perhaps it's our brain chemistry. As such, it may have "adaptive" value, by virtue of causing some people to believe that all the pain and suffering of life is worthwhile in terms of a beautiful Reality beyond what the world has to offer. Such a belief motivates many to carry on and stay relatively sane. But sehnsucht is not, really, evidence of any such Reality. Or is it?

Like Lewis, I think it is. I have always thought so. In general, natural, inescapable desires for good things can and should be satisfied. We have natural, inescapable desires for food, sleep, sex, play, knowledge, beauty, and many other generic goods. It is natural for us to love—even to love specific people, such as our children. Under certain conditions, all the aforementioned goods are available; under certain conditions, we should seek and attain them; when we do, we enjoy them. Why should that natural, inescapable desire called sehnsucht be any different? Is there any reason to believe that "reality" ultimately frustrates that longing, that what's longed for cannot be named because it does not exist? Of course it's logically possible that sehnsucht is futile at the end of the day, or of life; but what's actually the case is only a small subset of what's logically possible, and much more interesting.

One can rule out such an "argument from desire" by stipulating that only what can be known scientifically can be known at all, and thus can be safely said to exist at all. But scientism would have us believe, like Bertrand Russell, that we are evolutionary experiments doomed to frustration and oblivion. To my mind, and that of most of the human race, nihilism is unreasonable as well as boring. Trust your sehnsucht instead. It's the reasonable thing to do.

Back, with evil

Apologies to my vast readership for the weeks of silence. At the beginning of September, I moved from NYC for a new full-time teaching job in Syracuse, which has turned out to be fairly demanding. At the same time, my father is terminally ill and my elder daughter is about to get married—in England. For reasons I won't explain further, my new job makes it much easier to deal with such family matters than staying in NYC would have. So I take this job to be providential. Even so, for the past six weeks I have been kept too busy for blogging. I probably shouldn't be blogging even now, but I can't help it. Another natural-theology issue keeps niggling at me.

I mean, of course, the so-called "problem of evil." I've written about that standard conundrum several times before, most notably here, and I'd love to write a book about it. My excuse for adding to the already staggering literature on the topic would be to show, rigorously, why most of said literature is irrelevant, and to tease out what is relevant. The main purpose of this post is to briefly explain why, and to state the appropriate lesson.

Last month, philosophers James Chastek and Alex Pruss made arguments that serve nicely as a point of departure. But only as a point of departure. First, Chastek's conclusion:

Christianity is utterly incoherent without the doctrine of original sin, which promises and insists upon the suffering and toil of the human race as a consequence of the divine goodness (namely, his justice). We can call this doctrine impossible or absurd, but we can’t very well say that we get the idea that God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent from Christianity and then turn around and say that we have no idea why the human race suffers. Omnipotence and omnibenevolence are a part of a package deal with original sin.

Next, Pruss' conclusion:

In the face of eternity, a finite amount of suffering is just a blip. But does it not beg the question to suppose eternal life in responding to the problem of evil? Not at all. The problem of evil is an argument against theism. Theism makes eternal life for any created persons very likely. Thus, if the problem of evil is to make a significant dent in the probability of theism, the problem of evil has to work even if there is eternal life, or else a good argument against eternal life is needed.

What's helpful about such arguments is their reminder that classical Christian theism, as distinct from a deracinated, generic philosophical theism, goes some way toward showing how an answer to the problem of evil is possible. Such an answer, I argued in the paper linked above, would be defense rather than theodicy. It would not explain how God is justified in presiding over all the unmerited suffering we find in the world, but it would show that his doing so is logically compatible with his being both all-powerful and perfectly good. And if my argument in that paper is sound, then defense is all anybody—theist and non-theist—has a right to expect.

But how, exactly, do Chastek and Pruss help? They invoke the Christian-theist doctrines of original sin and an everlasting afterlife, respectively. I want to argue that, in conjunction with certain other doctrines, that of original sin entails that God could not have prevented our first parents' sin from depriving their descendants of grace without trashing the created order of things. Now Chastek thinks the inheritance of original sin is required by God's "justice." But if that's so, it's only remotely, insofar as God's justice requires that he not trash the created order of things. For the descendants of our first parents did not deserve to inherit such a deprivation: none of us, prior to conception, did a thing to deserve anything, bad or good. But the inheritance of the deprivation is balanced out by the offer to all of an unmerited share in the divine nature. That entails everlasting life. None of us, of course, deserve everlasting life either. If we are all (with the usual few exceptions understood) conceived without grace, we are all called by grace to unmerited glory. That balance is itself just, even though neither end of the scale by itself is fair. This life isn't about fairness. It's about mercy.

Of course none of that shows that God had to set things up in such a way. Nothing could show that. Some would even argue that God is immoral for setting things up that way. Odd as that may sound, it's an argument worth taking seriously. But for the reasons Chastek and Pruss give, it cannot be plausibly argued that such a setup shows that divine omnipotence and omnibenevolence are mutually incompatible on a Christian account of those attributes. That takes the logical sting out of the problem of evil. Raising the problem is a lament and a question; its mere existence is not a logical demonstration of any anti-Christian conclusion.

Resisting the Gnostic impulse

Gnosticism is a perennial impulse. I don't mean all the mythic confabulations that the bewildering variety of Gnostic sects spun during the first three centuries C.E.  I mean a tendency they all had in common. Like the Devil himself, it is deadliest when unrecognized.

To expose that for what it is, however, we need to excavate the two notions that the ancient Gnostics all shared. The first was that the universe as we observe and experience it is evil. It is a prison from which only a few inmates, able to recognize and accept enlightenment about their true situation, have any chance of escape. Second, and on most of the ancient accounts, the world was created by an errant demiurge of some sort who keeps sparks of the divine, our true selves, imprisoned in our bodies. Accordingly, the task of those who want salvation is to escape the clutches of matter altogether and rejoin that ineffable, purely spiritual Pleroma ("fullness") from which the Demiurge had the ill grace to devolve. It all sounds like an elaborate fantasy to most of us today who have heard it at all. And ultimately, that's just what it is. But it actually sprang, and in some forms continues to spring, from a perennial tendency I recognize even in myself: cosmic cynicism.

