Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Given my mounting frustration of late with the ignorance of history so oppressively present among our generally-educated masses, I’ve been meaning to get around to some blogging on David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. This book is about as good a response to contemporary atheism as one can give, recognizing as Hart does, with brilliant eloquence and tight logic, that the New Atheism is a disconsoling sign of cultural degradation. Hart asserts repeatedly in his book that the new bookselling atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc.) are desparately shallow and ignorant of history, in many ways unworthy adverseries of the Christian proclamation, unlike the great anti-Christian philosophers of the past, such as Nietzsche.  Hart seems to imply that there is really not much that an historically-informed intellectual can say about them or to them, because they are so much beneath the European tradition of high culture, whether atheist or not. It is hardly worth one’s time. His own book, in fact, is not so much a response to any one of these men, whom he considers to be rather truculent, overgrown adolescents, as it is a primer on history meant as edification for generally educated humanists of good will. Indeed, he implies that the spokemen of the New Atheism are just so proudly and obstinately and arrogantly ignorant of the historical revolution that Christian faith brought to man, and that is at the foundation of our modern sense of what it is to be human, that it is tempting for the Christian intellectual simply to ignore them and to go on with his business. After all, there remain a handful of genuinely sophisticated intellectual adverseries of the faith today, at least on the continent, though their ranks seem to be dwindling.

I. The Whigs: Modern and Postmodern

Yet, I am of the opinion that for all of the anti-intellectual petulance of the New Atheism that Hart laments, it is good that these men (are their any women among them?) are bringing out into the open the fact that the Whig myth of history remains the driving narrative of Anglophone culture. The postmodern, postcolonialist turn in the humanities might have temporarily blinded us to this fact. What does it mean to speak of a “Whig myth of history?” A bit of etymology is in order. In a well-known interview with Zenit, Tracey Rowland, herself a noted postmodern Catholic theologian, defined the term “Whig”:

Originally the word “Whig” came from the Scottish word “Whiggamor” for a cattle driver — though some sources say cattle thief and others say horse thief. It was initially applied to Scottish Presbyterians, mostly from the west coast of Scotland, who opposed the Stuart cause in the wars of the 17th century.

Their counterparts, the Tories — a word derived from the Gaelic for “outlaw” — consisted of some aristocrats, large landowners and agrarian peasants. They were mercantilist in economic policy, royalist in politics and tended to support the succession of James II [1633-1701].

Over time the term was used to refer to a faction in British politics. Although there was never anything like a strong doctrinal definition of the term, as a sociological generalization it can be said that the Whigs were the heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized economic and political liberty, or an emerging philosophy known as liberalism, which was often fused with a Puritan form of Protestantism.

In addition to what Rowland says, it should be noted that the view of history that emerged in a Whig context was anti-Catholic and rabidly secular. It equated the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages and saw the Church as an enemy of progress. The Whig vision of history was the predominant understanding of history taught in England and America, in the universities and on all levels of public education, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The postmodernists, who gradually took control of the humanities departments in the western universities in the last half of the twentieth century, presumed themselves to have exposed the Whig narrative as a mere fable, whose sole purpose, they argued, was to provide a justification for the exploitation and subjugation by European civilization of traditional cultures throughout the world. But, it must be admitted, none of the postmodernists or postcolonialists had any deeply-set objections in principle to modern, western colonialism as such. They simply did not much care for the West in its Christian religion, on the one hand, or its economic capitalism, on the other — not that these two are necessarily intertwined.

The advent of modern Europe was rightly connected by the postmodernists to some sort of Christian inspiration, however heretical in its theological foundation that inspiration may have been. The Whig vision of history was itself seen as a product of vestigial Christianity. With the continued fading of Christian belief, and the expansion in the twentieth century of socialist colonialism, the need to wage a prophetic rejection of the Whig fable diminished.

Already, by century’s end, the shibboleths of the postmodern rejection of modern colonialism could themselves be seen as ideological constructions, and it was clear that in fact a new Whiggish colonialism was in place that had brought the expansion into the “Global South” of a permutation of the domineering, western ideological tradition. Only this time, the colonialism involved scientific eugenics and the transgression of the natural family. Western Europe was well-underway, in other words, in exporting its sexual nihilism to the “Global South,” and the postmodern postcolonialists, it turned out, were little more than the new Whigs, proudly advocating a western-derived, secular ideology of history and progress as a justification for the worldwide subjugation of traditional religious moral values pertaining to marriage and the family.

Whether the contemporary academy basks for the moment in the light of modernism or postmodernism, underlying it all is the deforming secular ideology of Whiggish progress. Whether it is manifested in the capitalism of Adam Smith, or in the reactionary relationalism of Karl Marx, or in the post-Marxian, misaptly described “postcolonialist” form of idolatry that just is identity politics and revolutionary, proselytizing sexual transgression, the Whig vision of secular progress is the unifying, underlying root condition of the contemporary universities and of the secular cultural imperialism that they have spawned.

II. Hart’s Response

The incoherencies of postmodernism are well-known, and its relativism is rejected by those whose intellectual predilection is for science rather than the humanities. This is actually, in some respects, a relatively noble characteristic of the New Atheism. Perhaps we might conclude, then, contra Dr. Hart, that Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett in fact make more respectable adverseries for Christian apologists than Jacques Derrida, or Michel Foucalt, or even Friederich Nietzsche.

Well, perhaps that is taking things too far. At any rate, Hart has undertaken the evisceration of the vulgar and logically inconsistent outpourings of a Christopher Hitchens, or a Samuel Harris, in Atheist Delusions, though by placing his focus not on their actual works but on the over-riding cultural situation that makes their productions possible. He lays bare, in other words, the cultural ignorance that makes possible the New Atheism. 

Though he does not use the term “Whig,” he in fact goes straight at the Whig ideology that each of the New Atheists presumes. Hart confronts it in all of its popular manifestations. One of the most important aspects of this is his putting to rest the Whiggish myth of the origins of science. He has a wonderful chapter on this topic. In showing the Christian origins of modern science, his argument seems to derive, at least in part, from the work of Stanley Jaki.  Hart’s demonstration is not nearly as thorough as Jaki’s – after all, Jaki dedicated his whole career to this topic. And, unlike Jaki, Hart admits that it is not necessarily a knock-down point for Christian apologists to demonstrate the roots of modern science in Christian theology. The “progress” of science has been, in many ways, an annihilating, anti-humanist force, so Christians should be careful about proudly laying claim to its origination. Still, it is worthwhile to trace his argument for the Christian origins of science. Perhaps all of those high-school boys nowadays, who are natural targets for for the New Atheism, could benefit from a basic presentation in this regard: which they will not, unfortunately, receive at any point during their formal education.

III. Contra The Whig Myth of Science

In order to have a clue about where science takes its origins, one has to take the logic of history with much greater seriousness than Whig ideology allows. First of all, one must dispel the myth of an interminable “Christian Dark Age” existing in the West from the period of the conversion of the Roman Empire under the rule of Constantine, in the 4th-5th centuries A.D., to the time of the Florentine Renaissance of the 15th century A.D. No serious scholar of history has such a facile view about a presumed Christian Dark Age, nowadays, and yet, in popular culture, such a view still fascinates a great many people. This is mainly so, I suppose, because it is the basic notion of history that the generally educated masses still get in their grade schools and high schools and in their undergraduate textbooks at college or university. And, of course, it is the view of things that masturbatory and snickering sophomore men in college get from watching those oh-so-clever Monty Python productions.

