Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

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.

A couple of things to pass along:

First, apparently our feed addresses have changed since our sever crash week before last so if you use Bloglines or one of the other aggregators you may need to reestablish our feed address.  Sorry about that.

Also, I would like to pass along the request from the Cardinal Newman Society to sign the petition against Barack Obama’s being honored by the University of Notre Dame.  The intransigence of Fr. Jenkins is unfortunate but I think that this is an important opportunity to draw the attention of Catholic Institutions to their obligations as such.  Here is the e-mail CNS is sending out with the particulars:

Dear Friend:

Thank you for signing the petition at NotreDameScandal.com, opposing the University of Notre Dame’s planned honor to President Barack Obama, despite his dangerous record on life issues.

More than 264,000 Catholics have signed the petition at NotreDameScandal.com, including many priests, Notre Dame families, college presidents and even some bishops!

But The Cardinal Newman Society needs your help again… to recruit MORE signers!

Notre Dame still has not yielded, and we need more Catholics to stand up and be counted.

Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has urged faithful Catholics to “do what you are supposed to be doing: to call, to email, to write letters, to express what’s in your heart about this”!

Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, a champion of Catholic identity, has specifically urged Catholics to sign the petition at  NotreDameScandal.com!

At this stage, and in addition to prayer, the single most important thing that the lay faithful can do THIS WEEK is to drive the number of signers on the petition even higher!

The petition has had a dramatic impact.  Nearly every media article and broadcast about the Notre Dame scandal – at MSNBC, FOX News, EWTN, TIME magazine, U.S. News & World Report, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and more – has pointed to the LARGE NUMBER of protesters at  NotreDameScandal.com!

And how often to we see nearly three dozen bishops so publicly decry scandal in the Church?

These bishops – including leading Cardinals and Archbishops – have declared Notre Dame’s planned honor a “travesty,” “unconscionable,” “indefensible,” “a public act of disobedience to the Bishops,” and “seemingly without regard for the mission of the Catholic Church in the United States“!

Please, take a few seconds to forward this e-mail to at least five friends and family, and encourage them to sign the petition at NotreDameScandal.com TODAY!

You see, at 7:00 a.m. Monday morning we are going to print the first wave of petitions, and what a statement it would make if Father Jenkins and the bishops (including some of our friends in Rome) saw that we had 300,000, 350,000 or even 400,000 Catholics demanding that Notre Dame live up to its Holy mission!

As much as pro-abortion Catholics want to make this a partisan issue, you and I know that at its core this scandal is about Catholics and Catholic institutions standing up as a witness for life and for our Holy, catholic and apostolic faith at this moment in history when it is under constant attack.

Please, it is critical that we get as many people as possible to sign the petition this week!

And you can do something else to help out: go to NotreDameScandal.com, click on the “Donate Now” button on the left, and send The Cardinal Newman Society even a small (tax-deductible) contribution.  Or simply click here.

My entire staff and I have devoted nearly every hour to this protest since the moment the scandal broke, and to be honest with you this effort is breaking our budget. If necessary, The Cardinal Newman Society will go broke to help stop the Notre Dame scandal… but I hope that is not God’s plan for us.

Would you please consider a gift of $5, $15, $30, or even $100 or more to help us in our 16-year fight combating scandals on Catholic campuses and working to renew Catholic higher education? Thank you!

May God bless you for your faithful witness to the truth, and may He inspire Father Jenkins to withdraw this scandalous honor!  Please keep watching NotreDameScandal.com for the latest breaking information on this story.

Yours in Christ,

Patrick J. Reilly

President, The Cardinal Newman Society

P.S. First priority: PLEASE HURRY, help us recruit more signers at NotreDameScandal.com TODAY!  And if you can help us with even a small donation, we would gratefully welcome you as a member of The Cardinal Newman Society and a partner in one of the most exciting projects in the Catholic Church today – the renewal of faithful Catholic education!

. . . I hope.  Did you miss us?

