Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

John Milbank is a fascinating mixture of insight and insanity, as is made clear by a recent interview that he’s given concerning Cardinal Newman’s forthcoming beatification and Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to England.

He is insightful at times in the area of the relation of theology to economics. He refuses, at least on the surface, to let theology be placed by the social sciences. Concomitantly, he recognizes that something is very wrong with a purely secular culture that has cut out any connection between itself and the divine, lacking any reference to the Christian sacred. He realizes that such a culture tends to promulgate barbaric practices in the realm of politics and economics. He even, on occasion, laments the “consumerizing” of sexual practices in post-1968 European culture.

In the recent  interview linked to above, published just today, in fact, he even goes so far as to argue that Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to England is very much needed and that the beatification of Cardinal Newman is a work of unity: as Newman, he argues, was both Anglican and Catholic and a treasure to both communions.

Anyone who is concerned with the integrity of the traditional faith, might, on occasion, be taken in by his words. But it is not long before a strange dissonance creeps in. For he speaks out of both sides of his mouth.

No sooner does he commend the high tradition of Patristic and Scholastic theology, then he starts in odd directions in regard to sexual issues. So, for instance, in the programmatic book on “Radical Orthodoxy,” which he compiled and edited, he publishes an essay (by another author, but presumably representative of the radically orthodox position) commending the practice of homosexual sexual unions as a sign of Trinitarian love, a position that he has never, to my knowledge, refuted. His critique of consumerism in the realm of sexual ethics can only fall to the ground with such an ideology in place.

In commending Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Great Britain, he adds the remark that the ordination of women to the episcopacy in the Anglican Church will prove to be, in the long run, a great ecumenical achievement,  especially now that, on Milbank’s opinion, the Pope’s recent provision to Anglicans who want to convert to Catholicism, Anglicanorum Coetibus, has shown that the Catholic Church recognizes Anglicanism to be a valid tradition, along the lines of Eastern Orthodoxy. This will, he implies, lead to a fluidity between the communions that will force the Catholic Church to confront the issues of homosexuality, the ordination of women, and married priests more forthrightly than it has done previously.

I suppose that this an interesting point to some extent, inasmuch as it gives a different perspective on Anglicanorum Coetibus than one generally hears from the Catholic side. Many traditionalist Catholics think that the provision will strengthen Catholic tradition, because it will presumably bring in converts who want more of that tradition and not less of it. Milbank in fact argues precisely to the contrary.

But this is why I think Milbank comes across as rather delusional in the end. The Catholic Church is not going to ordain women — ever, just as it has never done in 2,000 years, and not simply because of cultural conditioning that has presumably affected the Church’s disciplinary practice. The debate is closed, and it will not be opening any time soon, except among aging college professors who will be long dead before they ever have had a chance to carry out the revolution that they have so long desired. To the extent that Anglicanism pushes in that direction, the Catholic Church will close its ears. At the same time, the Catholic Church is not going to canonize the act of homosexual sex — ever, just as it has never done in 2,000 years. Milbank has accused John Paul II of being a Romantic for arguing for traditional marriage on the grounds of the nuptial analogy of the body. But, in fact, it is Milbank who has accepted, hook, line, and sinker, the libertine premises that have traditionally accompanied the Romantic ideology.

Milbank’s reading of the tradition comes across as tendentious and twisted. In the end, I think that the best that can be said of him is that he is a theological modernist who just happens to love some smells and bells. And, by the way, he is completely out of touch with the direction in which the Catholic Church is headed. Few young Catholics today, who take their faith seriously, are attracted to the kind of pansexualism that Milank would have us submerged in. The young priests, who will soon be bishops and popes, are going in a direction diametrically opposed to the Milbankian option. And, besides, he has hardly spearheaded a renewal of the life of faith in his own Anglican communion. We’re hardly talking about a personage on the level of John Paul II here. Radical Orthodoxy may be appealing to a handful of subversive and socially awkward eggheads, but it is not the path to spiritual renewal in Christianity.

Last Monday night’s Theology of the Body class brought up a short discussion on a topic of some recent interest to me.  I have been developing my thoughts on this topic for a number of years, however at Monday’s class I was not able to recall all of them.  This post is a first attempt to jot down the main thread of my thinking for future development and share it with whomever might still be happening by CLS.

A number of years ago, I recall hearing what at the time I considered to be an extremely fanciful theory about what exactly the act that comprised Original Sin entailed.  In a class, one of my students mentioned that they had heard Christopher West say that the original sin of Adam and Eve was contraceptive sex.  Now it is true there is a very old tradition, dismissed by most because of the way it is characterized, that their sin was sexually based.  This tradition is reflected in the (humorous?) adage, “it wasn’t so much the apple in the tree but the pair on the ground.”  But I wondered, how could one seriously move from this tradition to suggest that it was really contraceptive sex by which they sinned?

I have not read or listened to much of Christopher West, so I have never heard this myself and so I do not know how he might justify his theory (though the theory was confirmed to me by someone who knows West’s work well).  Nevertheless, to my surprise the more I considered it, the more sense it began to make to me.  Now I have not adequately fleshed it out in my thinking in order to begin teaching this as a cogent theory, but several of my classes have heard my current thinking on the subject.  Unfortunately, I think that I gave my best description of it during last year’s theology of the body class but I never did document it and cannot now recall all of my points.  Thus, I thought I might start to document them here.

Of course, we ought to begin with what Genesis has to say.  In sketch, Genesis 3 describes God’s proscription against Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  I don’t intend to do a thorough exegesis of the text here.  Nor will I try to draw correspondences of all of the mythical language to this theory.

What I would like to look at first is the use of the terms “fruit” (periy) and “knowledge” (technically yada` is the verb form, while Gen 2 uses the noun form da`ath).  These terms certainly are used in a variety of ways  in Scripture but here the terms have a decidedly procreative meaning.  Anyone who has studied JPII’s Theology of the Body catecheses will understand the procreative significance of the term “knowledge.”  From a hylomorphic hermeneutic, knowledge encompasses cognitive knowledge but it extends to a more comprehensive exchange of persons and is completed in its most intimate visible manifestation in the marital act in which there is a complete body-soul exchange of gifts of one to the other in life-giving, fruitful love.

Fruit likewise, is a key term.  Adam and Eve were told to be “fruitful and multiply” as were the animals, but they had the additional charge to self-determination…to subdue the earth and have dominion over its creatures.  Choice, necessitating a free will, are fundamental to authentic human fruitfulness (i.e to go beyond simply animal procreation).   In these terms, the fruit of Adam “knowing” Eve was first Cain.  It would seem that there is warrant at this point to at least considering the possibility that the mythical language about “knowledge” and “fruit” in Genesis 3 could be a reference to the marital act.  But of course, we must go much further.

The next thing to consider is the adjectival phrase “good and evil” modifying “knowledge.”  One must ask the question how one might know evil.  Metaphysically speaking, evil can only exist parasitically in some good.  That is, evil exists by depriving the good of some necessary aspect of its existence.  Thus, evil is a state and not a created entity.  Evil has only a privative existence.

If we are consider what this primordial knowledge of good and evil might be in the context of our theory, we must recall that authentic knowledge must be an act where the form of the act manifests a potentially fruitful, complete exchange of persons in the most intimate of all self-giving.  This act is good but it can be experienced also as evil if it is deprived of some essential aspect of its being.  Any time the form of the act is altered from its archetypal structure, it is evil.  If the man does not cling to his wife as the two become one flesh (e.g. adultery or premarital sex) it is evil.  If it is not open to the two being fruitful and multiplying it turns into an evil (i.e. contraceptive sex).  Both cases lead to the “eating” of a deficient “fruit”,  however, it would seem that the text suggests that they are created as man and wife, called to consummate their marriage and so the latter option is left.

A reasonable question that could be asked would be about the significance of contraceptive intercourse as the act by which all of creation would be torn from its relationship with God.  This is indeed a significant question and I think that the theology of nuptial mystery provides the rationale for it and for a second question.  That is, why Satan would choose deforming the marital act as his first (apparently) attack against man.   The nuptial mystery understands Trinitarian Communion as the archetype of nuptial love.  The narratives of man’s creation in both accounts (Gen  1 & 2) focus on man’s creation as complementary selves who are called to be fruitful (Gen 1), to be one flesh (Gen 2) which by nature can be seen as ordered to the same goal.  Some strands of nuptial theology understand the marital act to be the one, par excellence, which hylomorphically manifests the life-giving, fruitful love of total-self gift which is the eternal Trinitarian Processions.  Man images God relatively (as St. Thomas says) more perfectly than the Angels, than Satan himself, in this act.  Where else would this prideful, fallen angel choose to attack man than in the act that allows man to image God, in one way, more than does Satan with all of his perfect intellectual nature.  That is, in the capacity to beget (recall the first Procession).

Recall also the tradition in which Satan is said to reply: non serviam when given the knowledge that he was made to serve man, this lowly vile creature with a body like the sub-personal animals.  Not only that, but that he would have to worship one of them whom God was to join to Himself.  What better way for Satan to prove to himself that he is superior if he can deform, and thereby pervert, the very act by which these (rational) animals superiorly image God?

But one would have to ask why Adam and Eve would be tempted into this?  It wasn’t like they would be afraid that college costs for their progeny would require them to give up the winter home in Aspen.  The Genesis text says that Eve saw that it was good for food, a delight to the eye, and desirable to make one wise.  Certainly knowledge, especially this marital knowledge is a good but Adam and Eve would have had to have been able to see that somehow this act without its procreative fruitfulness was preferable to the authentic act.  I think that the answer here is to realize that they were tempted into falling into Satan’s prideful sin.  They tried to achieve their destiny, to become God-like, without God.  I suggest that they thought that “knowing” one another on their own terms, without God’s “interference” (i.e. His law and the law of the order of nature) was the only way to really authentically experience their “freedom to choose.”  Isn’t this the continuing problem today.  We can often be so blinded by our need to freely choose, and this is a real human need, that we are drawn to ignore the structure by which this choosing leads to authentic human happiness.

Adam and Eve ruptured the integrity of God’s creation by abusing the gift of self-determination.  Instead of following the divine archetype in Whom, through Whom, and for Whom they were created–that is returning themselves to the Father in love, trust and thanksgiving–they tried to take the gift and use it for their selfish ends at the expense of the good of the sacred order.  A final thought.  If it were contraceptive sex that led to this, would this not perhaps by why it is pointed out that while God did not take away the gift of the possibility of fruitful self-giving, the fruit would now be more painful for the woman?

Ok, these are my thoughts thus far.  Thoughtful comments, critiques solicited.

The third part of our 8 part series was last Wednesday night.  Don’t forget that it is being streamed from grnonline.com at 8pm Central; you can call in and let us know that we are not just talking to ourselves (though we know that is a distinct possibility).  Let us know what you think:

Click here to view.

This is the second part of the eight part series for those (both) avid followers of this blog. It is a look at the meaning of the human person as made in the image of a Trinitarian God.  We didn’t quite get through all of the points that I had wanted but that is the consequence of doing a live program.

I was not as pleased with this session as the last but I have found that going by one’s feelings is not always a reliable indicator.  The president of our College saw this session and remarked that he had never seen me so animated.  I am not sure if that was good or bad?