The basic premise of the history of science that is propounded from the prism of Whig ideology is that the victory of Christianity under Constantine killed the Greco-Roman pursuit of science and high philosophy. Christianity, so the argument runs, values only blind obedience to authority and not the life of reason. The fideism of Christianity, then (so it is claimed), was the destructive agent that buried pagan wisdom, and it was only in the Renaissance, with the disinterment of the great pagan philosophers, that reason could once again flourish. It was only then that Christianity could finally be cast off and modern science take its origin.

No competent historian of science nowadays gives any weight to this sort of account of things, and, yet, it is the basic premise of so much that pours forth from the pens of the New Atheists. Pierre Duhem, a physicist and eminent scholar of science, had destroyed this myth over a century ago. Even lesser lights in the study of the history of science, who yet decisively shaped the field, such as Alexander Koyre, and who were even anti-Christian, realized that the Whig history of science was very much in need of demythologization.

Hart puts to rest the Whiggish mythical understanding of the history of science with the very basic and irrefutably logical point that “scientific thought does not lurch from one mind to another across gulfs of time, nor do great scientists suddenly and miraculously emerge from the darkness, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.” (p. 58) In other words, the advent of Copernican and Galilean science has to be understood in terms of the immediate historical context in which it arose, and not by reference to a fabulous past that Copernicus could have suddenly rediscovered and revivified by his own unaided genius. Competent assessment of the history of an idea requires a thorough assessment of the immediate social context of its advent. It is an example of incompetent and amateurish historiography to place the genesis of a modern idea by finding its explicatory context in ancient history.

In short, what the Whig historians always fail to account for is that the ideas and advances of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton were made possible by the Christian universities in which these men matriculated, and which the Church created and zealously nurtured and defended, and which were, in fact, truly Christian institutions far longer than they have been secular institutions.

IV. The Christian Presuppositions for Science

We must, then, root the history of the origin of modern science in its immediate context. What was it about the Catholic universities of Europe in the centuries leading up to Copernicus and Galileo that made it possible for them to develop the essential thrust of inquiry that gave us modern science? Hart shows that the key lies in seeing  the recognition by 14th century scholastic cosmologists in Oxford and Paris, such as Buridan and Oresme, that the motion of bodies can be understood without reference to an a priori theory of causality, as in Aristotle’s physics.

The pre-Copernican scholastic theologians had begun to extricate themselves from the a priori conceptual schemes of Aristotle and Ptolemy that had been for so long the accepted cosmologies of late Antique and early Medieval science, in both Christian and Muslim lands. They had begun to develop, more specifically, an understanding of impetus that was “kinematic” rather than “dynamic.” This is to say that they had begun to study the laws of motion in themselves without consideration of an external force or “dynamis” as the ultimate causal agency of motion. This new, “immanentizing,” non-Aristotelian concept of motion was the stepping stone to the modern concept of inertial motion. It enabled the 14th century scholastic cosmologist to postulate, even, the existence of terrestrial rotation: whereas Aristotle and Ptolemy both understood the world to be stationary. Even more, it opened up these scholastic cosmologists to consideration of falling bodies and to their centers of gravity. This new type of study of motion was the Christian scholastic beginning of modern science, and Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were the heirs of its spirit of inquiry and not its initiators sprung from a remote past or from nowhere.

Hart points out that the success of 16th and 17th century science amounted to the final defeat of Hellenistic science and not its ultimate triumph. Hart realizes, with all good historians of science, that the story of science as told by a Carl Sagan or an Arthur C. Clarke is pure nonsense. As early as the 6th century A.D., the Christian John Philoponous had already critiqued the Aristotelian and Stoic pantheistic doctrines of the cosmos as a cosmic machine or as a wondrous divine organism. Philoponous argued, contra the Greek natural philosophers, that the stars were not immutable and that terrestrial and celestial objects did not possess distinct natures. This made possible a valuation of the empirical study of the celestial regions. No longer could it be assumed, as almost all educated Greeks had done, that the nature of the stars and their motions could be deduced by a priori deduction. The celestial realm, Philoponous realized, is every bit as “creaturely” as the terrestrial realm. It was not a divine realm, as for Aristotle, and was susceptible therefore to the same contingency as the terrestrial realm. Its motion, therefore, had to be studied by empirical observation.

What made Philoponous able to make this breakthrough from out of the Greek natural philosophy? It was his implicit acceptance of the Christian doctrine of the transcendent God who created the world ”ex nihilo” — out of nothing. The celestial realm and the terrestrial realm of matter were able, as a logical consequence of this doctrine, to be seen as of the same basic substance(s), amenable to the same scientific laws, requiring empirical study in order to make sense of their contingent ordering.

Though Aristotelian science would still hold sway in the medieval universities for a long time, the breakthrough to modern science was enabled by recognizing, as these Catholic schoolmen in Oxford and Paris had done, that the world is not a divine being and that God is transcendent to it. It is ordered, to be sure. The scholastic theologians all recognized that God had made all things, as the Wisdom of Solomon tells us, according to measure, number, and weight. Many ancient cultures did not see things this way. For much of the Orient, for instance, the world was understood to be a pure illusion. Indeed, the Christian scholastics went even further in their estimation of the order of creation. They understood that the very orderer of the universe had united himself to matter in the most intimate manner conceivable in the Incarnation of Christ. The “logos” or rationality of matter was given thereby a special consecration that Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Neoplatonist, and Oriental cosmologists could not even have dreamt of and probably would have thought unseemly and undignified.

So, given its status as creature, the Christian scholastics began to understand that the universe has to be studied empirically and not by a priori deduction. Its being cannot be deduced in the way of, for instance, Anselm’s a priori argument for the essence and existence of God. On the other hand, given the dignity of its inherent logos, the universe is open to being known in its immanent laws. Both of these presuppositions about the nature of the universe, its contingency and its rationality, had to be held together in order for the scientific spirit of inquiry to develop. Both presuppositions are the logical outcome of the Christian doctrine of creation, held by all of the scholastic theologians who eventually, like Philoponous before them, were able to extricate themselves from the vestiges of Aristotelian pantheism and pave the way for the advent of modern science.

V. Overcoming the Myth of the Galileo Affair

Hart, then, has a nice and brief discussion of the shift in understanding of the universe that was enabled by the Christian doctrine of creation. It is not on the same level of Jaki’s thorough demonstrations, but it can serve as a good primer.

Yet Hart is even more concerned in his chapter on the history of science to lay to rest ridiculous myths about the presumed warfare between science and religion that fascinate contemporary culture. Such is the case with the Galileo affair. He gives a good presentation of basic points of the story that are too often missed: that Galileo was not subjected by the Church to torture or imprisonment in a dungeon for his science; that the conflict involved in the incident was not in essence between the Church and modern science but between Aristotelian science and modern science; that Urban VIII was not defending the faith, which we have good reason to think that he may not even have held, but the traditional science of Aristotle (in spite of the fact that the best scholastic theologians had already overcome its defects); that the Galileo incident was but one minor incident in a cultural context in which the Church’s universities were producing Jesuit and Franciscan scientists who were as truly scientific as any major modern scientists who have succeeded them; and most importantly, that Copernicus’s heliocentrism was a hypothesis at the time of Galileo and not an established empircal fact.

Regarding this last point, Hart shows that Galileo put forward an incomptent case in support of Copernicus’s heliocentrism. Indeed, he makes the plausible suggestion, given the poor case that Galileo had made to the Roman censors, that it was the Church who was in fact defending reason and Galileo who was acting on faith. Hart shows that Galileo was defending a theory that he had not proven and that violates our most basic common sense: we do not, after all, experience the earth to revolve around the sun. The extraordinary claim of heliocentrism, then, to parrot the unfortunate Carl Sagan, should have required extraordinary evidence, which Galileo, for all of his genius in fields other than astronomy, was not able to give.