Shelray has been working with our host to get us back on-line.  It turns out that our shared server crashed over the weekend and it took them a couple of days to rebuild it.  It also took them time to realize, I think, that it was a faulty server and not our account that had been causing the CPU to run amok.  If it happens again, I suppose we will be looking for a new host.

Any way, we will get back to posting shortly.

For those who visit us regularly, if there are any such souls, you will have noticed C-L-S has been down all day.  You will also notice that our site has lost several of our recent posts along with a host of comments.  It is not exactly clear what happened but something ran wild eating up our CPU allocation.  We were not able to gain access to the site so our host provider started deleting files until the problem was resolved.  Well the problem is now resolved sans a few posts that probably will not be missed by anyone.  Thanks for your patience.

A story is making the rounds that Barack Obama made reference, during the campaign, to the importance of the medieval monk Joachim of Fiore, whom he apparently said was “a master of contemporary civilization.” Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Pontifical Household, responding to these glowing references by the president to Joachim, has dismissed Obama’s references by denouncing Joachim as heretical. To speak of Joachim, whose theology was one of the sources of Marxism, as a heretic is indeed appropriate, as his writings (unlike those of, say, Von Balthasar) have been condemned by papal decree.

It stands to reason that Barack would speak glowingly of one of his spiritual forerunners, though one wonders who among Barack’s entourage dug up the name of Joachim. Barack is a technocrat, not an intellectual or a scholar. There is no reason to think that he has much grasp of the genealogy of his own ideas. Surely there must have been some liberation theologian out there who suggested bringing up the name, in order that Barack might continue his ruse of belonging to the Christian heritage.

But it is quite intriguing that the medieval monk’s name should come up before the journalistic class at this time. Barack Obama is still accorded the status of deity on much of the world stage, though that will probably diminish as events turn for the worse. Still, Obama’s glorified, secular messianism stands in stark contrast to the crucifying mission of Peter, carried out in the person of Benedict XVI, who is suffering slings and arrows from all quarters, and most of all from within the very Church that it is his divine mandate to shepherd.

We may not be in a final apocalyptic age, awaiting the imminent final battle of Good and Evil. But we seem very well to be in an age that is a type of the final apocalypse, a type of the final revelation or inbreaking of the Kingdom of God in the Second and Glorious coming of Christ. We seem to be in the midst of epochal transformation. Even academes, secular and Christian postmodernists alike, have been telling us something along these lines for decades. Either way, though, whether the transformation be definitive or exemplary, the Church will emerge from the ashes of a dead secularism.

Joachim’s vision is the precursor to the vision of Barack Obama, wherein history is seen as a movement of immanent spirit, transformed into a mythos of secular progress.

Benedict XVI’s vision, by contrast, has been, from the very beginning of his theological career, oriented to the overcoming of Joachim’s distortion of history as coming to a culmination without Christ and the Church. Few people realize that Benedict’s doctoral dissertation on Saint Augustine, and his habilitation thesis on Saint Bonaventure, were both repudiations of Joachimism, with its propensity to degenerate into secular messianism. The Marxist influence on Christian theology was being felt even when Benedict was a student, and he delved into the historical sources that might enable him to combat the influence. These studies by Benedict form the basis for his important book on eschatology, which he has called the most thoroughly researched treatise that he has ever written, and for his encyclical “Spe Salvi.”

Benedict XVI and Barack Obama are starkly contrasting figures: they could not be moreso. Benedict stands for a vision of history that sees all things in their relationship to Christ. He is a theologian par excellence of divine grace, of the Mystical Body of Christ, and of two cities. He knows well the lessons of the twentieth century, the grandchild of the French Revolution (itself a remote godchild of Joachim), the most violent century in human history. He knows that there can be no hope and no future without the grace of Christ, poured out through the sacraments of His Church, and faith in what He has revealed to us.

Barack Obama stands for a vision of history that absorbs Christ into dialectical process, that absorbs the divine nature into man, that extols the delusory progress of seemingly untethered human freedom, where freedom is misconstrued as “choice.” There is little reason to wonder why Hans Kung could wistfully express in public that he would rather have Barack Obama as pope than Benedict XVI. How many Catholics view Obama’s voice as more authoritative than Benedict XVI’s?