By 'cosmic cynicism' I mean the attitude which naturally springs up when we disbelieve that the "cosmos," that vast, more-or-less ordered whole we experience, is the product of a Love and a Reason that are one. The cosmos or "universe," in the scientific sense of the term, doesn't care about what we tend to care about most—such as love, goodness, and beauty. Nowadays, of course, many of those who find the universe morally or spiritually wanting tend to be atheists or agnostics. Like most of us, they see much apparently pointless suffering and lament how "the innocent" suffer at least as much, if not more, than the villainous. That fortune and deserts do not seem to coincide is the hard truth motivating believer and unbeliever alike to raise "the problem of evil" as an objection to classical theism. And those who find that objection decisive conclude that, if the universe is created at all, its creator must be immoral, foolish, or both--certainly not the all-perfect God of classical theism. That's what the Gnostics concluded; yet, thanks to the historic monotheistic religions, most moderns don't buy the sort of metaphysics that allows for and requires an errant demiurge. So today's cosmic cynics generally conclude there is no creator in any sense at all. The universe is just a brute fact, brutal in its indifference to our most cherished, sentimental pieties. Humanity is just an evolutionary experiment, probably doomed, and certainly not worthwhile in any objective terms save those of Dawkins' "selfish gene." That is now considered the "enlightened" point of view by most of the culture's clerisies. It's the new Gnosis, sans the old myths and metaphysics.

Yet how much success would a man have if he tried to induce a woman to marry him by pointing out that their genes, together, have a real good shot at beating out many others in the struggle for survival? Not much; and we can't even imagine a woman proposing to a man in such terms. We need our sentimental pieties, if that's what they are, in order to find life worth affirming. But the Gnostic naturalists urge us not to imagine that Reality cares a whit, or is even capable of doing so. And even those of us, the majority, who aren't really naturalist in our philosophy can't help worrying that some version of naturalism might be true. After all, most scientists are naturalists, and science is the most successful form of intellectual inquiry we've ever come up with. Scientists are today's bearers of "enlightenment." So as we go on being human, indulging our sentimental pieties, many of us can't help being at least a tad cynical about it as we take our cues from the enlightened.

That kind of cosmic cynicism, which we might call "tough-minded despair," isn't just modern. In fact, it has always been with us. One finds it in such ancient philosophers as Democritus and Lucretius, and I suspect that their attitude was more widespread than the written record indicates. But the Gnostics had much larger followings than such thinkers. That's because most people have never been able to believe that the universe is just a brute fact which neither requires nor admits explanation in terms of something beyond it. There must be some sort of story behind it, even if the self-styled experts tell us otherwise. Or so most people have always thought. So we might see Gnosticism properly so-called as cosmic cynicism combined with a metaphysics that at least purports to explain why such an ultimately futile setup as the universe came to be.

But when we look at Gnosticism that way, it becomes clear almost at once that the impulse behind it isn't limited to either Gnosticism properly so-called or to secular, metaphysical naturalism. The largest Eastern religions—Hinduism and Buddhism—don't seem to value this life all that much either. For them, the goal is to attain nirvana by escaping the universe, understood as an endlessly cycling wheel of death and rebirth—and we do that, roughly, by accumulating good karma. "We gotta be good here so we can get outta here." That's the same impulse as the one behind Gnosticism. The Christian notion that creation is a positive good, freely created in love by a personal God, whose aim is to unite it to himself through the divinization of his rational creatures, is not really what we get in Hinduism, Buddhism, or in most other religions originating East of Iraq and west of Hawaii. The largest of them incorporate a cosmic cynicism. The Universe is something to be left behind, not elevated and transformed, when we reach whatever our goal is supposed to be. It's just maya, illusion: the Self's hiding from itself.

One even finds cosmic cynicism in the Bible, from the mouth of Qoheleth. Ecclesiastes got included in the canon largely because it's a kind of reverse preparatio evangelica for the Messiah. But it only works that way when messianism becomes apocalyptic and universal—which is just what we find in Judaism as it approached the time of Jesus of Nazareth. Ultimately, the only antidote to cosmic cynicism is the belief that the Universe is both rational and good, because the Reason that created it has a reason based in Love for doing so. That belief was the engine behind the development of modern science, which began in the Christian Middle Ages.

For most of us, though, belief in the goodness and rationality of the cosmos comes only by faith through an authority that transcends human reason. We're pretty cynical about authority these days. And that's the other main reason it's so hard to resist cosmic cynicism. We accept the authority of scientists, more or less, because science works, more or less, in a way that observation and common sense enable us to appreciate. But the things of the spirit? If there is such a thing as "spirit" at all, we seem to face only competing authorities about what it is and what, if anything, it's for.

That is why, I believe, Newman was right to argue that in the end, the only choices are Catholicism and atheism. That choice is not logically exhaustive, but I am convinced the future will show it to be existentially so. Among human beings, only the bishops of the Catholic Church, united with the pope as their chief, claim to be given authority by a God who can neither deceive nor be deceived to say what God has revealed. If there is no such authority, then we cannot know what God has specially revealed, and hence we can maintain no lively sense that God, even if he is Reason in some sense, is Love. We can have only opinions about what various people have said, written, and done about God, assuming there is one. And in the era of postmodernism, we are as cynical about opinions as we are about everything else.

Where's the joy?

Almost every American past puberty knows the old Wendy's hamburger slogan: "Where's the beef?" Used as a metaphor, it summarizes part of why I majored in philosophy and came to be still more interested in theology. The other half is summed up by "Where's the joy?" I started asking myself that question about life as a teenager after I had read as much Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton as I could. It's the question more people need to be asking themselves. We all want both, but fewer can articulate the longings expressed by the former than those expressed by the latter.

