Paying Attention To The Sky

Christmas With Fr. Robert Barron

December 25, 2009

I’ve never forgotten this little presentation Fr. Robert Barron made. Although one has heard the story from Luke so many times (as recently as today) this is the only one that truly made me understand what was going on: suddenly the swaddling clothes, the story of the census and who Caesar Augustus really was — I never quite put it all together. But it’s these details that give this story its meaning. Somehow I got lost in the tinsel of the baby Jesus for too many years.

Now the Christ is in Christmas for me which means that I call it Advent and the most important thing I do is attend Mass because that is where my home and my family are now.

Here’s the telling of the story that so impressed me:

Posted in Apologetics | Tagged Christmas, Fr. Robert Barron | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections II From Catholicism By Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson

December 23, 2009

Interior of Rheims Cathedral, France

The Church
Catholics believe that God was made man in order, among other things, to deliver a body of truth to man, much of which he might have guessed at, some of which he might positively have known, some of which he could neither have known nor guessed at. This body of truth was delivered to His Apostles; and it is beyond the power or the rights of their successors either to add to, or to diminish, in the smallest degree, this Divine Revelation.

Christ constituted, however, a Church — that is to say, a group of persons raised, by certain rites which we shall consider later, to the supernatural state, and intended to embrace sooner or later the whole of human kind; and one of the functions of this Church is to preserve aright and to promulgate the truths revealed to her by Christ. Yet, while the Church may not modify the truths themselves, she will “develop,” as time goes by, their contents; she will, for instance, make more explicit that which was at first implicit or obscure, in answer to questions or denials on matters of faith; and in this action — in the exercise, that is to say, of this supreme dogmatic function of hers — she believes herself so far safeguarded by the assistance of God as to be incapable of teaching error. This gift of Infallibility, it will be noticed, is quite another thing from Inspiration. The former is rather a negative gift by which she is kept immune from error; the latter a positive impulse, given to the prophets and the writers of Scripture, including Infallibility, but transcending it. The Church does not claim Inspiration, either for her General Councils or for her Divinely appointed Head; yet she claims entire infallibility for these two mouths of hers by which she formally defines truth.

The Unity of the Church
Unity is provided for in the following manner: Christ, it is recorded in the Gospels, chose out one from among His Apostles to be the leader, and, in a sense, the centre of the rest; and He particularized him in many ways. First He gave him a new name, and Himself supplied the interpretation of that name. He called him Cephas, or Peter; and added that “upon this Cephas” (He) would build His Church; further adding that “the gates of hell should not prevail against” this Church. Next He said that to him He would give “the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven”; and lastly commissioned him to “feed His sheep.” It is noticeable that these three functions thus representatively conferred upon Peter are predicated in their fullness only of Christ Himself: He is the “Foundation Stone,” the “Door,” and the “Good Shepherd.”

Catholics therefore claim that the Church of Christ — that Church to which Christ committed such functions and to which He promised His continual Presence — can be identified by its unity with Peter; and the See of Rome, therefore, where Peter lived and died, is called the “Holy” or the “Apostolic” See; and its occupant is regarded as having inherited the prerogatives of Peter. Among these prerogatives, therefore, is that of safeguarding and defining the truth; and the Bishop of Rome, or “Pope,” is named the “Vicar of Christ.” He, therefore, when, as supreme Pastor of Souls, in a matter of Faith or Morals, he defines a truth to be held by all Christians, acts in virtue of his commission from Christ, and is divinely safeguarded from error. His prerogative does not preclude the possibility of his erring in his private capacity; still less does it preserve him from personal sin.

The promises of Christ, however, were made to the whole Church in the person of Peter and a properly constituted “General Council” therefore, sitting under the presidentship of “Peter,” is also believed to be infallible. In cases where such a Council has sat, the Pope does no more than ratify and confirm the decisions which, it is believed, are also safeguarded from error by the same promises of Christ. To the Pope also belongs supreme jurisdiction, and from him every bishop and priest draws his right to act in his official capacity. Most of these acts are valid, though irregular, even when exercised in defiance of, or separation from, the Pope; some of them — for example, absolution or the Power of the Keys — are invalid as well as irregular under those conditions.

The Church Is Dispenser Of Grace
The second great function of the Church is that of Dispenser of Grace. The Incarnation and the Atonement, as has been seen, are believed to have released an infinite torrent of grace for the salvation of all mankind; but this grace must, normally, be applied to the individual through certain channels and agents. Chief among these channels are the Sacraments; chief among these agents is the Sacerdotal Hierarchy; and the second is, normally, the dispenser of the former.

THE SACRAMENTS
The Sacraments are seven in number: Baptism; Penance; the Eucharist; Confirmation; Holy Order; Holy Matrimony; and Extreme Unction. First, however, the Eucharist should be considered, as it is more than a Sacrament.

According to the doctrine of the Atonement, Christ offered on Calvary the one perfect and adequate Sacrifice for the sins of the world. A Sacrifice is commonly believed to involve two things: primarily the offering and death of a Victim, and secondarily an Union with God to whom the Victim is offered by means of a feast upon its Flesh. Two things therefore are involved in the Atonement wrought by Christ: there is first the Sacrifice proper; there is next Communion with God by feeding upon the Divine Victim.

Now Christ spoke of these two things expressly in one sentence, “The (Living) Bread which I will give is My Flesh which I will give for the life of the world”; and again, “Except you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you.” Further, He instituted a Rite by which (1) the Sacrifice once offered should be continually re-presented to God; (2) the Flesh and Blood, thus sacrificed, should be made accessible for human food. This Rite is called the Eucharist.

The Eucharist
In the Eucharist, by Divine Power exercised through the priest, the “elements” of Bread and Wine are changed substantially (though not accidentally) into the very Flesh and Blood of Christ. This is called the dogma of Transubstantiation, and signifies that while the externals or “accidents” of the elements — those qualities accessible to the senses — remain unchanged, the substance — that in which the “accidents” inhere and by which, for instance, the bread is bread — is changed into the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. In the transubstantiated elements there is no actual separation of Body and Blood; the Host and the contents of the chalice are, alike, Christ whole and entire (since a real separation would involve another death of Christ); but the two different elements are used in order to signify and to re-present, mystically, that actual separation which took place on Calvary.

Here, then, in the Eucharist, is, first, the Sacrifice of the Mass — the re-presenting, that is, under another mode, of the Sacrifice of Calvary; then in the Communion, the Body and Blood of the Sacrificed Divine Victim are assimilated by the participators. Lastly, in Catholic Churches, the “Blessed Sacrament” is preserved in the Tabernacle, and both here, and in the service of Benediction, is adored by Catholics. The Eucharist, therefore, pre-eminently above the other Sacraments, is sometimes referred to as the “extension of the Incarnation,” though all the Sacraments are this also in their degree. But in the Eucharist, according to Catholic belief, the Human Nature of Christ is always present on earth — dwelling in the Tabernacle, sacrificed in the Mass, and assimilable in Communion.

Baptism
Baptism is the Rite ordained by Christ for the washing away of original sin; and Penance (or Absolution) for the further washing away of sins afterwards contracted.

Baptism therefore is the first sacrament received by the individual. Since man is not pure spirit, but spirit incarnate, the supreme means of grace also have something of this double nature — an external visible part, and the interior grace conveyed by it and Baptism (which, like matrimony, does not necessarily require a priest for its valid administration) is an outward ablution accompanied by certain words, which whole Rite raises the catechumen to the supernatural life, removes his sins, original and actual, and infuses certain graces into the soul. It is “necessary to salvation”; yet the Church has always held that the “Baptism of Desire” — i.e. God’s response to a perfectly pure and good intention of pleasing Him, accompanied by an implicit wish to conform in all things to His Will and therefore inclusive of a desire for baptism, if the necessity of such were known to the individual — confers the grace of the sacrament upon those who are unable actually to obtain it.

Penance
Penance is the sacrament instituted by Christ, by which post-baptismal sins are forgiven through the ministry of a priest acting judicially, in virtue of Christ’s words to His apostles, ” Whosesoever sins you forgive they are forgiven.”

Confirmation, Holy Order, Holy Matrimony, Extreme Unction
Confirmation is the sacrament by which certain gifts of the Holy Ghost — seven in number — beyond those received in baptism, are conveyed to the individual, primarily for his strengthening in the battle of life.

Holy Order is the sacrament by which men are raised to the ministry, and made sharers in and administrators of the Royal Priesthood of Jesus Christ.

Holy Matrimony is the sacrament by which a man and a woman are united before God in such a manner that what would, without grace, be merely a contract terminable or dissoluble, becomes a mysterious uniting of the two that nothing but death can sever. The Church entirely denies divorce, and refuses the sacraments to those who have profited by a legal “divorce” to marry again in the lifetime of their surviving partners.

Extreme Unction (“The Last Anointing”) is the sacrament by which the sick in danger of death are frequently restored to health, or, if not, purified and made ready for death.

Lastly, on the point of the Sacraments, it must be added that three of them — Baptism, Confirmation, and Order — confer “Character,” or an indelible seal upon the soul; and these three sacraments therefore can be received but once. These are also the three sacraments in which the Holy Ghost acts directly upon the soul and is “given” to her.

The Sacraments are, as has been seen, dispensed by the Church, and for five of them the ministry of a priest is essential for validity; further, for two of these five (for Order absolutely, and for the administration of Confirmation, with certain rare exceptions) the Episcopal order is necessary. For Extreme Unction too the use of oil blessed by a bishop is necessary. In Baptism any rational human being can act as minister; in Holy Matrimony the ” ministers,” strictly speaking, are the contracting parties, though by recent legislation the presence of the parish priest is, as a matter of fact, also necessary.

The Hierarchy Of The Church
All Priesthood, it is taught, comes from Jesus Christ, who is alone the Supreme and Absolute Priest. But He has raised men to be not only His representatives, but actually the agents by whom that “Melchisedech” priesthood is exercised on earth. He conferred this gift upon His Apostles at the Last Supper, and gave them also the power of passing it on to their successors, under certain restrictions and safeguards: and this Priesthood includes primarily the power to offer the sacrifice of the Mass by consecrating the Eucharist, as well as the power to forgive sins in His Name, to bless, and to administer other means of grace.

There are seven orders in the Hierarchy. First the three Major Orders; the Priesthood (which in its plenitude is present only in the Episcopate), the Diaconate, and the Subdiaconate: then the four Minor Orders; the offices of Doorkeeper, Reader, Exorcist, and Acolyte. The reception of the “tonsure,” by which a man becomes an ecclesiastic or “clerk,” precedes that of the Minor Orders, but is not an order in itself. Now the four Minor Orders do not necessarily preclude a man from returning to ordinary lay life in the world: he remains always an ecclesiastic, but he is not bound to wear ecclesiastical dress or to remain unmarried. Usually however, in our own days, the reception of Minor Orders is but a preliminary to the Major ; and when the Subdiaconate has once been received it is impossible without a special dispensation, exceedingly difficult to obtain, to return to lay life. Henceforward the man is bound to be a celibate, to say the Divine Office every day, and to dress as an ecclesiastic. (A slightly different discipline prevails, however, in the Churches of the East that are in communion with Rome, by which a married man may become a priest, although a priest may never marry.)

