Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among the theological sophisticates these days, a new type of theological politics is starting to gain favor. It’s known, in Britain and Canada at least, as “Red Toryism,” supposedly combining the best virtues of the European conservative tradition with a  concern for the social dimensions of human political and economic culture, a concern that presumably short-circuits the socialist critique of the conservative tradition

The primary exponent of this new theological politics in Britain is Phillip Blond, who was widely considered by pundits before the most recent elections in Britain to be David Cameron’s political guru. Cameron heads the new “conservative” coalition government in Britain. Blond himself is generally associated with the so-called radical orthodoxy of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock which, as David has argued on this blog, is in fact quite radically unorthodox.  The radically (un)orthodox are basically as libertine as it comes in matters sexual, no less than the Corinthians to whom Paul preached conversion.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the new “conservative coalition” in Britain is pushing an internationalist eugenics program that rivals anything that we saw in the 20th century, or among the immediate predecessors to the Cameron government in Britain.

The Anglophone world has been a great source of evil in the world in this regard, for well over a century now. One can hardly imagine anything coming out of this world, operating from within its own nominalist premises, that might shift the balance in a more virtuous direction. The British Empire is not dead, unfortunately. They still have far too much money to work with. One can hardly speak with any more assurance of the American Empire.

Here is the last episode of our 8 part TV and radio series.  To sum it up, perhaps we can say that to have a good death one needs to practice dying now.  You can download the video here.

Here is the 7th segment of our 8 part series on Theology of the Body…

To download, click here.

It is becoming longer and longer between posts, but I haven’t yet decided to call it quits.  As such, here is number 6 in our television/radio series on TOB.  Click here to view (please excuse the lead in…).

Here is the fifth in the Theology of the Body TV/Radio series.  This episode looks at the significance of this theology for ecclesiology. Thoughts?

Click here to view.

Here is the fourth installment of the TV/Radio series we are doing in South Texas.  In it, we try to bring out the significance of the Incarnation, focusing on the fact the Son of God took upon Himself a body.

Click here to view.

Some have asked, so I thought I would pass along to those who might want the warning.  Yes, tonight is the fourth episode in our TV/radio series on Theology of the Body.  If you are not in San Antonio, you can catch it streamed live on Guadalupe Radio Network at 8pm Central.   Select the South Texas option.  If you do happen along to listen, how about giving us a call…we get kind of lonely in the studio all by our lonesomes…

Well, it is kind of a double entendre any way if you are familiar with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  I wanted to share with y’all (I’m back in Texas so I’m allowed) one of the irons I have had in the fire (which is one reason I have been slacking with my posts).  I will be doing an 8 part series on the theology of the body on local Catholic TV and Radio, the latter of which unfortunately for you, is also streamed.  This first series will take John Paul’s work from a little different perspective.  A short description of the series is found below.  The CTSA program description and resources will be found here.  The streaming can be found here (runs at 8pm Central on the Wednesdays noted below; select “listen in English” and then choose “South Texas”).

The popular treatment of Theology of the Body has been focused around the most obvious areas, the promotion of chastity and purity, and to a lesser extent, marriage but I would argue that John Paul II’s theology of the body is a new, complete synthesis of Catholic teaching in the manner of what St. Thomas Aquinas did with his Summa theologiae.  This first series will approach John Paul II’s insights in a manner of a mini-catechism in order to try to illustrate its wide reaching implications.  Here is a summary of the series:

Episode 1 (Mar 10): “Theology of the Mystical Body”

This first episode explains the purpose of the series and how it will progress to include a brief overview of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and its significance for the Church.

Episode 2 (Mar 24): “Know Thyself”

This episode discusses the meaning of man as made in the image of God, emphasizing why understanding the Trinity is essential for understanding what makes us tick and how we ultimately will find our happiness.

Episode 3 (Apr 14): “This Valley of Tears”

This episode explores creation and the Fall and what this means for our personal experience of goodness and of sin.  It looks at how the Fall affects our relationship with God and with others, and what the challenges are for having a fully Christian life of joy.

Episode 4 (Apr 28):  “Jesus’ Body”

This episode looks at the Incarnation Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ from a fresh perspective.  It explains these events in order to highlight their universal significance while at the same time providing insights into the human condition and the meaning of life.

Episode 5 (May 12):  “Christ’s Body”

This episode investigates various doctrines concerning the Church from the perspective of marriage based upon John Paul II’s analysis of Ephesians 5.