None of this is to say that Hart rejects heliocentrism. It should be needless to point this out, but in this day and age one has to take extraordinary steps to state the obvious. But it is to say that it is hightime that the myth of the Galileo affair is put to rest in popular culture.

There are other important points that Hart makes in his chapter on science that are worth attending to, which is only a small part, and perhaps the most inessential, of his book. I don’t have time to go into these other points here. It should be reiterated that Hart does not wish to rest his whole case against the New Atheism on the issue of science, which has been in many ways but an ambiguous good in the modern age. Indeed, Hart has some deep sympathies with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the utilitarian objectivism and nihilism that gives rise to science-worship.

Nevertheless, the chapter in question is a good primer and worth reading as a whole. Upon doing so, one may want to turn to Jaki’s many volumes to fill in the details.

This is a post about the French theologian Jean Borella, but I need to set a context for his work. So, please permit me to first tell the story of the wonderful turning in the French Academy that has occured in recent years.

I. The New French Theology

As far as current trends in theology go, perhaps the most interesting work being done is in France. A hope-inspiring current of thought has emerged in the past two decades, existing in the line of the great French theologians like Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, and Louis Bouyer. I refer to a loosely connected current of thought embodied in such illustrious contemporary figures as Jean Luc Marion, Remi Brague, Yves Lacoste, and Robert Armogathe. These figures are all well-known, even in America, albeit mostly in the area of philosophy. But they have brought French humanism to the doorstep of theology by recovering the Catholic theological dimension of modern French philosophy in its Cartesian and Pascalian directions. That is no mean achievement, given the rabid secularism of the French Academy, with its propensity to repudiate, in Manichean fashion, the very Church that gave birth to the European universities. Interestingly, most of these new French Catholic thinkers emerged as Christian humanists in response to the cultural revolution in western universities in the late 1960s.

Indeed, in response to the Communist-led student revolutions of those years, one of the great ecclesiastical figures of the French Church in the twentieth century, Msgr. Maxime Charles, formed a non-credit school of theology for the most promising young French Catholic students of the day – at the Shrine for the Sacred Heart at Montmarte overlooking Paris.  These included Marion, Brague, and Armogathe, as well as the now-prominent professor of literature in France, Jean Duchesne.

Msgr. Charles brought together an eminently distinguished group of theologians to teach these young students, including de Lubac, Danielou, and Bouyer, all of whom deeply inspired the theology of Vatican II. Interestingly, all of these theologians had in common with Charles a sense of isolation from the mainstream Church in France in the post-conciliar age. They had wanted to engage the culture of the day from the heart of the Church’s doctrinal, scriptural, liturgical, and spiritual tradition. The mainstream French Church, on the other hand, had capitulated to a large extent to the ideology of the student revolutionaries.

In spite of all that, and with the grace of God, Msgr. Charles’s non-credit academy of Christian theology would form this young group of French scholars to go out into the universities and to bring  the message and person of Christ there: albeit through the subtle workings of philosophy, philology, and genealogy. They would not be able to enter directly into theology at all times, but they would be able to encounter the radicals and ex-radicals of the Academy with the subtle voice of the Logos who speaks to the depths of all human hearts.

Though Msgr. Maxime Charles, de Lubac, and these other great theologians whom Charles had recruited, were radically isolated from the French Church-at-large, this was only a temporary condition. For the ideology of the Communist revolutionaries faded, and Charles’s informal academy of Christian education had done its job so well that French Catholic thought was taken back into the heart of the Church by these now-eminent scholars. Cardinal Lustiger, later appointed by John Paul II as the Archbishop of Paris, would encourage the direction in Catholic education that Msgr. Charles had begun with this aspiring group of intellectuals. Indeed, in the equally troubling days of WW II, Lustiger, then a young student, had himself been converted to the Church through the instrumentality of Msgr. Charles’s influence! Lustiger would even reopen the cathedral school in Paris, where nowadays Parisian seminarians receive at least some of their theological formation. This is a remarkable turn of events, a concrete example of Europe perhaps coming back to its Christian roots.

All of this is providential, following the pattern of wisdom that is imprinted in the created order and brought to radical newness in Christ. The Church of Christ is the means for the salvation for humanity; it is only natural that it should prove to be, in unenlightened, dark ages such as our own, the great means of salvation for the humanities as well.

II. The Example of Jean Borella 

I wanted to do this post strictly on Borella, but I think that he is representative of this greater direction in French thought. So, it seemed appropriate to detail the encouraging signs of development in post-conciliar French theology as a whole.

Borella was not himself, so far as I know, formed in the school of theology at Montmarte that Msgr. Charles had started. He is, in fact, of a different generation. But he might be the most interesting thinker among all the names that I have mentioned in this post. He is a French Traditionalist Catholic: a faithful Catholic theologian in the schools of both Henri de Lubac and Rene Guenon, the latter of whom he greatly criticized for his syncretism and for his denial that Catholic theology has a truly mystical dimension. Borella has written several books detailing the spiritual depths of the Catholic faith, defending the tradition of Christian gnosis, seeking to provide a greater understanding of Henri de Lubac’s seminal theology, defending the papacy of John Paul II, detailing the root cause of the Church’s post-conciliar liturgical desacralization, and showing the roots of modernity in Christian heresy.

Perhaps his most interesting book is The Sense of the Supernatural, which was written over ten years ago now, but is still of great importance. Arthur Versluis summarizes the book in this way:

Like The Secret [an earlier book of Borella's], The Sense of the Supernatural is a devotional work on the orthodoxy of gnosis, but it includes a different aspect — historical analysis — and in this it is a groundbreaking and extremely important book. If in The Secret, Borella is concerned with establishing the necessity for an authentic Christian gnosis comparable to but distinct from what one finds in Taoism, Sufism, or other world religious traditions, in The Sense of the Supernatural, Borella’s focus is much more analysis of what he sees as the various modernist heresies that have emerged in the past several centuries. Chief among these is the refusal not only of those in secular society, but what is worse in his eyes, of those who represent Roman Catholicism itself, the refusal to recognize the primacy of faith and of what he calls the “sense of the supernatural.” Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular have become almost totally secularized, and Borella analyzes this secularization in some detail from the perspective of a traditional Roman Catholic clearly scandalized by it and by some of the rather astonishing pronouncements by contemporary or recent Roman Catholic clergy, theologians, and even bishops.

But what makes The Sense of the Supernatural so valuable is the perspective it offers on what I would call the paradox of modernity. The paradox of modernity is this: how is it on the one hand that modernity is indissolubly based in the notion of “progress,” and that indeed there are numerous advancements, technological, medical, and otherwise that may be adduced to support the notion of progress, and yet it is self-evident that this “progress” is destructive not only of humanity and culture, not only of nature, but also of religious tradition? If from a purely materialistic perspective, we may be said to live in an era of unparalleled “progress,” the same cannot be said of our eroding and disappearing religious traditions and traditional cultures. The paradox of modernity, simply put, is that all our “progress” appears to have as corollary effects cultural and religious regress or decadence, and the destruction of the natural world. The Sense of the Supernatural offers an analysis of modernity from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective informed by a vast erudition, secular and theological. This vantage point is in fact to a considerable extent outside modernity itself, and thus offers insights that one will not find elsewhere.