It is by this Hierarchy therefore, governed locally by bishops, and supremely by the Pope, that the dispensing of grace, the preaching of the faith, and the preserving of the Tradition undefiled, are effected and it is an essential of the Catholic Religion that this should be so. It is indeed possible for souls who, without their own fault, are unable to have access to a priest (whether that inability is virtual or physical), to obtain from God direct all necessary graces. An act of “perfect contrition,” for example, removes the guilt even of mortal sin without the ministry of a priest, under such circumstances; and it is exactly for this reason that the Church never presumes to declare the final fate of any individual soul outside her pale, since God only can know the dispositions of such a soul. Persons may, that is, belong to the “Soul” of the Church who, for no fault of theirs, have been excluded from the “Body.” Yet wilfully to reject the ordinance of Christ — to refuse Baptism or Penance, for example, when the Institution by Christ of these sacraments is known and their efficacy recognized — is to forfeit all claim on obtaining in other ways the graces conferred by them; to lose their place in the “Soul” of the Church as well as in the “Body.”

Other Means Of Grace
First, there are those things or rites which she calls Sacramentals, resembling the Sacraments in their double nature, as well as in the fact of their conferring grace (though, theologically speaking, in a slightly different mode), yet not instituted by Christ Himself. Such a sacramental is Holy Water. Holy Water is water, with a small infusion of salt, blessed by a priest in virtue of his general powers to bless, and used by the faithful for the purifying away of lesser stains of guilt, for their protection against spiritual assaults, and for the disposal of their mind towards Divine things. Blessed ashes and palms are other examples of sacramentals; and all these depend for their efficacy not only on the blessing that they have received, but on the fervour and the disposition of those who use them.

Next, there is Prayer, or the lifting up of the heart to God with attention and intention, whether the aspirations are vocally expressed or not. And there is perhaps no department of the Catholic system more minutely or exhaustively treated than is that of Prayer.

Prayer is of two main kinds. First, there is Vocal Prayer, especially that form of Vocal Prayer stereotyped in the Mass and in the Divine Office. All Religious and all ecclesiastics above the rank of Subdeacon are bound under pain of mortal sin to “recite office,” except where special exemptions are given to the illiterate or to those otherwise physically or morally incapable of fulfilling the obligation. So high is the value attached to this exercise that among monks it is called Opus Dei — The Work of God — and is the supreme duty of their daily life. Further, it must be said aloud, or, in the case of private recitation, with at least the deliberate movement of the lips; and, in Enclosed Houses, it forms the chief occupation of every day: a large proportion of it is recited, in choir, in such houses during the hours of the night.

Secondly, there is Mental Prayer; rising at last into Contemplation; and this, though practiced widely by the faithful everywhere, reaches, as a rule, its perfection only in Religious Houses, where its cultivation is brought to the highest possible pitch. In one Order, for example, only partially “enclosed,” Mental Prayer or Meditation on the subject of the Passion of Christ is enjoined on all members for two hours every day.

Lastly, the Church regards as means of Grace all good actions done with a pure intention to God’s glory; and she names the principal of these, Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy.

Corollary Doctrines And Practices
So far the Catholic Religion has been described in a few of its barest essentials only: and it need hardly be said that a vast number of doctrines and practices — corollaries even further detached from those that have been mentioned — have not been touched upon at all. Such are the Church’s teaching upon eschatology, beyond what has already been said, devotion to Mary and the Saints, the “Religious Life” in general, the place of Miracles, together with a less formal consideration of the system of faith and life as a whole. It will perhaps be better to treat of these now, separately. Their connection with what has already been said will easily be seen.

It has been remarked that the Catholic recognizes but one probation here on earth, closing with the “Particular Judgment” that takes place immediately after death; and but two final states or places to which the individual Soul can come. Yet he recognizes a third intermediate state, not final, through which the vast majority of souls who are, later, to attain the Beatific Vision must pass. This place is named Purgatory; and in Purgatory the temporal debt due for forgiven sin is paid, as well as the punishment for venial sins in which the soul has left the body.

For the forgiveness of mortal sin (as in Penance, for example) does not, obviously, involve the remission of all penalty. A drunkard, for instance, who turns from his sin and is forgiven, does not, as a matter of fact, receive his health back again immediately. The guilt is forgiven; there is no longer, that is to say, any obstacle between his soul and God; he is restored to the life of grace; and the eternal punishment due to him becomes merely temporal. It is conceivable therefore, and indeed practically certain, that many souls whose sins have been few and whose sufferings many, pay that debt in this life, and do not, therefore, go to Purgatory. But with the vast majority of souls the case is not so. Many spiritual sins, for instance, have little or no perceptible penalty attached to them in this life. Such sinners as these, therefore, as well as those whose sins are out of all proportion to their sufferings, pay the balance due to such sins in the pains of Purgatory.

Two practical corollaries follow from this dogma.

First, there follows the utility and the duty of praying for the departed that they may be purged from their pains quickly and pass to their eternal joy; and for this purpose also the Sacrifice of the Mass is offered for them on earth. For if, as Catholics believe, intercession avails with God, in such a way that the pleading of a soul in grace, on behalf of another, helps and forwards that other soul while still on earth, so too will it avail for souls departed.

The Doctrine Of Indulgences
Secondly, there follows the doctrine of Indulgences — a doctrine that has given rise, probably, to more misunderstanding than any other, yet one that is perfectly consistent and inevitable, if the Catholic teaching on Sin and its penalties, and on the common supernatural life enjoyed by the baptized, is once understood.

Briefly the doctrine is as follows:

A soul that has sinned and has been restored to grace yet owes, as has been said, a temporal debt to God; and this temporal debt is, for the most part, paid only in Purgatory. Now all that such a forgiven soul is obliged to do, if she would enter heaven, is to remain in the “state of grace” while still on earth. If then she does more than she is obliged; if she undertakes, let us say, some heroic work for the poor or the suffering; if she strips herself, for the love of God and in reparation for her sins, of her temporal possessions; if she devotes herself to austerity and prayer — it is quite certain that such efforts and reparations on her part must count before a Just God as payment of her debt; and such is of the more value before Him, as she undertakes such acts voluntarily and lovingly.

Now the whole doctrine of Indulgences is, in its essence, nothing more than a systematization of this very reasonable idea. The Church runs to help, so to speak, a generous soul such as this, and not only directs her in her efforts and gives her special aids and privileges, but further, showers upon her a portion of the superabundant merits of all souls, from the Soul of Christ downwards, who, like her, have done far more than their absolute duty obliged them to do. For so deep and intimate is the interior union between soul and soul in grace, and so authoritative the commission uttered to the Church by Christ to the effect that what she “binds on earth shall be bound in heaven,” that the Catholic Church claims to have a kind of “impetratory” (vocab: obtaining by petition or entreaty) authority over such transactions, and to be able to help one soul that is struggling heroically and lovingly upwards, by the merits of other souls that have striven yet more heroically and lovingly in the past.

The “Treasury of Merits” is the phrase used of that vast community of meritorious actions and lives which is placed, in a sense, at the disposal of Christ’s Representative and Vicar on earth.

It is hardly necessary to add, then, that “Indulgences”(that is, a remission of future Purgatorial pains) can only be gained by souls that are not only in grace, but in the possession of good and fervent dispositions.

Corollary Doctrines And Practices: Devotion To Mary
When once the doctrine of the Incarnation is grasped, as well as that of the Virgin-Birth of Christ, devotion to the Mother of God is seen to be inevitable. And it is extremely significant that where this devotion ceases, sooner or later the doctrine of the Incarnation grows obscure or is even denied. In fact, the use or the disuse of the phrase “Mother of God” is a tolerable guide to the more fundamental doctrinal belief of those concerned, since the phrase is, to the Catholic, nothing but a simple statement of the Divinity of Mary’s Son.

Now devotion to Mary, and dogmatic statements as to her Person and office and attributes, are matters of extremely careful and well-tested theology. They are very far from being, as is sometimes thought, the result of popular and rhetorical sentiment. Their origins are found, for example, in the Church of the Catacombs, at which period she was depicted in the attitude of intercession, and given the title of “Advocatrix.” Parallels were also drawn, in very early days, between Mary the Mother of the Redeemed and Eve the mother of the fallen.

By the disobedience of the one the way was made open for the first Adam to ruin the race at the Tree of Death; by the obedience of the other the way was made open for the second Adam to redeem the race at the Tree of Life: and all subsequent “Marian” theology takes its rise and form and is limited by her function as an “Assistant,” so to speak, of Redemption, not as a source of Redemption. It is not believed by Catholics that Mary is more than this; she can intercede, but she cannot, strictly, “give”; there is offered to her a veneration higher than that offered to any other creature, since she stands towards God, in virtue of her Motherhood and of the privileges He has given her, in an absolutely unique position; yet this veneration never approaches and never can approach, even when offered by the simplest and most uneducated believer, that supreme and unique adoration which is offered to God alone.

It is not only that Sacrifice is offered to God alone; there is also another kind of prayer — the outcome of the relation of the Creature towards the Creator — which is given to God and to God only. All the rhetoric of the lovers of Mary, all the devotions performed in her honour, all the sounding titles bestowed on her with or without authority — these can no more be taken to imply an assertion of her Divinity, than the adding together of finite numbers can attain to infinity.

Corollary Doctrines And Practices: Devotion To The Saints And Angels
Following upon this devotion to Mary comes devotion to the Saints and Angels, and, most of all, towards those Saints more intimately associated with the event of the Incarnation — such persons, for example, as St. Joseph, Spouse of Mary Ever-Virgin, and St. John the Baptist, the Forerunner of Christ. Devotion to these is natural and inevitable, for the same reason as to Mary, though all the honour paid to them can never equal that paid to the actual Woman of whom God Incarnate was born, and who, as Catholics believe, was specially prepared for her high destiny by being conceived in the womb free from the taint of original sin. There is, in fact, no difference in kind between the honour given to such saints as St. Joseph or St. John the Baptist and the honour given to those later and other friends of God who, by the sentence of canonization, are declared certainly to have attained the Beatific Vision, and to be proper objects for the veneration of the faithful.

For, to Catholics, the grace of God is as powerful as ever, and the stream of “saints” therefore can never cease. There always have been, and always will be, souls that live lives so heroic, for motives so pure, as to merit this title. Some few of these are detected by the Church, and, at some period after their death, are publicly proclaimed, after an exceedingly searching inquiry, to have reached the technical standard of “sanctity”: the vast majority, no doubt, succeed in evading the honours from which their humility would naturally shrink.

