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.

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, 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.

I started this post last week and was close to being finished but lost it all when I went to save it.  I am just now having a chance to return to it so you have had a week’s reprieve…but no longer…

A number of months ago, I read through Dinesh D’Souza’a What’s So Great About Christianity.  This was D’Souza’s response to the aggressive atheists’ attack on religion of recent years.  I congratulate him for taking on such an important task.  I also have to say that I am impressed at the breadth of material that a “policy wonk” was able to sift through and to apply.  In many respects, he did a masterful job in assimilating and articulating a variety of significant issues and arguments

Regrettably, that is not uniformly the case.  In fact, in reading some of his arguments one gets the sense that he is at least as influenced by Protestant thought than by the Catholic intellectual tradition even though he is Catholic.  For example, D’Souza cites St. Thomas Aquinas the same number of times as he does Martin Luther and few would argue that when it comes to natural theology, a good part of the purpose of his book, there is absolutely no comparison between the two.  In the end, I suspect that it is a lack of adequate familiarity with Catholic thought that gives this book the appearance of a potpourri of arguments rather than a coherent, systematized response to fundamental errors in atheism.

In what I consider to be a fatal flaw for this book, D”Souza invokes Immanuel Kant as a modern philosopher who provides what the author believes to be an unassailable defense against the atheists’ materialist reduction of reality.  D’Souza summarizes his thinking on Kant in this article he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor just before his book was released:

Kant erected a sturdy intellectual bulwark against atheism that hasn’t been breached since. His defense doesn’t draw on sacred texts or any other sources of authority to which people of faith might naturally and rightfully turn when confronted with atheist arguments. Instead, it relies on the only framework that today’s atheist proselytizers say is valid: reason. The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know – reality itself. This view says we can find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. It holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

In his 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. Kant showed that human knowledge is constrained not merely by the unlimited magnitude of reality but also by a limited sensory apparatus of perception.

Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, namely sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient? What makes us think that there is no reality that lies beyond sensory perception?

What appeals to D’Souza about Kant is that the latter seems to provide a rational solution to the reductive, materialist assumption of atheists.  Kant appears to provide a sound basis for showing the atheist that he is assuming too much when he declares his ability to rule out the existence of anything but the material world.  It seems to me that this is a novel reading of Kant.  I am not an expert on Kant, but I do not think that Kant employed his thinking against atheists’ materialist reductionism.  Nevertheless, even if the implications of Kant’s thinking do provide this consequence, the costs that come with accepting Kant are simply too high.  We can begin to see the implications of Kant’s thinking by reading more of what D’Souza has to say about him:

Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or “take” on it. Kant’s startling claim is that we have no basis for assuming that a material perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. I can tell if my daughter’s drawing of her teacher looks like the teacher by placing the portrait alongside the person. With my eyes, I compare the copy with the original. Kant points out, however, that comparing our experience of reality to reality itself is impossible. We have representations only, never the originals. So we have no basis for presuming that the two are even comparable. When we equate experience and reality, we are making an unjustified leap.

It is essential to recognize that Kant isn’t diminishing the importance of experience. It is entirely rational for us to use science and reason to discover the operating principles of the world of experience. This world, however, is not the only one there is. Kant contended that while science and reason apply to the world of sensory phenomena, of things as they are experienced by us, science and reason cannot penetrate what Kant termed the noumena – things as they are in themselves.

Some critics have understood Kant to be denying the existence of external reality or of arguing that all of reality is “in the mind.” Kant emphatically rejects this. He insists that the noumenon obviously exists because it is what gives rise to phenomena. In other words, our experience is an experience of something. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see Kant as positing two kinds of reality: the material reality that we experience and reality itself. To many, the implication of Kant’s argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human perception and human reason.

And herein lies the rub.  It matters not whether Kant tries to take experience seriously or not.  It matters not whether he denies the existence of external reality or not.  The consequences of his thinking end with the same result.

Kant is very similar to Descartes but with even more deliterious consequence.  Descartes was attempting to overcome the epistemological skepticism of his day when he began the modern inward turn with his cogito ergo sum.  In doing so, he accepted in principle ( at least hypothetically) the fatal error that one might be distrustful of all that he knows through experience. Descartes tried to rebuild, with mathematical precision, a solid philosophy that did away with all skepticism.  Unfortunately, attempting to create a philosophy which uses as its foundation and starting point, one’s self-awareness as the only sure point of knowledge, is impossible.  It did not take very long for his entire system to be deconstructed.  David Hume accepted Descartes implicit epistemological skepticism and took it to its logical dead end.

Unfortunately, Immaneul Kant accepted Hume’s fundamental epistemological skepticism but not his methodological skepticism about the empirical world.  Thus, Kant, like Descartes, attempted to build a philosophy that explained how one could function in the empirical world while denying the ability to know anything beyond.  It did not take long for Kant’s system to be likewise dismantled, though his thinking about religion and God were problematic in and of themselves.

Kant indeed draws an insuperable barrier between the world of experience, the phenomenal world, and reality itself, the noumenal world.  D’Souza does not address Kant’s own explicit implications of this lack of access to the noumenal world.

For Kant, St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Five Ways,” his proofs for the existence of God, are invalid.  In fact, for Kant there is no possibility for any speculative knowledge about God or any reality beyond phenomenal experience.  The human intellect just has not capacity in this regard and so it is doomed to failure.  Thus, D’Souza is being intellectually inconsistent by citing Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal dichotomy and St. Thomas’ natural theology in the same work.

So does Kant believe in God?  He does, but Kant’s belief is not one of faith nor is it a product of speculative induction.  It is a curious deduction that is based, apparently, solely upon pragmatic necessity.  He starts with the premise that we must be moral and for a variety of reasons concludes that we must believe in God if we are to live a moral life.  The implications of this are clear.  Kant’s position leaves us with the functional demand to believe in God without the intellectual frame work to make such belief reasonable.  We can see from this the metaphysical basis for atheism: faith is simply morality, faith is unreasonable, faith is fideistic, etc. In fact, most acknowledge Kant as the father of German Idealism and many have recognized German Idealism as a significant progenitor of modern atheism.

It is ironic that D’Souza would select a modern thinker who is arguably a significant contributor to the development of modern atheism as a defense against it.  Even more, that he would use the precise epistemologically skeptical theory that promoted its development.  Fr. Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, in his book The Mass and Modernity, argues that Kant reduces religion to morality and the implications of such are destructive to Catholicism.  Kant rules out the use of pure reason and eliminates our access to God.  He rejects supernatural divine revelation and our ability to speculatively reason about God or any reality beyond our experience.  He rejects Church structure, Sacraments, prayer, etc. as anything more than a time conditioned, concrete manifestation of the human attempt to establish a moral structure for life.

Moreover, it is ironic that D’Souza would tear asunder that one point of common reference between atheists and the Catholic intellectual tradition, that is our reason and its ability to know the created (for Catholics anyway) world as it is.  Chesterton pointed out that these points of agreement are instrumental in establishing dialogue and debate in order to change minds and hearts.  This is one truth that we cannot afford to throw away.  The Catholic intellectual tradition provides a much greater wealth of resources to refute the materialist reduction of atheism without the penalty we must pay to saddle up with Kant.  If we are looking for a compelling argument that can ultimately unmask the atheists’ naivete about the limits of their thinking, well I will only say that Kant can’t do it.

Well, it was not a surprise I suppose, but it was still a blow.  On Friday, as expected, BO signed an executive order reversing the Mexico City policy which now allows US funded NGOs to promote abortion–and promote they will.  It is not a surprise since BO made it clear that this was his plan and he is filling his staff which will oversee life issues, with proabortion zealots.  BO has bought into the illusion that abortion is a matter of women’s rights just as he has bought into the error that the same sex attraction disorder agenda is also a matter of civil rights.  Thus, these are areas in which he will brook no compromise.

The extent to which these rights extend in his mind can be seen in his active support of FOCA and his rejection of former President Bush’s end of term executive order put in place to safeguard the right to conscience of health care workers.  The ACLU is emblematic of this disturbing thinking.  The right to act according to one’s conscience is trumped by a supposed “right” not just to “act out” on disorders (abortion, SSAD, etc.) but also by a “right” to force others to enable such behavior.  In fact, BO’s support for additional “hate crimes” legislation, as we are seeing in Canada and in Europe, suggests that religious liberties are also to be subordinated to such fabricated “rights.”