Benedict’s papacy represents a definitive overcoming of Joachim’s dialectical distortion of God’s work in history. Barack Obama’s presidency represents perhaps a last, violent, clinging to or grasping at the Joachimite vision. Barack has the capacity to plunge us, perhaps unwittingly, back into the genocidal barbarism of the twentieth century, if he is not careful. Why should not a return to twentieth century Marxian ideas on the economic, social, and political order not lead to the same brutalizing outcomes?

Pray for the Holy Father!

There is a very interesting, or so it seems, book slated to be published soon by T & T Clarke on Von Balthasar. T & T Clarke has a blog, and they have put an excerpt up of the book on-line. The excerpt is quite intriguing: apparently, the book’s author sees the debate about Balthasar as a debate concerning, to some extent, competing Thomisms. I think that sounds about right. I did a dissertation on another, less controversial (for traditionalists), “nouvelle theologie” figure, and I came to the conclusion that he was less neo-patristic (as it may at first seem in reading him) and more Gilsonian Thomist. The same might very well be true of Balthasar, with whom my person of study was good friends. They were both highly critical of the emergence of a totalizing philosophy from out of the early modern scholastic tradition. They both thought that a deeper reading of Thomas does not lead to the condoning of philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline. The guy that I did my dissertation on did not go the Balthasarian route in regard to the kenotic doctrine of Christ’s sacrificial death. But, in many other respects, their theological perspectives cohered. So, I can see this author’s point.

I have no interest in defending Balthasar beyond rescuing him from charges of heresy (or “tending to heresy”) or from those who see him as a scandal to the Church. The reason that I am so inclined to defend him in this regard is because a defense of Balthasar from these charges is a defense of Benedict XVI — whom I view it as my Catholic obligation to defend. Balthasar was so influential to Ratzinger, though Ratzinger is said to be critical of Balthasar’s fascination with Adrienne von Speyer, that one cannot so absolutely call Balthasar’s work into question, as heresy or as scandal, without raising doubts about the theological competence of the Holy Father.

So, forgive me those of you who happen upon this blog who have no interest in intra-ecclesial squabbling, but here is the excerpt:

Balthasar and the Resurgence of Traditional Catholicism

Because Seth, in a previous post, appears perpetually insistent that Von Balthasar, whose theology has been lauded by both JP II and Benedict XVI, would have been a scandal as cardinal because he embraced theological positions that are “heretical or tending to heresy,” I thought that I’d cut and paste an important post from the First Things website by Russell Reno, one of the better young theologians in the Church in America, who teaches at Creighton. The post briefly summarizes Paul Griffiths’s important article from Pro Ecclesia regarding the infamous Pitstick-Oakes debate. In short, Reno seems to agree with Oakes and Griffiths and JP II and Benedict XVI that Balthasar’s theology was not “heretical or tending to heresy,” but that we should recognize, in theological debate, functional categories for orthodoxy, a recognition that has become problematic for post-Conciliar theologians. I would concur with that assessment, but recognize as well that a theologian’s full body of work has to be taken into consideration, as well as his basic intention: Does he desire to think with the mind of the Church? Is he open to correction by the Magisterium? Will he recant specific positions deemed heretical if it is demonstrated that they are so?

Readers will no doubt remember the recent heated exchange in the pages of First Things. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick summarized her analysis of Balthasar’s provocative and dramatic (and by her reading unorthodox) vision of the depths of the paschal mystery. Balthasar scholar Edward Oakes, S.J., rose to defend the orthodoxy of the great Swiss theologian, adducing a cloud of witnesses on his behalf, not least of whom is the current pope. Then there was a counter-response, followed by a counter-counter-response. And did I mention the cascade of letters?

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of dust was kicked up. We shouldn’t be surprised. The passions of faith, magisterial authority, theological speculation: The mix has always been volatile. Truth matters, and the truth about Christ matters most of all.