This last week there was some sort of technical glitch (still not sure exactly what happened) but the radio simulcast did not activate.  As a result,  the regular EWTN radio program was playing for anyone who happened to try to listen in (I heard from a few).  Sorry about that; however, here is the video for anyone who might have the time and inclination to watch.

This runs live every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, so we have a three week break until the next episode.  Again, these recordings will also be available on the sidebar under metathreads.

Click here to download.

Well there was an overwhelming request to have access to the broadcast for those who could not listen to it live streaming so here it is…for both of you.  I will have it as a page that you can find on the meta threads on the side bar (look carefully, I need to ask Shelray to make an icon for it).  I will also post here when I upload a new one sometime after the showing.  Here it is as well so you don’t have to go looking for it.

Click here to download.

Hierothee suggested I do a post on my research about the connection of sacrifice to consumption.  This is very difficult to do in the space of a standard post so this will necessarily be a broad sketch of what one day may be a much more compelling (I hope) manuscript.

I suppose the place to start is with John Paul’s Trinitarian anthropology.  Man is made in the image of a Communion of Persons.  He explains this Communion, starting from traditional Processional theology, in terms of total self-gift.  Communion is total self-gift.  This total self-gift  is thereby the archetype for the human person in his relationships.

The human person is a hylomorphic entity; that is, a unity comprised of a spiritual soul and a material body.  Man exists at once,  in the realm of the spiritual and the animal.  As a spiritual being man shares in the capacity for communion by use of his rational faculties, intellect and will.  These faculties give him he capacity for total self-gift, for communion.

Animals also, in some way, must reflect God’s perfection.  As fundamental as communion is to God’s being, one might expect that there should be some way in which sub-personal animals participate in communion.  Certainly sub-personal beings do not have the rational faculties necessary for the communion of gift.  They do however, experience a sort of communion in which they join themselves to something of a lower nature (hopefully).  However, this union is through annihilating the lower nature and raising it into a higher nature.  They become one with it, though this is a defective communion because the “other” has lost its being.

Man lives in both of these dimensions.  He experiences both this spiritual communion of persons–most perfectly when the giving accords with the archetype, that is total, disinterested self-gift.  He also experiences the communion of consumption when he eats…though I would argue he can consume in other ways…when he treats another person as a means rather than an end…but this requires more discussion than we have space for.

Man now exists in a deficient condition; he is fallen.  It is very interesting to look at the third book of Genesis and the story of the fall in light of the above discussion.  The mythic (this does not mean untrue of course) imagery shows our first parents with the task of total self-gift–that is, to give themselves in trust and thanksgiving to God, very much the way that John Paul describes the second Procession of the Son.  There is a detailed discussion of the theology of creation in relation to the Son and the second Procession which should be inserted here but neither is there space for that so this might seem less compelling than it should be, but the support will have to wait a longer work.

The Genesis imagery of the fall indicates that the instead of achieving communion through this act of total-self gift, they instead chose consumption.  I would argue that whatever the act of rebellion might have actually been, the choice of the consumption imagery is significant.  It suggests that consumption–communion on man’s terms rather than God’s terms–is to be a perennial problem.  In fact, consumption now often masquerades as communion.  I believe that this is the anthropology behind what we know as “comfort foods” which are standard recourse for many of us, particularly when we have trouble with relationships of communion.

Man’s fallen state means that his capacity for love takes upon itself, potentially a bitter aspect.  It is now the case that one has to die in different ways, when one loves.  In the very least, he must die to himself and his selfish inclinations if he is to love the other for the other’s sake.  This is a type of sacrifice.  In fact, the challenge to love disinterestedly requires varying degrees of sacrifice.  Sacrifice is to give of yourself for the sake of the other to the point that you experience loss in some manner or another.  This is ultimately what the divine Processions are…though it may not be appropriate to use the term sacrifice for the divine Procession because of the attendant connotation of loss in sacrifice and there is no loss in the divine Communion.

However, the remedy to the fall, in which man’s failure to emulate the second Procession, will take on the proper meaning of the term sacrifice.  The Son Incarnate will freely choose to manifest temporally what He does eternally.  He will, in love, trust and thanksgiving, return to the Father all that the Father has given Him…including His human life.  This Sacrifice on the cross will restore the conditions of possibility for communion, but interestingly enough, it does so in a way the redeems the consumption by which man’s initial communion was lost.

Of course we know well the fact that the Cross draws together the eternal with the temporal.  It draws into itself the last Passover seder in the upper room before Christ’s Passion, as He transforms this  seder into the New Testament Passover–the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Cross also brings forth the economic manifestation of the second Procession, that is Pentecost–in an analogous way in the first Procession brings about the second.

This one Paschal act, beginning with the Incarnation and ending with the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is liturgically made present in the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Mass re-presents the Sacrifice of the Cross through the memorial enactment of the New Testament Passover proleptically celebrated in the Upper Room.   It culminates in an efficacious symbol of communion which looks very much like animal consumption–we call it Holy Communion.

The consumption in the Garden of Eden which destroyed man’s communion with God  is now redeemed by the Son.  The Son, who in an act of total self-gift reflective of His eternal gift, continually gives up His Body and Blood in every Mass celebrated throughout the ages, that through an animal act of consumption the faithful are restored by this life-giving communion with the Son and thereby, inserted into Trinitarian Communion.

In a hylomorphic act of love which eclipses Aristotle’s greatest thoughts, both aspects of the human person, animal and spiritual, are incorporated during this divinizing rite we call Holy Communion.  The human person is inserted into the hypostatic order giving him entrance into Trinitarian life when he consumes the Flesh of the Son of Man and drinks His Blood…he now truly has life in him.

Consumption has been redeemed and is immutably implicated in spiritual communion.  This doesn’t mean that consumption no longer masquerades as communion; it does.

It does mean though, that when this masquerading does lead to sin, it is now the source of its own ultimate undoing…because where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.  The love revealed and effected on the Cross, is poured out in time via the mediation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, restoring communion where souls choose to turn again to God.  Sacrifice has redeemed consumption and made it the material cause of communion.

Edward Oakes has a post up at First Things about Rene Girard. There has been much talk about Girard at First Things lately, as Oakes himself notes, but as well at National Review, where Peter Robinson has an interview up (but which I was unable to find in a quick search). It has inspired me to post a stinging criticism of Girard’s theory of the origin of religious sacrifice taken from Louis Bouyer (Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, 1988, p. 238, n. 14). In explaining the tenor of the following quotation, I should point out that Bouyer had a strong aversion to theories of the necessary evolution of a religionless Christianity, such as one could find in Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, and he seems to have seen Girard as a proponent of this sort of thinking. In other words, anathema to him were those who think that Christianity is necessarily secularizing and that Christ’s sacrifice put an end to religion.  Also, he had a strong aversion to annihilationist theories of sacrifice. Sacrifice, he held, is divine self-gift to humanity in which we are ourselves incorporated and made fully self-gift, and it is consummated in the sacred meal, wherein our being comes to fulfillment. Sacrifice is not consummated in the putting to death of a sacrificial victim. The sacred meal is the fundamental activity of man, and the pre-Christian religions pre-figured the Christian Eucharist in this regard, without ever having had access to a truly efficacious communion with deity:

The ideas developed by Rene Girard on the nature of sacrifice have recently created a considerable stir in learned circles. But his brilliant speculations overlook virtually all the contributions made in the last hundred years on this undeniably fundamental aspect of religion. Which may be why he considers supremely indicative of the meaning of sacrifice the apotropaic rites now recognized by all specialists as never having been looked upon as sacrifices by those who practiced these rituals. Quite simply, scapegoats and all variations on the theme, far from ever being considered as sacrifices to God, were always sent to the devil! On the materiality of sacrifices — the necessary starting point before any attempt to unravel their meaning — one may refer to works such as R.K. Yerkes’s Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and in Primitive Judaism. This kind of factual study inevitably leads to a firm conclusion: it is not the killing which determines sacrifice, even when the victim is put to death, which is far from always being the case (see in this respect E.O. James, Origins of Sacrifice, London, 1953, pp. 256 ff.). Neither is its nature established by the oblation to the divinity. Instead, a sacrifice is a meal, but a meal considered as sacred because the divinity partakes of it, whether the sacrifice is exlusively intended for the deity (as in the holocaust), whether priests alone also take part (as in the Hebrew sacrifices for the expiation of sins), or finally whether the entire people participate with them, as in the sacrifice of communion. Or indeed in the Passover, and this seems to have been a characteristic of the very earliest sacrifices, in which all is consumed by the participants, with no role clearly reserved for the divinity.

This explains why, in the most ancient mythic expression of their significance, sacrifices are far from appearing as tremulous attempts of terrified humans to placate a bloodthirsty divinity through some kind of ritual murder. Instead, the gods themselves, acting either directly or through kings deemed to embody or represent them, are the initiators of sacrifices, and thereby show themselves as the quintessential benefactors of mankind, and more particularly the sources of human life in that which maintains it (nourishment) and produces it (sexuality). The idea of sacrifice as a ritual murder is nothing but the fabrication of self-styled scholars, who thus prove that they belong with the pathetic dupes who persist in taking seriously the alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I was reading an article today about four US bishops who have stopped their diocesan collections for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).  This article brought to mind an article I recently read that a friend of mine is trying to get published.  In my friend’s article, he makes the argument that because of the foundation of the Legionaries of Christ is in a radically disturbed man, that the only real possibility for reform of the order would be by re-founding it completely cutoff from Fr. Maciel (though he does not seem to think that is possible).  I don’t intend to go into the issue of the Legionaries now but it occurred to me that this same basic idea must be applied to the CCHD.

Why is it that we see so many problems with CCHD and the organizations that they fund?  While they have cleaned up their act considerably from the days that they openly and wantonly funded groups at odds with Church teaching, they still have not been adequately successful in purging themselves of past demons.  I propose that the reason for this lies in CCHD’s roots.  CCHD is essentially formed around the ideology of the architect of community organizing, Saul D. Alinsky.

Saul Alinsky is a complex figure who formed his ideology from a variety of sources especially from Marxism.  However, one cannot say that he was purely aligned with Marxism, though he did seem to most consistently espouse the gradualism of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist.   Gramsci promoted a gradualist sort communist revolution that relied on infiltrating the “oppressing” source of power and using the dialectic process in a transformative approach rather than fomenting bloody revolution.

Alinsky’s thought is summarized in his two books, Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971).  In these, he lays out his philosophy of life and his approach to community organizing.  For those wishing a quick look at his thought, let me point to one sympathetic treatment of his thought and another  not so sympathetic.  Interestingly enough, you get the same basic insights  from both.  Some points that seem to stand out with respect to Alinsky’s thought is that when it comes to the good of the community (in Alinsky’s view of good) that the end always justifies the means. In fact, Alinsky eschews the idea of following one’s conscience if it means not promoting what he understands to be the  good for the masses:

He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of ‘personal salvation’; he doesn’t care enough for people to ‘be corrupted’ for them. (Alinsky 1972: 25) (cited here).

It also seems to be the case that pragmatic activism is the only acceptable approach to change.  Pragmatic activism means that one cannot do nothing and so if there is only one option open to achieving an end, regardless of what it is or what one’s conscience tells him about this option, it must be taken if the “powerless” may be said to benefit.  Pragmatic further means that it must be able to achieve the end; an idealist approach that has little chance of working is also to be shunned.