Episode 6 (May 26):  “Offer It Up”

This episode explores the significance of the liturgy & the Sacraments from the perspective of the human person and his place in the cosmos.

Episode 7 (Jun 9):  “It’s Not Hard, But It Is Humanly Impossible”

This episode discusses the moral life by looking at the interplay of grace and human action in achieving self-mastery and joy in this life in order to prepare for the next.

Episode 8 (Jun 23):  “Earth in Heaven”

This last episode of the series explains the Last Things from the perspective of what it means to be human; i.e. what the Last Things mean with respect to a body as well as a soul.

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.

Lest it be concluded that I am absolutely oblivious to the nihilism that is present on the contemporary American right, I thought that I should add a new post. There is a clear moral separation between the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right. For the former, it is a settled issue that eugenics, abortion, euthanasia,  the deconstruction of the natural family, and the eradication of religious freedom are indisputable goods to be pursued. The right is generally opposed to all of these, on the level of public policy at any rate, if only for the purely utilitarian reasons of electoral politics.

With that said, the contemporary American right is obviously full of its own, well, nihilists. Take this example. Recently, a 22 year old struggling artist in Ohio died of the H1 N1 virus. As she was striving to be an artist, and possibly just because of the bad economy, her two jobs were not lucrative enough to be able to afford health insurance. Without health insurance, and fearful of the cost of prospective medical treatment, she was reluctant to go to the hospital when her symptoms hit. She eventually went, but by that time it was too late, and she died. It is a tragic story.

Of course, her death has been immediately politicized by the left in the push for health-care reform. But check out this response by Steve Spruiell, representative of the neo-conservative counteresponse, on National Review’s “The Corner”:

When Artists Starve  

A few points regarding this story [the story of the girl's tragic death]:

• The median starting salary for Miami University (Ohio) graduates is $47,100.

• A healthy 22-year-old female in Oxford, Ohio can purchase serviceable health insurance ($30 co-pay for office visits) for $55 a month, according to ehealthinsurance.com.

This young woman’s death is indeed tragic, but it is not an indictment of the U.S. health-care system, cheap left-wing moralizing to the contrary notwithstanding. Many capable young people forgo stable careers in order to try their hands at starving-artistry. The rest of us are under no obligation to subsidize that choice.

This response seems utterly soulless, in the manner of the master Ayn Rand herself. Did Mr. Spruiell take account of our economy? Does he realize how difficult it is for newcomers in the job market right now to find jobs that he would approve of? And what of the pursuit of art as a career? So many pundits on the “neo-conservative” right have no concern whatsoever for any pursuit in life that does not involve wealth creation or being established in a sinecure as a policy-wonk-masquerading-as-a-philosopher. If they had their way, there would be nothing beautiful in the realm of human culture. We would all be buried in a dystopia of brick and steel with no art or religion to lift our spirits, spending our whole lives toiling in meaningless work.

The left is no better, what with their transvaluation of the transcendentals of being, giving us such marvelous testimonies to human artistic creativity as the “Piss Christ,” and whatnot. Nevertheless, to see the picture of this beautiful young woman, taken out of life tragically, and to respond the way Mr. Spruiell has done, is indicative of a nihilism on the right that is simply a mirror image of that of their political counterparts.

We pray for the repose of the soul of Kimberly Young.

Perhaps the most obvious example of moral distance between the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right is the Singerian, Malthusian, anti-humanism granted ideological prestige by the left. Such anti-humanism certainly has a prominent place in the Barack Obama administration: in the persons of John Holdren and Cass Sunstein and the myriad radical abortionists appointed by him.

The most recent example of this is Cass Sunstein. At What’s Wrong With the World, they have engaged in a nice conversation on this man’s radical equivocations on the dignity of human personhood. A very sharp contributor by the name of Lydia McGrew has shown what’s wrong with Cass Sunstein’s idea to grant the legal right to sue, and thus to give the status of personhood under the law, to animals.

A “paleo-conservative” by the name of Maximos has tried to refute Lydia’s concerns on the same blog. If you read the combox of Maximos’s post, you’ll see that Lydia very summarily handles his “defense,” if we can call it that, of Sunstein.

The whole debate between these two contributors on that blog points to the problematic political stance that has been taken by “paleo-conservatives” since the Bush years. In their desire to oppose the Iraq war, and so forth, they have become more sympathetic to the contemporary left than to the “neo-conservative” right.