What I mean is illustrated by a contrasting pair of items from the blogosphere. Such items at least have the advantage of being easy to retrieve.

Consider theologian Rusty Reno's First Things "On the Square" piece Homosexuality and the Moral Failure of Higher Education.  Discussing why the affirmation of homosexuality has become a key benchmark of the rigorous orthodoxy enforced on secular campuses, he concludes:

Thus the need to use a kind of intellectual Agent Orange to destroy even the slightest judgments of immorality, because they reinforce what the voice of conscience keeps telling us, and what we would like to avoid hearing. Those who say that homosexual acts are immoral are oppressors, because their words—however dispassionate, however well-reasoned, however subtly expressed, however concerned for others—agitate consciences and block the free flow of desire.

Indeed, even those who are diffident are under suspicion, because that voice of conscience needs complete support to be suppressed. In the cause of sexual liberation nothing is acceptable short of full affirmation, or at least a scrupulous silence that expresses no reservations.

Sexual liberation is a Gucci freedom. Upper middle class Americans possess the resources to get a great deal of what they want, and part of what they want is sexual liberation. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the modern institution most closely associated with elite culture—higher education—should devote a great deal of energy to removing those who believe in moral limitations.

The well-known phenomenon Reno describes instances a larger phenomenon that philosopher J. Budziszewski calls "the revenge of conscience." Read both pieces in full. Now I am not primarily concerned to argue that peoples' consciences ought to tell them that sodomy, whether practiced by gays or straights, is immoral. I'm not even primarily concerned with the question how to tell the difference between the moral and the immoral. What I'm struck by today is the deep-seated joylessness of the new secular orthodoxy in general, and by that of complete sexual autonomy in particular. I've known plenty of people who live by that ideology. Such autonomy, when lived as though it can really be had, leads to many things—most of them bad. Yet even those who defend it passionately do not argue that it leads, in the long run, to what Lewis called "joy." Even old queens living together in a distant parody of marriage wouldn't tell you it does—at least not the ones I've known. Yet that joy, deep down, is what we all want—even though the self-styled best and brightest are ideologically committed to viewing it as "nothing but" one of the brain's evolutionary adaptations. Nothing-buttery is not tasty.

Now consider, by contrast, this story from Rod Dreher about how God gave him the woman he fell in love with and married. It's almost four years old now, and I wish I had seen it sooner. When I finished it today, I was in tears. What an affirmation of prayer in true faith, and the joy that it leads to!  The story of the Drehers' meeting, love, and marriage is an instance of how God wants things to be, at least for those called to Christian marriage. Whatever is natural, as opposed to what is anti-natural, can be a fit occasion for joy.

But the thing about joy is that you can't get it by striving for it directly. Doing that, in fact, loses it. You get it unbidden, and it leaves one with Sehnsucht, a poignant longing for the Reality toward which even the greatest of earthly beauty and joy only points. It is a law of spiritual nature that one only gains what joy is about by leaving joy aside to do what one must, while offering the resulting abnegation to God and remembering the joy. That's what Jesus did. That's what the ideologues of radical autonomism, sexual or otherwise, cannot do. If they remember joy at all, they think it can be had, or at least preserved, by doing what feels best. Sometimes, that is true—when what feels best coincides, like a husband and wife making love, with what we ought by nature to be doing. But only then. If we seek joy on our terms, we end up with ennui: the intimation of the nihil of evil, not of that Reality which is the source and goal of all.

Organizing apologetics

Perhaps I'm weird, but I must admit that, even when I was alienated from the Catholic Church in youth, I never had any principled difficulty with the faith/reason relation. I always took for granted that the two are compatible, even before I learned that the Church teaches as much. Of course, and like most other thoughtful people, I did have difficulties with certain specific issues. But the Catholic Church has shown, at least to me, that she has means to address such issues reasonably without compromising what she says is de fide.

As we all know, though, more than half the Christian world disagrees. I say "more than half" because, even though about half of all Christians were baptized in the Catholic Church, many educated Catholics reject what I've just said the Church has shown me. The two most common objections to Catholicism one hears from educated Christians, including some who are nominally Catholic, are: (1) Distinctively Catholic doctrines are not rationally necessitated by the early sources, and so shouldn't be thought to belong to divine revelation as distinct from human tradition, and (2) The course of Catholic doctrinal development yields internal inconsistency at the highest level, so that the Church's claim to infallibility--even under limited conditions--is not credible. It might be useful to others for me to state here, in baldest outline, what I offer as answers to such objections. Such a way of organizing the arguments, if sound and taken to heart, would save a lot of people a lot of wheel-spinning.

(1) misconceives the nature of divine revelation and the assent of faith thereto. Divine revelation does not consist primarily in a set of propositions to be inferred from writings and other evidence from the past. Such things, to be sure, are indispensable for preserving the Church's collective memory of what's been handed on by the Spirit through Sacred Tradition. Yet at bottom, what's handed on is the reality of the decisive encounter between God and man in Christ Jesus. Forms of words, archeological evidence, comparative religion, and so on merely help express that. Now if Christianity is true, then by God's design, the ongoing encounter between God and man takes place through something called "the Church" even though, as is the case with many who hear the call to faith in Christ, it needn't start in the Church. Yet without being in any way limited to the authority of the Church, said encounter always and necessarily depends on a visible, clearly identifiable ecclesial authority which exercises God's own authority as revealer and sanctifier. For without such an authority, the content and power of divine revelation would end up appearing only as a matter of opinion. That, for us, would be no revelation at all, and assent to it, such as it is, would be no faith at all. Despite how different they are in many respects, Aquinas and Newman made essentially that argument. Following them, it's one that I've long made myself.