The tyranny that appears to be on our horizon, the foreshadowing of which was Friday’s executive order, is a modern form of tyranny which Monsignor Robert Sokolowski mentions in his epic tome, Phenomenology of the Human Person.  In summarizing the way that syntax reveals the human person as the agent of truth, Sokolowski asserts that the corruption of truth is the aspect of modern tyranny that makes it perhaps the greatest malady man must endure.  He refers to George Orwell’s novel 1984:

… modern tyranny is complete only when subjects are willing to disavow their own exercise of truthfulness, and to say that four fingers being held up in front of them are not necessarily four, but that they could be three, or five, or four, or even all of these at once, depending on what the Party says the are.  As the tyrannical O’Brien says to Winston in 1984, “The thought is all we care about,” and, “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will” (96).

Clearly, the tyranny is not yet complete.  However, it seems that the groundwork is now being laid.  The majority of the US electorate either cared not enough about the threat or did not see it clearly enough.  The crisis atmosphere is now upon us which makes the possibility that the majority could willingly abandon their responsibilities as agents of truth all the more credible. We will see in the next few months how committed BO is to social reconstruction as a priority.  He has loaded his administration with abortion ideologues.  He is willing to now spend scarce US tax dollars on pushing the abortion “ideal” upon the underdeveloped world.  If he champions FOCA and hate speech legislation amidst the crises he has on his plate, the answer will be clear.

When Catholic hospitals and all healthcare workers of conscience  find that they now are obligated to cooperate with the culture of death, expect to hear again Blago’s retort to Illinois pharmacists…”it’s time to find another profession.”  When Christians, Jews, and Muslims are ordered to no longer teach that abortion is murder or that same sex attraction is a disorder, expect to hear that they have no right to promote hateful and devisive ideas. When BO holds up four fingers and asks what you see, expect to hear the Party whisper in your ear the answer you are to give before you have a chance to respond.

We may have turned the corner that we all were hoping we would not turn.  If this charismatic man who now inhabits the White House indends, as his first priority, on foisting upon us the social shennanigans he has promised, then the Church in the U.S. should be ready for persecution well beyond the threat of taxation we are now seeing in San Francisco.  With the Psalmist we should pray all the more fervently for the Church: Lord, protect Her from evil, guard Her still.

I was at the gym this morning and, as usual, was exposed to the latest bloviation from the mainstream media.  This morning, Kerry Kennedy was on some morning show offering her explorations into her Catholic faith that she is promoting through a new book, Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talk About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning.

Kennedy is one of Robert F. Kennedy’s youngest children.  She describes her motivation to write the book:

So, what happened is that I was feeling conflicted because my Catholicism is so deeply important to me — it was my sense of connection to the almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing. And my Catholicism informed my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues. And yet, so often when I went to church, I was confronted with words and symbols that were anathema to my values. …So I thought it was time to take some time and reflect more deeply on these issues.

I suppose that this is a good thing.  One should feel a sense of consternation when the values one holds are in conflict with the faith one professes.  Now Kennedy is a lawyer, so we might assume a lawyer who is going to investigate some conflict of positions would begin by looking at the reasoning behind the positions in which she is in conflict.  That is not apparently what Kennedy chooses to do.

Her modus operandi is to ask 37 different prominent Catholic Americans for their views on Catholicism.  She wanted a broad spectrum of views from people of have thought seriously about some issue…any issue.  She did not think it important that they have thought seriously about what it means to be Catholic.  Some of her choices of “Catholics” are quite curious.  While there are a couple who might make sense, Cardinal McCarrick and Tom Monghan, others are bizzarre.  She interviews such authorities on what it means to be Catholic like: Bill Maher, Dan Akroyd, Susan Sarandon, Andrew Sullivan, and Nancy Pelosi.  Bill Maher, are you kidding.  Exactly what will you learn from this obscence, anti-Catholic ignoramus?  For some reason, I do not think that if I wanted to know about a topic, say superstring theory, that I would ask someone who has thought a lot about Keynesian economics but hasn’t a clue about superstring theory.  I dunno., maybe that’s just me.

The problem, it seems to me, is that instead of considering the source of the Church’s teaching and the source of her values, Kennedy instead seems to assume her values to be foundational and instead an open investigation into Church teaching and an honest self-assessment, she turns her focus on trying to legitimize her desire to remain Catholic while rejecting those teachings which conflict with her “values.”  With such an agenda, where else would one turn than to some of the notable leaders of dissent:

So, as Robert Drinan in this book pointed out, the pope apologized for 92 things that the Catholic church had done wrong, and he (Drinan) said, ‘These are fallible people and I expect them to do fallible things in the future as well.’ And so I think that that is a source of comfort for me, to view it sort of in that way, that we’re all fallible, and we’ll all make mistakes, but that this is an important institution to be part of.

This is the old, tired canard of dissenters.  The Church has erred on this or that issue in the past, and usually they make no distinctions among the issues that throw out, thus they are wrong (and I am right) in my dissent against this or that issue (which usually has to deal with sexual restraint).  These dissenters generally conflate matters of prudential judgment, sinfulness of some members of the hierachy (she makes much hay over the “pedophile” scandal), changes in disciplinary practice, and authentic development of doctrine all to suggest that the Church is not infallible (not asking how much more fallible she might be than the Institution). And that is what Kennedy does here:

I was trying to resolve that issue, of how do people who disagree with what the institutional church is saying to them look themselves in the mirror and say, ‘I am a Catholic.’ And what I found is that absolutely everybody disagrees with the church. The cardinals disagree with the church, and the nuns and the priests, and even Tom Monaghan disagrees with the church, so everybody has a disagreement, which is interesting to me. It’s just not a monolith at all. It’s an enormous organism with a lot of moving parts and people with strong opinions and I think that that’s good.

Tom Monaghan’s admitting that he would not again send his children to Catholic schools because they have become destructive to the faith of young people is not the same as Fr. Drinan arguing that abortion “rights” is an issue that Catholics can legitimately support. Kennedy certainly does not demonstrate that she possesses a mature understanding of her faith.  In fact, she does not manifest even the capacity for making critical distinctions that is supposed to be the art of a lawyer.  In terms of her  understanding of the faith, here is what I take to be her summary:

I also think that Catholicism is inherently about contradiction. So much of the New Testament is about Christ arguing with the Pharisees and with the scribes and with the Jewish leaders of the day, and as Pope Benedict said, it’s a quest for the truth. And so if you’re going to have a quest for the truth, you’re going to have a lot of questioning of authority. And we’re taught to have obedience to authority, but we’re also taught to revere saints, so many of whom were burnt at the stake or martyred because they questioned authority. And then we are told that Christ has died but Christ is coming again. And when Catholics say I don’t understand this, how can this really be transformed into the blood of Christ, is this really the body of Christ that we are eating now, they are told, ‘That’s the mystery,’ and ‘Go in peace,’ and that’s sort of it. And so I think that, in a way, I think it’s good, because it prepares us to deal with so many other parts of life, where there are conflicting emotions. At the moment of greatest love, there is greatest fear, and at the moment of enormous repression, there is resistance, and therefore a chance at revolutionary change. And so I think our lives are full of contradictions.

So since the Catholic Church is about contradiction she “feels” that she can be at peace with holding to the faith which is “anathema” to many of her personal  values.  For example, the Church is a strong promoter of social justice around the world she argues, except for the parish she went to in Northern Virginia which preached on ending a woman’s right to abortion.  Nor did it permit girl altar servers, an even more disturbing anachronism it seems.  But not to worry, now she is in a great parish in Armonk, New York where the priest is always putting a picture of haloed Gandhi on the altar. She seems to equate Christian mystery with contradiction reflecting a rather immature (and erroneous) understanding of this important doctrine.

Implied is that for Kennedy, the most relevant contradiction is the fact that the Church requires obedience to authority (at least she knows that) but on the other hand, everyone knows that Jesus was a rebel (of course, Matthew 23:2-3 was a distortion of the pure Gospel message inserted by some later, ecclesio-centric redactor). So she will be an obedient rebel?  I suppose she will be obedient to her personal “values” and rebellious against Church authority because it will not canonize her personal values.  The scary thing is that this lady says she is teaching CCD.