Enter Paul Griffiths. The current issue of the theological journal Pro Ecclesia features a helpful essay by Griffiths, a Duke professor and First Things contributor: “Is There a Doctrine of the Descent into Hell?” (Summer 2008). With his usual care, Griffiths assesses the main claim about the orthodoxy of Balthasar’s theology put forward by Alyssa Lyra Pitstick in Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell (Eerdmans, 2007).

Griffiths brackets the thorny question of how to interpret Balthasar, whose vivid biblical imagery and brilliant conceptual formulations do not lend themselves to easy summary. His focus is formal. He wishes only to query whether or not there is a magisterial teaching on Christ’s descent that can be used to assess the orthodoxy of Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Griffiths focuses on two elements of Pitstick’s distillation of the tradition. One has to do with the purpose of Christ’s descent, while the other has to do with the mode. By Pitstick’s reckoning, the Church teaches that Christ’s descent was to “the limbo of the Fathers,” which is to say, to the patriarchs of the Old Testament, in order to liberate them. Moreover, this descent was “glorious” and involved no suffering on Christ’s part.

There can be no doubt that Balthasar’s own theology of Holy Saturday teaches otherwise. Inspired by the mystical visions of Adrienne von Speyr, Balthasar developed an extraordinarily vivid account of Christ’s descent into hell. Instead of entering hell in triumphant splendor so as to rescue the Israelites of old whose faith was awaiting completion, Balthasar envisions the crucified Son of God as a depth charge of divine life tossed into the abyss of dissolution. The more deeply the Son sinks into death, the more profoundly does the eventual, inevitable, and triumphant explosion of divine life reverberate.

So what are we to make of the obvious differences? Balthasar has Christ descending to what really amounts to the metaphysical depths of nothingness, while, according to Pitstick, the tradition teaches that Christ descends to “the limbo of the Fathers.” Balthasar goes to great lengths to dramatize the agony of separation as the dead Son descends ever farther from the everlasting life of the Father, and again the tradition seems to go in a different direction, emphasizing the invulnerable, triumphant divinity shared between Father and Son.

But hold on. Griffiths searches magisterial documents, and he finds that the term “the limbo of the Fathers” occurs only in a text by Pius VI from 1784. As he notes, “The term is not found in the 1992 Catechism, nor in the Catechism of the Council of Trent.” So, it turns out that “the limbo of the Fathers” may have a fine theological pedigree, but it has no obvious or stable place in the Catholic hierarchy of truth. In short, the idea that Christ descends to “the limbo of the Fathers” is part of a venerable Catholic theological tradition that invites reflection, discussion, and debate rather than compels assent.

The same holds for Pitstick’s claim that the Church’s magisterium teaches that Christ’s descent was glorious and without suffering. As Griffiths notes, Christ’s work in overcoming the power of the devil is surely glorious, and calling it so “is deeply rooted in that tradition.” “But,” he continues, “the idea that calling the descent glorious excludes suffering from it, I take to be on much less solid ground.” Aside from a passage from the Catechism of the Council of Trent, he observes that “there is nothing else in the tradition of which I am aware (or of which Pitstick is aware: if she had been she would have told us) which suggests the possibility that her preferred construal of the glory of the descent should be elevated to doctrinal status: nothing creedal, nothing conciliar, and nothing magisterial.”

Where does this put us? At the minimum, Griffiths helps us understand why both John Paul II and Benedict XVI felt no reservations celebrating Balthasar’s intellectual contributions to the Church. Balthasar may have been wrong or one-sided when he was bold and unconventional, but he was not rejecting or undermining magisterial teaching.

More broadly, Griffiths sheds light on the difficulty we all face as the generation after the generation after Vatican II. For a long time now, critique has reigned supreme, and “orthodoxy” has been an empty standard in academic theology. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick’s trenchant analysis of Hans Urs von Balthasar represents an effort to recover a functional standard of orthodoxy for Catholic theology. Griffiths makes a very convincing case that she fails. She both overestimates the precision of the tradition on the destination and nature of Christ’s descent into hell, and underestimates the scope for speculation and debate on this theological topic.