Alinsky also seemed to be strongly influenced by the Marxist view of power and its dialectal “truth” that conflict was the necessary means by which two opposing views would be reconciled.  As such, a fundamental principle of community organizing is that the organizer must be committed to agitating.  He must create conflict where there is none, if there is going to be change.  For Alinsky, change is structural change in the organization of the community and organization of the community is defined in terms of who holds power.  If held by the elite it must be gradually wrested away from them and given to the “powerless.”

Alinsky was not against radicalism.  He was simply a pragmatic gradualist.  He thought that one needed to work within the system in order to transform it into a radically new structure.  Thus, while Alinsky’s sentiments for bettering the lives of the poor and downtrodden was noble, his Machiavellian-Marxist philosophy left him and his followers open to the attitude that anything goes in the struggle for power if the end can be characterized as giving power to the powerless and the end is achievable.

So what does Saul Alinsky’s philosophy have to do with CCHD?  Alinsky is known as the father of community organizing.  Lawrence J. Engel, in an article  published in Theological Studies, talks about Alinsky and his influence on CCHD.  Engel  shows that Alinsky must be considered not only the father of community organizing but also the father of CCHD.  Engel writes of Father P. David Finks of the Diocese of Rochester, active in Alinsky’s FIGHT organization and arguably one of the founders of CCHD:

Thirty years later, Finks recalled his own work during the late 1960s: “[T]he NCCB Urban Task Force, the Catholic Committee for Urban Ministry, my years on staff at USCC/NCCB, the organization and selling to the bishops of the Campaign for Human Development–all were an attempt to make available and find support for Alinsky’s approach to community organization, empowerment of USA citizens from the bottom up, and what his IAF successors now call church/congregation-based organizing. As for me, I loved Saul. He stood me on my head and showed me a radically different way to see the world, the church, and democratic politics.”(110) The influence of Alinsky is evident in Finks’s own words and is also confirmed by the priests who worked closely with him in the 1960s. John McCarthy recalls that Finks “idolized Alinsky” and that community organization was “all Finks would be able to talk about.”(111) Charles Burns of the Urban Task Force staff remember that “Finks worshipped [sic] the ground Alinsky walked on,” and that Alinsky was “his father.”(112)

CCHD was, and one might argue must still be assumed to be,  thoroughly imbued with Alinsky’s Machiavellian philosophy and his metaphysic of power dialectics.  Certainly those community organizing institutions that CCHD funds are to varying degrees infected by Alinsky’s defective philosophies.  Is it any wonder that ACORN is as corrupt as it appears to be?  Can we be surprised at what these Alinskyite organizations can justify and work for when what is always right is whatever some organizing leader claims would benefit the powerless and when one’s conscience is no justification for not acting on such.

Alinsky’s ideology is built upon a false view of reality and distorted view of the human person.  It is based upon moral relativism which can justify just about anything as a good.  It is founded upon agitation, ridicule (which is one of Alinsky’s 13 primary tactics for community organizers) and the premise that life is about a struggle for power.   Ultimately, this ideology’s underlying anthropology cannot account for the authentic needs of the human person.  It cannot consistently identify or work for the common good.  Even when it might happen to do so accidentally,  it’s methods will ultimately damage those it intends to support by fomenting a mentality which assumes the only way out of a difficult situation is to do battle in some deceptive manner, with those “in power.”

A Catholic approach to community organizing, rather recognizes that authentic structural transformation comes about not through deception and seizing power but through individual conversion and human solidarity.  It recognizes also that subsidiarity is a co-principle with solidarity.  This means that long term solutions are found in helping those in need to recognize that part of any solution is working for the holiness of both the “powerful” as well as the “powerless.”  It realizes that situations and societies are authentically transformed not through conflict but through selfless cooperation.

It recognizes that those being served must be an integral part of any solution meant to serve them, and this includes setting the goals and the strategies for achieving them.  It is not that confronting unjust situations might sometimes be necessary but a Catholic approach may not succumb to the ideology that confrontation is a normal, even necessary approach.

Neither can a Catholic approach fall into the adjunct heresy that life is a struggle for power. Authentic power is not the forcing of one person’s or group of people’s will over another’s.  Rather, authentic power occurs only when love triumphs.  God is love who is the source of all authentic power.  When one views the other as an enemy to be defeated, authentic power is suppressed.  When one views the other, even an oppressor, as a fellow sinner who Christ died for one will be better prepared to discern the proper approach for a particular situation.

Because CCHD was founded upon a counter-Catholic ideology, I would argue that CCHD must be disbanded.  The Church must also eliminate its material support of any organization formed around Alinsky’s  ideology.  It is true that we must support efforts that help others “learn to fish” but the Church cannot support corrupt, ideological movements in order to achieve such noble ends.

It is time to abandon this failed experiment called CCHD and devote the available resources to building a new Catholic apostolate dedicated to promoting authentic human flourishing.  This new apostolate should base itself upon the social teachings of the Church, built upon an authentic understanding of the human person and how the truth of man demands a social interaction according to the co-principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.  The social encyclicals of John Paul II and Benedict XVI are the most mature articulation of this.  Anything short of this will risk contaminating authentic efforts at social justice with tactics arising from a relativist, amoral ideology.  If we continue with the status quo, we cannot expect anything but more of the same.

Everyone who is concerned with fighting the culture of death should be a regular reader of Wesley J. Smith’s blog at First Things: Secondhand Smoke. No one in the realm of public punditry understands better than he the ethos and tactics of the eugenicists in our midst. And, unlike prevaricators of Rod Dreher’s ilk, who think that it is more appropriate to target Glenn Beck for public recrimination than, say, John Holdren, he does not sugarcoat the perfidious direction in which the Barack Obama administration is taking our nation.

His most recent posts, this one on the New Republic’s Greg Easterbrook, in particular, are bringing to light the truly despicable anti-humanism that is now, with the advent of leftist supremacy in the White House and in congress, coming out into full display. And where are the David Frums, Rod Drehers, and paleo-conservative pundits in general in taking note of this flourishing anti-humanism of the left? They are nowhere to be found. Here’s a tidbit from Wesley Smith’s most recent post, where he makes a connection between the biotech revolution and scientific anti-humanism (part of the ethos that supports eugenics):

The biotech agenda has never been about stem cell research. That is only a stage. The ultimate agenda is Brave New World, e.g. genetic engineering, reproductive cloning, post humanism, and anything goes.  This has been hidden for political reasons, but with the hated Bush’s stem cell funding restrictions now defunct, we are beginning to see some truth in advertising.Greg Easterbrook of the New Republic fame spills some beans over at Wired.  From his column “Embrace Human Cloning:”

Others argue that cloning is “unnatural.” But nature wants us to pass on our genes; if cloning assists in that effort, nature would not be offended. Moreover, cloning itself isn’t new; there have been many species that reproduced clonally and a few that still do. And there’s nothing intrinsically unnatural about human inventions that improve reproductive odds—does anyone think nature is offended by hospital delivery made safe by banks of machines?

This does not necessarily make human cloning desirable; there are complicated issues to consider. Initial mammalian cloning experiments, with sheep and other species, have produced many sickly offspring that die quickly. Could it ever be ethical to conduct research that produces sick babies in the hope of figuring out how to make healthy clones? And clones might be treated as inferiors, rendering them unhappy.

Still, human cloning should not be out of the question. In vitro fertilization was once seen as depraved God-playing and is now embraced, even by many of the devoutly religious. Cloning could be a blessing for the infertile, who otherwise could not experience biological parenthood. And, of course, it would be a blessing for the clone itself. Suppose a clone is later asked, “Are you glad you exist even though you are physically quite similar to someone else, or do you wish you had never existed?” We all know what the answer would be.

The column is mainly a bunch of assertions without real moral engagement.  Note, for example, that Easterbrook is unable or unwilling to say categorically that it would wrong to experiment on sick babies to perfect human cloning.  And that isn’t all it would take to make human reproductive cloning “safe.”  There would have to be many thousands of cloned embryos manufactured (raising the egg biological colonialism issue), eventually gestated into fetuses, and terminated to see how the genes are expressing and as part of the attempt to discover reliable quality control techniques.  Even successful reproductive cloning would also be  human experimentation of the rankest kind since any cloned child successfully brought to birth would be subjected to continued scientific prodding and poking to see how his/her biological systems functioned.

The ethos on display in this ”Wired” article that Smith dissects — that is, turning human persons into subjects fit only for scientific experimentation – was precisely that of the Nazi regime in Germany, in its first stages, and this is why so many on the American right are now prone to level charges of Nazism at the democrats: who uniformly support the biotech revolution. This is a legitimate connection, one that Edwin Black made quite convincingly in linking early twentieth century American eugenics and scientific experimentation to the ethos of Hitler, in his important book The War Against the Weak. Indeed, it was early twentieth century American progressivism that normalized eugenics and the reduction of the person to an experimental subject for scientific prodding. One hundred years later, little has changed.

This is perhaps the third or fourth post that I have started in the last month, never having had time to finish any of them.  But here goes again…

Our late Holy Father, John Paul II, began his encyclical, Fides et ratio with a quote from a carving in the entryway of the temple Delphi admonishing those entering to “Know Thyself.”   This was perhaps the greatest theme of John Paul II’s magisterial papacy.  He spent much of his teaching trying to help Christians and all men of good will to better understand the truth of who and what they are.  Ultimately, he warned, that without God, man becomes an enigma to himself and in the end, he will turn against himself.

This is what John Paul saw in two evil political instantiations  during his early years in his beloved Poland which caused him to refer to the 20th century as the century of tears.  Indeed, both of these were socialist movements, Nazism and Marxist Communism, which explicitly removed God from the equation.  While both ostensibly were aimed at improving the lot of man, they grossly missed his meaning.  The failure to understand man as made in the image of God means that man becomes at best, an animal.  However, he is still not like the other animals.  He possesses something that makes him much more dangerous than the most ferocious carnivore.  He possesses free will (even if the more intellectually consistent atheists will try to explain this away, they still have to presuppose it).

This leads me to the motivation for this particular attempt at a post.  Reading Hierothee’s latest post got me ta think’un again.  The current administration has provided much fodder for posting (if one just had the time).  The big uproar over health care is part and parcel of the problem that comes from trying to address real social problems based upon a flawed, and therefore dangerous, anthropology.  So many of those in this administration exhibit this confused thinking about the human person.  They see him as special and in need of help and protection in some ways (programs for the poor, universal access to health care) but they likewise disregard his intrinsic value and see him as dispensable in so many other ways (abortion, embryo destructive research, euthanasia).

The tendency toward government control over all decision making further reflects this schizophrenic ideology.  This plutocratic tendency is one which reflects a distrust of man’s freewill in this fallen dispensation.  It demands, in gnostic fashion, that the few Enlightened do all of the important decision making for the “instinct” driven masses–though at some level they recognize that the danger is that the masses do not reliably follow their “instincts.”

This ideological crowd is at once philanthropic and misanthropic because they do not know man or why he is special.  They replace truth with ideology.  Without God they cannot know man’s dignity.  So they develop confused criteria for when a man must be treated with concern and when he can be thrown out as so much medical waste.