So the Church prepares us for the contradictions of life by being, not a contradiction with the world, but a contradiction with reason.  This sense that faith is opposed to reason, the radical individualism, and the anti-authority rebellion are emblematic of Enlightenment rationalism and are all manifested in Kennedy’s assertions.  But she is not even a rationalist.  Rather, she is parasitic on Enlightenment premises for some of her argumentation but proves to be, as will be seen, thoroughly post-modern.  This justifies (in her mind I suppose) her self-contradictions in arguing that her “Catholicism inform[s] my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues” but at the same time it does not inform her moral world view in terms of same sex attraction disorder, abortion, contraception and the like.

One might ask why she would still want to be a member of the Church with which she has so much disagreement.  Well, it is for an immature understanding of a seriously correct reason.  The Catholic Church provides her “sense of connection to the almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing.” It does provide this because the Church is man’s entry into communion with God.  Unfortunately, Kennedy’s dualistic ecclesiology feeds her individualistic worldview.  For her, the institutional Church “is separate and apart from my sense of connection to the Almighty, when I pray.” She believes that she can separate the “institutional” Church from her “Catholicism.”

Perhaps someone should recommend to her De Lubac’s Splendor of the Church, or Balthasar’s The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church as counter proposals to her defective understanding of the Church.  In these works, these 20th century thinkers show how the Church is an organic whole comprising the Totus Christus, the Whole Christ.  One cannot have the unity with the Father the Church effects while rejecting the hierarchical structure that the Lord Jesus established to tend His sheep. Or as St. Cyprian says, “one cannot have God as Father who will not have the Church as his Mother.” One cannot fully embrace the Father if one rejects the fullness of the Truth, which is His Son–and this includes the Son’s Mystical Body–the Church.  The fragmented thinking of our time might make a fragmented view of the Church seem plausible but it is worldview that has deleterious consequences for one’s soul.

Kennedy presents a confused sort of argument which allows her to maintain her connection with her childhood memories by remaining Catholic and still embracing her Enlightenment formed, personal “values.”  She hopes that her book will be a comfort for other confused Catholics who are searching for a rationalization, or more correctly mutual emotional support, for their dissent:

I hope that they’ll feel like they’re not alone…I hope that people will feel that there are a lot of others out there who are grappling with the same issues: Should I raise my children Catholic? What does that mean? Am I a good Catholic? What does it mean to be a good Catholic today? If I’m not following the way I was taught as a child, or that my parents approached the religion, does that mean that I’m somehow missing something, or that I’m bad? And I hope also that others might feel a sense that the essence, the goodness of Catholicism, of that relationship with God, of that sense of love, can be embraced without embracing the parts of the institutional church which are anathema to your values, to one’s values.

Kennedy chooses an apt term for her position.  Her desire that people considering dissent are able to “feel” a solidarity with other dissenters is more truthful than asserting that any honest, thinking person could embrace such drivel. She is in fact, proposing that the ground of action must be one’s arbitrarily chosen “values” rather than a quest for truth and justice.  When faced with a contradiction of values, Kennedy chooses to side with Nietzsche and Sarte.  Unfortunately, with these two rebels as her priest-mediators, she is risking abandoning the “connection with the Almighty” she claims to desire; regardless of what her affective senses tell her.

It seems that there are always numerous stories floating around that manifest the great dangers a society faces when it has rejected sound, classical philosophy. Modern philosophy, with its foundation in Cartesian doubt, has left the average person who has thought about it with the impression that philosophy is to be equated with sophism.

Modern philosophy has also undermined our ability to any longer distinguish right from wrong. For centuries the Christian ethos in the West held at bay the deleterious effects of the loss of classical metaphysics, philosophical anthropology and practical philosophy (politics, economics, and ethics). The West, by and large, is now post-Christian. The Christian ethos is lost and now we are drifting free in Nietzsche’s great sea of endless possibilities that he waxed on about in his Gay Science. Unfortunately the sea he envisioned will be found to be the “lake of fire” St. John saw in his vision.

We now have medical ethicists who, if not morally sound, at least are honest. Two of them recently published an article in the NEJM, as reported by LifeSiteNews, in which they admit that brain death and cardiac death are fictions. These “ethicists” support the donation of vital organs and are left undeterred by the prospects for donations even though they admit we cannot reliably determine death before needing to harvest vital organs. LifeSiteNews quotes the two doctors:

Troug and Miller suggest that, rather than insisting on dead donors, “ethical requirements of organ donation” should be looked at “in terms of valid informed consent under the limited conditions of devastating neurologic injury.”

They base their “ethics” on a synthesis of Mills’s utilitarianism and Nietzsche’s will to power. If one does not have the prospects of an “adequate” quality of life (i.e. a devastating neurologic injury) then someone (Danger! Danger! Will Robinson) can choose (ala Nietzsche) to kill that person in order to harvest his organs. This is perfectly in line with our culture of comfort and choice.

It seems so reasonable because choosing to be comfortable is the only non-negotiable “value” that we seem to have left. Thus, choice becomes the only absolute moral norm. Good is the right to choose, bad is anything that conflicts with this “right.” How about when two choices for comfort conflict? Well, Barack Obama provides us the answer using this neo-Western ethic.

Last week LifeSiteNews ran a story about Senator Obama’s radical position on abortion and his work in killing (sardonic pun intended) the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection bill. The details are curious. Issues of his integrity in owning up to what he actually did with this bill aside, one thing really stands out to me. The Illinois bill copied language from a congressional bill that passed, that included a so-called neutrality clause. The language of this clause is enough to make one shudder:

‘‘(c) Nothing in this section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being ‘born alive’ as defined in this section’’

Look at the stark language which wishes to exclude from the bill, any change in legal status or legal right of “a member of the species homo sapiens” before he is born alive. In other words, those drafting this bill who support the “right” to choose (i.e. abortion) have to have carefully considered how to separate members of the same species from one another with respect to legal rights. We have seen this happen in many different ways in the past. We can see it in the U.S. slavery episode, we can see it with the way aboriginal people were often treated, and we can see it in the systems of totalitarian collectivism of the 20th century in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, China, North Korea, etc.

Here is the philosophical problem with pro-abortion thinking in terms of the above clause. They have chosen the criteria of passive potency in order to distinguish between members of the same species. Passive potency is essentially all of those possibilities of changes that can be done to a human being from the outside (without killing him). They do not seem to have the sense of active potency, those things that a human being already inherently has and can do by virtue of his nature as being human, but has not yet manifested.

What I mean by this is that they do not seem to recognize that everything that a human being will become, he has already in himself, in seed-form if you will, from conception. In other words, after conception, from the perspective of nature, a man gains nothing new. He simply is able to manifest inherent capabilities at different stages of maturity, that already exist in him as “potency.”

All human attributes, for those who reject classical philosophy, seem to become passive potencies–they are given from the outside–somehow. That is why they think that the status of a member of a species can change when some new attribute is manifested or hidden. The problem with this is that there is no way to decided then which attributes are necessary to be manifested, or even how they should be manifested, in order to change the status of a member of the species from one who deserves no protection under the law to one who now is given rights that can come at the expense of the unprotected class (see list of abuses above).

The underlying danger with this type of thinking is that when choice becomes the absolute moral norm, there is no way of ultimately deconflicting the choices of groups or individuals. The atheist phenomenologist Jean Paul Sartre saw this clearly–that is why he so coldly proclaimed that “hell” is other people. The mere existence of others denies one the absolute liberty to do as he wishes. This explains why the Liberté of the French Revolutionaries turned into totalitarian bloodshed. It also explains why “liberal” political movements such as Nazism, Fascism, and Bolshevism become totalitarian. It helps us to understand why modern liberalism also moves in the direction of media censorship and thought censorship (e.g. Canada’s Human Rights Commissions, the modern liberal mind’s proclivity to legislate against “hate speech,” this movement’s move to do away with medical practitioners’ conscience clauses when it comes to “choice” issues such as abortion and contraception, etc.).

This, I fear, is also behind Senator Obama’s rhetoric about getting beyond the debate about abortion. For him the debate is over, even though in reality it is just beginning to turn against abortion “rights.” The debate must end because the supporters lack the intellectual resources found in classical philosophy to defend their positions and they are now coming to terms with the fact that their arguments leave them in self-contradictory, and thus intellectually indefensible, positions. The only option left to them is the “will to power.” They must gain power in order to exert their will upon others–i.e. to end the debate. If this comes to pass, anyone familiar with history must be aware of the dangers which lie ahead.