Now, granted all the problems with the “neo-conservative” right, it is exceedingly problematic to see a moral equivalence between the neoconservatives (who have given us decent supreme court appointments in the past 8 years, and who make the likes of Leon Kass — rather than Peter Singer — public voices of moral authority) and the new left.

It all hinges on the nature of the person, as David has been right to show. What is often unnoticed with the contemporary left is their uniform tendency to diminish the onotological status of the human person. Indeed, the reductionist programs of research into the brain in the contemporary academy are fed by and feed the political programs of contemporary leftism. Peter Singer is no anomaly in the contemporary academy. And his view of the person is at home on the left much more so than on the right — David Frum, or Rod Dreher, or David Brooks notwithstanding.

The Barack Obama administration has, in fact, given us an instructive example on this point. Cass Sunstein’s legal theory in defense of animal rights shows that the person does not have for him  a unique, unrepeatable, ontological dignity by virtue of his embodiment of a rational and free nature.

Two things have happened in the realm of education recently that bring out the point that I have made incessantly on this blog: there is not the remotest moral equivalence between the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right.

One of the things to which I refer made the news today — the scary video of children singing paeans to the American Messiah-in-Chief. It has been much discussed. You can see it here. Basically, we see in this video an example of demagoguery and secular messianism of the most frightening variety.

The second, less reported thing to which I refer involves a recent court decision in New Hampshire forcing a young girl out of homeschooling because it was deemed by the court that her Christian education was making her too religiously rigid:

In New Hampshire, a 12 year old home schooled girl was ordered into public school because her religious beliefs were too ‘sincere’ and ‘rigid’. 

The girl was home schooled by her mother, and her parents were divorced.  Her father was against homeschooling because he thought it would interfere with her social development.

When a court renegotiated the terms of parenting for the young girl, the judge ordered her to attend public schools for the 2009-2010 school year.  The court’s Guardian ad Litem said that the girl lacked some ” youthful characteristics,” partly because “she appeared to reflect her mother’s rigidity on questions of faith.”

The court stated that the girl ”would be best served by exposure  to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior and cooperation in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs.”

We have in these two juxtaposed cases examples of what I have been writing about for months. The contemporary American left, in good Stalinist fashion, wishes to obliterate all pre-political communities that stand in the way of the State’s complete control over the individual’s life. This means especially for them that all parental and religious authority over children has to be abolished for the sake of assimilating them to the technocracy of the mechanized State. Obama, as the figurehead of the State, becomes the personified force of technocratic providence, rightly to be liturgized by little children as the One who will bring fairness and justice to the land.

Ooops: I had to remove most of this post due to incoherence. It was written too late at night.

Thank God for Glenn Beck. Really. If it were not for his television show, Barack Obama’s radicalism would still largely go without comment. No other reputable journalist has brought the true nature of Obama’s ideology to the light of day. Thanks largely to Glenn Beck (he’s the first to have put the incriminating video on television and to have devoted whole shows to it), ACORN is on the verge of extinction. Thanks largely to Glenn Beck, the National Endowment of the Arts is not going to become an out-and-out propaganda arm for the Obama administration in the near future. Thanks largely to Glenn Beck, we know of the true nature of the radicals whom Obama has placed into positions of inluence in his administration — including the self-avowed communist, Van Jones. Where is the rest of the journalistic community to be found on these vital issues? They are in absentia.

Yet, the pious Christians at Beliefnet — namely, Mark Shea and Rod Dreher — have decided in their own journalistic wisdom that Beck is bad for the republic. They are, of course, repeating a meme that is being endlessly repeated by the journalistic community at large. They have even gone so far as to try to repudiate Beck by pointing out his reliance upon one of the books by Mormon anti-communist Cleon Skousen. It should be needless to say, however, that Skousen’s views are far less whacky than, for instance, the Malthusian anti-humanism of Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, who has in the past advocated compulsory mass abortion and sterilization. It always amazes me that presumably Christian pundits fail to acknowledge how thoroughly absurd philosophical materialism is, and all political philosophies built upon it. And, by the way, neither Skousen (who is dead), nor Beck (who is but a television and radio mouthpiece), have the power to inluence public policy, as Holdren does.

The criticisms by Shea and Dreher are, in fact, largely irrelevant. Each has failed to acknowledge the importance of Beck’s demonstrations of the insidious nature of Obama’s commitments. Neither of them — and Dreher far less so than Shea — has taken the full measure of Obama’s radicalism.