Without Trinitarian anthropology they cannot know man’s real needs.  That is, he is an individual made for communion with God and other human beings.  In his fallen state, this means he has a task.  So they deprive him of his authentic rights to help perfect himself and society and treat him as a quasi-special animal who must be pacified through “bread and circuses” and so whose free will can be controlled.

However, that is not man’s authentic nature.  Man must be provided the room to master himself, while respecting this opportunity for all men, in such a way that he can enter into authentic relationships, that is relationships of communion with God and with others.  These relationships of communion arise from the divine archetype, which is a Trinity of total self-giving.  Thus, man must master himself so that he fully possess himself and therefore has all of himself to give to God and to others.  That is, one gives oneself to others for their own sake and not for what they can do for me.

What this means is that man necessarily possesses free will because this is a prerequisite for authentic self-giving, which the Christian tradition calls agape.  Thus we see the human being as an individual who is made for relationships with others.  He is at once a member of the human family according to nature but alone as a person until he authentically enters into a relationship and thereby fulfills his potential as a person.

This is the anthropology behind the co-principles of human social relationships called solidarity (a mutual responsibility for all) and subsidiarity (responsibilities must be exercised at the lowest social structure possible).  Those representing the current administration seem to recognize (at some level) that we share a human nature and so have a mutual responsibility for one another–solidarity.  However, they do not recognize that man has a task to exercise his free will in such a way as to master himself in order to perfect himself as a person and contribute thereby, to the perfection of society–subsidiarity.  But as JPII intimated and B16 made explicit (though not using my terminology) in his latest encyclical, these two principles are co-principles.  That is, one cannot have one without the other.

Solidarity without subsidiarity denies the truth of the human being and so degrades into collectivism where the species is important but not the individual.  This is what we generally see with socialism.  It is what is behind, to some degree, the outrage of those who see the current administration as wanting to interpose the State into personal health care decisions.  The so called “public option” that is so important to those with a socialist ideology is seen as dehumanizing, which it certainly can quickly become,  for those who currently have health care.

However, it must be said that the response of this latter group does not always indicate that they appreciate the principle of solidarity.  That is, they express their wish to maintain their freedom of decision making but they do not show that they recognize that part of the reason for the health care reform movement is an inefficient and inequitable access to it for all persons.

The fact that we are in a fallen world, means that solidarity is not lived out with sufficient consistency.  There is a need for some coercive controls on society that ensures those with the smallest voices are also integrated into and have reasonable access to the benefits of society; i.e. there is some legitimate role for governmental involvement, as long as the principle of subsidiarity is honored.  Thus, when this group does not possess a zeal for solidarity, their subsidiarity devolves into individualism.

Which of these is more dangerous?  I would argue that the historical evidence is that the socialist denial of the importance of the individual leads to a totalitarian, coercive collectivism.  Thus, socialism has the most dangerous tendency, at least in terms of recovering from it without bloodshed.  However, tt seems to me that the failure of giving due concern to  solidarity is what opens the door to this socialist tendency.

On the other hand, left to its own, the trajectory of the latter group seems to be individualist anarchy.  That is, in fact, a good part of what we are seeing happening in our society. The difference being that in political structures tending toward the individualist ideology there is still the room for freedom of action that allows at least the possibility for authentic reform (though of course, the individualism must reformed).

Currently, both of these ideologies are now forming much of the rancorous debate and are at loggerheads with one another.  They reflect a crisis of the understanding of the meaning of the human person, his dignity and what he needs in terms of social structures for his authentic flourishing.  It is tragic that most Catholics in political positions to influence this problem have traded the truth for one or the other of these faulty political ideologies.  This even more, makes this situation a real crisis of anthropology.

I have been slowly making my way through B16′s new Encyclical and have been simultaneously keeping track of what many are saying about it.   I am not finished with it yet, but as with others I feel compelled to provide some initial thoughts.  I should like to take (I have been conversing with someone from the UK recently) George Weigel’s comments in NRO as a point of discussion.  I have had a great deal of respect for George Weigel’s insights and viewpoints ever since I read his Witness to Hope.  Often, I think he is right on.  Other times, I think that he can allow his neo-conservative politico-economic outlook to unduly color his analyses of Church issues.  I think that his analysis of Benedict’s latest encyclical falls squarely in the latter category.

He begins by suggesting that inter-curial machinations demand that one approach the Encyclical with a hermeneutic of suspicion leading to a source-critical reading of the text.  This seems to me, all too reminiscent of dissenting scholars’ approach to Church teaching and so it gives me pause at the outset.  I don’t know, Weigel may very well have inside information (in contrast to his implication that it is just a set of suspicions) that justifies his wariness.  For myself, I find the document to be seamlessly coherent.  I believe that what accounts for this difference is the politico-economic biases to which I would argue that he succumbs.

This is what I mean.  Weigel seems to have an allergic reaction to certain phrases such as “wealth redistribution.”  It is true that this is a favorite phrase of many socialists but one must recognize that B16 has accepted the use of the term for his Encyclical.  Clearly Benedict is thoroughly Catholic and in full agreement with Rerum novarum.  Unlike many revisionists, he does not distance himself from any of Leo XIII’s or subsequent pope’s criticisms of socialism (that I have seen any way). However, this does not mean that this phrase is not his.  Rather, one must read it in the context of Benedict’s references to the need for sharing wealth through gratuitousness.  He states that gratuitousness is in contrast to “the logic of public obligation, imposed by State law” (39).  In other words, when Benedict talks of wealth redistribution, he is not talking of technical solutions to problems of povery so much as he is discussing the needs of anthropology at the macro level.  This is why I would argue that Weigel’s complaint that the Encyclical does not give sufficient attention to wealth generation is unwarranted.

For Weigel, the discussion of gratuitousness and gift seems to be “clotted and muddled.”  If one presupposes that the Encyclical is interwoven with two opposing streams of thought then one will not be likely to look for clarifying explanations throughout the text.  This seems to be the problem with Weigel’s take on the “gift” discussion.  He recognizes that it might be the Communio school’s anthropology but seems to dismiss that possibility because he finds the language so “clotted and muddled.” Perhaps he does not recognize that this anthropology is more ubiquitous among Communio scholars that just JPII.  However, if one does recognize that B16 is in fact employing the vision of the human person as an individual who has the task of perfecting himself after the manner of the divine archetype, which is a total self-gift of self to others in relationships, the entire logic of the Encyclical becomes clear (at least as far as I have so far read).

Weigel and others seem to be worried that Benedict is implying a prudential judgment of the priority of wealth sharing over wealth production.  Benedict is doing nothing of the sort.  Again, he is instructing about a socio-economic necessity deriving from an anthropology that undergtands man is created after the image of total Self-gift.  His point is that for an authentic economic structure that promotes the integral human fulfillment of all of its members, the economic structure must be one which promotes all freely giving of themselves for the common, the greater good.

He is true to his word; he provides no technical solutions to such a great challenge.  However his comments in paragraph 39 (see above) and other places show that this structure has to be one promoting the free giving of individuals and societies at all levels.   In other words, this cannot be achieved through State compulsion.  That is not to say that there is no place for some level of public obligation.  Benedict is not trying to instruct the reader in the concrete solutions.  He is providing insights into what the human person and society need in order to flourish and to overcome the economic manifestations of the spiritual crisis in which we now find ourselves.

I am sure that I will have more to say later; especially in terms of Benedict’s discussion of what I term the co-principles of subsidiarity and solidarity.  I have an article I am working on that addresses this very point.  However, Hierothee has convinced me that it needs some reworking.  As I settle into a new routine, I hope to take the article back up again.

O.k., I suppose that I am done for now…

In this post, continuing in my series of posts dedicated to the issue of why scientific materialism undermines human reason, I want to deal briefly with the question of postmodernism. I take as my starting point this illuminating quotation from Hannah Arendt, wherein she describes the consequences of modernity’s denial of the existence of a supersensual reality, or a realm of being beyond that which comes to us through our senses:

In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development [modernity's denial of the supersensual realm]; and although they themselves seldom invoke it, they have an important argument in their favor: it is indeed true that once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries, is also annihilated. The sensual, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the supersensual. No one knew this better than Nietzsche who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God in Zarathustra, has caused so much confusion in these matters. In a significant passage in The Twilight of the Idols, he clarifies what the word God meant in Zarathustra. It was merely a symbol for the supersensual realm as understood by metaphysics; he now uses instead of God the word true world and says: “We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.” (Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Consideration,” Social Research 38 (Autumn, 1971): 240.

Nietzsche was the “prophet”/philosopher/philologist whose aphoristic, 19th-century utterances became the inspiration of much continental philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century, the type of philosophy that we have come to refer to as “postmodern.” Increasingly, he wields an influence in Anglo-American philosophy. It is, in one sense, good that he should do so: at least if his thought is properly interpreted.

Nietzsche was indeed a nihilist: he denied that we can rationally affirm our intellectual or moral judgments. But at least he was generally honest that scientific materialism, if one is forthright and self-aware, leads to nihilism. He knew that a commitment to scientific materialism or a denial of the “supersensual” world should cut one loose from all conceivable moorings. He knew that scientific materialism implies the unreality of our experience, of all appearances, and of the objectivity of all cultural creations: religion, poetry, art, and even science (and perhaps science most of all). He did not go into a desparate Kantian direction, trying to save science by stressing the universal nature of human mental constructs. Unlike Kant, Nietzsche took the poison pill of scientific materialism with all the of the steely-willed resolve of the uebermensch whom he portrayed as the savior of the world. He did not go in for palliative measures in this regard. He fully embraced, and consistently, the sort of forelorn solitude and dejection that was only an occasional encumbrance to Hume’s daily living (see the quotation toward the end of my first post in this series).

Arendt points out that the reduction of reality to what comes to us in appearances through our sensory organs is in fact the abolition of even the appearances themselves. Appearances of color, fragrance, beautiful music, etc., can only be, if matter is the only reality, as illusory as the world was in itself for Kant.  Indeed, the entire Kantian project rests on self-delusion. Without any external reality as a correlate to our experience, knowledge, and moral judgments, we do away not only with the world-in-itself but with any substance to our own experience and lives. The postulation of universal organizing categories of the self is manifestly lacking in realism and cannot overcome the radically contingent and ephermeral reality of our subjective existence.

It is this general sense of things that feeds postmodernism. Recognizing the radically contingent and constructive character of human experience and judgment (intellecual or moral), postmodernism sees the human person as a being entirely bound by historical and cultural context. It is impossible for us, in the postmodern view of humanity, to reach universal intellectual truths or moral judgments. Least of all can we come up with a logically compelling picture of universal destiny, such as one finds in neo-Darwinism. There is no “Big Picture,”  to use the expression of Richard Rorty, that we can derive from reasoned experience. All that we can do is to construct “metanarratives,” to use the expression of Lyotard, or concoct our own particular tales about reality. Indeed, as the postmodern Catholic philosopher Gianni Vattimo has put it, postmodernism is the “demythologization of demythologization.” Everything is a myth now, a personal story that we tell, a narrative, fit for a particular time or place but with no universal validity. Even modern science tells a grand narrative on this view, a story not unlike the story of salvation that one finds in scripture. It is no more true or false than the cultural stories of human origins and destiny that were edifying to previous generations of humanity, given their own volitional concerns deriving from their peculiar historical circumstances.