It is to souls that have been publicly proclaimed as “saints” that public veneration may be paid, though privately any Catholic may invoke the prayers of any soul or even of all the “holy souls” in Purgatory: and this public veneration is, of course, in a line with the whole main thought of Catholicism in which the Humanity of Christ, and not merely His Divinity, is believed to be the instrument of Redemption. Once again it is directly from the full Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation that the veneration of saints springs, since by the Incarnation man is united to God potentially, and by the sanctity of the individual this potentiality becomes actual. It is then merely as from intercessors and advocates that Catholics seek the assistance of the saints, not as from men who have become part of the Deity, and who therefore merit Divine honours.

Posted in Readings | Tagged Baptism, Devotion To Mary, Devotion To The Saints And Angels, Indulgences, Penance, Sacramentals, The Church, The Church As Dispenser Of Grace, The Eucharist, The Hierarchy Of The Church, The Sacraments of the Catholic Church, The Unity of the Church | Leave a Comment »

On Tiger’s Passion

December 21, 2009

One of things that always surprised me about the passion was the prominence given to the ridicule Christ had to endure. It is something every schoolchild can associate with and is placed in the context of real physical abuse. The beating, the crowning of the thorns are also part of being dressed in a “robe,” given a “scepter” and then being led around while his jailers jeered and ridiculed Him. And this stuff follows Him all the way to the Cross.

The gospels seem to be reminding us that this kind of abuse can be just as painful as the physical pain inflicted up our Lord. In fact, I don’t think it really has to tell us this, as deep within our hearts we all know this is true. Our most vulnerable part is our puny egos and for all of us who “creep our days, guarding our hearts from blows,” fated to die obscurely, the savagery of the ridicule our Lord endures makes the passion the most unendurably painful event in world literature. Everything else is mere prolix.

One wonders about the sanity of Tiger Woods these days – an intensely private and proud man of biracial ancestry, now unable to pass on to his children what his father gave him – a sense of pride and simple honesty. While the mass media calculates the losses in income to his “bottom line,” I can almost guarantee you that wherever Mr. Woods is hold up (reading comics and playing night golf according to last reports) the one thing he wants back is what he has lost forever.

For that assiduously burnished byproduct of his fame (“Nothing is more important than family”), meant more to him than all else. He could give a flying hoot about the money, believe me. However Tiger is forever in the public memory now proclaiming that the most important thing in life is skanks performing at your command.

Pity his wife and children. That’s all he is thinking about now. Which is why the appearance on Oprah and a sobbing mea culpa is pretty much a forgone conclusion. Yet when you think about who he is and his character, that appearance will crush him. TomCruise? He’d be on the couch bearing his tortured soul in a New York minute. Tiger Woods? I don’t think we have ever seen him.

But the question here also is what of us? We who deal in the endless Tiger jokes and guy banter. When is enough enough? When does Tiger become Christ like? We teach our children in school about bullying but then ceaselessly provide them with adult examples. What kid old enough to understand Jay Leno doesn’t take away the power of ridicule and its effectiveness at demeaning an opponent? This is why repentance works in America. It lets us off the hook, we’re the ones who need it.

Can there be anything farther from St. Thomas’ definition of love: “Loving the other as other.” With complete disregard for our own selves, truly letting the other be completely free to fulfill themselves. Ridicule is an almost exquisite extreme of this Christian view of love – it turns the other into caricature and object. Nowhere do I see this more fully played out in my experience than on so-called internet “Discussion Forums.”

And I am guilty more than most of using the sarcastic barb against those who jeer and use invective against the Catholic Church. I demand others listen to me as a Catholic and chafe when they misunderstand and accuse me of fundamentalist or Calvinist distortions. Rather than redouble my efforts to listen better to others or to more patiently explain my Church I clamor for my right to be heard and understood. Yes, there are those who throw rocks and ridicule Catholic teachings but they are the god-haters who have always been there but the more you truly listen the less of them there are.

Or am I being overly rosy here? Must be Christmas week.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged Christ, ridicule, the Passion, Tiger Woods | Leave a Comment »

Questions and Caricatures of Isolated Minds

December 18, 2009

the infamous jayd808

I participate in several forums on the net. One is at LibraryThing where my presence has become synonymous with the KKK. The sheer invective and vitriol seemed deserving of its own discussion forum which I recently launched there. The initial post follows:

“Hey as long as many of the forums I contribute to dissolve into attacks on me, why not have a forum topic devoted just to why I am such an asshole and all the “half-assed shit” I produce on my website?

Questions and Caricatures of Isolated Minds

The Unquestioned Life:

When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising – and totally justifiable – that atheists and skeptics question the source of this authority.
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If a person or group is going to make claims about empirical truth, then I’m going to ask for reliable evidence for those claims, especially if the claims are extraordinary or harmful in some way….
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There appears to be an assumption at work here (or in the unquestioned life) that Christians are at work to undermine the freedoms of others or to cause harm. Perhaps even that they are a source of evil in the modern world (Dawkins). Yet Christians specifically associate their God with goodness. At least Catholics do, which is what I am. Somehow this has been transformed in the modern atheist mindset as a source of all modern evil.

Michael Novak has written:

“I have no doubt that Christians have committed many evils, and written some disgraceful pages in human history. Yet on a fair ledger of what Judaism and Christianity added to pagan Greece, Rome, the Arab nations (before Mohammed), the German, Frankish, and Celtic tribes, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, one is puzzled not to find atheists and skeptics giving thanks for many innovations: hospitals, orphanages, cathedral schools in early centuries, universities not much later, some of the most beautiful works of art — in music, architecture, .painting, and poetry — in the human patrimony.

And why do they overlook the hard intellectual work on concepts such as “person” “community” “civitas,” “consent” “tyranny” and “limited government” (“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.”) that framed the conceptual background of such great documents as the Magna Carta?

Dawkins (for example) in the few pages on the founding and nourishing of his beloved Oxford by its early Catholic patrons is mockingly ungrateful. And if Oxford disappoints him, has he no gratitude for the building of virtually every other old and famous universities of Europe (and the Americas)?

He writes nothing about the great religious communities founded for the express purpose of building schools for the free education of the poor.

Nothing about the thousands of monastic lives dedicated to the delicate and exhausting labor of copying by hand the great manuscripts of the past — often with the lavish love manifested in illuminations — during long centuries in which there were no printing presses.

Nothing about the founding of the Vatican Library and its importance for the genesis of nearly a dozen modern sciences. Nothing about the learned priests and faithful who have made so many crucial discoveries in science, medicine, and technology.”

Alan Mittleman writes that “God plays a role in a way of speaking that is constitutive of a way of life, without which the world would be poorer and darker. The work it does is not to name a mysterious being who may or may not exist.

The word God does not make a claim about the furniture of the universe. Rather, to speak of God is to underwrite a form of life that allows us to respond with love and courage and hope to the mystery out of which we come and toward which we progress.” All that Novak recites above bears testament to the legacy of that Christian underwriting. THIS IS WHAT GOD MEANS to many faith communities and their believers.

Why aren’t atheists cognizant of their fundamental ungratefulness? They are like those who villify the military while using the very same rights to free speech that their soldier ancestors fought and died for.

Mittleman continues: “That some of our ancestors took the language of God in a mythological way, as a set of existence claims, is undeniable, although even here great ancestors, such as Maimonides, saw the problems that inhere in such naivete.

Wittgenstein taught us that language belongs to groups, not to isolated minds. Language reflects communal practices. Much of the reality that terms mark out is specific to the communities that use the terms.

As any learner of a foreign language knows, reading a newspaper in that language requires learning about social and political realities specific to another culture. The abstract question “Does God exist?” is the question of an isolated mind. It tears God out of the context of communities who pray, celebrate, and serve, and it reduces the term to a cipher.”

Yet atheist secularists put these communities under assault — threatening to close down such communities by eliminating tax shelters if gay marriages are not performed in sacraments. Or forcing Christian charities to close if orphans are not handed over to gay couples.

What holidays would we celebrate if we were an atheists? What kind of community could atheism sustain? What degree of continuity, if any, could a perfectly atheist Western civilization sustain with its own past?

This is not to suggest that religion is warranted only on account of the social, functional tasks that it performs. All sorts of false and pernicious things can enhance social solidarity and mobilization. Rather, it is to point toward a truth: As communal beings, we have constitutive ways of speaking that locate us in a meaningful universe and give moral contours to our shared form of life.

An adequate conversation between a person of faith and an atheist cannot afford to neglect the questions of what we can celebrate, what we can hope for, what we must remember, what stories we can tell our children, and why we should bring children into the world.”

Let me suggest that this is a conversation that will never begin on these forums as long as the snarky atheists who lurk in the LT grasses cling to these caricatures of Christian life.

I have no problem with any of you as atheists or skeptics. My “problem” (some see it as anger) is directed at your narrowness, your bigoted Homosexualism against my gay Catholic brothers and your glacially olympian know-it-all attitudes (never proven and rooted as they are in a crippling ignorance, I might add). I am not a homophobe or a racist, a member of the KKK or Christian fundamentalist. Yet many have accused me of being such.

So here is your chance. Feel free to chip in and tell me my problems. If you have evidence of my homophobia or fundamentalist mindset or other KKK material, please cite examples and let me have it.

your friend in Christ,

jayd808

Posted in Jousting | Tagged LibraryThing | Leave a Comment »

Book Recommendation: “Catholicism” By Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson

December 17, 2009

Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson

Robert Hugh Benson
(1871-1914) Benson was educated at Eton College, and then studied Classics and Theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1893. In 1895, he was ordained a priest in the Church of England by his father, Edward White Benson, who was then Archbishop of Canterbury – a prince of the Anglican Church.

His father died suddenly in 1896, and Benson was sent on a trip to the Middle East to recover his own health. While there, he began to question the status of the Church of England and to consider the claims of the Roman Catholic Church. His own piety began to tend toward the High Church variety, and he started exploring religious life in various Anglican communities, eventually obtaining permission to join the Community of the Resurrection.

Benson made his profession as a member of the community in 1901, at which time he had no thoughts of leaving the Church of England. But as he continued his studies and began writing, he became more and more uneasy with his own doctrinal position, and on 11 September 1903 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church – in its time, perhaps one of the most shocking conversion.

He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904 and sent to Cambridge. He continued his writing career along with the usual elements of priestly ministry. He was appointed a Monsignor by Pope Pius X, and died in 1914 due to heart problems brought on by overwork, and pneumonia, being buried in the grounds of his home, Hare Street House, at Buntingford, near London.

If you would like a look at his home and the lovely chapel on its grounds (now a country estate for the Archbishop of Westminster) check out this blog.