Shy of the re-Christianization of the West, we need to re-appropriate the self-consistent philosophical framework of classical philosophy in order to facilitate lucid and fruitful public debate on these life and death issue; that is, if we are to turn back the lemming-like march toward liberal totalitarianism. It appears, however, that at this point a Christian West is the more realistic of the two possibilities.

Update: Senator Obama’s campaign now admits that the “people” whom Obama had accused of lying about his part in voting down the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection bill . . . was Senator Obama.  It appears that Obama did indeed take the position that he now says “defies common sense.”  One wonders what position he really holds with respect to infants born alive as is clear that one cannot reliably discern this based upon his words.

In the most recent issue of the University Bookman, the publication of the Russell Kirk Research Center, James Seaton provides a review of Anthony Kronman’s book on the death of humanities programs in Western universities: Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (published by Yale University Press in 2007). Seaton entitles his piece A Stirring Defense of the Conversation. Kronman’s main thesis is that the research ideal adopted by universities after the Civil War, when eventually combined with 60s-era political correctness, has made it impossible for humanities departments to fulfill their task. Kronman sees this task as one of providing a forum for an open-ended, free debate on the meaning of life, though centered on attention to the classical texts of the Western tradition.

According to Seaton, Kronman suggests returning to the ideal of “secular humanism” that was central to the humanities departments prior to the 1960s. In those presumably halcyon days, humanities professors were unashamed about asking and answering questions about how we should live or what we should care about. Kronman is said to claim that these are precisely the sorts of questions that are dismissed in most contemporary universities, where intellectual debate about the essential issues of life is stifled by the assimilation of the study of the humanities to the ideals of scientific research and by multiculturalism.

Seaton tells us of Kronman’s (in my view) ridiculous proposal for the revival of the humanities: in part, it involves the apparent imperative that religion should not be allowed as a topic for consideration in the classroom. For, according to Kronman, religions all presume that there is only one true answer to the question of the meaning of life, and this we cannot have in a free and open society.

Seaton only mildly criticizes Kronman for a certain level of rhetorical abuse on this point. As far as Seaton is concerned, Kronman has brilliantly diagnosed the problem in contemporary universities. Only his solution might need to be modified.

But it seems to me that Kronman’s suggested solution is demonstrative of such a wild misunderstanding of human history that it must surely render pointless the rest of his discussion. Kronman, Seaton tells us, claims to be no enemy of religion. Well, he may be no enemy of religion, but he must surely be – given his recommended solution to the crisis of the humanities – an enemy of informed knowledge about human history.

One cannot undertake a study of the humanities without making religion central to it. The classical texts of the Western tradition – and of all cultures – are by-and-large religious texts. The great answers to the deepest questions of life are all religious by nature. Indeed, the very questions themselves are fundamentally religious. In fact, the very historical root of philosophy, as the best anthropological studies have shown us, was in reflection upon religious ritual and myth. All cultures and civilizations have been rooted in religion – and perhaps the West most of all. The very word “culture” is derived from “cultus,” which is the foundational religious activity of any civilization. Modern science arose in the West because a settled instinct about the rationality and contingency of the universe was nurtured in the hearts and minds of European humanity by participation, through the centuries, in the sacred liturgy of the Church.

The Russell Kirk Center, as many may know, is a locus of the conservative movement. Seaton’s review of Kronman’s book demonstrates a problem that continues to beset the movement: a harboring of sympathy to notions of history that equate secularism and progress. This leads to a monumental blind-spot regarding interpretations of the nature of philosophy, art, literature, culture, and science. With such a blind-spot, how can we trust their proposed solutions for reviving the humanities? Of course, the problem is that the conservative movement is too closely tied to classical liberalism, but that’s a story for another day…

If what is said in this review of Kronman’s book is true, then the only conversation to which he is contributing is that of how to keep the humanities permanently dead and buried.

Hierothee passed along the latest in archeologism that the popular press expects will force a revision of the “Jesus story.” A short summary for those who are not familiar with it and don’t want to follow the link: about a decade ago, a three foot high tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew text was found, probably in the region of the Dead Sea in Jordan. The authenticity has not yet been questioned, and the dating is believed to be no later than the first century BC.

The text is somewhat illegible in parts, and so there is necessarily some interpolation required. Such is the case in a specific area of the text which some have read to suggest that the Messiah will die and rise in three days. This is being promoted by at least one “scholar” and, of course, the media, to suggest that Jesus simply heard about this tradition and applied it to himself. In other words, they suppose that if the prediction of a suffering Messiah existed in the Jewish tradition prior to Jesus’ arrival then one must suppose that this prediction brings into question any subsequent claims of fulfillment.

Let us assume that the tablet is authentic, the dating is correct, and these interpolations are accurate. The point is that even though Christianity is an historical religion no single archaeological find will ever require a revision of historical Christianity. Those who think that it might do not understand the limitations of empirical science and/or are ignorant of methodological limitations of historical research. Historical data themselves demonstrate the confluence of a stream of supporting evidence that one piece (or a few pieces) of archaeological evidence by itself will never be able to overcome.

Furthermore, the specific claims here are based upon much conjecture, not simply about the tablet itself, but about what this one text means for first century Palestine. This tablet, if it is all the above article says that it is, still does not indicate how widespread this idea might have been. One would suspect that Jesus’ words to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus in Luke 24, showing them that the Christ was to suffer, suggest that if the prophecy about the suffering and death of the Messiah did exist at Jesus’ time it was not widely known. The claims also seem to imply a Marcion-like dichotomy between Old Testament Messianic prophecy and New Testament fulfillment. In other words, the uniqueness of Jesus Christ implies for some Christians almost a complete rupture with the predicted Jewish Messiah. Of course, a prediction of a suffering, dying Messiah should not be surprising, especially in light of Isaiah 53.

Claims have been around since antiquity that the Christians pilfered various texts from the Hebrew scriptures and cobbled them together in constructing their narrative of the suffering and dying Messiah. There’s nothing new under the sun with this new, media-driven story. One can reasonably claim that Old Testament texts prophesy the coming of the Suffering Servant and the Son of Man. Or, alternatively, one can claim that early Christians stole these texts and, on the basis of the theology of these texts, constructed the story of the Christian Messiah. A third option is that the texts are neither prophetic nor source materials for a fabricated story. Similarly, interpretations of this newly-found Hebrew tablet may be taken in any of these directions: it may be prophetic, or it may be source material for a fabricated story, or it may be completely irrelevant to the story of Jesus. In other words, it does not have to be assumed that the tablet can only be interpreted as source material for a fabricated story.

Regarding Old Testament texts, it is our considered opinion, based on various strands of evidence or “converging probabilities,” that they point to the coming of Christ, the Suffering Servant and the Son of Man. That is, the Old Testament texts foretell the coming of Christ and his redemptive mission. They are not simply fodder for invented stories. The newly-found tablet under discussion might very well have been engraved by people inspired by the very same Spirit who enabled the Hebrew prophets to catch a glimpse of the coming of the Savior of the world.

It is not surprising that academics and a popular media with an animus for Christianity and a motivation for sensationalism are going to try to maximize the significance of the meager datum of conjecture they proffer. However, while this tablet may or may not be of any value for Judeo-Christian studies, at its worst, it provides nothing in the way of concern for historical Christianity.

Note: I posted this quickly last night just before our drive back from TX early this morning (made it safe and sound!) and forgot to mention that Hierothee significantly contributed to this post.

Browsing through a local Barnes and Noble bookseller yesterday, I happened upon Antony Flew’s new book recounting his conversion from atheism to deism:

I had some time to kill, so I spent an hour or two reading through most of it in the store. It is, amidst strong arguments refuting atheism, a fascinating tale of philosophical transformation. Flew, as many know, was the leading light of philosophical atheism in the English-speaking world for close to five decades. The son of a prominent English Methodist minister and evangelist, Flew never had a “taste” for worship, or an intellectual interest in religious matters. He became an atheist, not out of any anger toward religion nor out of any apparent Oedipal complex. He was simply utterly indifferent to religion. Thus, when faced with theologically challenging questions – particularly the question of theodicy – he was not particularly predisposed to issuing a defense of what Laplace deprecatingly called “the God hypothesis.”