I went through all of this prior to the election, but now might be an opportune time to repeat it. Barack Obama and his minions are committed to transgressing natural, pre-political societies that impede the direct authority of the State over the individual. And, by the way, they can see the human person, the individual, as nothing more than the sum of his bodily, economic relations. This is standard policy and anthropology for the left, and if it were not for Beck’s loud mouth (and I say that in a complimentary way), Obama might have proceeded much farther along his transgressive path than he has been able to do so far. And who knows how far the left might be able to take their anti-humanist fantasies if they usurp control of the nation’s health-care system?

Obama’s left is firmly, joyously committed to the extension of abortion rights, euthanasia, contraception (read: eugenics), and the deconstruction of the natural family. It is committed to the repudiation by the force of law of any and all religious authority that contradicts its moral ideology (see my next post, regarding homeschooling). The anthropology of the left is firmly rooted in a de-humanizing materialism that reduces the human person to just another natural object in the world — like a rock, or a tree, or a body of water. This is why politicians on the left have no trouble — as Barack Obama’s latest appointment, Cass Sunstein, has shown — with any of the grave insults to human integrity that I have already mentioned, as well as with human cloning, or embryonic stem cell research, or scientific experimentations of any kind, or enforced, coercive water and food rationing for the sake of environmental concerns, etc.

And why does Rod Dreher in particular seem to be oblivious to the impending danger of giving our healthcare system over to people with these radically reductionistic views? And how can Mark Shea draw a moral equivalence between the water-boarding of enemy combattants and a political ideology firmly committed to the destruction of human lives that pose no bodily threat to the population at large? (In a future post on Reinhold Schneider, a hero of Hans Urs von Balthasar, I hope to show the millenarian, essentially Protestant ideology, that supports equivocations of these sorts).

No, Glenn Beck is not the problem in our republic. He is no intellectual, and he is no confessional Christian. And he might very well have a mental breakdown in the very near future. But he poses far less of a threat to the republic than those who deny the spiritual dignity of the human person, and who have the unimpeded force of law to enforce coercively their anti-humanism. The problem in our republic is much more that the journalists or journalistically-minded pundits, deadened in their moral sensibilities, are oblivious to the true nature of the of the contemporary left.

American Papist is reporting that the E.E.O.C. has found Belmont Abbey College discriminatory toward women in removing coverage for oral contraception from its health care package. This is a troubling story on a couple of levels. On the surface, it is just one more example of the socialist desire to eliminate religious freedom, and free association in general, in favor of statist programs of eugenics, and so forth. It exemplifies as well the fight that the Church has now in this country against the political regime of death, which is just going to worsen over time as long as the Democrats are in power.

But on another level, it would be inappropriate to think of Belmont Abbey College as an innocent victim in this. The discrimination complaint against the college was brought to the E.E.O.C. by faculty members, including a prominent, stupid, out-and-proud atheist psychologist — the head of the psychology department! She’s a mind-numbed feminist, of course (whom I won’t name), who thinks of the human person as just another biological system, and she teaches her students to think likewise. And she is representative of much of the faculty that they’ve hired in the past few decades!

For 3 decades or so, Belmont Abbey College did not care a wit for Catholic identity, when it came to the rubber hitting the road in its faculty hiring decisions. In recent years, they’ve put a new administration in place to try and clean things up, but it is questionable whether such ships as these can ever be brought back into port once they’ve gone past a certain point: as the new E.E.O.C. decision makes clear. They are going to have to make a tough decision. Keep going, and violate Church teachings, or close the doors of the college. Of course, the monastery, itself dwindling drastically and aging in numbers, has its share of monks who are perfectly aligned with the recalcitrant faculty. Rahner’s theology is never far from the lips of these people, and the liturgy there is like a fly stuck in 1970s amber.

The Abbot once told the community of the college that if push came to shove, he would close the doors of the college. Well, his own monastic community is responsible for letting things get to this point.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so hard on the psychology professor whom I just mentioned. After all, she is only doing what it is in her nature to do. If you don’t want to want to be eaten by a lion, don’t let one into your home!

For fans of Fr. Don Calloway, you will be interested in knowing that he has a new website.  Go take a look.

Update: Here is Amanda’s interview on Guadalupe Radio if you missed the program.

Listen to Guadalupe Radio Monday (tomorrow) at 12 noon! 89.7 FM KJMA in San Antonio. There is streaming online.