Describing Religion
A man’s religion is, in its essence, that system of faith and morals by which he believes that he can enter and remain in right relations with God. In a description therefore of any religion in particular, three main points must be eminent:

(1) the account given of God by that religion — His Being, His Nature, His Action;

(2) the account given of man — his being, his origin, his nature, his final end;

(3) the system by which it is hoped to bring about and to sustain right relations between God and man.

It is along these three main lines, therefore, that the following post will run. They will close with a few detached paragraphs on particular points that cannot well be dealt with in the course of the sustained exposition.

God In The Catholic Religion
The account given, by the Catholic Religion, of God is capable of literally endless expansion, since Infinity is the first thing predicated of Him. Every word or epithet, therefore, applied to God, is only applicable to Him in an analogical or derived sense. When He is called “Just” or “Holy,” He is so called since no better words are at our disposal; yet no word so applied to Him signifies exactly the same as when applied to man, since man is finite and God Infinite.

The Being of God
It is believed by Catholics that God is Eternal, that He has had no beginning and will have no end, that He is in Himself immutable, knowing no progress since He has always been Himself final and ultimate Perfection. His “essential glory” then can have no addition or diminution; it is His “accidental glory” only to which created wills can minister. He alone subsists of Himself; all else exists only by Him. He is “Personal,” yet without the limitations associated with that idea.

Three Persons
In the Divine Nature, however, there are Three “Persons,” all co-eternal and co-equal; and the names by which they are known to man are “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Ghost.” There is no inferiority between them, as the “Arian” heresy maintained; neither are they merely three various Actions or Aspects, as the “Sabellians” taught. They are distinct one from the other; yet they are one. A far-off analogy is sometimes used with regard to this “Mystery of the Blessed Trinity” — by which the union and yet the distinctness of the Memory, the Will, and the Understanding in man is thought to bear a certain resemblance to the relations of the Three Persons in the One God.

Another suggestive analogy is the consideration of the three things necessary to any action or any agent. There must be the Agent, the Action, and the Acting: the Lover, the Beloved, and the Loving; and a further suggestion as to the value of this analogy is to be found in the Christian term “The Eternal Word” as applied to the Second Person. Under this aspect it may be said that the “Father” is the Originator and Source, the “Son” the Word eternally uttered or “generated” by Him, and the “Holy Ghost” the personal Link between the two, “proceeding from both.” Yet it must be remembered that each is a “Person,” and each is equal to each; — in other words, that no analogy is exhaustive, or even perfect so far as it goes.

Finally, it must be said that every epithet and attribute that predicates goodness or beauty or truth can be applied fully and infinitely and ultimately to God alone. “There is none good save God.” All other persons and things are “good” only in proportion as they approach the Perfection of the Divine Will.

The Creation
So far the outline of God-in-Himself only has been considered — the outline, that is, which Catholic Dogmatic Theology lays down as revealed. Beyond that outline — beyond, that is to say, the numerous dogmas that further develop and safeguard the main Facts which Catholics claim have been revealed by God Himself — there remains a literally infinite field for speculation, beyond even those points on which theologians have disputed in the past. The knowledge of God in its entirety, so far as that is open to creatures, is only possible in the “Beatific Vision” Itself The next point, then, to consider, is the manner in which Catholics believe the universe to have come into existence.

The word used by the Church is Creation, by which she intends deliberately to rule out either that the Universe is a kind of emanation from God in such a sense that the word “Divine” can be applied to its nature; or that it has existed co-eternally along with God. She further explains her meaning by adding that God created all things that are or have been, out of nothing. It was in no sense by a necessity of His Being that He created the Universe; neither was it by any kind of evolution from Himself that it came to exist. He created all things out of nothing by a free act of His own Sovereign Will. And if it be asked, Why did He so create? it can only be answered, humanwise, that He saw that more “good” — more, that is, to His own “accidental” glory — would be the result than if He had not so acted. His Foreknowledge is perfect; yet it must be remembered also that the Catholic Church entirely denies Calvinistic teaching to the effect that that Foreknowledge constrains any will that He has created free. The situation may be tolerably summed up by saying, God foreordained because He foreknew; He did not foreknow because He foreordained.

Now this Act of God, called Creation, first brought into being an unknown number of beings purely spiritual, like God Himself. These are named generally Angels, and are divided into Nine Orders. It is further believed that these Angels underwent a certain probation; they possessed, therefore, free-wills; and in the event a certain proportion of these beings “fell.” There has been in the past much speculation among theologians as to the nature of the trial they underwent: yet nothing is dogmatically defined on the subject.

Following the creation of the Angels, there came at some unknown period that of the world in which men live; and, finally, of man himself. So far, however, definition is of the slightest. It is to these main dogmas only that the Church authoritatively witnesses. An enormous latitude is permitted to Catholics as regards the time and the place and the circumstances and even the interpretations of the events of which these doctrines speak. It is at the next point that a far more precise defining begins.

A More Precise Definition Of Man
Man, unlike the Angels, is not pure spirit: he is spirit incarnate. He was created innocent, with a certain knowledge of God, though not that full knowledge of which he is capable, and enjoyed Grace. Like the Angels, however, he was created free, and like the Angels who fell, he too fell.

Now this is an exceedingly significant doctrine, for upon it depends, in a sense, the entire system known as the Catholic Religion. If man were merely a creature struggling upwards always, the most fundamental Catholic dogmas would be evacuated of meaning. Certainly it is open to a Catholic to believe that a certain kind of evolution had place in the process of man’s creation, that his body, for example, was gradually fitted by selection and generation to be the habitation of an immortal rational soul. But it is an essential of the Catholic Faith that man’s spirit when first created was both free and innocent, and that it fell from innocence by the abuse of its own free-will.

Man was created, then, to know and serve God in this world and to enjoy Him for ever in the next world. Yet man’s first parents fell from this destiny, and transmitted that fallen nature to their descendants. And it is only possible for fallen man to regain his position by the aid of God’s Grace — that is, by free gifts from God of light and strength. Further, the Sin of Man is so great an outrage against God that nothing but an adequate sacrifice can compensate for it, or can win for man that access to Grace by which alone he can rise again to a state of friendship and union with his Creator. As to what this Sacrifice proves to be, and as to the various methods and channels by which Grace comes, we shall consider later.

This, then, the Church teaches, is the state in which the natural man finds himself in this world. He is fallen, but he is not (as Calvin taught) absolutely corrupt: he has still a conscience — that is, a faculty by which he can discern good and evil; he has still aspirations after good, and, by the mercy of God, a certain power of choosing it: he is still “free,” though his freedom is enormously hampered by that downward tendency that is the result of the Fall.

Further, it is taught, every man has sufficient grace for salvation — sufficient help, that is, from God, to regain the destiny for which God made him, and to avoid the final doom to which sin naturally leads. He is faced by two final states, and two only; and he has but this one life on earth for his probation. If he “corresponds” sufficiently with the grace that God gives him he passes gradually upwards to that union with God of which he is capable, and in Heaven enjoys eternally the “Beatific Vision” — a state in which he at once preserves his own individuality and yet is united to God.

If, on the other hand, he fails to correspond with grace, and yields to the downward drag of his fallen nature in such a degree as to be, when his probation closes with death, in a state of “enmity” with God, he passes to that state which he himself has, in effect, freely chosen, and in hell is excluded eternally from the presence of his Creator. Only, it must be noticed in passing, never yet on any individual has the Catholic Church uttered a decision of final condemnation, since the interior dispositions of a man at the time of his death can be known only to God.

No excommunication or anathema can be more than an approximate attempt to deal with the soul so far as she falls under the Church’s jurisdiction, and such are issued with the express hope of awakening such a soul to her own condition of danger. Neither does the Church for one moment dare to dogmatize as to the state of those who die outside her pale; for even though, as will be seen later, she claims to be the One Ark of Salvation, this does not in any sense derogate from God’s Sovereign right and power to deal with souls in His own way.

Central Doctrines
So far much that has been said is applicable to nearly all Theistic belief. It is as to the nature of the system by which fallen man may be restored that the differences begin to manifest themselves more particularly.

The central doctrine of the Catholic Religion is that of the Incarnation. This doctrine teaches that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity at a certain moment in history was “made man” in such a sense that He assumed complete Human Nature, both body and soul, yet without ceasing to be God or suffering any essential change, that He was born of a woman, lived a human life, and after His death reunited again in the Resurrection both Body and Soul, and finally took back in the Ascension that human nature with Him, perfected and transfigured, to the “Throne” of God. It is by this Incarnation, this “Hypostatic Union” between God and Man in Jesus Christ, that God and man are reunited. Intimately bound up with the doctrine of the Incarnation is that of the Atonement, in which it is believed that the free offering by Jesus Christ of Himself to God — an offering consummated in His Crucifixion on Calvary — constituted the Sacrifice which alone is adequate to compensate for the Sin of Man.

Heresies
Innumerable interpretations of these doctrines, especially of that of the Incarnation, have been successively rejected by the Church under the name of Heresies. It is necessary to touch on a few of these, since it was by their rejection that the Catholic doctrine itself has more precisely emerged. It must be remembered, however, that in the Catholic view all dealings of God with man — of the Infinite with the finite — are bound to be enveloped largely in mystery. The Church claims to state and safeguard the facts revealed by God, not always to reconcile and elucidate them exhaustively.

Two Classes of Heresies
Heresies on the Incarnation fall roughly into two classes namely, those which minimize, respectively, the Human Nature or the Divine Nature of Jesus Christ. The former, and the earlier in point of history, regarded the Human Nature of Christ as either so drowned in the Divinity as to be practically negligible, or as phantom-like and unreal.

In opposition to this the Catholic Church teaches that the Human Nature was completely real and that therefore the sufferings and needs of that Human Nature were also real. Without this reality the Sacrifice of Calvary would be no more than a drama acted for men’s imitation or admiration. Christ had, in fact, a Human Will also, and was capable therefore of feeling the stress of temptation, though Himself actually incapable of sin.

The later heresies, largely adopted at the present day by many who claim the name of Christian, minimize the Divinity of Christ, using that word only to denote either a superhuman quality of goodness or a human quality raised to the utmost intensity; and in opposition to this the Church teaches that the Person of Jesus Christ was, and has always continued to be, the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, immutable and unchanged; that He possessed therefore all the attributes of the Deity since He Himself was God even further, that His Human Nature, so intimate was its union with God, enjoyed always and unceasingly even upon earth the Beatific Vision; and, in virtue of that same union, was and is a proper object of adoration.

It will be seen plainly then that the doctrine of the Atonement depends absolutely upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Human Nature of Christ were in any sense unreal, the Incarnation would be unnecessary. If the Divinity of Christ were not absolute, His Sacrifice would, at the most, only differ from the death of martyrs and saints in degree but not in kind; and again the Incarnation would be unnecessary. As perfect God and perfect Man, however, He accomplished what neither God nor man could accomplish separately: He united real Humanity to real Divinity; and by His Sacrifice consummated that union, and atoned for that for which man alone was incapable of atoning.