Flew, quite by accident, stumbled upon the vocation of philosophy. He became, as a student, an integral part of the philosophy scene at Oxford. He participated in Oxford’s “Socrates Club,” which was then chaired by C.S. Lewis – who was, of course, the greatest apologist of Christianity in the second half of the 20^th century. Flew became a very important analytical philosopher in his own right.

He was present at the famous debate involving Elizabeth Anscombe (herself a Catholic) and C.S. Lewis which led Lewis to revise one of the chapters of his book on miracles. Flew was invigorated by such debates. He never held an animosity toward Christianity, and, tellingly, he was not a proponent of “logical positivism.”

I say tellingly because logical positivism was infamous for excluding genuinely metaphysical and theological questions from the domain of rational investigation. Flew refuted the narrowness of logical positivism in a famous paper he wrote entitled “Theology and Falsification.” Flew, though an atheist, actually kept theological questioning alive in the English-speaking world. This helped to inspire the revival of Christian apologetics within the domain of analytic philosophy. Such luminous figures of Christian philosophy in the Anglophone world as Alvin Plantinga, John Haldane, William Alston, and Brian Leftow were inspired, in part by Flew’s atheism, to develop a sophisticated current of theism within the wider current of English philosophy.

Flew eventually came to his present deistic position because, as he tells us in the book, modern science compels us to admit that a divine intellect must be at the root of the physical processes of the world. Only a divine intellect, he argues, can give to the world its lawful structure. Moreover, it seems that Flew, though a deist, is not entirely lost to Christianity: the book includes an appendix by N.T. Wright defending Christian revelation, a defense that Flew considers to be quite intriguing.

However, for now, Flew’s thinking still has one major inconsistency: he rejects the immortality of the soul. This is inconsistent because the postulation of the soul’s immortality follows from a recognition that only the existence of a spiritual soul – not bound by the exigencies of space, time and matter – can account for man’s capacity to be a rational agent. Flew is willing to admit that there must be an eternal divine intellect to account for the intelligibility of the universe. It is inconsistent, then, not to recognize that only the existence of an immortal soul can account for the human capacity to recognize the universe’s intelligibility.

Perhaps the most interesting philosophical contribution to the book comes from Roy Abraham Varghese, a noted analytic philosopher who provides an introduction to the book and an appendix. This appendix to the book is an excellent, pithy refutation of the philosophical inanity of the new fundamentalist atheists: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Lewis Wolpert, Sam Harris, et al. Varghese shows that philosophical materialism cannot account for the existence of the universe, for life, for consciousness, for thought, or for the unity of the human self. He makes the interesting point that the new atheists are 50 years behind the times, philosophically speaking. They have not understood the direction of philosophy in the past 50 years and have fallen back into some of the errors of the logical positivists – who were definitively refuted long ago.

I do not know if it is true that the new atheists are utterly behind the times. Most philosophy departments in the English-speaking world presume philosophical materialism and atheism. But, at the same time, it is true that there is a burgeoning movement of Christian philosophy that presents a formidable challenge to the still- regnant materialism and atheism. Christianity – and indeed all of humanity in the Anglophone world – has Antony Flew to thank who, even when an atheist, took theological questioning seriously again in the halls of academe.

I recently read the English translation of the book covering B16’s 2006 Schülerkreis (a yearly meeting he has with his former students) published by Ignatius Press under the title, Creation and Evolution. That is probably why Carl Olson’s post on the book interested me. What caught my eye in particular was Carl’s reference to a Reuter’s article/post on the topic. The Reuter’s author, Tom Heneghan, recently did a Reuter’s blog post on the English translation in which he makes reference to an earlier article of his based upon the release of the German edition of the book.

Heneghan says that anyone who wants to know where the Catholic Church stands on the issue of creation and evolution, should read this book. His claim is that B16 proclaims in the book, the classic Catholic teaching on the topic called, Theistic evolution. He doesn’t explain this term but does link to a wikipedia entry on the topic which I guess we must assume is his definition. Wikipedia indicates that this term refers to those who believe there is no necessary conflict between Christian faith in creation and the theory of evolution. However, the term itself, and Heneghan’s use of it, seem to imply that the biological theory of evolution is accepted by B16 on some level.

I would not agree with Heneghan’s assertion that this book will explain the Catholic position on evolution and creation. There is no magisterial, or even private, attempt to explicate the Catholic position. One should not even read the book with the expectation of a great insight into B16’s thought on the subject (though the Foreword does contain copious relevant quotes from his pre-Papal writings). The bulk of the book is comprised of the presentations and discussion that occurred the day prior to B16’s joining the group. On the day that Benedict was there, he did not comment at any considerable length. In fact, of the 210 pages in this translation, there are perhaps only about five pages in which B16 gives his view. One hears much more from Cardinal Schönborn than from the Holy Father.

Heneghen only comments upon Benedict’s interventions so it is not clear whether he read the whole book or made himself aware of the context of the discussion upon which the Pope was entering. Rather, it seems his primary concern is to show that Benedict rejects what Heneghen terms “Intelligent Design.” Heneghen does not make any precisions about ID and so he does not correlate the views that B16 does present to the various ID theories. It is, therefore, hard to know if Heneghen has the background to make such a claim.

I suppose that B16’s response to the one evolution proponent in the book’s recorded discussions could be an indicator that he does not find compelling the ID theory that irreducibly complex organic structures necessitate a designer of some type. Peter Schuster, professor the theoretical chemistry and one who follows Darwinian mechanisms for common descent argued that there was not to be found, God’s activity in the process of biological evolution. This he said, put one in danger of falling into the God of the gaps conundrum. B16 said that he did not wish to cram God into the gaps but he went on to say that evolutionary theory implies questions which the natural sciences do not have the competence to address and so, must be assigned to philosophy (see pp. 161-62; all page numbers in this post refer to Creation and Evolution from Ignatius Press).

However, one cannot read the discussions carefully without understanding that Benedict seems to favor Cardinal Schönborn’s ideas. In other words, neither seem to be a fan of the biological theory, or at least its Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation (and its subsequent modulations) and natural selection. Referring to John Paul the Great’s oft cited statement that evolution is more than an hypothesis, B16 says that JPII had his reasons for saying this, strongly suggesting that he did not share the thought (see p. 152).

He says several times that evolution is something that science can never prove by empirical methods (which modern science limits itself to) because one can observe 10,000 generations in a lab (see p. 162). He refers to Cardinal Schönborn’s interest in the fact that punctuated equilibrium has replaced Darwin’s gradualism and suggests that evolution “by leaps” has many questions to answer before he would find it compelling (see p. 162). This much is further suggested by his subsequent reference to the fact that positive mutations are very rare (see p. 163). Benedict does not make his views explicit but one can legitimately say that he appears to be suspicious of Darwinian mechanisms; what he thinks of common descent is not as obvious.

This is all to say that one cannot assume that Benedict would reject the design detection algorithm proposed by William Dembski, though the ability to mathematically detect a designer is certainly not necessary, or one might add a strong advantage, for Benedict’s view of creation. He says that he is aware that there is a certain “rationality” in matter, it can be read (primarily through mathematics). Further, there is a rationality to the process of evolution as proposed by modern science. All of this rationality corresponds to the human intellect’s capacity to know and to understand.

He asks where this rationality originates? This question is not one that modern empirical science can answer, in fact he says, it must not try (see pp. 163-64). This, presumably, is because of its reductionist methodology. He answers the question about rationality’s Source later on. This Source can only be found in the creative and redemptive Logos of faith. It is here one can turn to find not only the Source of rationality but the source of irrationality (the Fall) that has the capacity to be surmounted, nay, redeemed, in the loving act (the Incarnation, death and Resurrection) of the Logos.

Cardinal Schönborn does the reader a great service by including quite lengthly quotes from Benedict’s pre-Papal writing in the Foreword. In his book Truth and Tolerance, Ratzinger more profoundly indicates his thinking on this matter. He asks the question whether it is more “reasonable” to believe that the rational has been begotten by the irrational. In the Logos, Christians choose the rational over the irrational. This is very profound when considered carefully. Those who reject God based on claims of reason are in fact placing the priority on the irrational and thereby undermining the basis for their confidence in their reason. Ratzinger asks: “. . . can reason really renounce its claim that the Logos is at the ultimate origin of things, without abolishing itself” (quoted in Creation and Evolution, p. 20).