What about (2)? As an argument, it begs the question either at the outset or in the end. In some formulations it premises, as the only reasonable ones to adopt, interpretations of Catholic doctrine that yield contradictions. But if the Magisterium's claims for itself are true, said premise is false. There must be other reasonable interpretations of Catholic doctrine that are collectively self-consistent, and those turn out to be just the ones the Magisterium itself, the author of the doctrines in dispute, has come to adopt. Given as much, the objector needs to show that interpretations yielding contradictions are ones that the Magisterium itself once adopted, and did so in such a way that its own criteria for infallibility were thereby satisfied. But those who press (2) usually don't try to show that. When they do, they end up begging the question all over again—by assuming a way of applying the criteria for infallibility that the Magisterium itself would reject.

Now it should go without saying, but often needs to be said, that successfully rebutting (1) and (2) does not prove Catholicism to be true. Indeed, given the Catholic understanding of how reason and faith are interrelated, nothing could "prove" Catholicism to be true. Faith is a divine gift that can only be accepted freely. If there were compelling arguments for Catholicism, then those who recognize as much would be compelled to believe, which is not faith. The role of reason in coming to faith is to show that faith is fully compatible with reason, not that reasoning compels it. That, of course, does not rule out the possibility that there are compelling arguments against Catholicism. But it is precisely the task of apologetics to show that there are no such arguments. In this post I've sketched two examples of how to carry out that task. I've elaborated those examples elsewhere, especially on this blog.

The Manhattan Declaration and Christian Principles

See my post at the First Things blog "First Thoughts."   A lot more can and should be said, but as a response to Steve Hutchens of Touchstone, I believe the post is a good conversation starter.

The authority question restated

As promised, I have deleted my lengthy post of February 1, "Which contest is worth pissing in?". I did so in order to respect the privacy that my chief interlocutor felt he needed in order to conduct his theological discussion without scandal. That said, however, I want to improve the contribution I made to that discussion, and to encourage the continued involvement of readers who made contributions to the lengthy combox of the deleted post. (Any of those contributors who want a copy of that combox for reference purposes should email me for one. I've saved it in Word format.)

Over the decades, I have heard countless debates about ecclesial authority and contributed to not a few of them. For reasons I've described on this blog and elsewhere, such debates are unavoidable and, up to a point, healthy. Many people try to avoid them, of course. They deny that any entity called "the Church" has authority beyond appeal to preserve, present, and interpret divine revelation for us. They insist that Jesus Christ alone, who has been given "all authority in heaven and on earth" (Matthew 28:18), has the requisite authority and thus merits the requisite submission of mind and will. In a sense, that is true. But the debate is precisely about the extent to which something called "the Church," the Mystical Body of Christ which, together with the risen Christ, makes up "the whole Christ," has been granted such authority. I don't believe, and never have been able to believe, that we can dispense with the living voice of "the" Church—whichever communion of churches that may be—in ascertaining what God has revealed to us. In that belief, I am far from alone.

I hold said belief because, after many of the aforesaid debates, I became convinced that, if nobody on earth after the Apostles has the same degree of divine authority as theirs to say which propositions are and are not de fide, then the question where to draw the line between theological opinions about the data of revelation and divine revelation itself reduces, always and necessarily, to a matter of opinion. And that effectively renders the entire subject of divine "revelation" a matter of opinion, not of revelation. That is the reductio of denying divine teaching authority to some entity justly deemed "the Church." As Newman so pithily put it: “No revelation is given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given.” Such an authority cannot of course decide on its own “what is given”; to serve its function, it can only do so with the subject matter and the authority Jesus Christ has given it. But if such authority has in fact been given it, then when it interprets Scripture and Tradition in a manner intended to bind the whole Church irreformably, the Holy Spirit guarantees that those interpretations will not be false.

That follows from the teaching of the Catholic Church, but it is not a distinctively Catholic position. The Orthodox churches too maintain that Scripture and Tradition can only be rightly received and interpreted in and through something called "the Church," that the authentic voice of the Church is the voice of Jesus Christ. The authentic voice of the Church is thus beyond appeal even if not "infallible" in the technical sense of that term employed by the two Vatican councils. Orthodoxy does differ from Catholicism about ecclesial authority, to be sure: it differs with Rome over the questions who in the Church teaches with the aforesaid voice and when. And those differences are significant enough to cause the Orthodox communion to regard itself, rather than the Roman communion, as "the" Church of Christ.

In point of fact, the centuries-old debates about ecclesial authority reveal not two but three distinct "hermeneutical circles" encompassing the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority. I shall describe those circles shortly. To characterize and understand them, however, we need to be limit who counts as participants in the debate.

It has become a sociological commonplace over the past few decades to note that the divisions between the three major strains of Christianity—Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy—are less important than the division between the more conservative and the more liberal believers within each of those strains. A conservative or a liberal believer within a given church generally has more in common with her counterparts in other churches than with people on the opposing wing in her own church. (Orthodoxy, of course, has a smaller percentage of "liberals" than Protestantism and Catholicism; but "liberals" there are, and I suspect there will be more in future.) I think the new commonplace is correct, and is best explained as the difference between people who believe that religious doctrine is ultimately a matter of provisional opinion—i.e., the liberals—and those who believe that divine revelation has given us identifiably absolute truths—i.e., the conservatives. It is the conservatives who count in the debate about ecclesial authority, because it is they who maintain that the revelation in and through Jesus Christ is public, complete, and definitive, in such a way that the deposit of faith left to us as the precipitate of revelation many neither be added to nor subtracted from. Accordingly, the three basic disagreements about the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial authority are disagreements among those who hold that the DF is both reliably identifiable as absolutely true and may neither be added to nor subtracted from. They are disagreements about precisely how the DF is to be handed on, received, and interpreted reliably, without augmentation or diminution, even as it was first left to us by a God "who can neither deceive nor be deceived."