At the end of his essay, Griffiths gives the impression that Pitstick should have limited herself to a school debate with Balthasar over the merits of his theology of Christ’s descent rather than raising the formal question of orthodoxy. I find myself disagreeing.

The estimable precision of Paul Griffith’s critical reflection on Pitstick’s treatment of Balthasar points out weaknesses. But Pitstick’s impulse is surely correct. There have been many remarkable achievements in Catholic thought and practice since Vatican II. Yet there have also been losses, and without a doubt one area of confusion has been about the boundaries of church-loyal theology. In the decades before the Council, a painfully narrow vision prevailed, which had the effect of enshrining a neo-scholastic pattern of thought as obligatory. In the decades after, the pendulum swung toward an overly lax approach.

In this context, Pitstick’s focus on the formal question of the orthodoxy of Hans Urs von Balthasar moves us in a helpful direction. She may overestimate the authoritative status of traditional accounts of Christ’s descent, and she may be wrong about the great Swiss theologian. But she’s right about something very important. We need a functional standard of orthodoxy: one supple enough to do justice to the sorts of nuances Griffiths introduces, but one real enough to help us understand when theological speculation, novelty, and critique undermine rather than enrich the faith of the Church.

As everyone knows by now, Barack Obama’s invitation to give the commencement address at Notre Dame and to receive an honorary Doctor of Law degree has met with outcry among Catholics who care deeply about issues ranging from the defense of life, to marriage protection, to religious freedom, to educational freedom.

Fr. Jenkins, the president of the university, has responded, via the Notre Dame student newspaper, to this outcry. He argues that the invitation to Obama should not be taken to be a sign that Obama’s positions on abortion and stem-cell research are condoned by the university. Rather, he says, the invitation honors the president for his leadership.

Here’s how Jenkins puts it: President Obama is “an inspiring leader who has taken leadership of the country facing many challenges: two wars, a really troubled economy, he has issues with health care, immigration, education reform, and he has addressed those with intelligence, courage and honesty.”

“We want to recognize his very real and significant accomplishments and his leadership. At the same time, we want to engage him in the future, and I think this occasion will be a wonderful time to do that.”

It is strange to say of a man who has been in office for all of two months that he is being honored for his leadership. Indeed, what little Obama has managed to “accomplish” in his time in office has been a sign of incompetence, at best, and wickedness, at worst. These are hardly characteristics that one should want to honor. He has not exactly stood out as an inspiring and exemplary leader.

As for incompetence, Obama has had a terrible time with cabinet picks, with oratorical gaffes, and with diplomatic insensitivity.

As for wickedness, he has already committed to send tax-payer money for abortions world-wide (the “Mexico City Policy”) and for embryonic stem-cell research at home. He has brought radical abortionists into his cabinet. He has, through his decisions on the economy, set in motion a process of wealth transference to the federal government that will be destructive of intermediate social associations and economic freedom. Measures that he has already suggested will be taken in regard to school choice are deleterious to private, religious educational institutions. Surely, when Jenkins hints that Obama needs to address educational reform, he is not at all suggesting that a man who is as vulgarly scientistic as Obama is going to do anything good in that regard? After his election, Obama made the foreboding suggestion that he is going to restore science to its proper level of dignity. This was, of course, a shot at the Bush administration for placing limits on embryonic stem-cell research, and for other policies and attitudes in the Bush administration that were aimed at limiting, in the interest of the human good, wanton scientific exploration.

Jenkins also makes the claim that inviting Obama to Notre Dame is going to open up room for dialogue with him. His critics, Jenkins implies, are stuck in a ghetto-Church mentality: “You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade, and if you cannot persuade them, show respect for them and listen to them.”