Of course, Borella’s Guénonian logic, combined with his total devotion to Roman Catholicism, leads him to condemn not only modernist secularism, but also the Protestantism that inevitably led to modernism. According to Guénonian logic, Protestantism was nothing more than a manifestation of the downward movement toward the complete loss of the sense of the supernatural, toward the individualism, secularism, and decadence of modernity, caught as it is in unredeemed historicism and materialism. Of course, this rather condemnatory view of Protestantism does totally ignore the entire Christian theosophic tradition that began with Jacob Böhme in the early seventeenth century, and that continued throughout the subsequent history of modernity in such stellar figures as Franz von Baader in the nineteenth century, and Leopold Ziegler and Nicholas Berdyaev in the twentieth centuries. And indeed, the truth is that Baader (himself a Catholic and also a theosopher in the line of Böhme) has much in common with Borella’s own insights. In overlooking the theosophic tradition in its entirety, and in its total condemnation of Protestantism as a whole, Borella’s work loses some of its luster. It would be richer were it to include the Böhmean current of theosophy and its insights. This said, Borella is faithful to his Guénonian premises here; for Guénon too, coming from a Catholic perspective, totally ignored the theosophic tradition.

One other major contribution of Borella’s The Sense of the Supernatural, beyond its analysis of modernity, is to introduce us to the work of Louis Lanneau, an eighteenth-century French missionary to South Asia who encountered Buddhism and who wrote a long manuscript on the Christian process of “deification” that was only relatively recently republished in French in full. One can see why for Borella the work of Lanneau would be immediately recognizable as important as a predecessor: it emphasizes the centrality in Christianity of a process of spiritual awakening through which one must go, as opposed to a merely historical understanding of Christianity according to which, since Christ died at a certain point in history, one need to nothing more than give lip service to one’s belief in that death and its significance. For Lanneau, as for Borella, Christianity is nothing if not a process of spiritual awakening that leads to gnosis, or direct spiritual knowledge of the divine and individual deification.

Borella is indeed representative of a fully Christianized, one should say more specifically, “Catholicized,” Guenonianism. This is a very important achievement. He has brought the great Henri de Lubac into confrontation with Guenon in a decisive manner and has turned the latter, through the instrumentality of de Lubac, in the direction of Christ. This is an important achievement because Guenon may be as influential a figure in the history of twentieth century thought as even the most prominent and famous philosophers that everyone studies in grad school.

For those who do not know, Guenon was the progenitor of the Traditionalist school of religious philosophy. This was a syncretizing movement of metaphysical theology that favored Islamic mystical monotheism over traditional Christian Trinitarian thought. People who are known to have been influenced greatly by Guenon are Mircea Eliade, Thomas Merton, Fritjof Schuon, Aldous Huxley, Philip Sherrard, Titus Burkhardt, E.F. Schumacher, Wolfgang Smith, Seyyed Hosein Nasr, Huston Smith, and Ananda Coomaraswamy (whose son, Rama, became a traditionalist Catholic priest).

This loosely connected school of thought is of world historical importance perhaps rivalling that of even the great and famous postmodern philosophers. Though its thinkers tended to exist on the margins of the universities (generally speaking, the WASPy Ivy Leagues were not a fitting match for these people) and largely go unstudied in official channels, they have greatly influenced attitudes in the West to world religion and have even played a role in the resurgence of Islam and radical Hinduism. As the religious essence of human existence becomes more and more a prominent, undeniable fact of culture, and as secularism fades gradually into insignificance, it might become evident that Guenon exceeds in importance even Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucalt.

But, like Derrida and Foucalt, Guenon’s thinking is marked by a darkness, nay, even a nihilism: for he rejects the triune God in favor of an Absolute in whom no alterity, no true deification of man, is allowable. He sees a perennial tradition of religious mysticism at the core of all religions, and this core is very much for him that of the Neo-platonic One- beyond-being, existence outside of which can be no more than an inexplicable egress.

Borella’s work is so important because, taking full cognizance of the mystical dimension that truly must nurture all religions, he brings the Guenonian tradition into a fully Trinitarian and Christological fulfillment. He helps to show that in Christ and in his Church alone can there be found a deification that truly answers to the yearning of human eros, the condition of unrequited longing that is at the root of all religion. Christian mysticism, in the orthodox form that Borella extols, follows the pattern of Chalcedonian Christology, in which it is understood that God’s perfect union with man in Christ and the eschatological Church is “without confusion or change.” Christian deification, unlike that of merely monotheistic mysticisms, is in fact a transfiguring recreation and not a decreation.

The other French thinkers whom I have mentioned, Marion, and so on, tend to take their starting point for dialogue and confrontation in the postmodern critique that enlivens the universities. But Borella’s thought, following the Guenonians, is rooted from the start in the religous center of human existence and in man’s quest for divinization. As a purely ideological humanism slowly disappears from the face of the earth with the disappearance of socialism, the religious dimension of man’s being will perhaps, as I’ve said, become an obvious cultural fact. The importance of Borella’s work will perhaps then also come to the fore, as he shows that the only truly efficacious religion is founded on the Mystical Body of the Eucharist of Christ.

Given the earlier discussion, I thought that I would try to clarify somewhat the position of the “Feingoldian” Thomists vis-à-vis Henri de Lubac. I follow in this regard a presentation by Fr. Guy Mansini, a professor of systematic theology at Saint Meinrad Seminary. It is from an article of his for which I do not have the bibliographical information. Nevertheless, I am going to present some aspects of the article, in the hopes that, lacking the bibliographical reference, I do not get into trouble (Update: thanks to reader W., here is the reference: Guy Mansini, “Henri de Lubac, the Natural Desire to See God, and Pure Nature,” 83 no. 1 Gregorianum [2002]: 89-109).

Mansini, in the article in question, lists five theses of de Lubac on the question of the relation of nature and grace:

Thesis One: Attention to the order of pure nature, which began in the 16th century, has had a malign impact on the Church both speculatively and practically. This is so because of the way that the doctrine of pure nature has developed historically. Either a) nature was conceived of in such a way that it needed grace (as with the theologian Baius) or b) it was supernaturalized. This latter way of thinking about pure nature postulated a natural intuition of God or a natural friendship with God; it led to “extrinsicist” accounts of grace, for which it is thought that human nature can have perfect contentment in its own order.

Thesis Two: God has never ordained for man anything more than a supernatural end. There is an intrinsic unity to the economy of salvation, and modern theology was not always sufficiently attentive to this fact.

Thesis Three: Human nature is what it is because it is ordered to a supernatural end, and would not be what it is if it were otherwise ordered.

Thesis Four: The fourth thesis that Mansini presents is complex. It is a thesis in three parts. First, the natural desire to see God must be foremost in our attention in speculative theology, otherwise we do not recognize the unity of the economy of salvation, and we get mixed up on the relationship between philosophical anthropology and theological anthropology, between knowledge and faith, and between philosophy and theology. Second, the natural desire to see God is both sign and effect of our being ordered to possession of beatific vision. Third, because the human “natural desire to see God” is inherently of the supernatural order, it must be understood to be a necessary and absolute ordination and not conditioned – yet, we must not deny that grace is truly gratuitous.

Thesis 5: There follows from theses 1-3 a prohibition: it is useless to consider in the speculative order the condition of our nature aside from its supernatural ordination.

Now, this is all a bit dense, but it is nevertheless a pithy summary of de Lubac’s position. What do the Thomists whom Mansini represents disagree with in these theses? It may surprise some to learn that they do, in fact, agree with theses 1-3. The fourth, multipart thesis is the root of their disagreement. They hold that it articulates an understanding of the expression “natural desire to see God” that is contrary to Thomas’s understanding of this desire. The natural desire to see God would still exist, they claim, even if we had been created outside of the supernatural order. The desire is really natural and is therefore wrongly understood to be absolute, necessary, unconditional, supernatural, etc. Thus, they argue, one must be able to consider the reality of “pure nature,” a nature which, contrary to fact, would have been created outside of the order of the supernatural.