Other Foundational Doctrines
This, very briefly, then, is the foundation of the Catholic Religion, and has been, at any rate, until comparatively recently, the foundation of all Protestantism as well. It is claimed, however, by Catholics that certain other doctrines follow inevitably (and were actually so revealed by Christ), and that the rejection of these doctrines by Protestantism has led to obscurity and even to positive heresy on the fundamental dogmas themselves.

First, then, the Catholic Religion teaches that the Grace and Spiritual Power released by the Incarnation and the Atonement need, and were supplied with, means by which such grace should be perpetually applied to the individual. Certainly the individual, where such means fail, can, by the mercy of God, interiorly apprehend the grace necessary for his salvation; but, it is claimed, Christ, who wrought these things under terms of time and space, has provided means also under terms of time and space by which such grace is applied.

Secondly, it is claimed that the truths revealed by Christ need in every age a Living Voice by which vital questions may be answered, and an infallible Authority by which such truths may be safeguarded. A Revelation enshrined in a written book ceases, by the variety of interpretations applied to it, to be a positive or certain Revelation at all, unless there he an authoritative and infallible Teacher on Earth to decide between such interpretations. The Catholic Church, therefore, unlike Protestantism, while she regards the Bible as the Word of God and as one fount of Truth, adds as a second and equally important fount of Truth, the Tradition committed to her by Christ, in the guardianship of which she believes herself divinely safeguarded.

Posted in Book Recommendations | Tagged A More Precise Definition Of Man, Catholicism, Central Doctrines of the Church, God In The Catholic Religion, Heresies, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, The Being of God, The Creation, Three Persons | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections From “Detractors and Defenders of Dostoevsky’s Art” by Victor Abbas

December 16, 2009

You will see scattered about Paying Attention To The Sky numerous references to Dostoevsky. Fr. Neuhaus recommended Victor Terras’ seminal work “Reading Dostoevsky” and we used reading selections from it and Henri de Lubac in a previous post on the Grand Inquisitor legend in the Brothers Karamazov. This is another selection that takes Dostoevsky’s critics as the point of departure to offer an comprehensive view of his writings.

No Time For “Stylistic Niceties?”
In his lifetime, Dostoevsky was not blessed with laudatory reviews. With time, he became defensive about the artistic quality of his work and made the excuse that he had had to write hurriedly, with no time to pay attention to stylistic niceties. Anybody familiar with Dostoevsky’s notebooks, drafts, and galley proofs knows that this was hardly true. But generations of critics have used Dostoevsky’s remarks to corroborate their negative assessment of his art.

Negative Opinions About Dostoevsky’s Work

Most negative opinions about Dostoevsky’s art boil down to an assertion that, while his works are of some interest psychologically or philosophically, their artistic quality is low. Thus, N. A. Dobroliubov, in an otherwise positive review of Dostoevsky’s novel The Insulted and Injured, “Downtrodden People” (Zabitye liudi, 1861), said in fact that it was “artistically below criticism.” Some more recent critics, such as Ivan Bunin and Vladimir Nabokov, concur. To be sure, much negative criticism was and still is caused by the critics’ disagreement with Dostoevsky’s ideological positions or his general ethos (“good, but pretentious,” said Chekhov).
As regards novelistic structure, some critics have seen Dostoevsky’s plots as chaotic and disorganized, while others have found them “Gothic” and aimed at cheap effects. Still others have charged Dostoevsky with excessive psychologizing (his rival Turgenev found it intolerable) and with overly pronounced naturalism (“copying court records”).’ Many critics have found Dostoevsky’s characters unrealistic, schematic, and contrived. The observation that they all talk alike — like the author — is heard often.
Even more intense is the criticism leveled at Dostoevsky’s stylistic craftsmanship. From the very beginning, critics found his style prolix, repetitious, and lacking in polish. Often enough Dostoevsky was also found to be obscure, artificial, and sentimental, Finally, he has been found to lack balance, restraint, and good taste. In a word, whatever the merits of his oeuvre as a whole, its aesthetic value was found to be slight or nonexistent.
Great moral flaws have also been found in Dostoevsky’s works. The charge heard most often is that of pessimism. Almost as often, the outré, hysterical, and morbid nature of Dostoevsky’s works is held up to censure, The label of a “cruel talent” has stuck to him ever since N. K. Mikhailovsky’s essay of that title (Zhestokii talant) appeared in 1882, Dostoevsky’s fascination with the extremes of the human condition is condemned by many critics. Less common are charges of insincerity, unctuousness, and “rosy Christianity.”
The truth content of Dostoevsky’s works has been often challenged as well. In particular, he is said to have pursued the exceptional instead of the typical. Tendentious distortion of reality is a common charge.In an age of realism, Dostoevsky’s penchant for the fantastic, the paradoxical, and the mystical met with much disapproval.

Analysis Of Structure
These opinions, each voiced by critics of note, maybe assumed to be representative of a substantial body of readers and deserve attention not only as a record of Rezeptionsgeschichte, but also as an avenue to an analysis of Dostoevsky’s works.

As regards the structure of Dostoevsky’s novels, the critics’ dissatisfaction is well founded. If the ideal is a well-spaced and economically developed linear plot, a Dostoevskian novel with its multitude of minor characters and subplots, inserted anecdotes, philosophical dialogues, and the narra tor’s essayistic and other digressions is hardly “well structured.” It must be considered, though, that this linear — or syntagmatic — view ignores the wealth of paradigmatic structures that may do quite as much to integrate the text as an elegant linear plot would: leitmotifs, situation rhyme, recurrent imagery, mirroring and doubling, symbolic foreshadowing, parallelism, literary echoes and outright quotations, and other such devices are all plentiful in Dostoevsky’s novels. Their effect tends to be subliminal, and their presence has been demonstrated only through the efforts of generations of literary scholars.

His Greatness As A Novelist
Claims for Dostoevsky’s greatness as a novelist must be staked in connection with the Bakhtinian sense of the novel as an all-inclusive, wide-open expression of the fullness of life in a world in flux. The pattern of a tightly structured tragic plot may be discerned within this loose texture.Isaiah Berlin was, I believe, deeply wrong when he called Dostoevsky a monist “hedgehog” whose art is all about a single issue, rather than a “fox” with a bagful of tricks.A great novelist in this Bakhtinian sense must be a pluralist. Dostoevsky is a pluralist in a variety of ways. He has been aptly called a “romantic realist.”He has been thought, certainly in the West, to be the most Russian of novelists; yet his greatest impact has been on Western readers. Dobroliubov considered Dostoevsky a champion of the “downtrodden;’ and his art is decidedly demotic, yet it came to be appreciated by the intellectual elite of the twentieth century, the Prousts, Gides, and Hermann Hesses.

All these contradictions are enhanced by what Bakhtin called the polyphonic quality of Dostoevsky’s art: the presence in his texts of a persistent “other voice,” generated by devices such as an ironic narrator, often himself the unwary butt of the implied author’s irony, frequent “inner dialogue,” multiple ambiguities, and an incessant stream of literary and journalistic quotations, echoes, and allusions. Dostoevsky’s texts contain many semantic levels. Their narrative level, itself many-faceted, is synchronized with a moral or political argument, such as the antinomy of human and divine justice in The Brothers Karamazov; an allegorical message, say, the prophetic anticipation of the Russian Revolution in The Possessed; and metaphysical symbolism, such as the theme of resurrection in Crime and Punishment.

Dostoevsky’s Skill As “Devil’s Advocate.”
Dostoevsky’s novels encompass antagonistic philosophies and value systems. He is an excellent “devil’s advocate.” Sophisticated readers have mistaken for his own ideas what Dostoevsky was in fact trying to refute. Dostoevsky’s negative characters, his losers, scoundrels, and villains, are presented with as much empathy as his tragic heroes. Bakhtin drew attention to the carnivalistic strain in Dostoevsky’s novels, where a tragic plot may develop from what was initially a scandalous incident or a bad joke. Burlesque comedy is interspersed with tragic action. Serious ideas are advanced by disreputable types, buffoons, or characters who are clearly wrong about things that are dear to the writer’s heart. Often Dostoevsky’s most cherished thoughts appear in travesty: Lebedev, a disreputable character, praying for the soul of the Countess Du Barry is in fact living up to Father Zosima’s principle of universal guilt and responsibility.

Dostoevsky’s Skill As A Master of Detail
Dostoevsky’s novels have been called ideological.” His heroes may be perceived as ideas incarnate and his plots as conflicts of ideas. But then, too, Dostoevsky “aimed at concreteness all his life,” as Viktor Shklovsky put it.A wealth of concrete detail, both incidental and significant, is to be found in his novels. Mundane concerns appear throughout in the most concrete terms. Dostoevsky is a master of the realistic detail évocateur. Sonia’s plaid shawl, Stavrogin’s little red spider, Arkady’s white-and-blue checkered handkerchief, Iliusha’s toy cannon, Aliosha’s sausage sandwich, and hundreds of such details are remembered by the reader.

Ambiguity
Dostoevsky’s novels are ambiguous even structurally. On the one hand, they leave openings to “real life” in a variety of ways (including allusions to contemporary events and concerns, and especially to contemporary literature). On the other, they are structured artifacts by virtue of the presence in them of abstract ideas that are brought home through various artful devices. A tragic plot in which ancient mythical themes have been detected may be embedded in what is recognizably an old-fashioned family novel with many feuilletonistic digressions, as is the case in The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

Featuring Exceptional Human Beings In Extreme Situations
The charge that Dostoevsky’s novels have Gothic traits and feature high or perverse passions, intrigue, murder, and suicide is of course valid. Dostoevsky’s main characters are exceptional human beings in extreme situations. Yet it must be understood that they live in a world populated by crowds of ordinary people leading ordinary lives. The saints, fanatics, murderers, and tragic sufferers of Dostoevsky’s novels live among men and women who pursue their mundane concerns in familiar ways. This does not invalidate the charge, however, and Dostoevsky’s answer to it was that extreme types and situations were more revealing of the human condition than the so-called “average?”³This is a fundamental question on which Dostoevsky disagreed with most of his contemporaries. Maximilian Braun has wisely suggested that the crises, rare but still real, of human life were precisely Dostoevsky’s forte, while he had less of an eye and ear for every-day life: courtship and marriage, making a living, raising a family, and such. Which area one considers more important depends on one’s Weltanschauwig.