This is an exceedingly perplexing comment, for at least two reasons. First of all, if Notre Dame had not invited Obama to speak at its commencement ceremony, and were not to offer him an honorary degree, that would not constitute a “shunning” of him. It would constitute, rather, a respect for the educational integrity of the university. It would constitute a shunning of his rank eugenicism, not of him. Jenkins is clearly stuck in an outdated, modernist epistemology of education. The university is not a “marketplace” of ideas, where all points of view are equally valid and worthy of being tested. In fact, most professors who, like Jenkins, are stuck in an outmoded modern picture of education, implicitly contradict their educational liberalism. Universities do not give an open platform to neo-Nazis, or klansmen. Some ideas, it is recognized, are intrinsically evil, recognized as such, and are not given consumer status in the ideological marketplace. Eugenicism, with the crimes against humanity to which it leads (mass abortion, scientific experimentation on the unborn, euthanasia, etc.), should likewise be shunned. Catholic universities have a special obligation to stand as exemplars in this regard, as secular universities, which were themselves quite good about rejecting eugenics after World War II, at least in Europe, have forgotten that the human person is not a natural object in the world to be disposed of at the whim of technocrats, whose uncultivated minds are the bane of education.

Second, Notre Dame is not inviting Barack Obama for the sake of persuading him. They are inviting him for the prestige that will be accorded to them in his addressing the students at their commencement ceremony. Jenkins is pushing worldly cynicism, not the evangelization of those who need the Gospel. He’ll get his thirty pieces of silver for his action, and secularized Catholics, who care more for worldly comfort and for the respect of the worldly than for living their lives in imitation of Christ, will disingenuously laud Jenkins for his fearlessness and tact.

One of the most interesting research scholars in contemporary theology and philosophy is Wayne Hankey, a professor of classics at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. He has done some very illuminating studies on the twentieth century retrieval of Neoplatonism among French philosophers and theologians and the influence of these French thinkers on Radical Orthodoxy. We have referenced Hankey here before. Very graciously, Hankey posts his published articles on his webpage at the university. Hankey possesses a mastery of the Greek and Latin sources of contemporary theology, and he is also a competent Heidegger scholar. His work is very helpful for all theologians who wish to engage the postmodern problematic, and he has made some incisive criticisms of Radical Orthodoxy. If my information is correct, he is a recent convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism.

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading one of his articles, entitled “9/11 and the History of Philosophy.”  This article, published in the journal Animus in 2006, is a valuable reminder of just how narrow the scope of philosophy is in the Anglophone world. I would like to share here a brief summary of the article.

Hankey makes the argument that the English-speaking world has artificially confined philosophical inquiry by placing arbitrary limits on our notions of what constitutes rationality. Essentially, Anglophone philosophers have stripped philosophy entirely of its inherent religious dimension. This leads to a major gap in knowledge. On the one hand, it leads to an unforgivable lacuna in what university philosophy faculties present of the historical tradition of Western philosophy. Philosophy departments in England and America exclude Neoplatonism from serious consideration. Neoplatonism was, of course, the main source of philosophical wisdom in the West from the time of Aristotle to Descartes. It was religious and liturgical in its orientation, focusing on the need for Divine Revelation to illumine our minds and hearts if we are to have a true grasp of the Real. Because Neoplatonism did not fully separate philosophy from religion, or reason from revelation, it is not considered by Anglo-American philosophers to be a legitimate exercise of the philosophical enterprise. This attitude to Neoplatonism leads the formators of English-speaking philosophy departments to exclude two millennia of philosophical wisdom from their purview!

On the other hand, this lacuna in the presentation of or knowledge held by English-speaking philosophy departments of the history of philosophy leads to another major gap: it makes it impossible for the West to penetrate with any depth into the intellectual culture of Islam. Islam carried forward the tradition of Hellenic rationality, particularly that of Neoplatonism. Islamic philosophy was never prone to split apart faith and reason, and it developed a profound philosophical culture that survives to our day. The philosophy of Islam has been a continuous practice that has been carried on by Scholastic theologians, Sufis, and theoretical gnostics of various stripes.

For these bearers of the Hellenic tradition in Islam, reason and mystical experience of the Divine are closely intertwined. A full exercise of reason, in their view, requires Divine Illumination. It involves also a participation in a living tradition of philosophical inquiry. Reason, for the Neoplatonist-inspired philosophers of Islam, cannot simply comprise philosophical arguments oriented to logical questions detached from their historical/religious context.