And this, they claim, is not merely a pointless exercise in contra-factual hypotheses. To consider the reality of “pure nature” has important religious significance, even though, historically, some theologians may have indeed fallen into “extrinsicism” in their considerations of it. Why is it religiously valuable to consider pure nature? Mansini himself argues that it enables us to appreciate more greatly the value of God’s elevating grace. Without our supernatural ordination to beatific vision, we would still have a desire to see God, but without the efficacious power to fulfill that desire. We would be in a condition that is aptly described as an “endless end.” We would be in a state where our desire could never be met. The condition that Mansini describes, following Thomas, is akin to that of pagan humanity: for whom it was not even clear that the human soul was immortal, or that the world was created.

Moreover, according to Mansini, there is greater biblical warrant for the position that recognizes the possibility for pure nature than for de Lubac’s: it corresponds to the reality of divine election. Even though the economy of salvation is a unity, still, God calls out a special people to mediate His presence to the world and to form His Church: in absolutizing or supernaturalizing the desire to see God, de Lubac’s position falls short of being able to account for the reality of divine election.

I shall leave it at that.

I apologize if my earlier post and comments confused the issues at hand.

Recently, I have had a number of opportunities to consider the current state of theological inquiry and the prevailing approach to Catholic theology that has been called “the current emphasis.” I will argue, that this new approach, the “Nuptial Mystery” reflects a new synthesis of authentic previous theology on the order of that established by St. Thomas. But first some background.

In the 13th century there was a watershed in Catholic theology which would establish the approach to Catholic theological inquiry for the next seven hundred years. If one allows St. Anselm of Canterbury to be identified as the progenitor of the scholastic method, this event occurred about a century and a half into the development of this systematic approach to doing theology. The watershed to which I refer, of course, is arrival on the scene of the intellectual giant, St. Thomas Aquinas, who not only mastered and perfected this method but he employed it in such a way as to synthesize (almost) literally, all available sources of authentic knowledge up to that time. At the outset, I must say that I am not reducing all medieval theology to Thomism. However, even the the most hostile scholars to Thomism must admit that since Augustine, no single theologian has had the wide-ranging influence of St. Thomas.

St. Thomas was not only a brilliant personality, but as Etienne Gilson points out, he possessed in uncommon abundance an attribute that magnifies intellect in a synergistic way–a great humility. St. Thomas was not simply an intellectual giant, he was a humble saint and these together allowed him the ability to synthesize knowledge in such a way that even almost eight centuries later, we have not finished plumbing the depths of what he left us. His great synthesis began with adapting and purifying the intellectual tools of philosophy, and integrating recently rediscovered Aristotelian metaphysics into this, for Christian theology. With these tools, he integrated the best of biblical scholarship with his mastery of theological wisdom and insights from the patristics and scholastics up to his time.

Because his insights and completeness of thought were so formidable, the greatest effort of the vast majority of theologians who came after him was in plumbing its depths rather than in adopting his method. This is not to ignore the Franciscan school’s rejection of Thomism and the attempts to set up an alternative school. However, it seems clear that while the Scotian school certainly influenced thinking, and not all for the good when one considers his student’s, William of Ockham, insidious distortion of Western thought with his Voluntarist Nominalism. Nevertheless, even this theology took Thomas as its point of departure. Years later, when Thomism was eventually embraced by a majority of Catholic theologians, later approaches (so called neo-scholasticism) did not place as high a premium on mastering the sources as Thomas had.

This began to change at the end of the 19th century in Tubingen, and even more so, in the early part of the 20th century leading up to the Second Vatican Council. Among an influential group of Catholic theologians, there grew an emphasis on a return to the sources, the so-called Ressourcement, that so many theologians had set aside. The fruit this bore, was its influence of the conciliar documents and it came of age in the years following the council, primarily in the school now called Communio. Those associated with this school are certainly not monolithic in their approach or their models. However, there is a prevailing theme that, I would argue, one might now identify as the dominant approach to modern Catholic theology at the turn of the millennium that is bearing fruit.

Hence, I must say that I agree with Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Chenu to Ratzinger, who identifies this approach to be the aforementioned “Nuptial Mystery.” In his book, Kerr attributes this theology primarily to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. So what is the nuptial mystery? You can read the About this Blog page to get a little better sense of it, but in a nut shell it is the recognition that the Trinity is a Communio Personarum, a Community of Persons. One of the most fruitful insights has come from recent insights in personalism. These insights begin with the fact that man is made in the image of this Communio and that the human person can in deed be understood in analogy to the Divine Persons. This has led to stunning implications of this image for anthropology, the Sacraments, ecclesiology, indeed, the whole of theological inquiry. In a word, the nuptial mystery looks at the analogy of the Trinitarian Communio with human nuptial communion as the “model” par excellence to draw together and provide the integrating theme for the various theological traditions describing Trinitarian life, creation, the Incarnation, soteriology and indeed, all of salvation history.

In the end, the beatific vision is described in terms of marriage; it is marriage with God for which man was created. This is because human marriage arises from and is possible only because of the divine Communio Personarum. Thus, marriage with God is understood as an insertion of individual persons into Trinitarian communion, not as individuals, but corporately. This corporate incorporation comes about again through marital communion. This marital communion is the marriage of the Church, the Bride to the Incarnate Son, the Bridegroom. It is this marital communion that integrates the corporate Bride into the Hypostatic order. In other words, humanity is restored to its communion with God in the Person of Jesus Christ. Fallen human beings share in this restored communion, by union with Jesus Christ, and thereby enter into the Trinitarian Communio–which is integration into the eternal marital communion of the Trinity. Everything that the Church teaches, then, can be understood in terms of this marital end for which we were created.

This nuptial mystery has its foundations in the the exitus–reditus schema which permeates many civilizations’ cosmologies and was taken up in Christianity, especially in the East. This idea of creation coming out of God and returning to God can only be maintained in coherence in the Christian distinction (i.e. the infinite difference between Uncreated Being (God’s nature) and created being). Thus, the going forth and returning cannot be maintained in a substantive sense but rather, must recogized to be in the category of real relations (on the part of creation, not of God of course). Not surprisingly, St. Thomas’ magnum opus his Summa Theologiae, is arguably organized according to this schema and his presentation of what is called today, the Immanent Trinity (the Trinity in Itself) and the Divine Processions, reflect this.

St. Thomas presents all of the features necessary for this Nuptial Mystery in his theological work. In fact, he presents a little recognized foundational insight for it in his treatise on the Angels in the prima pars of the Summa. Here he says that while the Angels in their nature more perfectly reflect God in His nature, human beings because of their begetting more perfectly reflect God relationally.

It seems to me that St. Thomas has the metaphysical tools necessary for expounding the depth and breadth of the Nuptial Mystery but primarily in metaphysical terms. He did not yet have the philosophical tools for further developing the theological analogy of human personhood to divine Personhood. Indeed, philosophical personalism would not begin to flourish until the early-mid 20th century and the theological implications of this would not come about until Balthasar and Wojtyla especially. Today we still do not have a vocabulary for describing the quasi-substantiality of real created relations, much less the quasi-substantiality of real, I would argue, volitional relationships.

Baltahasar and Wojtyla are themselves synthesizers of the fruits that have arisen from biblical scholarship and the return to the sources that began in the years prior to their entry onto the scene. Between the two, I would say that Balthasar, in some ways, has been the most creative. However, I would argue that Wojtyla/JPII has been the greater and more complete synthesizer. One of the reasons for this is the latter’s better understanding and complete acceptance of Thomist metaphysics which stands at the foundation of his theology. Fused with this is Wojtyla/JPII’s mastery of a relatively new philosophical tool, phenomenology, which has enhanced developments in philosophical personalism. Wojtyla/JPII uses phenomenology to extract universal insights from subjective experiences by bracketing the subject’s unique conditioning of the way he interprets his experiences.