Dostoevsky’s Naturalism
The charge of “naturalism” is also justified. This goes both for Dostoevsky’s use of topics and details of current journalistic interest and for his frequent depictions of the seamy side of life and distasteful aspects of personal appearance and behavior. Dostoevsky offended not only Victorian sensibilities in this respect. As for Dostoevsky’s characters, it is true that many of them are based on identifiable real-life prototypes. It is also true that these, as well as some other, apparently imaginary characters, are readily perceived as “types,” which was Dostoevsky’s intent. The portraits of, say, Turgenev in The Possessed or of G. Z. Eliseev in The Brothers Karamazov are indiscreetly recognizable and quite cruel. They are also drawn satirically, as social types. But this can hardly be considered an aesthetic blemish, unless one clings to a narrow conception of realist art that excludes satire on the grounds that it distorts reality.

Dostoevsky’s Idealist Belief In The Freedom Of The Human Spirit
More serious is M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s charge that The Idiot contains, “on the one side, characters full of life and truth, but on the other, some mysterious puppets whirling madly as though in a dream, made by hands trembling with rage.”Similar impressions come from other reputable critics who were at odds with Dostoevsky’s political views. They tended to find Dostoevsky’s characters contrived and carelessly executed. For instance, Mikhailovsky calls the nihilist figures in The Possessed, including Stavrogin, Piotr Verkhovensky, Shatov, and Kirillov, “puppets” and “pale, pretentious, and artificial.”Tolstoi’s identical charge refers to The Brothers Karamazov as a whole.These opinions are to be explained by the fact that the characters perceived as artificial and contrived were in fact created as ideas incarnate. They owe their existence to the ideas that possess them.Their social and psychological Gestalt is a function of these ideas. The disagreement between Dostoevsky and critics who would rather see ideas as a function of a character’s social identity is of a basic nature. It is a disagreement between a positivist social determinism and Dostoevsky’s idealist belief in the freedom of the human spirit.

Another violation of strict realism may be seen in Dostoevsky’s tendency to give many of his characters the gift of imaginative expression. Too many of them talk and think well, or at least interestingly, to be altogether believable. Homer, Dante, and, Shakespeare, to name only the greatest, take the same risk. The gain is in expressiveness. It is this form of poetic license that energizes Dostoevsky’s texts and makes them so memorable.

Dostoevsky’s Characters Talk Like The Author
The most damaging of the charges, that all Dostoevsky’s characters talk like the author, has been heard often since V. G. Belinsky first leveled it, and from as authoritative a reader as Tolstoi. It clashes with Bakhtin’s polyphonic conception of the Dostoevskian novel. How is this patent contradiction to be resolved? It is a fact that Dostoevsky, never a writer “from the notebook” (in the literal sense, that is), is not a very careful stylist when it comes to creating a social, regional, or occupational idiolect for his characters. He also lets some of his characters express thoughts which appear to be “over their heads” and which may be a part of the author’s ideological argument. Furthermore, more than most novelists, Dostoevsky likes to introduce a literary subtext into his dialogue, a trait that runs the danger of deconstructing its realism, as the reader’s mind is directed to the text quoted or alluded to and away from the situation at hand. The justification for this practice is that Dostoevsky’s novels are not primarily novels of manners, or even realistic social novels, but are rather in many ways close to the tradition that began with the Platonic dialogue. They are novels about ideas as much as about people.

Dostoevsky’s texts are alive, rather than lucid, well written, or elegant. They present the narrator’s and the characters’ speech in living flux, rather than as a finished product. An undercurrent of emotion or thought-in-progress is constantly present. The text is energized by an ever-active “inner form,” by which I mean any kind of verbal content beyond direct routine communication, or, in other words, any active ingredient added to the message by its medium. Metaphoric expression, such as podpol’e, “underground,” nadryv, “rupture,” or besy, “demons;’ is the most obvious example. “Inner form” may be generated also by rhythm, dialogic expression (as in irony, ambiguity, allusion, innuendo), over- and understatement, poignancy, solemnity, strangeness (through quirkiness, buffoonery, slang, idiolect, catachresis), challenging the reader by open partisanship, provocation, suspense, or novelty, and the narrator’s and everybody else’s unflagging personal interest in the action. “Inner form” makes the reader see things by making them concrete. For instance, the first chapter subtitle in The Brothers Karamazov might have been “The Story of a Family:’ which would have been routine communication without inner form. Instead, it is Istoriia Odnoi Semeiki– “The (Hi)Story of One Nice Little Family.”

A Reputation As A Poor Stylist
A reputation as a poor stylist has accompanied Dostoevsky since the publication of his first works. The critics’ opinion is the result of a misunderstanding that has been removed by Bakhtin’s insights. Bakhtin showed that Dostoevsky’s text creates a polyphonic concert of living voices, one of which is the narrator’s (which itself may well be dialogic!), rather than a homophonic narrative dominated by the narrator’s voice, Hence a controlled, economical, and well-integrated narrative style is not what Dostoevsky pursues. He will write elegantly only when the voice in question demands it. If one disregards the “polyphony” argument, Dostoevsky’s highly uneven narrative style, often distinctly colloquial, often journalistic, sometimes chatty, then again lyrical, solemn, or pathetic, places his work with the roman-feuilleton and may be legitimately seen as an aesthetic flaw. Today it is commonly seen as an innovative trait, adopted by Céline, Faulkner, Grass, and other leading novelists of the twentieth century.

Dostoevsky’s Religious Thought
The alleged moral flaws of Dostoevsky’s works are a function of the critic’s Weltanschauung. I believe that a Christian view close to Dostoevsky’s lets these flaws disappear. This is also true of Dostoevsky’s alleged pessimism. Thus, it is often said of The Idiot that the Good, personified in Prince Myshkin, is wholly ineffectual, and the ideal that the Prince stands for quite incompatible with life. Such criticism is invalid from Dostoevsky’s Christian viewpoint, for a Christian’s hope and joy are nurtured not by any earthly “and they lived happily ever after:’ but by faith in resurrection. A similar defense may be advanced against the charge that the atmosphere Dostoevsky created is sickly, hysterical, or outré (as he said himself). Nietzsche once called the evangelic world a mixture of the sickly, the childlike, and the sublime. The fervent excitement that permeates Dostoevsky’s world is shared with every ambience of religious or political ferment.

Ways In Which Men Live And Die With Or Without God
Dostoevsky’s religious thought is concerned with the ways in which men live and die with or without God. The solipsist antihero of Notes from Underground, the would-be Nietzschean Ubermensch Raskolnikov, l’homme revolte Kirillov of The Possessed, burnt-out Byronic heroes like Svidrigailov and Stavrogin, sensualists like Fiodor Pavlovich Karamazov, crude cynics like Smerdiakov, and even god-builders like Ivan Karamazov or Versilov of A Raw Youth – they are all humanists who believe that man can stand alone, without God — or against God. Dostoevsky’s peculiar approach to existence without God made him a forerunner of Existentialism. He asked not whether or not there is a God, but what living with or without God means for the existence of modern man.Despite his efforts to discredit atheist humanism, Dostoevsky became a prophet of the “death of God.” He certainly defined the condition of man without God with great power, though this achievement may have lost some of its provocative edge in our godless age.

Those of Dostoevsky’s characters who are with God, holy men like Tikhon, Makar Dolgoruky, or Zosima, simple souls like Sonia Marmeladov, Prince Myshkin, or Aliosha Karamazov, humble sinners like Marmeladov or Dmitry Karamazov, are no less memorable. Their state of grace is not determined by good deeds, or even by the fruits of their striving, but entirely by their unquestioning acceptance of God’s fatherhood. This position is complemented by a doctrine, stated most clearly by Father Zosima, of human solidarity in sonhood, which lets every human bear guilt and responsibility for every sin of humanity.

Dostoevsky’s Beliefs
Dostoevsky believed that a Christian’s progress is a struggle against human nature.Man is sustained in this struggle by epiphanies of divine grace, Father Zosima’s “contacts with other worlds,” which intrude upon man’s mundane existence. This position, and Dostoevsky’s rejection of ethical rationalism, are in accord not only with Orthodox doctrine, but also with some strains of romantic idealism. Dostoevsky’s religious philosophy is generally in tune with Russian Slavophile thought. Important as Dostoevsky’s religious ideas and Kulturkritik may be, to see his greatness mainly in these terms may divert us from an appreciation of his genius, simply because today, as in the writer’s lifetime, many readers will reject these ideas out of hand.

Nabokov’s Criticism
As for the cruelty of Dostoevsky’s talent, a charge raised by V. P. Burenineven before Mikhailovsky’s celebrated article, and reiterated by Nabokov, who speaks of Dostoevsky’s “wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity,” this too depends on the critic’s point of view. A remark by Saltykov-Shchedrin, rather to the same effect, may put this trait in the right context. Speaking of Notes from Underground, Saltykov-Shchedrin suggests that the point of this work is to show that every man is trash; nor will he ever become a good man until he is convinced that he is indeed trash. He then adds: “In the end, he moves on to the real subject of his musings. He draws his proofs mostly from St. Thomas Aquinas, but since he fails to reveal this, his readers may think that these thoughts are the narrator’s own.”The meaning of this Aesopian comment is that Dostoevsky has taken his hero to the depths of abjection only in order to lead him thereafter to faith and salvation. From a Christian viewpoint there is nothing wrong with this. But it is difficult for a reader who does not share Dostoevsky’s Christian convictions to see it this way, or, for another example, to see Marmeladov, that image of abjection and degradation, as an edifying example and perhaps the most positive character of Crime and Punishment, discounting Sonia, who is a saint.

A Rosy Christianity?
Other charges related to the moral aspect of Dostoevsky’s works are also a matter of ideology. Such are the charges of unctuousness and “rosy Christianity.” The former is a matter of faith: a nonbeliever like Nabokov will find the reading of the Gospel that brings together “the murderer and the harlot” to be simply in bad taste. The believer will find it moving and edifying. Leontiev’s charge of “rosy Christianity,” shared with some conservative Orthodox churchmen, may well be valid for some of Dostoevsky’s writings, though not for his total oeuvre.

The Truth Content Of Dostoevsky’s Works
Turning now to the truth content of Dostoevsky’s works, the foremost charge is that he deals with the exceptional, rather than with the typical: a serious charge, considering Dostoevsky’s insistence that he was a realist, albeit “in a higher sense.” V. G. Belinsky said that madmen — Dostoevsky’s Goliadkin, hero of The Double (1846), is the case in point — being atypical, “belong in lunatic asylums, not in novels.”Dostoevsky, in commenting on his novel years later, said that he had heralded, precisely in this character, a new social type of importance. So Goliadkin’s madness was typical after all. Analogous disagreements between author and critics were repeated in connection with almost every work. Dostoevsky was confident that the future would prove him right: his “exceptional” characters would one day be recognized as prophetic of Russia’s future, while those of Goncharov, Turgenev, and Tolstoi would appear as what they were, even at their appearance: representations of Russia’s past. The last word may not yet have been said about Dostoevsky the prophet and religious thinker. His analysis of the mentality that caused the Russian Revolution was profoundly correct, yet he was wrong, judging from the present point in history, in assuming that Russian spirituality would prevail over the demons of godless humanism and nthilism.