Amanda Pirih, a missionary and campus director at NYU with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) will be on Guadalupe Radio at 12 noon tomorrow!  Please listen in to learn more about this great apostolate!

The mission of FOCUS is to combat the culture of death that pervades today’s college campuses and to bring to Catholic students, the light of Christ and the truth of His Catholic Church.  Amanda will share with you the success stories that are happening every academic year on the 45 college campuses that FOCUS now serves and the sacrifices that young men and women are happily making every year to ensure that the truth is now being preached in places that it have for too long, been silent.  Amanda gave up a lucrative engineering career to become a missionary. Please  Listen to Amanda and see if you might be interested in helping her and FOCUS to carry the Church’s mission to the nation’s future leaders.

If you would like to help support Amanda, see here.

From June Ely:

I am sending along a link to a website that has all of the music from the Sacred Music Colloquium in Chicago last month. These live recordings are from the Mass with composers such as Victoria, Brahms, Palestrina, etc..

and new up and coming composers such as Kevin Allen. They have asked us to evangelize with our beautiful Catholic musical tradition, so if you choose to post this info, please ask people to download it, burn it, give it out:

Here is a link to a short YouTube video telling about the Sacred MusicColloquium:

I continue now with my posts on why philosophical materialism and, by implication, contemporary atheism, undermines human reason and science. I shall explore in this and the next couple of posts the reality of formal causality in nature, which is implicitly or explicitly denied by philosophical proponents of the proposition that all that there is to know can be known by modern science.

The concept of forms or ideas is not understood in our day by most educated people, so a bit of historical exegesis is necessary. One has to go all the way back to Plato, following Socrates, to get at the origin of the concept of forms and of formal causality. I shall enlist the aid of the Catholic philosopher and Lonergan scholar Hugo A. Meynell, in his essay “How Right Plato Was,” [In Meynell's Redirecting Philosophy, University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 241-51] to briefly bring out salient features of Plato’s doctrine and its contemporary relevance.

Meynell says that it is characteristic of Platonic forms:

1) that they correspond to universal terms; 2) that they are realities as opposed to appearances; 3) that they are intelligible as opposed to sensible; 4) that they make knowledge possible; 5) that they are permanent as opposed to changeable, ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’; 6) that mathematics as well as ethics and aesthetics have to do with their apprehension.

These characterizations require a bit of unpacking. To say with Plato, as in points one and two, that forms are realities that correspond to universal terms is to say that there are objective realities that correspond to predicates applied to many subjects. So, we speak of “virtue,” or “health,” or “good,” applying these terms to many subjects and assuming that they have common or universal meanings. These universal meanings, according to Plato, correspond to formal realities. For instance, we say of a man or a woman that he or she is healthy. Does health have a completely different meaning for each of them, or does it have a common meaning? Plato answers that though health is realized in different subjects to different degrees, there is a common meaning to the term “health” and an objective reality that is common to or shared by all who are healthy. There is an objective reality or “form” corresponding to the universal term “health.” The same can be said of “good,” or “justice,” or “virtue,” or “beauty.” These are all terms with common meanings that correspond to objective realities or forms that individual things in the material world, the world of sense, can share in or participate in to varying degrees.

Needless to say, such universal realities as “health” or “virtue” or “goodness” are beyond the capacity of science to discover. These are objective realities, in the Platonic view, but science cannot prove or disprove their existence or scientifically demonstrate their meaning. They are, as said in point three above, intelligible realities, but they are discoverable by theological and philosophical reason not by scientific reason. Also, as intelligible realities rather than sensual or material, they can be shared in by individual beings.

What if we were to deny that there are such things as formal realities corresponding to universal terms? This is what the late medieval nominalists, following William of Ockham, did at the Catholic universities in England (Oxford and Cambridge). The British Empiricists would bring this nominalist tradition of thought to its fruition, ending in the skepticism of Hume. Plato was right to see, as in point four above, that the objective existence of forms is necessary for human knowledge. And Hume, assuming the rejection of forms as part and parcel of his Anglophone tradition, was right to see that his tradition of thought should end in skepticism toward all knowledge.