Balthasar, on the other hand, leaves too many cracks in his theology, it seems to me. Specifically, he has abandoned a consistent metaphysics (read Thomism) in favor of embellishing his theo-dramatic model. For example, he dismisses the metaphysical structure for discourse about God and His immutability because he cannot reconcile this with God’s suffering in His divinity. Suffering in God is important for the symmetry of his Theodrama. However, in doing this Balthasar leaves a contradiction between suffering and immutability because suffering per se means privation of being. Thus, he is left with a contradiction that he has to hide with appeals to mystery.  I cannot see how this avoids abusing the meaning of mystery and thus leaves him open to charges of fideism.

The Nuptial Mystery is an integrating thread that demonstrates the consistency and coherence of myriad traditional theologies such as those found for creation, the Incarnation and salvation, the Church, anthropology, the Sacraments, the liturgy, and eschatology. It also explains the human person and makes sense of interior dynamic experience. However, not everyone is happy with this approach. Not surprisingly, it appears to be those who are not especially attached to Catholic teaching or traditional Catholic theology.

R. R. Reno of Creighton University gives some insight into this disapproval in a follow up to his review of Kerr’s book cited above, both in First Things and both of which are more interesting reads than this post I must admit. Any way, Reno discusses the fact that Kerr is lambasted by the seventies crowd for many things in his book, but especially for not criticizing the Nuptial Mystery. Reno points out that Kerr defends himself in response, obviously hurt by the rejection of his contemporaries, that he was misunderstood, and that his “sardonic style” was missed. Those who reject this new synthetic theology are the usual suspects. They are radical feminists, sexual libertines, and others who wish to promote lifestyles that reject the truth that sexual intercourse can only be expressed legitimately within the marital covenant, and then only in openness to life.

Background in the Nuptial Mystery brings with it new and deeper meaning to reading Wojytla/JPII’s writings, especially his Theology of the Body. It will make deeper sense of Ratzinger/B16’s works such as the Spirit of the Liturgy. A good book on this that I would recommend is by Angelo Cardinal Scola entitled nothing other than, The Nuptial Mystery.  If you needed any other motivation to learn more about it, read Reno’s On the Square post about those who reject it…this should be sufficient evidence that there is something compelling there.

The other day I cited John Paul’s admonition of what happens when we forget God–man become an enigma to himself and ends up turning against himself. As I was preparing for a theology of the body lecture, I reread John Paul’s Jan 20th, 1980 Wednesday Audience in which he teaches that because man is created in the image of God, Who is Self-gift, man becomes a gift to the world.

How different this view of man is from those who have rejected God. We are hearing more and more from even the mainstream media about man as not a gift to the world but rather its bane. This view is being fed to them by misguided atheistic ecologists who, after rejecting the Triune, transcendent God of Christianity, have divinized sub-personal creation. They now consider mankind a virus. For example, last year a Texas ecologist was being investigated by the FBI for statements he made that seemed to advocate bio-terrorism. According to LifeSite he said:

“Good terrorists would be taking [Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire] so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of people.”

To “save” the world from the “scourge of humanity” he advocates the eradication of 90% of what he terms the “fat, human biomass.” Earlier this year an interview with an author who wrote a book about what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from the earth, Matt Lauer from the Today Show seems to advocate this same line of thinking. Rather than asking critical questions, he and co-host Meredeth Vieira talk about human developments such as cities, dams, canals, etc. as making a mess of the environment. They both agree that the world would be much better off without us. What the world without humanity would mean is a unanswered question. Does it make a difference to the world if it is a molten mass of lava or a lush green paradise? These confused souls seem to presuppose that “better off” means pristine conditions for the highest forms of life but then they reject the highest forms of life–human beings–as the problem. This dichotomous thinking is also epidemic amongst those fanning global warming hysteria. Global warming, if human caused, will only harm humans…so what would be the beef that these anti-human ecologists have with it?

Let’s look at this confused “thinking” a little more closely. The interesting thing here is that the first premise in their logic is that humanity is just another form of life, with no more value than any other. They reduce humanity to the animal aspect of its hylomorphic nature. However, they then have to distinguish humanity from the rest of the animals in order to be able to declare that human beings are the virus while the rest of the animal kingdom is not.

Therefore, for the next step in logic they are forced to make a distinction and it is a fundamental one. The reason that humans are dangerous for the world are that they alone have the capacity to transcend themselves and their environment. The capacity that makes us distinctly different from the rest of creation is no longer a sign that man has a vastly higher moral worth than sub-personal animals. Rather, not being constrained by instinct and having intellect and will, free will, becomes a danger that reduces us to the level, ironically enough, of a virus. A virus is a non-living entity that has no free will and simply responds to environmental pressures according to its nature. A virus is seen as bad, by the way, because it is dangerous to humans. There is no consistency in thought here, except to throw whatever one can at one overriding idea–the self-hatred of man.

However, it would not be correct to say that this self-hatred arises simply out of nowhere. It is a self-hatred that arises from a hatred of God and the fact that we are made in His image. It is a rebellion against the only creature which God put here on earth for its own sake. When one rejects God, he rejects himself and comes to hate in himself the reminder that he is created in God’s image–his free will. Paradoxically, he must employ and, in fact, make his will into an idol in order to do so. But again, we have shown that it is hate and self-will, not logic, which drives this movement.

We have removed God from public life and our late-modern thinking has eliminated the idea of things having a nature. The result is that there is no foundation for morality. One can no longer speak of divine law in public discourse. Nor can one easily speak of natural law because there is professed to be (by our high priests of modern science) no order to nature but a random arrived at arrangement of matter (that only begrudgingly will these “thinkers” admit is ordered). The “thinking” exhibited by these folks is vague at best. If one recalls the tradition that Satan’s non serviam was a rebellion against serving humanity because its animality was too far below him, one might justly call this latest assault on human dignity, satanic.

Post-Darwinist, a Toronto-based journalist, wrote on an interview by Anthony Flew (who used to be one of the world’s best known and most academically serious atheists journalist) and Lee strobel, both of whom became theists through the evidence for intelligent design of the universe.

It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian – and now biological discoveries have caused the world’s most famous philosophical atheist, Dr. Antony Flew, to declare his belief in a Creator. An account of my rare interview with Flew is below, and you can find free video clips at LeeStrobel.com.

Be Here Mondays gives his take on this October’s “First Things” review by Stephen M. Barr on Creation and the book by the Harvard scientist Edward O. Wilson Ed, who is first and foremost an ant man, but also has a profound admiration for scarab beetles.

“Do you want to buy an egg, sperm and surrogate mother?’

“Designer babies? Yeah. Why not?” she replies with a laugh. For years, she adds, sperm banks have required college degrees from donors. She often uses a sperm bank that requires sperm from Ph.D.s. “Does that make it a designer baby because they have a Ph.D.? But why wouldn’t I use someone with a Ph.D. versus a truck driver? It’s all the same cost.”

“You know why I did it? Because I could.” Ryan explains. She started Abigails Silver Spoons Adoptions, Inc., years ago, and while that enterprise continues, Ryan saw a new market in embryos.

The attitude towards eugenics, contraception, abortion, etc.., of each person may be dependent on their view of God. If God is seen as Love, then there is a sense of trust and the desire to receive. If God is not recognized as Love, then there is no trust, and He is a potential threat to happiness, that must be taken or grasped for themselves. Here is a great explanation of In-Vitro Fertilization and the Hermeneutic of the Gift.