There is some good that has come out of postmodernism. Aside from unmasking, in a definitive manner, the dire consequences of modern notions of rationality based upon philosophical materialism, postmodern thought has opened up philosophy to values of a more literary nature. Stories and myths, postmodernism has shown, do not lack cognitive legitimacy. Moreover, postmodernism has the possibility of leading to what the Catholic philosopher Hugo Meynell has referred to as a “New Enlightenment,” where the foundations of human knowledge are definitively established and the materialism or scientism of the “Old Enlightenment” is done away with. Postmodern thought shakes modern thought to its very foundations, denying that there can be any rational grounding for knowledge or the human moral good. A new foundation, in this situation, can be laid. And much twentieth century Catholic thought could come to the rescue in this regard. Meynell points to Bernard Lonergan. But one might also point to the Catholic phenomenologists, or to Aristotelian Thomists, or to the participants in the Augustinian revival in twentieth century Catholic thought. A vast treasure of Catholic thinking, that has dealt with the epistemological problems of modern materialism, awaits recovery and synthesis in the wake of the postmodern challenge. Would that our Catholic colleges and universities would take this treasury seriously and orient their educational pursuits around it!

With all of this said, there is no getting around the dark skepticism and cynicism that postmodernism brings in its wake. Postmodernism relativizes truth, goodness, and beauty. But it is often not fully brought out that the cognitive accomplishments of science are themselves relativized by postmodernism, and this fact is the thrust of my posts in this series. 

If matter in motion is the only reality, then human persons are inevitably caught up in a flux of purely spatio-temporal processes, of pure location, and so cannot transcend their biological/historical/cultural standpoint to reach universal truths, including scientific truths. It is meaningless to try to locate the universality of scientific truth in the human subject, because the human subject, on a materialist view, has no lasting interiority. We are, each of us alone and altogether, caught up inevitably and irrevocably in the fleeting processes of material processes in motion. Our natures, then, could not be universal, underlain by universal categories, but contingent upon history and culture. Science has value in our age, given the strong manner by which we experience the technological imperative, but it may just as easily disappear in a future age, where other values are experienced and asserted, and a different story or narrative is told. And if it should disappear, we have no way of adjudicating whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

If you are an atheist, which implies (practically-speaking in our culture) a commitment to scientific materialism, the only intellectual choice you have, ultimately, is this relativist direction of postmodernism. Matter, however it is conceived, does not transcend the locality of spatiotemporal instances. It does not admit of universal knowledge, only of particular moments, times, and places, of a radically individual character. Material processes, if there is no formal causality in nature, could admit of no generalized laws, no universal truths.

I shall make this last point clearer, hopefully, in my next post, where I shall discuss formal causality: the missing dimension of modern attempts to understand human knowledge and the world.

Getting back to my demonstration of why philosophical materialism undermines human reason, I want to discuss briefly Immanuel Kant. Recall that the dilemma posed to human knowledge by materialism was keenly felt by Hume, a problem that has become especially acute in our own day now that many scientists and philosophers have come to argue that human consciousness is reducible to physical brain processes.

If consciousness is just brain activity, how could it reveal to us a world that is external and other? Our neural activity exists entirely in the spatial confines of our own brains. Given that this is so, the best that our brains could do for us is to give to us representations of the world external to us, but they cannot give us the world as it is in itself.

Hume saw that reductionism of the sort that is prevalent in contemporary brain science should lead us to deny the objective reality of all so-called secondary qualities, which is to say of our entire perceptual experience. Our perceptions of color, sound, taste, etc. could only be innate ideas or internal representations that tell us nothing about reality in itself, if we presume philosophical materialism. In itself, reality would be a flux of material processes wholly other from our experience. Hume saw that the materialist account of perception also requires us to doubt the objective reality of our ideas of uniform causal influence and therefore of universal logical, mathematical, and scientific laws. If constant material flux or process is the only objective reality, then there is no “place” in the world to situate universal, uniform, unchanging laws of reason — except in the human mind. Our ideas of universal natural laws, then, can tell us nothing about the world in itself but only about our own psychology and ultimately about our own neural structure (Noam Chomsky has in fact reached this conclusion, albeit inconsistently, with his postulation of a “universal grammar” of the brain). All that we directly experience is the constant, contingent flux of matter striking our sense organs, and this can come to us only in point-instants of material process from which it is impossible to deduce universal causal influence in nature. Any universal laws of logic, math, or science, then, would have to be abstract or purely mental realities.

Hume, in drawing these consequences, was simply bringing a tradition of thought stemming from Descartes and Galileo, and consolidated on seemingly unimpeachable grounds by Isaac Newton, to its inevitable conclusion. In doing so, he unexpectedly shattered the logical foundations of modern science. No one understood the earth-shaking consequences of Hume’s conclusions better than Immanuel Kant, who sought to refute Hume and put science on a surer foundation of reason. But, in the end, all that he ended up doing was to give birth to a fantastic idealism that has given philosophy a bad name in the modern world. At least this is so in England and America, which have never been able to embrace fully the post-Kantian idealist strand of continental philosophy. Though, one could argue that this is largely to the discredit of Anglo-American philosophy, whose proponents are mostly shallow and ignorant of history.

Kant started his career as a science teacher and a physicist. He wrote a treatise in 1755 entitled The Universal History of Nature that anticipated many of the scientific cosmological theories that would be explored in astronomy in the next two hundred years. Kant was thoroughly Newtonian in these early stages of his career, but his reading of Hume in the 1760s called the whole Newtonian project into question for him. The question that Hume raised, that Kant realized was unavoidable, was how Newton’s purely empirical, contingent, and natural science could correspond to the necessary and universal dicta of formal and mathematical demonstration. Mathematical explanation was the ultimate goal of modern science for Newton and Kant (as it is for science today). But how could such universal descriptions fit the radically contingent structure of physical nature as it presents itself to our fleeting experiences?

Kant (and Newton) sought for universal and necessary axioms of nature, a goal that presupposes the conviction that nature is governed by uniform systems of cause and effect. As noted above, Hume called this conviction into question, and rightfully so, given the “sensationism” to which he was committed by virture of his materialism. The presupposition of uniform causal influence has no basis in reason because we have no access to it by experience. If matter is the only reality, there is no way that we could truly be said to know of the existence universal laws of causality. In fact, such laws could not even exist, though Hume himself did not reach this latter conclusion.

Kant, understanding the fundamental truth in Hume’s objection, tried to refute Hume and to establish the reasonableness of the Newtonian project by laying out a highly complex “transcendental” argument that presumed to show the basis in the human subject of all knowledge and experience. Jonathan Robinson, in his wonderful little book detailing the effects of bad philosophy on modern liturgy, summarizes Kant’s argument in support of the universality of science.

Beginning with the fact that physics is possible, because after all we in fact do it, he [Kant] then asks what the necessary conditions for the possibility of physics are. He then argues that among these conditions is the truth of the proposition that every event has a cause; and, if every event has a cause, then this establishes the reign of law in nature. The reality of this reign of law is what makes it possible for us to do physics. His position is that natural necessity constitutes the objective world we all experience, but we have no way of knowing whether or not this necessity also characterizes the world lying behind the objective world of experience. (The Mass and Modernity, 81)

Kant “rescues” or “saves” the reality of science, then, not on the basis of a correspondence between human experience and physical nature as it is in itself but on the basis of our own inner or “transcendental” experience. He remains committed to the materialist axiom that physical nature comprises nothing more than contingent material flux, whose importance for the problem of knowledge was made clear to him by Hume. But he refutes Hume by arguing that there is universality to our experience, as a result of the universality of human nature, and therefore that there is universality to science. In other words, the universal structure of physical laws is not found in nature but in the organizing capacity of the human person or subject.

Kant worked out a list of formal structures of the human subject that he held to be responsible for the ordering of our experience of contingent physical nature and which thereby make universal scientific deductions possible. These are known as Kant’s a priori categories of understanding. He establishes twelve such categories under four headings (quantity, quality, relation, and modality), each with three categories of its own. Kant also absorbed universal space and time entirely into the human subject. As for space, Kant says:

Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside one another, and accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the representation of space must be presupposed. The representation of space cannot, therefore, be empirically obtained from the relations of outer appearance. On the contrary, this outer experience is itself possible at all only through this representation. (Critique of Pure Reason, New York, 1958, 43)

As for time, Kant has this to say:

What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish. As appearances, they cannot exist in themselves but only in us. What objects may be in themselves, and apart from this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them. (Critique of Pure Reason, New York, 1958, 46)

Space and time, Kant argues, are intuitions or forms of our innate sensibility, but not realities of the objective world itself. They must be presupposed in our experience and not derived from empirical encounter with physical nature. It can be no other way, once again, if we presume that the process, contingency, and flux of matter is the only reality of physical nature. We have to impose our mental life on physical nature in order to establish physical science, not understand nature in itself. If we want to save science, Kant realized, and yet maintain our commitment to philosophical materialism, we have to place the uniformity or universality of science entirely within our own mental life.

Indeed, Kant, through the influence especially of Ernst Mach, had an impact on Albert Einstein’s revolution of modern physics in his formulation of the relativity of time and space, though Einstein, who was not a competent philosopher, did not take things in the purely subjective direction that Kant did.

Can the universality of science really be rescued on a purely subjective basis? Postmodern thought has called the Kantian “rescue operation” into question by stressing the radically historical and contingent constitution of human nature itself. Nowadays, there are many who argue that science is an artifact of a particular historical mentality and not an expression of universal human nature. Indeed, human nature does not, for these postmodernists, even exist. So, the findings of science are not universally true for them in either an objective or a subjective sense. The postmodern turn will be the topic of my next post.

What is missing in the Humean/Kantian analysis? In the end, Kant does not succeed in saving science from Hume. If we truly want to affirm that science tells us about the universal laws of nature and not about our own psychology or history, we have to affirm (as Hume and Kant did not) the reality of formal causality in physical nature. In other words, we must affirm the presence of spirit in physical nature in order to account for the objective correlation of physical nature and human reason. But that will be the subject of my final post in this series.

I recently had the displeasure of running across a post on Rod Dreher’s blog where Dreher had made reference to an internet discussion hosted by Stanley Fish of Terry Eagleton’s new book on the silliness of contemporary atheism. Fish had in this discussion given his own public unmasking of the epistemological naivete of philosophical materialism. A bunch of people who seem to crosspost one another so as to gang up against theists in comment boxes had put together a string of comments attempting to dismiss Eagleton and Fish. Their comments were, as is usually the case with these people, embarrassingly ignorant and shallow.

I decided to enter into the fray, pointing out to these sadly ignorant atheists that the implicit assumption of philosophical materialism or naturalism would, if its implications were truly understood, lead to skepticism of all forms of knowledge. Of course, many atheists tend to presume that science undermines Christian faith. They view themselves as the upholders of reason and science against the obfuscations of Christian belief. Little do they realize that the scientific materialism that they have embraced, in whatever particular form it may take with them, undermines the valid achievements of human reason altogether, including the achievements of science. Atheism, in other words, and not religious faith, undermines science.