This gets at the fifth characteristic of forms mentioned above: they must be eternal and unchangeable, otherwise their meaning would be fleeting and so equivocal that they could not be known. If there are no “supersensual,”  eternal forms of goodness, truth, virtue, beauty, justice, health, etc., these realities could only be ephemeral constructs of our minds. They could have no set and discernable meaning. In reducing reality to that which is available only to fleeting sensory experience, a reduction that is essential to the nominalism of Anglophone thought, Hume had to come to skepticism. I have described Hume’s basic position enough now in this series of posts that I don’t need to reiterate it here, except to say that he failed to understand that sensory objects are “in-formed,” and so can correspond to a universal intelligibility that we can understand by intelligent reflection on our sensory experience.

So, there are objective correlates, “forms,” to universal terms (though not, as Plato realized, to all universal terms). Science cannot discover the forms that are correlated to terms that are related to ethics or aesthetics. Only theology or philosophy can do that. Only theology or philosophy, then, can discuss in a meaningful fashion goodness, or virtue, or truth, or justice, or beauty. But is science absolutely powerless to discover the reality of forms? Not when it comes to the sixth characteristic that Meynell describes: the mathematical dimension.

Indeed, science only “works” because it presumes the reality of that which transcends the sensory and the material. It  presumes the existence of universal logical laws (or forms), and the explanations that science provides are not complete until mathematical “form-alization” is achieved. Science ultimately, contra to the myth of modern Anglophone empiricism, deals with ideal meanings which correspond to human intellectual judgments applied to the parsing of our sensory experience.

Plato realized all of this long ago. In his Republic, he issued a criticism of the sciences whose essential insight, as described by his modern commentator, A.E. Taylor, is still valid for us today. Taylor describes this essential insight: “in all the sciences the objects we are studying are objects we have to think but cannot perceive by any of our senses. Yet the sciences throughout direct attention to these objects which are, in fact, forms, by appealing in the first instance to sense” (quoted by Meynell, p. 243).

Many people presume that science is just an inductive, measuring, taking-a-look-at-sensory-things that leads to technologically useful information. But that is not what science is at all. Science discovers ideal meanings through the a priori hypothetical postulation of ideal concepts whose explanatory value for material causality is tested and verified or falsified (this is somewhat Popperian, though Meynell himself is not afraid to invoke a modified Popperian view). So, science can give such positive in-form-ation as the chemical structure of water, or the atomic weight of silicon. These scientifically described realities are, in fact, eternal, ideal realities instantiated in particular, individual compounds or elements. The chemical structure of water is invariant and would be what it is even if there were no water; likewise, the atomic weight of silicon. These descriptions correspond to ideal, supersensual realities, even though their explanatory value is realized through intelligent description of the sensory-perceived action of chemical compounds. But isn’t this idea of supersensual forms corresponding to atomic weight or chemical structure abstract and unreal? Exactly where do these ideal meanings exist? They cannot exist in physical nature, merely, because they do not require the existence of physical nature in order to have their ideal or formal reality. They cannot exist in the human mind, merely, because they are more than human mental constructs. Where, then, precisely, do they exist, and how? I shall address these sorts of questions in the last post in this series.

The standard inductive account of science is historically and philosophically inaccurate. It fails to recognize that the entities of science transcend direct access to our senses. Meynell himself gives a description of the process of scientific investigation, more true-to-fact than standard empiricist or materialist theses, that it is worth quoting in full:

…the scientific community has arrived at a peculiar conception of things in various fields. What is characteristic of this conception? (1) It is in terms of entities and properties which, while they are (at least provisionally) verified in experience, are not themselves direct objects of experience. Newtonian mass is not exactly the weight you feel when you lift an object, but it is logically related to a ‘force’ and an ‘acceleration’ which similarly are not directly perceptible; and no sensation, or imaginative picture based on sensation, could really be of a photon with its paradoxical part-wave part-particle nature. And even the child’s conception of an elephant as a large animal with trunk and huge ears is hardly the same as the zoologist’s conception of it, as member of a species related more or less closely with other mammalian species, and having evolved in morphology and habit to survive within a certain range of environments. The elephant of the zoologist, scarcely less than the photon of the physicist, is not so much a direct object of experience as an intellectual construction rather comprehensively verified in experience; one might in both cases, with only a little poetic licence, say that the entities and properties concerned can be grasped only “with the eyes of the mind.” (2) It is plausible (here a subjective idealist would disagree) to say that the aspects of the world so envisaged constitute the real world, or at least tend to constitute it (since scientific theory is in a constant state of revision), in contrast to the merely sense-related world of ordinary experience. We may say that by means of scientific inquiry we come increasingly to know things as they really are, as really related to one another, “in their causes” as Aristotle would say, as opposed to merely as related to ourselves. (3) It seems to follow from this last point that the existence of such things and properties makes knowledge properly speaking possible, if by ‘knowledge’ one means well-grounded apprehension of the truth about what really is so. (4) Mathematics (at least in the case of physics, chemistry, or astronomy) is par excellence the discipline by way of which these entities and properites may be grasped. It is by now a cliche, of course, that “mathematics is the language of science.” In each of these four respects, it seems evident that the whole development of science constitutes a massive vindication of Platonism.