As I've said, the disagreements take the form of three hermeneutical circles. The idea of a hermeneutical circle began, ironically enough, with the liberal Protestant theologian and biblical critic Friedrich Schliermacher; the term was formally introduced a century later by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who developed the idea further in parallel with another German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer. The core idea was that, in reading a text, the parts can only be understood with reference to the whole and the whole can only be understood with reference to the parts. That yields a circle. But an interpretive motif arising therefrom need not be viciously circular. For hermeneutical circles are unavoidable, and the way to decide between them—if and when we face such a decision—is to assess which of them is most capacious and plausible in light of what is known about the intentions of the author(s), the literary antecedents, and the historical context of the text. And even when such "knowledge" is too limited to settle the question, there's always the distinct possibility that such limits will be outgrown in the future.

For purposes of discussion, I cannot avoid oversimplifying the content of the three competing hermeneutical circles which, I believe, define the epistemic differences between the three main strains of Christianity. I am forced to omit all the variations and nuances of each and most of the supporting arguments for each. But each involves an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority; and I believe that, in the final analysis, the three circles may be described as follows with minimal unfairness:

• The Protestant HC. Scripture records the substance of apostolic Tradition, and the canon of Scripture was put together by ecclesial authorities over a rather long period of time. But once that process was complete, Scripture was recognized and accepted by all Christians as the sole written work of man which is inspired by the Holy Spirit. As such, Scripture is (a) materially sufficient as an expression of the DF, and (b) perspicuous enough in itself to enable any Spirit-led believer who reads it to reliably understand the parts in terms of the whole and the whole in terms of the parts. Accordingly and (c), Scripture is the sole "infallible" rule of faith after the Apostles, and comprises all that is necessary for any Spirit-led believer to know, in its fullness, the verbally expressible content of what God has revealed to humanity in and through Jesus Christ.
  
  This HC is complete in principle. It enables believers, quite generally, to judge the orthodoxy of ecclesial authority in terms of Scripture. For given the material sufficiency and interpretive perspicuity of Scripture, any doctrine which is not explicitly stated in Scripture must be derivable therefrom by some form of rational necessity. The sole function of ecclesial authority is to bear and enforce faithful institutional witness to the Truth that can, in principle, be understood independently of such authority. Thus, such authority is not strictly necessary for assimilating divine revelation; it is only a disciplinary and educational convenience.
  
  
• The Orthodox HC. Scripture is indeed inspired by the Spirit and materially sufficient for expressing the DF. But Scripture is a work of the Church and for the Church, and can only be reliably understood as read by the Church in light of the broader "Holy Tradition" handed down to her from the Apostles. Tradition in that sense is the sum total of the ways in which the life of the Holy Spirit is manifest in the Church as a collectivity. Those ways chiefly include: the liturgy, the writings of the Fathers, the lives and wisdom of the saints, and the Ecumenical Councils. Although ecclesial teaching authority is ordinarily exercised by individual bishops over their flocks, only the dogmatic decress of the Ecumenical Councils must be understood as affirmations of faith which bind the whole Church.
  
  The doctrinal authority of such councils, however, is not primarily juridical. It lies in their "reception" by the whole Church over time as authentic expressions of the consensus of the faithful, informed as that consensus is by Scripture and Tradition understood together. From that point of view, "the Church" consists of those believers who accept such criteria as exhaustive touchstones of orthodoxy; hence the "Orthodox" communion. Such an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority constitutes an HC; for we know by the consensus of the Church which understandings of Scripture and Tradition are orthodox, and we know who is in the Church by their adherence to what is orthodox.
  
  But this is not a vicious circle. For to know the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who is a Person, entails belonging to his people, his Body, the Church; there is no standpoint outside her by which the true doctrine can be reliably known. At the same time, there is nothing in the historic consensus of the faithful to suggest that Jesus Christ willed that any one bishop or leader in the Church, apart from the consensus of the whole, exercise supreme doctrinal or disciplinary jurisdiction over the Church catholic. Orthodoxy is a gift of divine love, collectively received and collectively known. Though juridical authority is necessary in the Church, even for teaching, disputes about doctrine cannot be resolved by mere juridical imposition on the whole Church without her consent. Consensus, not diktat, is the true sign of what is Orthodox.

• The Catholic HC. First, read Dei Verbum §7-§10 and Lumen Gentium §25.
  
  Although Scripture and Tradition taken together are "materially sufficient" for expressing the entire DF, and can sometimes be understood to a great extent by various individuals without ecclesial authority, they can only be interpreted and understood "authentically"—i.e., with the authentic and thus binding voice of the Church—by the apostolic teaching authority or "Magisterium" of the Church. The "ordinary" way in which that is done is by the consensus of the bishops, which must be at least diachronic and is ideally synchronic too; "extraordinarily," it is done by the dogmatic decrees of ecumenical councils of the bishops and/or the dogmatic definitions of popes.
  
  For a putatively ecumenical council to bind the whole Church, it is necessary that its dogmatic decrees have at least the free consent if not the ratification of the Roman Pontiff, who succeeds Peter as the visible head of the episcopal college. Indeed he can, if he so chooses, speak unilaterally with the authentic voice of the Church, and when so doing enjoys "the infallibility with which Christ willed His Church to be endowed in teaching on faith or morals." Such definitions do not therefore acquire their binding character from the "consent of the Church" (cf. Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus); yet in such cases "the assent of the Church can never be wanting, on account of the activity of that same Holy Spirit, by which the whole flock of Christ is preserved and progresses in unity of faith" (LG §25).
  