The charges of outright distortion of reality relate mostly to Dostoevsky’s understanding of the mood and moral attitude of the young generation of the Russian intelligentsia. It would seem that he was overly optimistic when he hoped that Kolia Krasotkin would follow the example of Aliosha Karamazov, rather than that of Rakitin.

Dostoevsky As A Keen Psychologist
Since the 1840s, Dostoevsky has had a reputation as a keen psychologist. Even then some critics found his psychologism excessive. In the 1860s and 1870s, such charges were heard frequently, and it was suggested that Dostoevsky’s morbidly self-conscious and self-lacerating characters were unrepresentative of Russian society, but were, rather, projections of the author’s own diseased mind. Unquestionably, Dostoevsky had a deep understanding of humans under conditions of great stress caused by want, suffering, frustration, rejection, and despair. He understood the psychology of poverty, humiliation, resentment, jealousy, cynicism, and cruelty better than most. Whether he had a balanced view of the Russian men and women of his age is a different question. Excellence as a psychologist is hardly the measure of his greatness, however, especially because Dostoevsky himself often spoke disparagingly of “scientific” psychology.

As for the charge that Dostoevsky developed his psychological dramas in a vacuum, neglecting to give them a natural and social background, I believe that it is unfounded. A careful reader will find that each scene of a Dostoevskian novel is provided with ample and aptly chosen detail that acts as a proper setting for the scene. Some critics have said that mundane details, such as food and drink, clothing and land- or city-scape, are missing from Dostoevsky’s novels. This is simply not true. There is ample material for an article on “Food and Drink in The Brothers Karamazov,” for example, or on “The Topography of St. Petersburg in Crime and Punishment.”

Posted in Readings | Tagged Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky's Greatness As A Novelist, Dostoevsky’s Beliefs, Dostoevsky’s Naturalism, Dostoevsky’s Religious Thought, Dostoevsky’s Skills, Exceptional Human Beings In Extreme Situations, Nabokov’s Criticism, Reading Dostoevsky, the polyphonic quality of Dostoevsky’s art, Victor Terras | Leave a Comment »

Book Recommendation: “Jesus, The Man Who Lives” by Malcolm Muggeridge

December 15, 2009

Salvador Dali "Christ of St. John of the Cross"

Tolstoy On The Gospels
An idea becomes close to you only when you are aware of it in your soul, when in reading about it it seems that it has already occurred to you, that you know it and you are simply recalling it. That’s how it was when I read the Gospel. In the Gospels I discovered a new world: I had not yet supposed that there was such a depth of thought in them. Yet it all seemed so familiar; it seemed that I had known it all long ago, that I had only forgotten it.
Tolstoy, As recorded in Bulgakov’s Diary 18 April 1910

The Revelation’s Impetus
..the revelation Jesus provided, in his teaching, and in the drama of his life, death, and Resurrection, of the true purpose and destination of our earthly existence, seems to me, even by comparison with other such revelations, to be of unique value and everlasting validity. The fact hat I happen to have come into the world myself at a time when the revelation’s impetus in history gives every sign of being almost spent, and when western Man is increasingly inclined to reject and despise the inheritance it has brought him, only serves to make me the more appreciative of it and awed by it. In the same sort of way the last notes of the Missa Solemnis seem to contain the whole beauty of what has gone before, or the light of a June evening to hold all the glory of the day that is ending.

Faith
The key to this seeming disparity between Pascal the scientist, scrupulously observing facts and weighing their relevance, and Pascal the Christian, bowing his head, bending his knees, humbling his proud mind, before the Virgin Mother of Jesus, lies in the one word “faith”…”the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”[Paul, Epistle to the Hebrews] Faith that bridges the chasm between what our minds can know and what our souls aspire after; faith which so dwarfs whatever we may consider ourselves to have achieved, or been, that it makes all men —- the humblest, the simplest, the most, in worldly terms –foolish — our equal, our brothers; faith which so irradiates our inner being and outward circumstances that the ostensible exactitudes of time and measure, of proof and disproof, lose their precision, existing only in relation to eternal absolutes which everything in the universe proclaims, and in which all life has its being – the stones and the creatures, the pigs grunt and the nightingale’s song, the trees and the mountains, the wind and the clouds, height and depth, darkness and light, everything that ever has been, or ever will be, attempted, or done, till the end of time — all swelling the chorus of faith.

Fantasy, Truth And The Eye
I want to cry out with the blind man to whom Jesus restored his sight: One thing that I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see. How, I ask myself, could I have missed it before? How not have understood that the grey–silver light across the water, the cry of the seagulls and the sweep of their wings, everything on which my eyes rest and my ears hear is telling me about God.

This life’s dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro’, the Eye.

Thus Blake distinguishes between the fantasy that is seen with the eye and truth that is seen though it. There are two clearly demarcated kingdoms; and passing from one to the other, from the kingdom of fantasy to the kingdom of reality, gives inexpressible delight. As when the sun comes out, and a dark landscape is suddenly glorified, all that was obscure becoming clear, all that was incomprehensible, comprehensible. Fantasy’s joys and desires dissolve away and in their place is one joy, one desire; one Oneness — God.

In this kingdom of reality, Simone Weil tells us, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy as goodness; no desert so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. There we may understand what St. Augustine meant when he insisted that ‘though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone, and how, in the light of this realization, all human progress, human morality, human law, based, as they are, on the opposite proposition — of the intrinsic superiority of the higher over the lower — is seen as written on water, scribbled on dust; like Jesus’ scribble while he was waiting for the accusers of he woman taken in adultery to disperse.

Approaching Jesus Through Art
Jesus’ story is a drama, not documentation, and the word whose flesh he became is every true word ever written or spoken; every true note ever sounded, every true stone ever laid on another, every true shape molded, or true color mixed. The whole creative achievement of Man is comprehended in it. Look for it in the light shining in El Greco’s faces; listen for it in the notes of Plainsong; marvel at it in the spire of Salisbury Cathedral rising so exquisitely into the sky; read it in Blake’s Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Hold it in your hand in a grain of sand; in your mind in the universe, with all its planetary systems within systems and ultimate vistas of everlasting space; in your soul in the contemplation of the creator of it all, the spirit which animates it all the beginning and the end of what has not beginning and no end — God. Then pinpoint it all, bring it all to a focus, concentrate it all in a Man and that Man – Jesus

The Meaning of The Incarnation
The perfection of Jesus’ divinity was expressed in the perfection of his humanity, and vice versa. He was God because he was so sublimely a man, and Man because, in all his sayings and doings, the grace of his person and words, in the love and compassion that shone out of him he walked so closely with God. As Man alone Jesus could not have saved us; as God alone, he would not. Incarnate, he could and did.

Prophecy
If, I remember reflecting as a child, and perhaps asking some unfortunate teacher, this or that had to be done to fulfill a prophecy, how was it a prophecy at all? Surely, prophesying meant foreseeing something that was going to happen, not so arranging things that it happened. Subsequent experience of life, and brooding thereon, made me understand that two parallel processes are at work – prophesying, and surrendering to the logic of events whereby the prophecy comes to pass. Built into our mortal circumstances here is what Blake called a Fearful Symmetry –

Tyger Tyger buring bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Western Man Has Decided To Abolish Himself
It has become abundantly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself. Having wearied of the struggle to be himself, he has created his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, his own vulnerability out of his own strength; himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down, and, in the process of auto–genocide, convincing himself that he is too numerous, and laboring accordingly with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer in order to be an easier prey for his enemies; until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct.

Determinism, Freedom And Prophecy
In their exposition of the fulfillment of the prophecy the Gospels faithfully reflect the mysterious blend of determinism and freedom which governs our lives. What happens, they tell us, has to happen, but still need not; we must bend our knees and bow our heads and say Thy will be done, while none the less knowing, as Jesus did in his darkest hour in the Garden of Gethsemane, that it is open to us to follow our own wills. The demons of the ego are allowed to enter into us, as they were allowed to enter into the Gadarene swine, and can send us similarly leaping to destruction…

The imagination can relate these two seeming opposites — determinism and freedom — into a wholeness which partakes of both and is greater than either. Hence art. Watching a performance of Macbeth, we know perfectly well that Macbeth will murder Duncan, and all the tragic consequences will ensue, and yet hang breathlessly on Macbeth’s words as he summons up his resolution to fulfill the witches’ prediction…

Prophecy belongs to the domain of the imagination, not of the intellect; its truth lies in the inescapable necessity to fulfill it; its strength, in our sense that we are free to fulfill or not as we think fit. This is why, especially at moments of great crisis in our individual lives or in history, we often seem to be following a preordained course, and yet choosing, whether grudgingly, heroically, or in desperation, to follow it.

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found
Where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding? [Job 28:12] Not, certainly, in what passes for being the documentation of this or any other age, whether recorded by a Josephus, elegantly recorded by a Gibbon, laboriously assembled by a Namier, dispersed in clouds of rhetoric by a Churchill, or reflected in the fabulous distorting mirror twentieth — century technology has devised to take in every detail and aspect of our contemporary scene — the television screen. This last, least of all; nothing is less actual that its actualites.

Only mystics, clowns and artists, in my experience, speak the truth, which, as Blake was always insisting, is perceptible to the imagination rather than the mind. Thus an animist groveling naked in the African bush before a painted stone may well be nearer to the heart of things than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell, and a painted clown riding a bicycle round and round a circus ring more attuned to the reality of life than a Talleyrand or a Bismark can hope to be. Jesus was making the same point when he insisted that God has revealed to the foolish what is hidden from the wise.

A Religion Of Slaves
Simone Weil describes…There was a full moon, and the wives of the fishermen were going in procession form ship to ship, carrying candles and singing ancient hymns of a heart — rending sadness. As she listened to them, here own sadness lifted, and she suddenly had a joyous conviction ‘that Christianity is preeminently a religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.’

Sinners’s Knowledge, Garnered In Sinlessness
This is like asking why the Word needed to become flesh in the first place; why it did not suffice just as Word. The point is that, to exist for us in time, the Word had to be spoken, and that the Incarnation was God’s way of speaking it. Or, as it is put in the Fourth Gospel in becoming flesh in the person of Jesus, the Word dwelt among us. Thus though Jesus’ coming into the world was divinely ordained, and represented God’s deliberate intervention in history, it was still the case that he had to live in the world as a man among other men. In this capacity, he heard and heeded John’s call to repentance and accepted John’s hands, just as later, he accepted crucifixion at Pilate’s.