Contemplating the fact that all of creation is rational (qualifications aside) and in the visible world, that the human mind alone has the innate capacity to understand it should be enough for most. The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his book, The Last Word, contemplates this paradox. He is committed to reason and he is fascinated at the fact that reason always seems to work. He admits that he greatly dislikes the implications of this because it points to a world view he is uncomfortable with, that there is a Creator. However, he admits that an honest thinker has to recognize that the mind seems to be made for the world.

I think, in general, Heneghen does not have a sufficient understanding of the nuances of Benedict’s philosophy or of his knowledge of the sciences to allow him to recognize that he (Heneghen) is jumping the gun in trying to classify B16’s position. Heneghen provides a snarky response to a critique of his first article which suggests the same thing. However, in truth, I think that he does not show he is aware of the distinctions necessary for his claims.

A similar problem seems to be at play in the discussions with the evolutionist, Peter Schuster, in this Schülerkreis. Schuster, several times, makes the claim that God cannot be found in biological evolution because there are no points at which he must “intervene.” He does not think philosophy/theology has much to say about biological evolution with respect to creation. He believes there is more potential for fruit in cosomology, presumably because of anthropic principle.

These statements seems to completely miss B16’s thought. Benedict is not the only one of the participants to try to show Schuster that he is presupposing organization of matter (even more, cosmic order) and then using its existence for arriving at philosophical assumptions (e.g. God does not need to intervene). One participant points out that modern science assumes that if it finds a mechanism (the efficient cause), it has exhausted not only questions of an empirical nature, but it has also obviated philosophical questions to boot. In other words, this is the reduction of all causality to material and efficient causality. This is not as a matter of method mind you, but as a matter of ontology.

A Johannes Lehmann-Dronke (identity unknown to me), in a very insightful intervention that goes on almost as long as all of B16’s combined interventions–but is much worth reading, points out that the intelligibility of matter can only be presumed by empirical methods, but it cannot be understood or explained per se (see pp. 166-70; though much of this material seems to have been added during the book’s editorial process). Schuster’s paper shows that he completely misses this point.

Schuster’s paper points to evolution through computer programs as evidence that it is more than a theory and so God does not need to “intervene.” He never steps back to realize that the logos for that program came from a human intellect. He also attempts to demonstrate that complexity can come from simple structures by pointing to mathematical structures called “cellular automotons” [sic]. He does not appear to stop to ask the question: “why that should be?” Simply knowing the mechanism by which it takes place is sufficient for the modern scientist, even when he plays philosopher.

Schuster, who appears to be a believer, is not alone. I recall a lengthly interchange that Hierothee and I had with some otherwise solid Catholics back in 2005 after the Schönborn article came out in the NY Times. They also had a difficult time stepping back and asking these meta-questions. I had intended to call this post, “Confessions of a Recovering Reductionist” because I too continue to uncover reductionist presuppositions still latent in my thinking; put there by my upbringing. I was going to describe my challenges with extracting myself from this perennial problem of so many coming from the science and engineering fields, but I the post ran too long.

The problem is what I call “ontologizing of the method.” Modern science reduces reality to its component parts as a method of study but then makes the unwarranted (and unarticulated) philosophical leap that this is the way of reality. That all entities are simply the sum of their parts. Some fields of science and engineering are beginning to come to terms with this philosophical error (e.g. the quality movement in engineering and systems biology in science). However, it takes much work, patience, and critical thinking to exorcise this demon. Hopefully this Schülerkreis can be Dr. Schuster’s path on his road to recovery.

I had been hoping to do a lengthy review of Msgr. Robert Sokolowski’s newly released book The Phenomenology of the Human Person. It is a masterpiece and the most important philosophy title, so far, of the 21st century. In it Fr. Sokolowki achieves no less of a task than the rescue of both philosophy and the human person. We have here, in the past few days, given a couple of posts that question the modern attempt to reduce the person or human life to the active brain. Well, Fr. Sokolowski shows, through a clear and profound phenomenological analysis of human communication and consciousness, that the person is much more than a brain, or psychlogical system, or a lump of matter. The person is, he shows conclusively, an agent of truth. Through a study of the nature of language and influenced by both Husserl and the Thomist tradition, Fr. Sokolowski demonstrates that the world is made present to human experience, that it is understood by man, and that this understanding is publically available to human reason and inevitably communicated. These may seem like rather basic conclusions to reach and hardly worth one’s time. But they are conclusions that run counter to most modern and postmodern philosophy. Sokolowski unveils the beauty of the truth that human beings are rational agents.

As I said, I was going to do a larger post reviewing this book. But Fr. Schall, a Professor at Georgetown and a contributor at Ignatius Insight, has given a thorough review to which I shall refer you.

Fr. Schall suggests that everyone who is currently studying philosophy should drop what they’re doing and turn to this book. I concur wholeheartedly. Enjoy!

Earlier today, I was reading through the transcripts and summaries of B16’s locutions during his pilgrimage to the US which ended today. I had seen it earlier in the week, but I again happened upon the summary of his talk to Catholic educators at CUA. In that talk, B16 comments on the question as to why people are reluctant to entrust themselves to God. According to the Zenit summary, the Pope says:

“It is a complex phenomenon and one which I ponder continually,” the Pope confessed. “While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will. Subsequently we observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted.

“Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in — a participation in Being itself. Hence authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God. Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.”

In these words, Benedict summarizes a fundamental problem in modern education. In modern education, we seem to have forgotten that education is not simply the imparting of knowledge. Rather, it is the cultivation of an intellect; indeed, the cultivation of a whole person. While it is a fundamental part of education then, inculcating knowledge is simply one component of it together with forming intellectual skills and the training of the will.  There are several implications arising from this authentic meaning of education.

First, children need to be taught the skills of thinking, including the ability to critically consider the messages of the culture in which they are raised. Secondly, children must be taught not only what truth is but they must be challenged continually to live in accord with this truth. Not only must a child’s education be cognitive but it must be formative and transformative of his entire person. Thus, education must include the formation of his character.

This means then, that education thus must be a cooperative effort between a child’s first educators, his parents, and those who have been charged with assisting them. That is, today’s professional educators. If this education is to be effective, it must be an education in the whole person in which parents and schools support and reinforce each other.

Unfortunately, in our society the tendency is to leave all education to the professionals in public education. Furthermore, the difficulties of pluralism in belief has prompted public education (at least in theory if not in practice) to take the easy way out and eliminate from curriculum and classroom any mention of God, morals, virtue, or right character. In practice however, children get formed in immorality veiled as tolerance, pluralism, social justice, civil rights, etc.

Even with Catholic schools, the emphasis is on imparting knowledge because they are so wedded to the pedagogical tools and theories of public education. Thus, knowledge is imparted but too often little attention is paid to character formation. Likewise, while parents of Catholic school children tend to be somewhat more involved in their children’s education there is still the tendency of parents to leave aside concerns for the cultivation of the whole child–intellectual knowledge, thinking skills, character development, and especially, spiritual maturation (i.e. development in holiness).

No wonder then, even children raised in Catholic homes where church attendance is faithful, the children often tend to stray from the faith. When B16 refers to the lack attention to formation of the will, it is character formation and spiritual maturation that he has in mind. When he refers to the mistaken view of freedom, he is referring to the lack of formation in a proper view of the moral life. He takes up this point again in his talk at Dunwoodie (a.k.a. St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers).

B16 links freedom to Being itself. Fr. John Richard Neuhaus, in his commentary during EWTN coverage at St. John’s explicates this link between freedom and God’s own Being in term of “freedom for excellence” and its antithesis, “freedom of indifference.” I mentioned this distinction some time ago in a post discussing the late Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P. and his coining of those terms.

Children need to be taught to overcome the legalistic thinking of our age which results in almost an allergic reaction to any demands of personal restraint. They need to be taught that authentic freedom cannot be the libertine view of freedom our culture feeds us. If it were, it would be a vacuous concept.  We know this because we can see that by simply exercising this “freedom” we lose it. Anyone who has become enslaved to his choices, like hitting the alarm continually in the morning instead of getting up and going to the gym, or like immoderate indulgence in food or drink, or like any other bad habit which can even become addictions.

We can verify from our own experiences that for freedom to be preserved one must first recognize and then obey an order to the cosmos that preexists our arbitrary choices. Neither is that cosmic order arbitrary. It arises from the “Order” of Being itself and so brings with it a structure for action that corresponds with the meaning of the human person.  Subordination to this order brings with the fruit of joy and its disregard brings eventual interior discord and, if the disregard is sufficiently grave and prolonged, moral collapse.