Needless to say, my comment was met by blank incomprehension and by evasion. It tended to annoy these shallow atheists, mostly trained in engineering methods but not in the exercise of human reason as applied to ultimate issues. Unfazed by their ignorant and uncomprehending dismissals, I have decided to demonstrate here, in a series of posts, why it is that the embrace of philosophical or scientific materialism must lead ultimately to a skepticism toward all knowledge. I shall demonstrate, in effect, that postmodern relativism is the inevitable outcome of believing that the only things in the world that are real are those entities that are in principle capable of being discovered by modern scientific investigation.

I’ll take as my starting point for this demonstration the philosophy of the great British Empiricists Bishop Berkeley and David Hume. Berkeley and Hume, in the 18th century, were the first to see the problem for human knowledge that comes with assuming that matter in its various forms is the only reality.

Berkeley saw the problem and was thereby led to reject the dogma of modern materialism that physical nature is composed entirely of material substances whose only reality is extension in space (res extensa) or geometrical shape. This doctrine had been upheld by Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, Newton, and Locke. It assumes that our perceptions are caused by that which is in fact imperceptible. Berkeley realized that this dogma must lead to a denial of the objective validity of human perception and knowledge. He argued, in order to counteract this materialist presupposition, that there is in fact nothing in nature that goes unperceived. All of physical nature is perceived: by humans, angels, and the mind of God. The imperceptible, in his view, is not the cause of the perceptible. Rather, all things are caused by the infinite perceiver: God himself (who does not go unperceived to himself).

Berkeley’s understanding of perception has generally been castigated as a form of subjective idealism. He has been accused of denying the objectivity of the world external to human perception. This is the standard reading of him. In fact, he did no such thing. He argued that the world that we perceive is the world as it is in itself. It is real, but it has its basis in the perceiving (read: knowing) mind of God. He argued that one must reject the reality of  purely material substances if one is to uphold the objective validity of human perception. Louis Dupre has rightly said of Berkeley’s position that it is, like Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 19th century epistemology, a form of spiritual empiricism, not of subjective idealism. Berkeley, unlike the subjective idealists and scientific materialists, upholds a doctrine of epistemological realism. He holds that we really perceive the objective world and that we can really come to know it.

Be that as it may, it is Hume who is the key figure of modern thought because he shows better than any other modern philosopher outside of Kant (on whom Hume was the decisive influence) the despair and skepticism to which scientific materialism must lead if its implications are rightly understood. Hume saw the validity of Berkeley’s insight that if material substances are the cause of all that we perceive then our perceptions cannot possibly put us in touch with objective nature. Hume realized this, but unlike Berkeley he did not come to reject the doctrine that material substances are the only principles of physical nature. He accepted the materialist doctrine and took it to its logical conclusion. He chose skepticism over Berkeley’s intuitive realism.

Hume understood that philosophical materialism implies a doctrine of perception that sees all human experience as rooted entirely in material processes (a doctrine that Alfred North Whitehead would later label “sensationism”). All human experience, if material substances are the sole reality of physical nature, must be caused entirely by material sensory impressions striking our sensory organs. Hume realized, like Berkeley before him, that if the striking and beating of material processes on sensory organs is the objective correlate of experience, then our perceptions must be internally generated ideas in the mind and not gateways to the objective world. How could it be otherwise? The colors, sounds, tastes, smells, etc., that we experience are not what is real in nature. What is real in nature is the bumping and striking of material substances whose whole reality can be encapsulated in mathematical formulas. The experience of the redness of an apple, for instance, is an illusion of our inner ideas. What is objectively real in the experience of an apple is its material or sensory basis: the light frequencies that extend from the material substance of the apple striking, in consecutive fashion, the human eye and optic nerve. These give us sensory impressions in our brain that our mind’s eye contemplates and turns into perceptual realities that bear nothing in common with the material sense impressions in themselves. The infinite array of human perceptions is qualititatively different from these purely material sensations. Yet, only the sensations are objectively, publicly real. The sensations are “primary” or real qualities. The perceptions are “secondary” or imaginary qualities.

This led to quite a dilemma for Hume. Refusing to reject materialist substantialism, he had to assume the existence of two separate worlds: one is the real world outside of perception that is mathematically describable, and the other world is the world that we perceive, a world of fragrance, and color, and beauty — a world that is felt in emotion and expressed in art, and religion, and poetry, but that does not correspond to the world-in-itself. The world of human culture is merely one of expressed ideas of impressions. It does not express the world as it objectively exists in time and space. Indeed, Hume was quite despondent over this situation. When he played the role of philosopher he found himself isolated, much as would later happen with Nietzsche:

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human comerce, and left utterly abandonded and desolate…I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side. (A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford, 1960, 264, 269)

Many “concretely-minded” Anglo-Americans in our day view such expressions of dread with a wink and a nod, seeing Hume as an exaggarator, or as a bit cracked. But Hume is a greater “agent of truth” than they. He is more perceptive and honest. He has considered the full consequences of the philosophical materialism that he has adopted. He realizes that if matter is the only ultimate reality then the world of common human experience, the world of human discourse and cultural achievement (including science), is nothing but a subjective illusion. And this should indeed shake one to the core of one’s being, if one truly understands or is truly honest.

Kant, originally a physicist who was himself “shaken from his dogmatic slumbers” by Hume, realized that science required a defense of its universal validity in the face of the dilemma of materialism that Hume had exposed. How did Kant “rescue” science? That will be the topic of my next post.

Well, I have just completed my first full week of unemployment.  I think that I had more leisure time while employed.  Unemployment began by waking up to 8 inches of water in the basement Saturday morning before last.  The sumps had stopped running for some reason.  I was able to get them started before heading off to Mass. The water was pumped out by the time we returned.  Tricia spent the morning trying to dry out our files that had been inundated with water while also holding a garage sale.  I spent the morning cleaning up the basement.  We headed out to Chicago to visit some friends in the afternoon and made it back home by 11pm.  That has been one of our more leisurely days.

We are in Dayton for our goddaughter’s graduation, so that is the only reason I have a breather right now.  I thought I would take the time to comment on a topic I have seen in my inbox this  month.  Several articles by several different persons have been forwarded to me about Christopher West and the fallout from his Nightline interview.  He has been taking quite a bit of heat for it.  According to some (Alice von Hildebrand and David Schindler), it is not simply the case that West was taken out of context and misconstrued,  but rather that he has some underlying problems in his anthropology.

First for some caveats and disclosures: I cannot speak as an expert on Christopher West’s interpretation of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, as I have read and/or heard relatvely little of his thought.  However, I have read and heard some and have found that I share some of the concerns being presented.  I know David Schindler.  I took a course from him at the John Paul II Institute which, by the way, served as the inspiration for the title of this blog.  He was also a reader for my dissertation.  I do not always agree with Schindler’s take on John Paul II. I think it is often too heavily read through his “Balthasarian lens.”  However, I do think that some of Schindler’s criticisms are well-founded, and these criticisms will be the focus of this post.  I don’t claim to be the world’s foremost expert on John Paul II or his theology of the body, but I do consider myself to have an above-average expertise, as this was the foundation of my dissertation, and I have taught undergraduate courses on the theology of the body for several years.

Schindler begins with some apparently rather questionable statements that Christopher West has made.  Oftentimes, these questionable statements can seem to be reconciled with orthodoxy when contextualized, but even in doing so, Schindler says that there is a residual problem.  Schindler lists four issues he sees with West’s approach, and also with the substance of his theology.  These Schindler sees as giving rise to what many find vulgar and prurient in West’s approach.

Schindler first lists West’s underestimation of the damage done to humanity by concupiscence.  Schindler refers to his having brought this up to West a number of years ago.  I recall Schindler’s having mentioned this discussion (back in 2003, I think it was).  He mentioned West’s problematic dismissal of the perduring effects of concupiscence and West’s response.  However, I also recall that I did not agree with the way the Schindler seemed to frame the meaning of concupiscence.  He seemed to reify it as some positive reality then, as something that resides in the body.  His statement in the above linked article also intimates this understanding.  Nevertheless, what I have heard from West seems to suggest to me that he does in fact underestimate the impact of concupiscence on the human person.  Redemptive grace in this dispensation does not remove concupiscence, and concupiscence in sexual attraction cannot be ignored.  West seems to forget this, though “Christopher” of this blog, who has recently taken a class from West, indicated that West is reconsidering his take on concupiscence.

I have the impression of West that he seems to consider puritanism as a greater threat than the sexual libertinism of the sexual revolution.  I seem to recall seeing this written by him, but if I am wrong about this, I apologize.  However, if it is true, it would explain many things about his overemphasis on sex which Schindler thinks arises from his lack of a proper sense of the analogia entis (the analogy of being), which takes its archetype in God but never forgets that the difference between God and His creation is greater than the similarity.  Puritanism is a distortion of chastity.  Libertinism is a rebellion against not only puritanism but also against chaste virtue.

West seems to think that concupiscence can and must be defeated.  This is impossible.  Temptation must be overcome and defeated but concupiscence remains for the entirety of this lifetime.  Concupiscence is not an object to be defeated.  Concupiscence is a privation of integrity between the affects (i.e. emotions and appetites) on the one hand and the intellect and will on the other.  The original state was one of integration among these faculties, which we had only because of original grace–but this is how we were created–we were created for grace.  This integrity can be provisionally restored to a greater or lesser extent by cooperating with sanctifying grace, but the proclivity to sin always remains, and so it must not be tempted.  West can seem to dismiss this.  In doing so, it seems that he is falling into the error of presuming upon God’s grace in order to reject the admonition to avoid the near temptation of sin.  God’s grace can transform us if we cooperate it, but in our fallen state this is not a straight path that one can achieve simply through the force of will or by a quietist presumption on grace.

Schindler criticizes West for a lack of Marian sensitivities in his theology of the body. The way Schindler describes this is pure Balthasar and so it is not fair, I think, to consider this a failure. John Paul’s theology is certainly sympathetic with Balthasar’s Mariology, and good arguments cans be made that he incorporated this to some degree in his own thinking.  At most this should be proposed as a corrective to West’s prurience but not a fault in West’s theology.  Hildebrand argued that West loses the mystery of the person by his lack of sensitivity to the dangers of concupiscence.  This I think I have seen.  It is, I think, the reason behind his inability to discern what is inappropriate or vulgar and what is not.

Puritanism and sexual libertinism are both threats.  The former because it set the stage for justification of the latter.  However, both reject the authentic meaning of the human person and the sacredness of the body.  The danger is (and I think that this is the trap that West falls into) that the response of one who suffers from puritanical thinking can look very much like the response of one who has an authentic anthropology and responds out of a desire for purity.  That is, when subjected to sights that might be a temptation both will turn away.  The puritan because he thinks that the naked body is dirty or evil and the wannabe saint because he realizes that the goodness of the naked body is sacred, and in his fallen state he can be tempted to reduce the other to his sexual value.  Furthermore, there is a stewardship for the weaknesses of others that must be observed in order to protect them from temptations.