  Such an account of the relationship between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial teaching authority constitutes an HC. On the one hand, it is clear that Scripture and Tradition, which together form "one sacred deposit of the Word of God," were not formed and cannot be authentically understood without the Magisterium (DV §10). On the other hand, the Magisterium has no authority other than that which Scripture and Tradition record as having been given by Jesus Christ to the Apostles and their successors, the college of bishops united with their head, the Bishop of Rome. Indeed the Magisterium, whether episcopal in general or papal in particular, would make no sense and could not function without a general understanding and possession of the DF in the Church as a whole. But without sitting, knowingly or unknowingly, on the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium, one cannot know what is orthodox by reference to Scripture and Tradition without the Magisterium. The ambit of orthodoxy, including the authentic development of doctrine, is definable only by the Magisterium in its definitive and binding interpretations of that unified "Word of God" known as Scripture-and-Tradition. But whenever the Magisterium does issue such definitive and binding interpretations of the DF, it must do so in a manner that logically consistent with its prior interpretations that enjoy the same degree of authority. It is of course logically possible for the Magisterium to fail to do so; but it is not spiritually possible, given that the three-legged stool is God's means of ensuring the Church's unfailing profession of the "faith once given to the saints" (Jude 3).

The first point to be made about the above three "hermeneutical circles" is that none can be shown superior to the others with an argument containing only premises that all parties involved—Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic—would accept. From within each circle, the others will seem at best question-begging and, at worst, viciously circular. To borrow a metaphor from the philosophy of science: each HC constitutes a paradigm that is epistemically incommensurable with the others. And that holds even when many quite similar doctrinal conclusions are reached from within each HC.

For example, for the last quarter of 2008, I actively participated in a series of Bible studies led by a team of conservative, evangelically-oriented Protestant ministers. Throughout the series, I heard not a single doctrinal assertion that was incompatible with Catholicism. Although the leaders did not recognize the Catholic Magisterium's claims to authority, their interpretations of the DF on the doctrinally significant points that came up were virtually indistinguishable from those of the Catholic Church. Similarly, as a college student in the 1970s, I attended many Orthodox talks and liturgies; once again, I heard not a single doctrinally significant assertion that I could find, after due inquiries, to be logically incompatible with Catholicism. Both the Protestants recently and the Orthodox back then turned out to be professing the same doctrines I did on the points being discussed, even though their language and conceptual framework were often quite different from what I was used to. The disagreements with me as a Catholic only came up when I asked them to give their reasons for interpreting the sources as they did. More generally, it seems to me that the differences defined by the three HCs are less over what we know of the DF than over how we know it.

But that source of Christian disunity, I submit, is not merely a philosophical problem. It is not just a matter of epistemological differences that could eventually be overcome by scholarly means such as clever argument, creative re-reading, and further research. No discoveries of lost texts or artifacts, no renewed critical editing of known texts, no work of theological genius, would even begin to break open and join into one the three HCs that define the basic epistemological differences between the three main strains of Christianity. By the same token, no arguments from reason alone are objectively cogent enough to rationally compel any informed but uncommitted inquirer to decide that one particular HC is better than the others. Each such inquirer should in due course decide, on the basis of the sort of information I've described above, which HC is the most plausible to him; and ordinarily, that suffices to justify a decision in good conscience to embrace one of them as a matter of faith. But given that each HC presents its understanding of doctrinal authority as an element of the DF, and therefore as a matter of faith, no such decision can be shown to be the only rationally justifiable one. For if any one HC were the only rationally justifiable one, then its understanding of doctrinal authority would be a conclusion of human reason rather than a tenet of divine faith.

I shall not repeat here my reasons for having chosen the Catholic HC. I've explained all that before and, if only as a means of defending my faith, will doubtless find myself doing so again. The point I want to close with is one that ought to be granted by any participant in the intra-Christian debates over ecclesial authority: if such debates could be resolved by scholarly considerations alone, they would already have been resolved. I am tempted to say they would never have arisen in the first place.

The religious basis of religious tolerance

From the current issue of First Things:

In our day, ideological minorities seeking refuge in the protections of the Constitution frequently do so in a manner that pits the Constitution against the American people. That is understandable, but it is a potentially fatal mistake. Keep in mind the preamble and irreplaceable premise of the Constitution: “We the people . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” That is to say, the Constitution and all its protections depend upon the sentiment of “we the people.” Majority rule is far from being the only principle of democratic governance and it is not a sufficient principle, but it is a necessary principle. In the Constitution, the majority imposes upon itself a self-denying ordinance; it promises not to do what it otherwise could do, namely, ride roughshod over the dissenting minorities.

Why, we might ask, does the majority continue to impose such a limitation upon itself? A number of answers suggest themselves. One reason is that most Americans recognize, however inarticulately, a sovereignty higher than the sovereignty of “we the people.” They believe there is absolute truth but they are not sure that they understand it absolutely; they are, therefore, disinclined to force it upon those who disagree.

It is not chiefly a secular but a religious restraint that prevents biblical believers from coercing others in matters of conscience. We do not kill one another over our disagreements about the will of God because we believe that it is the will of God that we should not kill one another over our disagreements about the will of God. Christians and Jews did not always believe that but, with very few exceptions, we in this country have come to believe it. It is among the truths that we hold. And by which we are held.

Read it all.

That little black spot

Most literate folk are familiar with the Yin-Yang symbol. I don't want to get into a discussion of what Yin and Yang really are, or are supposed to be; that is a topic for comparative religion, and Gagdad Bob is better qualified to handle it in a way I would respect. By way of introduction to my real topic, however, I note that when I first saw the symbol, I thought that it was intended to represent the relationship of good and evil in human beings. Thus, there's a little bit of good even in bad people (the little white spot) and a little bit of bad even in good people (the little black spot). I am told that such is a common misimpression among undergraduates. I am reminded of it by a post I've just read by a man who calls himself "janotec" and seems to be an Orthodox cleric, even perhaps a theologian.