Of course, Meynell is not unaware that modern science is, in fact, in its origin the off-shoot of the revival of Christian Platonism in the Renaissance. But that is beside the point for the purposes of this post. The main issue to be emphasized here is that science cannot work without connecting to “supersensual,” formal entities. And its descriptions are not complete until they express formal, invariant, “supersensual” meaning.

Science is not the only path to formal realities, as I have said. It deals with mathematical forms, but mathematical forms are powerless to encompass biological explanation or to account for such realities made present to human experience as the objects of moral and artistic endeavor. In the next post, I shall consider the biological aspect of forms, which brings Aristotle rather than Plato to the foreground, and requires us to consider forms in their causal efficacy and not simply in their bare reality.

A final post in this series will consider a cosmological argument for the existence of God that starts from acceptance, based on intelligent consideration of empirical experience, of the reality of forms.

The noted Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, has recently published a wonderful book of Christian apologetics, entitled Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. In it, he takes on the so-called “new atheists,” Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, et. al. It is, as anyone who knows about Hart’s work would expect, brilliantly written and engaging to read. Hart takes apart the atheists precisely at the point at which they are the most vulnerable: on the level of historical knowledge.

Usually, when the topic of the new atheism comes up, it is assumed that the battle that these intrepid, self-proclaimed enemies of religion are fighting is the age-old one of science versus religion. It is tempting, in countering their propoganda, to bring out arguments drawn from natural theology for the existence of God. It would seem, on the surface, that cosmological arguments for God’s existence might break their spell of scientism.

But Hart does not bother with natural theology. Such arguments, he realizes, are quite beside the point. These new atheists are not so much sharp-minded partners in a life or death debate, genuinely open to philosophical questioning, but symbols of a decrepit culture that has proudly forgotten its past. These men have no idea where they or their ideas come from, and they really could not care less. They are not proponents of scientific wisdom who see religion as a threat to knowledge. One might actually have some sympathy for them if they were. No. They are not intellectual worthies. They are, instead, men who fairly beseech us to forget about our historical origins.  

With the true nature of these erstwhile locutioners of religion  in mind, Hart focuses his discussion largely on the historical plane.  How else could one deal, for instance, with a boastful and anti-scholarly journalist, Christopher Hitchens, drunkenly claiming that “religion poisons everything?” Is such a man truly open to philosophical debate or theological knowledge? Perhaps the best thing to do is to pound him over the head with the hammer of his own ignorance of history. Hart wields the hammer, but he does so with a deft touch.

After all, history teaches, contrary to Hitchens’s bombastic jeremiads, that religion is the root of all culture and civilization. Without religion there would have developed no art, music, poetry, architecture, science, or political organization. Were all of these poisoned from their inception? Do the monuments of antiquity hold absolutely no beauty or wisdom?

All ancient cultures and civilizations were established on a cultic, ritual basis. Every human activity was referred to liturgy and seen in terms of its sacral significance. Modern culture and civilization likewise have a cultic basis. They are, of course, based on the liturgical life of the Church. Every positive, human value of our modern social existence that we take for granted, from our science to our modern sense of the inherent dignity of human life, the very foundation of our modern political order, is a vestigial presence of the Church’s cultic influence.

Hart brings out the Christian basis of modern civilization in his book. He does so with great style and verve. But he sounds a troubling note: we should not, he insists, be too hasty in attributing modern civilization to the Church. After all, he argues, modern civilization is largely barbaric.

How does he reconcile these claims, namely, his claim that the Church is the foundation of our culture and his claim that modern civilization might rightly be thought of as barbaric?

I hope to bring out the intricate balancing of these themes in Hart’s book in a series of posts, time permitting. I hope to do a summary of each chapter. I’ll start in the next day or two with chapter one, “The Gospel of Unbelief.” It is an enjoyable book, highly recommended, and I hope that my little posts might do it some justice.