When inadvertantly subjected to experiences that can lead to lust, one does indeed have the obligation through self-mastery to overcome the temptation.  However, one also has the obligation to avoid the near temptation of sin.  It is ill advised, indeed it can be sinful, to  subject oneself purposefully to anything with which Satan or our simple fallenness can use to draw us more easily into sin.  Everyone is different.  Men and women are tempted differently.  Men tend to reduce women to their sexual value for the sake of pleasure.  Women tend to reduce men to the latter’s ability to meet their need for complementary bonding and personal fulfillment.  Among men, however, temperament, experience, history of subjection to pornography, etc. all factor into what can lead to temptations and how difficult it is to master oneself in this regard.  One may not sin in a misguided attempt to attain self-mastery. Neither may I assume that what I can safely be subjected to is the standard for everyone.

West’s use of images that offend the sensibilities of many good Catholics seems to be motivated by the fact that he thinks that puritanism is the root cause for their offense.  He needs to be reminded that puritanism is a relatively recent phenomenon and that chastity and purity are age old virtues.  While it is true that some cultures are not offended by things sexual that do offend others (a point I recall West often making), one must not draw conclusions based upon superficial assessments.  Lack of offense does not imply purity in reception.  Cultures in which men and women are both publicly naked must not be assumed to show that public nakedness is a possibility for a society that wants to achieve purity.  In fact, these cultures rarely show a high regard for women and their sexuality.

Ok, enough blathering and back to the question: is Christopher West’s interpretation of theology of the body dangerous?  First, I will say that I wish that this discussion could go on in private because it serves to give comfort and aid to dissenters and can undermine a good apostolate that West has developed, albeit, one that is in need of some course corrections. However, with respect to the question,  I suspect that for some people it can be.   I do think that in many ways he has done very much good, and I have no way of knowing how much that his disregard for concupiscience may have caused damage to those misled by it.  I do hope that he will take the public criticism to heart and find someone who can help him to correct his misinterpretations.  Our culture needs it and so does the Church.

Well, it looks like we will be moving back to San Antonio after having been away for almost the entire decade.  The sad end to this apostolate has opened the door to a promising new apostolate in San Antonio.  A new school called the Mexican American Catholic College will begin offering courses in the fall.  I will be serving as their academic dean.  I have been meaning for some years to recover my long dormant Spanish (I pray that it is dormant and not lost) and this new position with this bi-lingual school makes that a pressing requirement.

In the waning weeks of our school of theology here in Champaign, I have had the opportunity to more clearly appreciate the gift that this apostolate was.  The time spent with students and staff, I do not take so much for granted any longer.  One such experience was my panel participation last Tuesday night in which our FOCUS missionaries hosted a campus wide  “Stump the Catholic” panel discussion.

Students from across the U of I campus were invited to bring their questions and boy did they.  One enterprising atheist student posted on reddit, soliciting questions in order to “demolish” us. Most of the questions from the floor were the old fare that one would expect to hear.  Some students clearly were taken aback that there were such solid answers to questions of which they had assumed that all serious Catholics must be ignorant.  Not all, however, allowed themselves to experience this ephiphany.  In reading about B16′s address this morning to the Pontifical Biblical Commission I am reminded of important insights that help to explain why with some questions, for example those which deal with Scripture, it is notoriously difficult to satisfy some people.

CNA reports that the Holy Father discussed the issues of contemporary biblical interpretation and reminded his audience that authentic interpretation of Scripture can only take place with the Church.  This is a very important point that needs to be understood.  Benedict goes into the justification in the article and so I will not repeat that.

However, let me offer that a proper anthropology can illustrate why this is so.  Such an assertion as Benedict’s is, of course, very offensive for those who subscribe to the notion that critical approaches to biblical exegesis are the only appropriate tools for “enlightened” minds.  These people who place themselves outside of the Church’s tradition take such a claim as one smacking of intellectual suppression.  It seems to me that this very mindset is the problem keeping them from considering the legitimacy of the Pope’s statement.

I would say that Benedict’s assertion is a corollary to St. Augustine’s sage insight articulated in the dictum: “I believe that I might understand.”  Belief is in fact a prerequisite to understanding the divine mysteries.  But belief is often misunderstood.  I recall the exchange of open letters between the late Carl Sagan and a priest from the Christophers (whose name I do not recall) a number of years back about Sagan’s unbelief.  It came down to the fact that Sagan was fearful of believing because he felt that belief surrendered the intellect and made him vulnerable to exploitation.

The US culture does in fact promote this type of thinkingthrough a still strong but fading fideistic current.  However, trust, belief, and faith are eminently human.  The less of them we possess, the more we surrender our capacities to fulfill ourselves has human beings.  We can see that we need trust just to live.  There is no place one can go in which he does not have to in some way, rely on another.  A quick (and adequately reflective)  audit of daily life will verify the level of interdependence we have on one another as well as the unreflective trust we immediately place in others upon whom we depend.  Moreover, we cannot have a relationship unless we trust.  The depth of a relationship is dictated by the level of trust between the two parties comprising the relationship.  We cannot fulfill ourselves as human persons without these deep, trusting, giving relationships with others.

We are in fact, created to trust.  Trust and belief do not require one to suspend his reason.  Far from it.  In fact, in order to mature in faith it demands active engagement of the intellect.  However, it begins with trust.

Trust is the first step in belief, in faith.  To be skeptical, is an anti-human disposition.  Now skepticism is not the same as prudential caution.  If the consequences are grave for misplaced trust and/or the probability high that one’s trust might be abused in less than grave situations, caution is very reasonable.  However, skepticism (as I am defining it anyway) is an act of the will against trust before even opening one’s mind to consideration of the rationale for the acceptance of a proposition.  In other words, one has prejudged; he has made made up his mind without fairly considering the evidence.  This is termed unjust prejudice and it is why prejudice is wrong.  Skepticism, as distinct from prudential caution, is simply prejudice or bigotry. To be truly human one must first trust; man is one who believes.

This is an initial step in recognizing why understanding Scripture requires one to be in communion with the Church but of course there are a few more to go. Once we trust (with prudential caution) we then are open to hearing, understanding, and considering a proposition .  This proposition is one in which we are asked to believe.  It is not a rare event mind you, to take on trust the propositions of others.  It is something we do countless times throughout the day. Those who tabulate such things claim that over 90% of what we “know” we have accepted in trust from others without verifying it for ourselves. If the proposition is reasonable and the proposer is credible and competent then it is eminently reasonable to begin the process of trusting the proposition.  Of course, various persons are going to have a variety of questions to be answered before determining any such proposition is reasonable.

At this point, one is open to the final stage in Christian faith and that is to accepting the gift, the theological virtue of faith which elevates and perfects the natural trust and belief of the hearer.  This theological virtue is that which deepens and broadens the understanding of the proposition in addition to being able to hold the conviction with unshakable certainty.  It is this experience of faith and of God’s love which gives one deeper and more profound insights into the propositions which convey the mystery of faith.

This experience of faith and love is nothing more than the experience of communion with God which human beings acheive through union with Christ.  Union with Christ is by definition, communion in His Church the fullness of which is the Catholic Church. The anthropology of trust makes understandable why one must be in the heart of the Church to understand its profound mysteries and why this communion does not entail suppression of one’s intellect.

B16′s statement has deep Trinitarian, Christological, ecclesiological and anthropological implications.  One of which suggests that those who uncritically accept the philosphical baggage that comes with the history of higher criticism will never be able to understand the authentic meaning of Scripture.  Criticism is a very useful tool but to assume that one must adopt skepticism toward divine revelation or toward the Church in order to perform the various methods of biblical criticism is to disqualify oneself from being a Catholic biblical scholar and to remove the liklihood that one will come to an authentic exegetical result.

It means that athiests and other methodological skeptics will never be convinced through intellectual argument alone.  They must first experience conversion, a softening of the heart.  It is the reason that our young atheist mentioned above subsequently claimed victory and why many in the Catholic bibilical academy will unfortunately go to their graves rejecting many Church teachings and steadfastly rejecting the use of any exegetical tools other than criticism.  We must pray for a change of heart for those who are thus instransigent so that they may be set free in order to more effectively use their heads.

In the myriad crises that the media, as usual, is helping to in some cases fan (economic) and in others foster (ecological, racial, political, etc.) it is not surprising that more end of days prophets have surfaced.  One good thing about this kind of environment is that I have found myself better attuned to consider more carefully the despair of our modern day nihilists.

As I was putting together notes for a lecture tonight, I was reading through JPTG’s theology of the body catecheses once again.   His commenting on a passage from 1 John struck me in a way that I had not considered in the who-knows-how-many-times I had previously read it:

On the one hand, “the world passes away with its concupiscence,” on the other, “the one who does the will of God will remain in eternity” (1Jn 2:17) [Waldstein, 101:7].

The context of his talk is the eschatological hope that one finds in marriage as the primordial sacrament.  However, what struck me is the lack of eschatological hope of so many in our society.  I suspect that the numbers comprising this group are those who are wedded to the passions of the flesh.  Why this is so is suggested in the above passage.

Fixating on the satiation of bodily passions to the neglect of the deeper needs of the soul attenuates, and perhaps completely suppresses, any awareness of that which allows us to transcend the material world.  That is, the spiritual aspect of our existence.  With our focus solely on the corruptible, and steadily corrupting flesh it is no mystery why we would have no long term hope in eternal life.

We see our own flesh, and that of others, decaying before our very eyes.  We have a clear, if subliminal, witness that concupiscence eventually passes away–even if it is our own.   In fact, our experience of concupiscence is that it does not provide a lasting substance on which to build anything.  Once a particular lust is sated, we are left empty.  When we respond in a disordered way to satisfy the urges of the animal aspect of our human nature, we kill again the spiritual life which gives us hope.

I suspect that the world’s hope for the future that rang in the ears of the practical nihilists during BO’s presidential campaign, for a moment at least, resonated with their innermost being.  This explains the explicit messianic adulation that BO received and continues to receive.  His message is one of hope without demands.  This is no hope at all.

This world is passing way as is the concupiscence that keeps it and us from acheiving its greatness.  For those who wed themselves to satisfying their concupiscent desires at the expense of their souls, even the exuberance of  the last election cycle will not be enough to keep them distracted for long.

Our economy has been based upon a rampant consumerism focused too much on an attempt to satisfy concupiscence’s infinite wants at the expense of truth.  The great demand to fill our spiritual void with material goods could not keep up with our incomes so we had to continue to fill the void with goods bought on credit.  It appears that the credit bubble has now burst.  I do not know if we have come to the end of the line with this or not but as any one with eyes can see the crisis we now face is more spiritual than it is economic.

Nevertheless, this world is fading away.  Perhaps now is the most auspicious time to proclaim the new world that this passing world still awaits as it groans in travail, the new creation that will be given to those who do the will of God.

I saw an article today reporting that the University Catholic Center at the University of Texas at Austin was starting a “Gay and Lesbian” support group.  This was confirmed on the Center’s website.

Now it is not clear from the report what this support group will entail.  They interview the Paulist priest who will be leading the group, Fr. Ed Koharchik, who provides some interesting statements as reported by UT’s student newspaper, The Daily Texan:

“We want to provide a safe place for young people to talk about this issue – how does it fit in with the Catholic Church teachings?” said the Rev. Ed Koharchik, associate director at the center. “Whether one is gay or straight, it’s morally neutral.”