This is what the Holy Father has often pondered. Why have we, especially in Catholic education and Catholic homes, failed to attend sufficiently to educating/forming our children’s will’s in addition to our concern for development of their intellects (or more precisely, to development of the cognitive content of their intellects)?

Perhaps we might pray that Catholic educators and Catholic parents will appreciate, appropriate, his words and also ponder with the Holy Father, what might be done in Catholic education that will again avail itself of the great patrimony of the Catholic Church.  This is the only way that Catholic children will not only learn not to fear giving themselves over to God, but will also allow them to be powerful witnesses of courage in surrender to God for the world.

I really like the ole, pseduo-Chinese proverb:

He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a student; teach him.

He who knows and knows that he knows is a teacher; follow him.

He who knows but knows not that he knows is asleep; awaken him.

He who knows not, but knows not that he knows not is a fool; fear him.

This proverb has come to mind quite a bit recently. I have been commiserating with colleagues lately about a number of issues that range from the students that we teach to the catechists that we are trying to form. Both have given us much room for discussion. In one enterprise, we have developed a new online catechetical formation program that we have directed toward students. catechists and catechetical leaders. First, I must say that we have been gratified by the response of those who have an intense desire for learning their faith. However, for everyone of these there are others who believe that all learning should be easy, entertaining, and an opportunity to emote with what they “think” (read feel) about that with which they are presented.

This is the response from not a few students of undergraduate age. That is to be expected. However, when similar attitudes are presented by the much older adult catechists and catechetical leaders who have taken it upon themselves to help teach the faith, one becomes a bit more jaundiced about the prospects for a springtime anytime soon.

Thus, when Shawn forwarded me this post by Barbara Nicolosi I decided that I would have to share it. After all, misery loves company. Here are some snippets:

I’m always pretty sharp in my critique of the Boomer Generation. I think they inherited a pretty good world and then selfishly screwed up so much that it will take a hundred years to even figure out where they left us. But, just to keep things balanced, it’s time to set the penetrating gaze on Gen X. (Of course, Gen X’s problems can mostly be laid at the feet of the Boomers, but whatever…) As somebody who has been teaching undergrads and twenty-somethings for the last decade, I have a lot of observations here. Maybe in a subsequent post I’ll flesh them out.

But let me start with one of the most serious issues that I see in Gen X. Let’s call it, “Defiantly Ignorant.” Simply put, one of the things that marks Gen Xers is the way they apprehend attempts to educate them as an assault on their personal dignity. Not everybody, but it is a generational trend. My experience with my students is that they are nearly incapable of debate, because every time you disagree with them, you suddenly find yourselves in a battle with their emotional survival. It makes many of them invincibly ignorant, I’m afraid.

An example of this comes up every time I teach Gen Xer’s this class I’ve got on the nature of beauty. Invariably, after I have gone through the three elements of the beautiful from St. Thomas – wholeness, harmony and radiance – one of the undergrads will prop a limp elbow into the air – what is it with this generation that even asking a question in class has to be a statement on how ambivalent they are about even being there? – and then he or she will issue forth, “I don’t agree.”

And then I respond, pretending all the while that this is the first time I’ve heard the astonishingness, “You don’t agree that there are elements to the beautiful? Okay, cool. Give me an argument.”

“Well, I think, you know, that any body can just decide what, you know, they like.”

“That’s not an argument.”

“I don’t need to give you an argument. It’s what I think. I have a right to my opinion.”

AHHHHHHHHHHH. There it is. The “rights” thing. And the abuse of the word “think.” There isn’t thinking going on here. There is resentment and petulance and the need to assert one’s existence. But it ain’t thinking. A huge inhibitor to great art coming out from the young generations today is that the assertion of knowable truth (including all of the skills that go into excellence of craft) comes off to Gen Xers and Millenials as an assault on their autonomy and personhood.

This is exactly on target. The intellects of young people these days seem to made in mush-melons with this deficient pedagogy that promotes the idea that everything a student says must be affirmed. Correction (unless it is a politically incorrect locution) is absolutely verboten. I would argue that this arises from the late-modern (aka post-modern) fantasy that one can create his own reality through the force of his will (ala Nietzsche and Sartre) combined with the sixties era confusion that supposes the solution to all the world’s problems is to be found through self-affirmation. But that is what we are left with.

Some have said that those involved in my enterprise today at the undergraduate level are greatly encumbered by being delivered with minds which are tabulae rasae. I would that this were the case. One could build from a blank slate. The problem today is that one has the problem of first dismantling a world view that confuses concupiscent emoting for critical thinking and before he may cultivate thinking skills. The latter takes effort and time, for neither of which does the hyperstimulated generation of today have much patience. Barbara would agree with this I suspect:

So, the two-part cause of the problem that is keeping Gen xers from adding anything really profound to the lasting cultural canon, is first that they have been so abysmally educated, that they live in chronic, probably insurmountbale double ignorance. They don’t know, and they don’t know that they don’t know. A reflection of double ignorance in Gen Xer storytelling is that they tend to say profound and then banal things back to back, and they really don’t know the difference. They don’t know when they are actually skirting and even ripping off great ideas that have been out there for three thousand years. And reciprocally, they don’t know what “obvious” means. (When I was in college, it was a funny insult to say that someone had “a keen sense of the obvious.” Today, I would kill for a room of students with that quality.)

[snip]

Secondly, they have been so wounded by the flailings around of their Boomer parents, that they are often simmering pools of resentment with the craven idol of their own hurt feelings relentlessly jerking them around. So, they don’t know, and it HURTS THEIR FEELINGS THAT THEY DON’T KNOW. When I correct my students for bad grammar, they tell me it hurts their feelings. When I call a young employee into my office for not doing her job well, she complains that it is a violation of her feelings. When I gave a student a completely unemotional notice that he had already missed his requisite three unexcused classes, he became pouty and petulant and told me I was harsh and didn’t understand him.

Yes, well sometimes reeducating these young (and unfortunately also the not so young) minds seems like a Quixotian enterprise. One is sometimes tempted to give up. It is then that I remember Mother Teresa reminder that God calls us to fidelity, not success. Then it becomes much easier to live with the marginal impact one gets to see that he makes and it becomes less burdensome to fear the masses whom we attempt to serve as they continue in the ignorance of what they do not know . . .

A reader friend pointed me to a post over at An Examined Life. The post is largely in response to Mike Liccione, of Sacramentum Vitae, who responded to one of Scott’s previous posts on the value of investigating miracles. I did not read Scott’s earlier post so I am not sure if he is going so far as to claim that the investigation of miracles is a waste of time or not. However, this would seem to be the implication.

Scott points out that that he is making some quite subtle distinctions and he is right. In doing so, he makes many valid, and I dare say, important points. Among the important distinctions he makes is the distinction (but not separation I trust) between the ontological and the epistemic orders. In order to discuss this issue with clarity one must distinguish between whether one is talking about whether a miracle really happens or whether we are talking about how we might come to know this. Another important point he makes is about the inaccessibility of empirical methods to the supernatural, which is the domain of the miraculous. One simply cannot empirically verify a miracle. However, this is not the same as saying that empirical evidence has no place in the verification of a miracle which appears to be his main assertion. More on my thesis later.

Scott also points out that miracles are for the strengthening of faith rather than for giving, much less compelling, faith. This is true and the reason for it can be seen by understanding what faith really is. A short phenomenology of faith might be helpful here. Faith begins with an openness to the truth and supernatural faith begins with God’s invitation. What I mean by openness is one must not precommit his will against a proposition, or faith. This is what I call skepticism. For supernatural faith, in response to God’s invitation, one must exercise trust and acceptance of a Person (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) through the mediation of a proposition (the content of faith) by means of an act of the will (I choose to believe that: God exists, Jesus is God and Savior, that He offers me eternal life, etc.). Only the human person, in all of visible creation, has the intellect necessary to understand any such proposition. This unique faculty of reason means that to respond in a human manner, one must first have a reasonable proposition in which to trust.  In other words, an fundamental component of faith is a human act which demands use of reason and free will.