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Surprised?

Before completing an application, students looking to enter the Harvard Business School MBA program are asked to fill out an online profile that offers three choices of gender: female, male, or transgender. The form also asks prospective applicants if they would be interested in learning more about the school’s “lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender” community.

If you think about it, Harvard appears to be taking the position that “transgenders” no longer (like all other human beings) have a legitimate sex.
Agape Press Source

The Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany has created artificial sperm in a laboratory experiment and used them to produce offspring in mice. There were abnormalities observed in the 7 baby mice, with 6 surviving to adulthood.

The abstract at Developmental Cell Online says the fact that the experiment succeeded in producing live mice “is a clear indication that male gametes derived in vitro from ES cells by this strategy are able to induce normal fertilization and development.”

While embryonic researchers talk about ending disease, their ultimate goal is to create “better people,” the eugenicists’ Holy Grail. Children produced by in vitro fertilization and other artificial methods, suffer birth defects and sometimes hidden genetic problems throughout their lives.

How about this?

In 2002, two major studies published in the New England Medical Journal showed that the risk of birth defects double with children produced by artificial means.

Source Article: LifeSite

The procedure for artificial insemination of a convicted hitman will be paid for by a local health service.

It appears that Salvino Madonia married a woman while in prison and now wishes to further dehumanize this woman by using her womb to carry on his family name. The situation is the “poster child” of everything that’s morally wrong with in-vitro fertilization, from the violation of the couple’s marriage covenant to the the “domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person”.

It’s harder to accept and seems more barbaric than using embroyonic stem cells, but the crime of taking of one life for the potential benefit of another (physical or emtional) is ALWAYS wrong.

China is killing prisoners by harvesting and selling their vital organs. “They take both kidneys, then the heart and the skin and the corneas and the liver, and your body is then thrown in the incinerator,”

The combination of genetics and environmental factors have impact on individual behaviors. New research on aggressive and sexual behaviors presented at International Congress of Neuroendocrinology June 19-22.

Genetics appear to be predictive only if men have hostile attitudes and fathers who never completed high school. Moreover, a genetic predisposition toward aggression could be rebuffed by a mother who nurtures her infant, suggests another study involving primates.

To understand what brings about arousal of the central nervous system leading to sexual behavior, scientists have had to discover specific biochemical reactions within a select group of neurons in the hypothalamus. The process involves a complement of sex steroid hormones, perhaps as many as 120 genes and a host of environmental variables (not least among them, arousing stimuli and a suitable mate).

With the development of this new test, clinics will have the capability of screening human embryos for about 6,000 diseases, compared to 200 for tests that are currently available.

Using the technique, doctors can examine every embryo created for a couple through IVF, and determine whether each is healthy and unaffected, a carrier of the disease, or destined to develop the full-blown medical condition.

The new test will allow doctors to see which male embryos are free of the disease-causing mutation, so fewer embryos will be wasted. In some cases, the test will allow doctors the controversial option of asking couples to choose the sex of the embryos that are transplanted.

The eugenic technology will be introduced at the annual meeting in Prague of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

“Certainly the use of prophylactics can, in some situations, constitute a lesser evil,”.

Condom use within a marriage for any reason will never be approved. My understanding of sex and marriage in the Catholic church is so sacred an act, that it goes far beyond what many of us can fully understand. It is a beautiful gift that is truly out of this world. The Father and the Son are truly one, no separation or conditional giving is possible.

By analogy we can use this phrase if we understand that human sex differences arise from universal cosmic principles of masculinity and femininity. However, we are not talking about gendered biology here.

I have mentioned before that Peter Kreeft has an excellent article on sexual symbolism that articulates how all of creation is ordered according to the cosmic principles of masculinity and femininity. This is due to the fact that creation is an overflowing of Trinitarian love. Hans Urs von Balthasar provides a very explicit discussion of this in Vol 4 of his Theodrama. John Paul the Great’s theology, though it does not directly address this theme, is quite compatible with Balthasar’s on the point. This discussion will integrate insights from these three thinkers.

God is a Trinitarian Family of Three Persons Who are unified in such a manner that all Three fully possess the one and only divine nature. These Persons are described by the Eternal Processions which John Paul characterizes as the total gift of Self of one divine Person to the Others. The Father’s total gift of Himself to the Son and the Son’s reciprocation of this gift are fruitful. This mutual Love is a Person–the Holy Spirit. Being the Source of everything that exists, this total self-giving establishes the framework for creation and so it is the interpretive key for understanding creation and most especially the human person who is created in the image of this Self-giving God.

Von Balthasar teaches that the eternal Trinitarian Processions have analogical expression in human sexual differences:

. . . the divine unity of action and consent . . . is expressed in the world in the duality of the sexes. In trinitarian terms, of course, the Father, who begets [the Son and] who is without origin, appears primarily as (super-) masculine; the Son, in consenting, appears initially as (super-) feminine, but in the act (together with the Father) of breathing forth the Spirit, he is (super-) masculine. As for the Spirit, he is (super-) feminine. There is even something (super-) feminine about the Father too, since . . . in the action of begetting and breathing forth he allows himself to be determined by the Persons who thus proceed from him; however, this does not affect his primacy in the order of the Trinity. The very fact of the Trinity forbids us to project any secular sexuality into the Godhead (as happens in many religions and in the Gnostic syzygia). It must be enough for us to regard the ever-new reciprocity of acting and consenting, which in turn is a form of activity and fruitfulness, as the transcendent origin of what we see realized in the world of creation: the form and actualization of love and its fruitfulness in sexuality (Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol V. The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998], 91).

Balthasar anchors masculinity and femininity in different modes of ‘act’. For Balthasar, the primary male mode is an initiating act of love. The woman’s primary mode is a receptive act of love. The woman secondarily then returns this love and the man secondarily receives it. Human souls, which are substantial forms of the body, have all that is necessary to human nature. They simply possess it differently. This reading of Balthasar is quite consonant with John Paul II’s morphology of the communio personarum-gift in his theology of the body catecheses, and which he succinctly summarizes in Mulieris dignitatem (MD): “When the author of the Letter to the Ephesians calls Christ ‘the Bridegroom’ and the Church ‘the Bride’, he indirectly confirms through this analogy the truth about woman as bride. The Bridegroom is the one who loves. The Bride is loved: it is she who receives love, in order to love in return” (MD, 29).

As you can see, this relation of love–an initiating love that we refer to as masculine and a receptive, reciprocating love which we call feminine, overflows into Creation. God relates to His creation according to the masculine principle of love. Creation responds to God according to the feminine principle of love. But within creation, the principle of masculine and feminine relation is also found. Kreeft describes it this way:

…we must distinguish “male” from “masculine.” Male and female are biological genders. Masculine and feminine, or yang and yin, are universal, cosmic principles, extending to all reality, including spirit.

All pre-modern civilizations knew this. English is almost the only language that does not have masculine and feminine nouns. So it is easy for us who speak English to believe that the ancients merely projected their own biological gender out onto nature in calling heaven masculine and earth feminine, day masculine and night feminine, sun masculine and moon feminine, land masculine and sea feminine. In the Hindu marriage ceremony the bridegroom says to the bride, “I am heaven, you are earth.” The bride replies, “I am earth, you are heaven.” Not only is cosmic sexuality universal, its patterns are suspiciously consistent. Most cultures saw the sun, day, land, light, and sky as male; moon, night, sea, darkness, and earth as female. Is it not incredibly provincial and culturally arrogant for us to assume, without a shred of proof, that this universal and fairly consistent human instinct is mere projection, myth, fantasy, and illusion rather than insight into a cosmic principle that is really there?