In recent weeks, the center has promoted the support group, whose purpose is to shed light on the “misconstrued teachings of the church” with respect to non-heterosexual lifestyles, Koharchik said.

“It’s about this group of people and how to stay within the teachings of the church and yet still identify as being of that orientation,” said Michael Jungwirth, a Middle Eastern studies graduate student. “It sounds reasonable.”

Now what he means by “morally neutral” I suppose depends upon what he means by being “gay or straight.”  Unfortunately, using those terms succumbs  to the mistaken notion that same sex attraction has some ontological basis rather than being a disorder that requires healing.  Fr. Koharchik seems to recognize that the terms refer first to a life style.  In other words, they are forms of behavior.

The comments from the student sound promising I suppose.  It is important to stay within the teachings of the Church.  However, I am not all that confident about Fr. Koharchik’s understanding of Church teaching if some of his interviews have been correctly reported.  For example, in an interview with the Daily Texan, published by Politico before the election he is said to have claimed that social issues like immigration and the death penalty were just as important as abortion…Catholics are not single issue voters.  Some additional comments:

Koharchik said he hopes to deter Catholics from breaking off their relationship with God due to their sexual orientation. He said he wants community members to know that sexuality is not tied to an individual’s personhood and that linking the two together could “cut off awareness to goodness.”

Now this is a troubling, deficient anthropology.  If he said this, he really should learn John Paul II’s theology of the body.  In fact, one’s sex is constitutive, in part, of personhood.  One is male or female and cannot be a human person without being so.  Sex difference establishes the structure by which the individual person exercises his personhood.  The claim attributed to Fr. Koharchik introduces a dualism into the person not unrelated to the body-soul dualism of our post-Cartesian Western culture (often mistakenly attributed to Platonism some would argue).  Teaching young people who are confused about their sexual identity because of some pathology that their sexual identity is not part of who they are as persons is not the solution.  In fact, they will recognize that this is false.

Rather, one needs to help them better understand how in fact their intuition that their sex is an integral aspect them as persons, is in fact valid.  The fact that they suffer from an interior conflict between who they are and how they feel is something they do need to understand.  Otherwise, I do not see how they will ever be able to understand why the Church teaches as She does, that they cannot act on certain inclinations.  If they are given to think that this great drive in their lives is something completely unrelated to them as persons and so acting upon it is sinful then this will appear to be an arbitrary, unfair, and impossible demand…something they already, no doubt, feel.

I am further discouraged by the resource that they have chosen as their guide; the problematic, notorious document released by the NCCB a few years back:

Among other pastoral recommendations aimed toward church ministers, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops suggests in its pamphlet, “Always Our Children,” that religious entities “help to establish or promote support groups for parents and family members” of gays and lesbians.

This document had the overall affect of saying “yes you are gay but you ought not to act upon it.”  A ridiculous proposition from any perspective.  I do hope that the following authentically expresses the teachings of the Church

Koharchik’s goal for the support group is to encourage a chaste lifestyle for every person and to encourage members to “live morally good and make proper decisions.

If the way Fr. Koharchik has been represented in the Daily Texan is an accurate portrayal of his thinking, I am concerned that his group will foster more hurt and confusion among those already suffering from such a difficult disorder that attacks the very center of one’s personal identity.  I recognize that it is possible that they are using terminology that they consider pastorally necessary (the fact that they seem to have asked for the Austin Diocese’s support might support this possibility) but it is also possible that they are getting into something that they are not qualified to do.  I would have to ask why they would not draw upon an already existing and successful program like Courage rather than going it alone with an approach that, as the reporting suggests, is in danger of bearing doing more harm than good.

David and I recently did a post on the disturbing phenomenon of sex parties at Catholic colleges. Since the time of that post, I have come across the darkly beautiful music video linked to below from the alt-rock group “Radiohead.”  The title of the song is “House of Cards:”

The song explores, with as much artistic depth as Generation X can muster, the interconnection of swinger’s parties, the technologization of man, and civilizational disintegration. It captures the encompassing despair of these sordid gatherings. The first line of the song, “I don’t wanna be your friend, I just wanna be your lover,” is the sort of twisted, dehumanizing compliment one might hear at a swinger’s party. The video suggests that the bursting is nigh of the bourgeois bubble of technology and suburban comfort that makes it possible for swinger’s parties to exist as sad realities of our age.

Amidst all of the dark themes in the song, the human spirit lifts above the carnage in the haunting vocals of Thom Yorke, the lead singer and songwriter for Radiohead. And the beauty of the human person shines through in the video, a beauty that even the darkest nihilism of our age cannot completely cover over. Even the thought that man is a collection of electronic data particles, which is one of the implicit themes of the video, cannot destroy our intuition of the beauty of the person. Our technological age induces us to assimilate ourselves to our machines. We are even compelled to think of ourselves as nothing more than ordered bits of electronic data. This pretense is intimately connected to our quest for loveless sexual exploration. But a finely honed artistic sense, as is expressed in this video, sees through, consciously or not, this deformed technologism.

The video is well worth viewing and the song worth listening to. The music of Radiohead is perhaps at the pinnacle of the alt-rock genre, for whatever that might be worth. It is often said that music is the condition that all art aspires to. In that spirit, I have often told people that the music of Radiohead is the condition that all of postmodernity aspires to.

Here’s an interesting interview that Thom Yorke gave to the Christian publication “Third Way” a couple of years ago. Obviously, given his genre of music, one would not expect Yorke to have much sympathy for Christianity. His religious preferences are western Buddhism and eco-radicalism. Noam Chomsky is his Promethean figure of choice. He is instinctively nihilistic, to be sure. But he remains, musically, a poet rather than a political hack. One could rightly say of him that he is a gifted artist working with the debased materials of his age.

I mentioned in a post yesterday, the discussion I had with some FOCUS missionaries about last month’s Humanists’ attack on Christmas with their “Just Be Good for Goodness Sake” campaign.  I would like to mention that I heard today that five women missionaries serving the University of Nebraska, Lincoln were involved in a serious car accident yesterday on the way to a retreat.  One of the girls is in critical condition and underwent surgery for a fractured skull. Please keep these women and their families in your prayers.

With regard to the question about the possibility of a standard of “goodness” without God, I would like to offer the following.  The ad campaign, you may recall, was sponsored by the American Humanists Association. It was an opportunistic event, they admit, given the rise of the atheist apologists in the public spot light, to promote their own agenda.  As with most of this ilk, they like to promote their presumed intellectual superiority to argue that there is no God.  This group’s particular emphasis seems to be a concern to show that one does not need God in order to be moral.

The campaign itself provided little in terms of defending this position. Rather, they seemed more concerned with how they were made to feel left out during the holidays.  However, one of the campaign spokesmen, Fred Edwords, published an article some time ago in which he tries to justify the claim.

Admittedly, he has a tough challenge in order to describe the variety of arguments from different religious traditions and theological schools in terms of morality.  However, unfortunately, he is not up to the challenge of even describing one of them reasonably.   Alas, the article is a frustrating read.  It is fraught with error, caricature, and leaps of logic.  I would hope that such “intellectuals” could provide more intelligent arguments than we find with Edwords.

Edwords spends most of the article trying to describe and “debunk” belief in God is necessary for morality.  He argues that theists claim moral laws demand that there be a moral Law Giver.  His argument is somewhat convoluted, but he uses what seems to be an adaptation of Thomas Aquinas’ proof from efficient causality for the basis of moral law as his understanding of the theist position.  He responds that theists simply arbitrarily stop at some supernatural being as the first Law Giver and he asks the question why doesn’t this Law Giver need another to give Him laws.

Of course, he misses the point as do most atheists when they ask who created God.  He doesn’t understand the need for necessary existence.  As such, he assumes that this first Law Giver then would have to simply legislate arbitrarily and he sees no reason that this arbitrary law should be binding upon humans.  Thus, he proposes that there is something innate in human nature that is the source of morality.

He simply assumes the definition of good and evil is that which allows man to survive and grow in the context of competing needs.  He tries to show that morality arises only because the needs of some human beings naturally will conflict with others.  Thus, with only one man, there would be no good or evil. Why subpersonal animals are not factored into the mix, I am not sure.  Thus, what he presents is an argument from pragmatism it would seem.

He dismisses without comment, Nietzschean morality.  That is, he ignores Nietzsche’s assertion that the exertion of the will of the powerful over the weak is the logical consequence of atheism by parenthetically setting aside “coercion” as a possible option. This, I would argue is parasitic on Judeo-Christian morality or it is simply an assumption that “will to power” is not pragmatic.  Pragmatism, however, is not the same as calling something good and evil.  He might say that some action is or is not wise, or that it does or does not comport with his personal value system.  However, to say that good and evil is just the way we are does nothing to overcome Hume’s Law which says that an “is” does not equate to an “ought.”

Furthermore, Edwords simply assumes that human nature is a given.  He does not ask why it is that humans’ “similar feelings of compassion to like events” is so.  Neither does he ask why common human “values are not all based on simple individual self-interest or egoism.” He simply answers that it is the result of a natural developmental process and since we share a common gene pool, we all have it. Yes, but why.  How does the selflessness of morality promote survival of the fittest?

Moreover, it does not occur to Edwords to ask why if we are some way, that we should be asked to behave in accord with that way.  That is, he does he ask the question about free will.  He does not seem to see the elephant in the living room.  He touts human reason but he does not address why anyone should need to be convinced to behave in a way that he says we are already programmed.  Free will is an impossible issue for a materialist and so it is an issue that goes unaddressed by this secular humanist. In the end he says:

It is theological values, then, and not human-oriented values, that are the most baseless. For, with theological values, an arbitrary leap of faith must be taken at some point. And once that arbitrary leap has been taken, all values so derived are as arbitrary as the leap of faith that made them possible.

Edwords has not seriously engaged Catholic thought.  He can make this claim only based upon a caricature of classical Christian teaching.  He tries to define a difference between positive law and natural law but he does not have the knowledge or philosophical background to do so.  He has obviously read atheists’ dismissal of the proofs for God’s existence, but as with most of them, has not seriously contended with the arguments themselves presented by solid Catholic thinkers.  As such, we are left with an defense of atheist morality that is nothing more than a catena of assertions linked solely by grammar.

It is ironic that Edwords is very close to providing a solid argument for the need for God if one is to have a morality. One begins with the need for God as Necessary Existence.  When we argue that contingent existence demands necessary existence we are not making an arbitrary assertion but we are asserting an existential necessity.  Nothing comes from nothing.  Edwords’s attempt to separate positive law from natural law and ground natural law in human nature demands that he address the question of human nature.  If human nature is simply the accidental result of random evironmental processes, then ultimately the imperative “just be good” is tautological.  In fact, there is no logical possibility for imperatives.  The statement simply becomes an indicative: “man acts in accord with his nature.”

We are moral solely because we have intellect and free will.  We have a common sense of right and wrong because we are created in the image of God who is Goodness itself.  We have to exhort people to moral behavior because we are fallen.  Only Original Sin explains how man is naturally attracted to the good but to his detriment, is too often tempted to evil.  Leaps of faith, properly understood, are much more human than the leaps of logic Edwords presents us with. Morality is a demand because as human beings we must live by faith–human faith in one another.  But we can ultimately fourish only with supernatural faith and this theological virtue demands the morally good.