Faith requires some cognitive act of reason before one can make an act of the will in order to trust. This trust and acceptance of the truth is then supernaturalized through a gift from God which we call grace. A person is in a state of grace receives this grace as a theological virtue. When one is a skeptic, he is not open to the truth. He makes an act of the will against belief as a precommitment.  I is usually a precommitment against the supernatural for a variety of reasons.  This precommitment however, is not limited to the case of belief in miracles or faith in God. It is oftentimes invoked as a defense against potential attacks against one’s worldview, which can be anything from atheism to belief or something in between.  Thus, Scott’s treatment of Mike Liccione’s assertion that those who do not believe just don’t get it appears to me to be accurate and fair.

However, if it is the case that Scott is going so far as to say that the process of verifying miracles is a waste of time, then I certainly disagree as I indicated above. In making this disagreement, I will again say that I agree with most of his substantive assertions.  However, it appears to me the disagreement comes in the subtle understanding of the phenomenology of faith and its relationship to reason.

Here I would quibble Scott’s assertion that if empirical observations were rationally compelling in the case of miracles then non-believers would be manifestly irrational.  Here seems to be the core of where I believe that he goes wrong.  If it is his claim that empirical evidence must be rationally compelling before it is worthwhile, then I would claim that this is in error and it is so in this case because of the interrelationship between faith and reason.

First we should realize that it is the very nature of empirical methodology that they can never be, per se, rationally compelling. That is why findings of science are understood to always be provisional. Empirical methods are never rationally compelling because one bases his theory on samples of available data. Decision making is, therefore, limited by what one has observed and the rest must be filled in with theorizing (an argument about the support of philosophical tools, such as mathematics, which are not empirical and so more certain, would take us too far afield here). Thus, one who has made a precommitment to a world view (belief in a miracle, or belief in a favorite physical theory) can always argue that there are unknowns yet to be discovered and more data yet to be amassed that could negate the competing claim.

This lack of rational compulsion is especially true in the case of trying to affirm a negative; which is the case when one is trying to affirm that there are no natural explanations when investigating a miracle. However, it is also the case in many other areas of empirical science.  While this is an aside and not important to my argument, I might point out that one can refer to a plethora of events in the history of modern science in which a majority of “experts” rejected a new theory, even in the face of weighty empirical support and which later became accepted, because of attachment to a current theory.

In a sense those who do so are motivated by the non-rational (emotional commitments to their world view usually) but they can sill make the case rationally that they are not compelled by reason to accept the competing world view.  Does this rule out the use of empirical evidence in supporting theories in modern science because the evidence is not rationally compelling? Of course not, modern science is about understanding the way that nature works and even when provisional, often time partially correct theories are sufficient to successfully manipulate the world to improve man’s quality of life.

Neither can faith ever be compelled. If it is, it is not faith. But that is no reason to reject the use of empirical methods to rule out the possibility of a natural explanation. But why does one need to rule out a natural explanation in coming to accept that something is miraculous?

The miraculous is by definition a suspension of physical laws. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that God does this for the strengthening of faith, as we discussed above. Faith is strengthened if one is given a reason to believe that it is miraculous. Remember, faith and reason are mutually supportive. Faith is not an act of reason, but faith begins with reason (in varying degrees with different people).  Empirical evidence is the universally available method (God rarely confirms miracles through infused knowledge) God has given us to provide the intellect a reason for affirming the miraculous.

I  completely agree with Scott’s statement in his last paragraph that the willingness to believe has nothing to do with empirical verification. Mike, Scott and I are in agreement that openness is a prerequisite. However, one must begin with a proposition to consider. In this case, someone makes the claim of a miracle. In other words, he has proposed that God has suspended physical laws in order to make His will manifestly known. Rarely does anyone come about this claim through a private revelation. He has come about it through empirical evidence, or lack thereof. He believes it is a miracle because he sees no natural explanation, sometimes this is after having made a request for a miracle. The issue is epistemological—how do we know that this is proposition is true?

We must investigate and verify that all known natural explanations fail. With respect to epistemology, we remain in the same domain as the one making the proposition, the empirical.  When we have verified that there is no natural explanation, there is now reason for the believer to be convinced that the proposition is true. Reason supports and nourishes the faith that is already there; the faith in God and His providence in general, and now that God has acted in this concrete event, this miracle.

I think that if Scott’s last paragraph is support for why one would not need empirical verification for a miracle it is possible that he is not distinguishing between God’s Providence, which is always active, and an authentic miracle, which is when His Providence is active through the suspension of physical laws.

I completely agree therefore, that God is always Provident and that when He actively wills someone to recover, even when He uses the secondary efficient causes described by physical laws, it is still God acting as Primary cause.  However, if we say that everything that God actively wills is to be called a miracle then the term has no more meaning and there is no way for reason to be used to nourish faith via miracles.  If this were so, the Church’s long teaching that God affirms the faith through miracles becomes meaningless.

In the end, I think that if Scott is in fact dismissing the importance of empirical verification of miracles, then even though he is right on the majority of what he says, it is likely because he does not take sufficient account of the definition of a miracle, or the phenomenology of faith and its relationship to reason.

I had mentioned that a new school of theology is opening up. Here is the press release that hopefully will be making it’s way to your nearest Catholic News Outlet in the near future:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“St. John Institute of Catholic Thought announces opening of a new school of theology”

Champaign, IL   March 11, 2008 Catholic graduate education is coming to Central Illinois.  St. John Institute of Catholic Thought (ICT), an apostolate within St. John’s Catholic Newman Center, announced today that it will begin offering Master degree programs in theology beginning this fall at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center near the campus of the University of Illinois.

The programs will be offered through the ICT’s new school of theology, which is independent of the university. After applying to the Illinois Board of Higher Education last fall, the school of theology was granted operating authority and degree granting authority for two separate master degrees: a Master of Theological Studies for students wishing to pursue a doctoral degree, and a Master of Arts aimed at those wishing to serve the Church or those wanting to deepen their understanding of their Catholic faith. The degrees will require 48 and 42 hours of coursework, respectively.

The Master programs are a natural extension of the existing academic efforts of St. John Institute of Catholic Thought and St. John’s Catholic Newman Center. “For over 85 years, we have offered for-credit undergraduate courses in Catholic studies through the University of Illinois and Parkland College,” explained Fr. Greg Ketcham, Director and Head Chaplain of the Newman Center. “These graduate level programs will enable us to offer a fuller, more solid Catholic academic formation.”

ICT Director and Senior Fellow, Dr. Kenneth Howell says the school of theology fills a significant void in central Illinois. The closest schools granting master degrees in Catholic theology are nearly 150 miles away. “A student would have to travel to South Bend, Chicago, or St. Louis to find other graduate programs in Catholic theology,” Howell says. He is already aware of several students who plan to begin studies this fall in Champaign.

The faculty of the ICT brings many years of combined experience to the new programs. The ICT faculty includes Dr. Howell, Dr. David Delaney, Associate Director and Fellow of the Institute, and Rev. Christopher Layden, S.T.L., Assistant Chaplain of the Newman Center. Additional faculty members include Dr. Douglas Grandon, a Church historian, and medical ethicist, Joseph Piccione, S.T.L..

In addition to the degree programs, the school of theology also plans to serve the greater diocese by offering certificate programs, including one for those without an undergraduate degree. These certificates will be well suited for catechists and others who want the benefit of the coursework but do not wish to do the additional work required for a degree. Future plans are to extend the school’s reach into Central Illinois by use of remote classrooms where instruction would be provided via video. The timing for the remote classrooms will be based upon obtaining the required funding.

The timing of the new degree offering comes amidst another significant expansion program at the nation’s largest Newman center. St. John’s is currently undergoing a $46M expansion and renovation of the Center which will be complete in August 2008. St. John’s Chapel and Newman Hall – the only Catholic residence hall on a public university campus in the county – will offer over 200,000 square feet of new facilities to better serve students. These expanded facilities will provide the classroom space, expanded library, and administrative offices for the Institute of Catholic Thought.

Admission into the ICT’s school of theology is now underway. More information can be found at www.ictsot.org.

St. John Institute of Catholic Thought is opening a new school of theology in Champaign, IL. You are one of the first to hear about it! The school with offer master degrees and certificate programs in theology with classes beginning this fall. The school will provide a robust formation not only in the breadth of Catholic theology but also a solid formation in the Catholic intellectual tradition. While the school will not be limited to any one particular school of thought, it will have an integrating focus around the liturgy and its connection to the trinitarian structure of creation (does this sound familiar??).

Please help spread the word!