Once we look, we find abundant analogical evidence for it from the bottom of the cosmic hierarchy to the top, from the electromagnetic attraction between electrons and protons to the circumincession of divine Persons in the Trinity. Male and female are only the biological version of cosmic masculine and feminine. God is masculine to everything, from angels to prime matter.

Thus, we have a cosmic structure of complementary relations with binary terms. The first term, masculinity, is an initiating total-gift of self and the second, femininity, is a receptive and reciprocating total self-gift. This is the cosmic structure of creation because it is the structure of Trinitarian love. The next installment will discuss human sex differences based upon this.

Sex and the Human Person:  Part III – Sex Differences

Gay Asylum Issue Raised In Holland  – Dutch Immigration officials, who had previously upheld a moratorium on sending LGBT asylum seekers back to Iran, now say the moratorium will be lifted, to the dismay of Human Rights Watch. A number of western governments offered support to gay people fleeing the country, after the public execution of two gay Iranian teenagers sparked international protest.

Human Rights Watch cited Iran’s criminal code that states that sexual intercourse between men “is punishable by death” and men convicted of foreplay can be punished with 100 lashes and be executed on the fourth conviction. Punishment for sex between women calls for similarly draconian penalities, including execution for successive convictions.

Poll: Most people reject evolution theory - A Gallup Poll released Wednesday suggests about 53 percent of Americans rejects the theory of evolution as the explanation for the origin of humans. 

American Medical Association commissioned Poll – Alcohol and sex play a prominent and potentially dangerous role in spring break trips of college co-eds according to an American Medical Association (AMA) poll released today. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 4.00 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence. Key findings of the poll include: More than half of women (57 percent) agree being promiscuous is a way to fit in.
 
 

      

“We just feel like God has fought and won this battle for us, and we want to give glory to Him”.  Dawn Finley

A jury deliberated only one hour before reaching its unanimous decision that Brandy Holmes must die for the murder of Rev. Julian Brandon. Brandy’s family, hoping for mercy, argued that their daughter was born with fetal alcohol syndrome which caused her to be mentally ill. The prosecutors said “she knew exactly” what she was doing.

I was struck by the reaction of Rev. Brandon’s daughter, who believed that it was the will of God that Brandy’s natural life be ended to pay for her crime. She went on to say that Brandy’s execution will give her and the family closure. Now, I am not being critical of someone who is obiously experiencing a great amount of grief, but the value she placed on having closure was greater than the life of another human being.  In her distorted and rather egocentric relationship with God, she concluded that in order to bring her comfort, God fought to have Brandy put to death. Does God have “favorites” according to who we are, or what we do? Did God exact his vengance according her will? Is it God’s will that his gift of life be taken away from one child in order to please and comfort another? Who is to serve Who?

(transition to abortion – insert here) 

It seems that a distorted and narcisitic sense of God’s love is prevelent among so many who justify abortion & euthanasia. Through their emotional immaturity, they assume the role of master, and reduce God to their servant of the will. What is especially confusing is how those who claim to be catholics (for choice) can justify their agenda. Do they think God runs an amazon.com type creation business? His goal is keep his customers happy. If your happy, than He’s happy. keep what you want, send back the rest, no questions asked!

Just to clarify, I am not comparing the family’s closure to abortion, I just get tangential from time to time.

Holmes to become second woman on death row

A short news video on the procedure of baby sex selection.

 

Amélie has posted some thoughts on this encyclical and the comments to her thread suggest that there is much interest in it.  However, some of the comments are a bit inane.  For example, one guy sees this Encyclical as an olive branch to “gays” because B16 does not explicitly limit eros to heterosexuality and limit “gays” to agape.  This sad thinking, besides being delusional, completely misunderstands the faith and the Trinitarian foundation of love.  If one reads this Encyclical closely, he will see that same-sex eros can never be purified.  One can never acheive same-sex agape (here I mean in the sense of which we call the disorder of same-sex attraction).

Part of the problem with understanding what unity in difference can mean is a lack of a proper metaphysics.  Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart does a masterful job in Beauty of the Infinite of showing that the errors of post-modernism reduces to monistic presuppositions about the Being of God.  This error of monism leads post-moderns to see God as in competition with creation and so in opposition to man, especially in terms of freedom.  What Msgr. Robert Sokolowski calls the Christian difference, solves this problem.  God is ontologically different than creation as His is Uncreated Being, where creatures possess created being.  Hart demonstrates that these are not at two opposite poles of the same dimension of being with the finite on one end and the Infinite at the other.  Rather created being ex-ists by participation in Uncreated Being (which sub-sists).  Infinite Being is not the sum of all beings, it is Being Itself.

This type of false opposition is at the heart of other confusions, including Trinitarian theology and the theology of love.  Eros and agape are not two different types of love in opposition to one another but two aspects of the unity which is love.  Like the distinction in Persons in the Unity of the divine nature, the distinctions of love do not eliminate love’s unity.

As the title of the Encyclical says, God is Love.  God is perfection itself and so Love, and loves distinctions into eros and agape are logical distinctions which allow understanding of the different manners in which created being participates in the simplicity of God’s Being. These distinctions are proper to created intellect, but making these distinctions shouldn’t be confused with complexity in God.

Love is an act of the will in which one selflessly gives himself as a gift to others.  But this gift of self is the result of a developing process (in creatures) which is the culmination of a love of attraction.  The attraction (eros) is not annihilated but it achieves its end in the self-gift (agape).  Eros, in our fallen state, must be purified in agape.  Neither is this self-gift static.  It is an on-going act of the will; it is a decision to give oneself as a gift and to receive the other likewise, in response.

What some folks seem to miss is that eros as we experience it, can and many times is, distorted.  B16 addresses that and makes it clear that eros which is not grounded in self-gift is a distortion which strips love and the lover of dignity and humanity.  So what is and is not authentic self-gift?

Self-gift can only be rooted in Trinitarian love.  The Father’s total gift of Himself to the Son and the Son’s reciprocation are fruitful. This mutual Love is a Person . . . the Holy Spirit. Being the Source of everything that exists, this total self-giving establishes the framework for creation and so it is the interpretive key for understanding creation and most especially the human person who is created in the image of this Self-giving God.

This framework shows that love must be true to the order of creation.  This is where those who mistakenly believe that B16 is somehow now saying that same-sex genital relations are suddenly not a disorder, completely miss the Trinitarian nature of creation.  The Encyclical says that “…man is somehow incomplete, driven by nature to seek in another the part that can make him whole, the idea that only in communion with the opposite sex can he become ‘complete’” (DCE 11).  Here B16 follows JPTG’s theology of the body in which the latter shows that man is made, male and female, in the Trinitarian image.  Husband and wife are a unity in difference, made complementarily for one another.  The structure of heterosexual anatomy demonstrates their complementarity and their having been ordered to the one-flesh union which is the only genital union that has the capacity to be fruitful in a life-giving way.

B16 uses the phrase unity and difference also to describe the hylomorphic union of body and soul. Because the soul is the substantial form of the body, the body expresses something in the soul.  This includes sex differences.  Sex differences are ontological and created for the unity in difference of love, manifested in its dimensions of eros and agape. 

So no Virginia, there is no Santa Claus…there is nothing here but wishful thinking to suggest homo-eroticism can be included in anything but a “warped and destructive form” of eros (DCE 4).

Now while marital love is the most clear place to demonstrate this unity and distinction, B16 does not do this.  I suppose that JPTG’s theology of the body, to which I find unmistakeable allusions, has already done that.  Here, B16 makes these distinctions in the unity of love as the prelude to what I believe may be a new development in Church social teaching and perhaps even in ecclesiology.  I will share those next time.