Philosophy for Islam, then, as was the case in Christendom until the advent of Nominalism, and, later, the Reformation, is not adequately lived out if it is not connected to religious practice. Philosophy is, indeed, a way of life in this view. It is no mere abstract theoretical production bent on manipulating human concepts.

How foreign this way of thinking is to Anglo-American philosophers! They have such difficulty understanding it and therefore are lost in regard to our intellectual past and to the present situation of Islamic culture. Hankey quotes from a piece in the New York Times penned by David Brooks after 9/11 to demonstrate the point:

Do the extremists play by the normal rules of geostrategy, or are their minds off in some mystical sphere that is utterly alien to our categories? Do they respond to incentives and follow the dictates of what we call self-interest? Can they be deterred by normal threats to their security? Or, alternatively, are they playing an entirely different game? Are the men who occupy the black hole that is the Iranian power elite engaged in a religious enterprise based on an eschatological time frame and driven by supernatural longings that we cannot fathom?

This quotation from Brooks, Hankey implies, is exemplary of the failure of the West to provide its citizens with a real philosophical education. The West itself, after all, was formed by men and women whose minds were “off in some mystical sphere that is utterly alien to our [present-day] categories.” The men and women who gave the West universities, science, hospitals, law, art — all of them engaged “in religious enterprise based on an eschatological time frame and driven by supernatural longings.” In other words, Brooks embodies in this quotation the profound ignorance of the West to its own intellectual heritage!

For the cultures of Rome, Jerusalem, Byzantium and Persia were all formed by the meeting of Abrahamic religion with Hellenic, specifically Neoplatonic, rationality. The “categories of thought” that are present to Islamic philosophy are the very categories that were once taken up into the great Augustinian and Thomistic syntheses of theology and philosophy. These categories are at the very foundation of the modern universities. Not only the answers to questions that we routinely provide in philosophy, but our very philosophical questions themselves, come to us through this Neoplatonist-inspired tradition. Our lack of sensitivity to the two millennia of philosophy between Aristotle and Descartes — which leads us to deride or to ignore the profound tradition of Neoplatonism –condemns us to ignorance of our very selves.

How have we gotten to the point that we have so thoroughly excluded religion from the intellectual enterprise, and so greatly come to misunderstand or to disregard Neoplatonism? Hankey does not trace out the path, but there is an historical importance implicit in two monikers that he applies: a) he speaks of the “secularized Calvinist” Ivy League schools, and b) he speaks of the intellectual milieux of the “Anglo-Protestant world.”

Why might these monikers get at the roots of the modern West’s profound ignorance of itself? One might surmise that the radical separation of faith and reason that would mock Neoplatonism as unphilosophical stems from an approach to the defense of the faith that was common among Nominalists, Reformers, and ecclesial figures such as Bishop Tempier (who condemned Saint Thomas). These would all have it that we deny the validity of philosophical reason in order to assure the experiential certainty of the data of revelation. Reason is then necessarily pitted against revelation. Given that revelation, shorn of its contact with human wisdom, cannot withstand the assault of reason, reason, now entirely disconnected from religion, eventually emerges as a dictatorial sovereign. This is, in short, where the “secularized Calvinism” of Harvard and Yale comes from, or the Anglo-Protestantism of Cambridge.

Be that as it may, this article by Hankey is highly illuminating. It makes one shake one’s head in wonder at the ridiculous battle of religion and reason that continues to engulf our culture. How ignorant must Daniel Dennett, or Richard Dawkins, be of the history of the human intellectual adventure! This article puts the lie to the pieties of both classical liberals (such as David Brooks) and postcoloniel liberals (such as Noam Chomsky) in regard to the question of Islam. It reminds us that Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought share a common intellectual heritage, and that all of the carriers of the great strands of the Abrahamic tradition can engage one another in a respectful, if firm, dialogue at the level of their shared categories of thought.