The post appears at the blog "Second Terrace" and is entitled Orthodox theologians do not speak in tongues. It is an impassioned yet reasonably well-argued plea for Orthodox theologians to expound dogma more and worry less about meeting the so-called "challenges of the age." With one qualification, I wish that I had written that post myself as a plea to Catholic theologians, whom I am better positioned to address. The qualification is that I object to the following two sentences, which unfortunately appear near the beginning:

A long time ago, when Orthodoxy got too conservative (or seemed that way), relevant philosophers who "responded" to "contemporary challenges" forged a nominalism that made Grace a far less frightening thing, and intellectualized it into something less than a phenomenon. Too, the West could now take its ethics in spoonfuls, in casuistic legerdemain.

For me, that kind of thing is like the little black spot: a stain on what would otherwise be dazzling white. I want to explain why so as to contribute, in my own small way, to an eminently desirable goal: getting Orthodox and Catholics to preach the Gospel effectively in today's world not only with the abiding resources of the Great Tradition, but with better mutual understanding.

The problem with the above-quoted little passage is not that it is altogether false. It contains an important element of truth. The problem is that it rhetorically lumps in something of the bad with something of the good which may be found within the theologies of something called "the West"—a term of art which, in Eastern-Orthodox parlance, means that part of Christendom which, for well over a millennium, worshiped and theologized in Latin rather than Greek. (To Christians in such places as Armenia, Iraq, and India, of course, "the West" included Constantinople too. And John Bekkos, a medieval patriarch of Constantinople with strong "Western" leanings, at least got a hearing in the city for a while. Yet for reasons it would be counterproductive to explain, I don't want to stress that very much.) The resentments, misunderstandings, and rivalries go back to at least the time when Pope Damasus I (366-384) substituted the vernacular Latin for Greek in the Roman Mass and didn't even take note of the First Council of Constantinople (381), which produced what was eventually accepted everywhere as the ecumenical Creed. And for various reasons, the negativity gradually worsened over time, eventually causing the schism that persists to this day. For my present purpose, the two most relevant problems are the Catholic-scholastic idea of "created grace" and the Western development of moral theology at the same time in terms drawn from legal theory.

I start with the concept of created grace. There certainly were Catholic theologians in the later Middle Ages who were "nominalists," and it is certainly true that many of those nominalists treated the question of grace in more or less the way janotec criticizes. But not all scholastics were nominalists by any means. The via moderna of that period in Catholic theology, in my opinion, did tend to go wrong as janotec says; and that was a key precursor to Protestantism's essentially forensic account of justification. But some Catholic theologians were Franciscans and Thomists who were anything but followers of that path. Indeed, in the hands of those more traditionally-minded theologians, the very concept of "created grace" was intended largely to explain how justification and sanctification consisted in what we'd now call an "ontological" change in the human soul, in such wise that the soul could become a "partaker of the divine nature" without becoming God-by-nature. In that respect, use of the concept of created grace had the same goal as that of St. Gregory Palamas when he expatiated on the distinction between the divine "essence," which cannot be shared, and the divine "energies" or actions ad extra, which can and indeed must be shared if we are to have the life God destines us for—the "life eternal" otherwise known as theosis or "divinization." As I see it, the chief difference between the older, more robust Catholic theology postulating "created" grace, and the Palamite view that the divine energies are "uncreated" and thus God, is that the Catholics used the term grace not merely for its primary referent, which is indeed the Uncreated himself insofar as he communicates his life to us, but also for the instruments he uses to communicate his life to the human person, and especially for some of the effects of that communication within the human person.¹

The main problem arose when neo-scholasticism as a whole became preoccupied with classifying and analyzing the kinds of created grace so understood, in order to explain how our "correspondence" with grace causes "congruous merit" in the human soul. That went on to such an extent that people started forgetting about the primary referent of the term 'grace' and got into the habit of speaking of grace as though it could be located, divvied up, and distributed almost according to formula. That explains a way of speaking even today that has always grated on me. Catholics often speak of grace as if it were some sort of spiritual fuel, with differing levels of octane, that one can get more or less of depending on one's recourse to the "means"of grace, such as the sacraments and prayer. That's what accounts in part for why many Catholics seem to treat church as a spiritual gas station: a place where you pull up, pay up, tank up with grace, and pull out in time for brunch or the football game (depending on which scheduled Mass you got up in time for). When people receive the Eucharist with such an attitude, it does them a lot less good than it could and, in cases of unrepented serious sin, real harm. Catholicism really has needed to recover a more Eastern, relational sense of grace as God himself operative within the person, without thereby sacrificing use of the term 'grace' in the derivative senses already described, which are perfectly consistent with the primary referent of the term when properly contextualized and understood. That, in effect, is what various Catholic movements and theologians have been doing ever since the ressourcement that preceded and helped to guide Vatican II.

For a long time, though, the chief obstacle to bringing that to fruition in Catholic sacramental, ascetical, and mystical theology has been a tendency to legalism in moral theology. When one treats Christian morality primarily as a set of rules, one comes to think of progress in the Christian life primarily as progress in observing those rules. Salvation is then conceived primarily as a reward for such progress—i.e., for one's degree of merit—and the function of grace is seen primarily as that of enabling one to achieve such merit. The serious Christian will thus do what they can to get "all the graces" they can because, after all, one can never have enough fuel for a long journey in which one too often finds oneself traveling backwards. That is the grain of truth in the common Protestant view that Catholicism teaches salvation by "works" rather than by "grace." Many Catholics, and not just Catholics, have in fact run their spiritual lives as if that were so. It is a kind of spiritual immaturity that certain tendencies in late-medieval, neo-scholastic, and Counter-Reformation thought only encouraged. I have seen the results in many an older Catholic, even those in bitter rebellion against it. I've even seen it in some young "trad" Catholics.

But as a doctrinal matter, the common Protestant view is false. The Catholic Church does not teach that salvation can be earned, and many writers have taken great pains to show that. "Merit" is the fruit of grace, and when God crowns our merits he is crowning his own gifts. Theologically too, the Catholic tradition is much richer than legalism and much closer to the Orthodox. And many Catholics do get it. The reasons why also show that janotec's charge of "casuistic legerdemain," made from an Orthodox point of view, is mostly empty rhetoric.

The purpose of casuistry is to apply genuinely Christian norms to "hard cases" so that people have specific, well-thought-out helps to form their consciences for dealing with such cases. Casuistry need not be, and is not intended by the Church to be, a substitution of law for grace. It is not even intended as an exhaustive resolution of cases. The harder the case, the more its resolution is a matter of individual judgment—or, if you prefer, conscience. The norms governing casuistry are guideposts, not inspiration. To be sure, many people have ridden "the rules" too hard, as if external conformity to even the most technical of them were the primary measure of virtue. But that's not a problem with the rules in themselves. It's a problem with some people's own spiritual growth. And though I can't speak for all Catholics, I don't take my "ethics in spoonfuls." I have learned by hard experience that Christ often calls us to a level of discipleship beyond "the law," i.e. beyond that level of behavior which casuistry can often excuse. He never stops challenging us to reach greater spiritual maturity. And I have found plenty of room in Catholicism for that recognition. It is indeed Catholic saints who have helped me to attain that recognition. And that room is taken up every day by a myriad of saints-in-the-making who will never be canonized.

I just wish janotec and many other intelligent Orthodox could lay off the potshots at "the West" and join with Catholics in rediscovering the common ground that East and West have come to till differently. That little black spot would then get smaller and smaller, so that scandal would not be given to undergraduates and other innocents.

_____________________________
1. I have been influenced to adopt this view by, among other works, Cardinal Journet's The Meaning of Grace (1957), republished in 1997; and by Jeffrey D Finch, "Neo-Palamism, Divinizing Grace, and the Breach between East and West," in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Tradition, edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).

The Culture of Charity

The title of this post is a link to an interview with Prof. Arthur C. Brooks, author of Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism. According to Brooks—or rather to the Wall Street Journal's summary of Brooks—"four distinct forces appear to have primary responsibility for making people behave charitably: religion, skepticism about the government’s role in economic life, strong families and personal entrepreneurship."

Surprising to many, to be sure; but not perhaps to readers of this blog.

HT to Siris.

The image at left is courtesy of xsitems.com, which has quite a good selection.

Science and religion: the latest skirmishes

Last weekend, Dr. Scott Carson posted on the most recent updates from the battlefield. Usefully, he points us to a few solid refutations of Richard Dawkins' standard rants against religion. Their authors have it rather easy, I'm afraid. Just as Andrew Greeley is a presumptively celibate priest who appears to have had no unpublished sexual thoughts, so Dawkins and his ilk will publicly spew whatever they feel about the Great Enemy as if they were actually authorities on the subject. One can hardly avoid noticing that they've gotten almost hysterical of late, both causing and signifying a certain degradation of thought that can only work to the advantage of philosophically trained theists. Yet, and more generally, the skirmish that most interests me is not the clash of the biblical fundamentalists and the scientistic extremists; that is a tiresome sideshow for most philosophers. To me, the important debate is over how the relationship between natural science and religious belief should be conceived in the first place. I think Scott lowballs that one a bit too much.

Last summer I read two recently published books by theists on that relationship: The Language of God by Francis Collins, lead scientist of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical (not: fundamentalist) Christian; and Is Nature Enough? by John Haught, the Landegger Distinguished Research Professor of Theology at Georgetown University, who has made a long career of this very topic. While the two men obviously come from quite different intellectual backgrounds and thus bring somewhat different agendas to the table, they do have a few key points in common. While science by itself can present no evidence in favor of religious belief, and indeed does present evidence against certain particular religious beliefs, its methodology leaves untouched the basic human questions to which religions typically offer answers. So, while "creationism" is decidedly not science, the philosophical gates remain wide open for scientists to be theists. In that vein, Collins and Haught argue to the effect that, when nested within a non-fundamentalist religious worldview, strictly scientific discoveries can actually help to reveal the mind of God. All that is rather familiar and congenial to certain philosophically trained theists, a group within which Catholics form the largest subset. But for some reason, Scott won't even go that far.

He writes:

For someone who has a great deal of interest in science and a great deal of interest in religion, I have remarkably little interest in that domain of inquiry sometimes called "the intersection of science and religion". I myself do not see that they overlap all that much, except in the rather trivial sense that all knowledge, whether scientific or otherwise, is subsidiary to our knowledge of the good, which is God.

Now if that means that the respective methods by which science and religion can present truth are largely incommensurable, I cannot but agree. Ditto for Collins and Haught; indeed, that very incommensurability is essential to Haught's larger thesis. But the larger debate is not merely about epistemology. If classical theism is true, then the subject matter of natural science is what God has created, or at least that part of God's creation which we can observe. Hence, both natural and revealed theology can and should take account of what science tells us about the observable universe. That's exactly why Aristotle thought of "theology"—i.e., God-talk—as a branch of "metaphysics"—i.e., that kind of inquiry which comes "after" physics and to some extent relies on physics.

To be sure, philosophical and theological conclusions reached thereby must always be provisional, inasmuch as the theories of natural science itself are always open to revision. When theologians forget that, the result is often the sad but amusing spectacle of believers watering down their faith in light of scientific theories that have been superseded by the progress of science itself. The most egregious example of that is how theologians started working physical determinism into their thought as a premise precisely when quantum mechanics was relativizing, if not altogether discrediting, a determinism that Newtonian mechanics had made long fashionable among non-believers. But such errors needn't be made and are by no means always made. So the question what science can help us to know about the mind of God is at least worth exploration by theologians and theistic philosophers.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Common Doctor of the Church, thought the same and wrote accordingly. He wasn't always right, of course; science progresses, and so must philosophizing and theologizing that uses scientific ideas as subject matter. But even when we have to modify our thoughts, that's s no reason not to have developed them.

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.