In this capacity too, he understood, fully and perfectly, the nature and driving force of sin. How otherwise could he have insisted that just to look after woman to lust after her is to commit adultery? This is sinner’s knowledge, as all sinners at once recognize. How otherwise would he know that the insatiable ego ever raising its cobra head will not be coaxed or persuaded or indulged into quiescence, but must be struck down once and for all? That to live we must die, experiencing the ultimate sweetness of life, the final fragrance and music of it, only in its final rejection. That when we at last know that life is worthless, then only do we truly live; that when we have absolutely nothing more to hope for —- no dream, however exalted, of delighting or uplifting our fellows, no vista of fulfilled love or of silver evening light falling serenely across our last days – then, at last, we can hope? That when the heart is empty, the mind dry, the soul blown away in dust, and the sheet of white paper that has to be covered stares back at us glassy-eyed, then, and only then, a flame leaps up of certainty, absolute and everlasting, that God awaits with outstretched arms to welcome us into the eternity whence we came? This is what Jesus knew — sinners’s knowledge, garnered in sinlessness.

Salvation For Individuals No Collective Cures
Jesus never used his miraculous powers to promote any general or collective purpose. The salvation he offered was for individuals not collectivities; for a person, not for an idea. Though the sick crowded around him there were no collective cures or blanket dispensations.

Fulfilling His Mission While Accepting Mortal Existence
…While he was incarnate he insisted on being regarded in every respect as a mortal man. Had he done otherwise, the focus and climax of all his teaching, the Cross, would have lost its point. For a man to die on the Cross for other men was sublime, where for God to be crucified would be nothing – like someone who is immortal serving a prison sentence. If the Devil had succeeded in persuading Jesus to exploit his miraculous powers to his own greater glory in the eyes of the world, his mission would have been emptied of its content. To fulfill his mission he had to accept all the limitations, fallibilities and inadequacies of our mortal existence and relate these to our immortal destiny, thereby enabling men to draw near to God, and God to make Himself accessible to men….

After his colloquy with the Devil it was to be abundantly clear to him that always and in all circumstances he must eschew the three pillars of earthly authority – marvels, affluence and the exercise of power. It was not for him to turn stones into bread, however plentiful the stones and scarce the bread, but rather to sacramentalize bodily into spiritual sustenance; not for him to draw men to him by calling on God for a sign, but rather to light with his truth their way to God and God’s way to them. Above all it was not for Him to look for help or support to any Caesar, actual or aspiring; still less to become one. He was to be no Fuhrer, no mythical resistance leader; there was poetry , but no rhetoric, in the words wherewith he would reveal to men how God would have them live together and do His will.

Adam And Jesus
As one man, Adam, had estranged men for God, so another man, Jesus, would reconcile them to God; as Adam’s disobedience necessitated Moses’ Law, so Jesus’ obedience opened up a new dispensation of love transcending Moses’ Law in relations between man and man, and between men and God…Jesus’ sacrifice undoes Adam’s sin; the Old Man with his deeds is put off, and the New Man, reborn in the spirit is put on; and all mankind, Jew and gentile, bond and free, conjoined together in one body, in one fellowship, with, and in, Christ. This was the new heaven and the new earth prophesied in the Scriptures…

C.H.Dodd On Truth In The Gospels
There are particular moments in the lives of men and in the history of mankind when what is permanently true (if largely unrecognized) becomes manifestly and effectively true. Such a moment in history is reflected in the Gospels. The presence of God with men, a truth for all times and all places, becomes an effective truth. It became such (we must conclude) because of the impact Jesus made; because in his words and actions it was presented with exceptional clarity and operative with exceptional power. Jesus himself pointed out the effects of his work as signs of the coming of the kingdom: If by the finger of God I drive out devils, then be sure the Kingdom of God has come upon you.

The Messiah Of The Prophecy And Jesus
The Messiah of the prophecy was for the Jews exclusively, and his Kingdom an Israel restored to a greatness and glory; the messiah in the person of Jesus is not for a Chosen People, but for all who will accept Him, and His Kingdom is not of this world at all. It is, at once, within us, and located beyond the confines of space and time and mortality.

We carry about it with us in our inner being, infinitely precious, as it might be some locket containing he likeness of a beloved face. At the same time, like Augustine’s City of God, it is high above us out of our reach — Isaiah’s land that is very far off; but still, for those who have eyes to see, discernible from our earthly city and the destination of our earthly pilgrimage.

It is both here and now, available to everyone for the asking, and to be vigilantly expected — as the wise virgins awaited the coming of the bridegroom, with their lamps full of oil, unlike the foolish ones who had used up their oil and then, when the bridegroom came , had no means of replenishing their lamps.

The Christian Life: Tasting Eternity In Time
As Shakespeare put it in his famous seven stages of man, we come into the world as babies mewling and puking in our nurse’s arms; then pass from childhood to youth, to mature manhood, until finally we peter out in second childishness and mere oblivion. Where in this process is there a place for being reborn? Yet it happens. Out of the dark womb of our own willfulness and carnality some force of spiritual creativity can push us into another birth. We emerge into the same world we have grown accustomed to, to find it now made new; its colors shining and translucent, its shapes sharpened and wonderful in their grace, its men and women moving like angels, and all its creatures disclosing a beauty hitherto secret.

So, seeing with new eyes, I see a new world; understanding with heart and mind and soul, truth breaks upon me, not thought or sensation or realization but in one comprehensive enlightenment. As a child with its first yawn or smile measures up to Time, I, reborn, and become a child again, measure up to Eternity. Who can doubt that this is the everlasting life Jesus promised – what is eternal in life becoming manifest eternally; each joy forever in its joyfulness, each woe likewise in its woefulness, and the two inextricably intertwined; in Blake’s words ‘woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine.’…

[Jesus’ Kingdom] offered salvation to men and women living in the world; holding out to them the possibility of a way of life on quite different terms from any hitherto envisaged. Tasting eternity in time; experiencing heavenly ecstasies while still walking the earth; carrying love, not just to the ultimate requirements of the Law, of morality, of human affections, but far, far beyond that — into the crazy extravagancies of God’s love, which knows no limits; which is poured out indiscriminately on all His creation, flooding it all in beauty, and making all its sounds — the grunts, the cries, the songs, the screeches – somehow melodious, not to mention words, which fill and billow like a sail to his Breath, and glow with his translucence. …

[Imagine] Paul breaking into song while living in and for Christ in Nero’s world…The joy and wonder were to continue unabated through all the troubles and pitfalls that lay ahead. In the world ye shall have tribulations: but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world – how often I have said over to myself with feelings of inexpressible comfort these words Jesus spoke to his disciples, knowing that when the test came they would scatter and lose heart, and regret ever having been associated with him . Jesus had indeed overcome the world, and forever…He had overcome the world by revealing its true nature, its reality contrasting with the layer upon layer of fantasy which the human ego is endlessly constructing out of itself, like a monstrous coral reef. The revelation was Jesus’ good news, the kingdom he came to proclaim. In its light, we may know ourselves to be displaced persons, who yet are given eyes, if we care to use them, capable of seeing here on earth, all the contours and of our true habitat and dwelling–place–to–be. Thus St Augustine’s preaching…after hearing the news of the sack of Rome:

You are surprised that the world is losing its grip? That the world is grown old and full of pressing tribulations? Do not hold on to the old man, the world; do not refuse to regain your youth in Christ, who says to you: the world is passing away, the world is losing its grip, the world is short of breath. Do not fear, thy youth shall be renewed as an eagle.

Christianity Is An Experience
The war goes on; and suddenly in the most unlikely theater of all, a Solzhenitsyn raises his voice, while in the dismal slums of Calcutta a Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity go about Jesus’ work of love with incomparable dedication. When I think of them, as I have seen them at their work and at their devotions, I want to put away all the books, tear up all the scribbled notes. There are no more doubts or dilemmas; everything is perfectly clear.

What commentary or exposition, however eloquent, lucid, perceptive, inspired even, can equal in elucidation and illumination the effect of these dedicated lives? What mind has conceived a discourse, or tongue spoken in it, which conveys even to a minute degree eh light they shine before men? I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked and ye clothed me: I was sick and ye visited me: I was in prison and ye came unto me – the words come alive, as no study or meditation could possibly make them, in the fulfillment in the most literal sense of Jesus’ behest to see in the suffering faces of humanity his suffering face, and in their broken bodies, his.

The religion Jesus gave the world is an experience, not a body of ideas or principles. It is being lived that it lives, as it is in loving that the love which it discloses at the heart of all creation becomes manifest. It belongs to the world of a Cervantes rather than a Wittgenstein; to Rabelais and Tolstoy rather than to Bultmann and Barth.

Our Transformation At Death
So at last I may understand, and understanding believe; see my ancient carcass, prone between the sheets, stained and worn like a scrap of paper dropped in the gutter, muddy and marred with being trodden underfoot, and hover over it, myself, like a butterfly released from its chrysalis stage and ready to fly away. Are caterpillars told of their impending resurrection? How in dying they will be transformed from poor earth — crawlers into creatures of the air, with exquisitely pained wings? If told, do they believe it?

Is it conceivable to them that so constricted an existence as this should burgeon into so gay and lightsome a one as a butterfly’s? I imagine the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads — no, it can’t be; it’s a fantasy, self–deception, a dream. Similarly, our wise ones. Yet in the limbo between living and dying, as the night clocks tick remorselessly on, and the black sky implacably shows not one single streak or scratch of grey, I hear those words; I am the resurrection, and the life, and feel myself to be carried along on a great tide of joy and peace.

Two Great Propositions
Jesus summarized all his teaching for us in two great propositions which have provided Christendom with, as it were, its moral and spiritual axis. The first and great commandment, he said , was: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and the second , like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these commandments, he insisted, hang all the law and the prophets. His manner of presenting them indicates their interdependence; unless we love God we cannot love our neighbor, and correspondingly, unless we love our neighbor we cannot love God.. Once again , there has to be a balance; Christianity is a system of such balanced obligations –To God and Caesar, to flesh and spirit; to God and our neighbor, and so on. Happy the man who strikes the balance justly; to its imbalance are due most of our miseries and misfortunes, individual as well as collective.

What Does Loving God Mean?
We can love the world he created and the universe which is its setting…All this we can love; but still it is not loving God…We may love the godly works of man…all this can be loved as emanating from God, and yet not even this is God. Yet again there are Man’s own particular and private loves, all of which pertaining to love partake in some degree of God’s love…how beautiful in old age to note in the grandchild newly born some trait remembered form long ago …like the echo of a distant bell…yet this is still not God…How is God to be found and loved? Not as philosophically conceived as a first cause or Categorical Imperative…still less are we capable of loving God as scientifically conceived…the life force which has triumphantly carried our species form primeval slime to Professor Ayer…the simple fact is that to be truly loved God has to become a Man without thereby ceasing to be God. Hence Jesus who provides the possibility of loving God through and in him.

Thus the two commandments become one; to be celebrated in a Man – Jesus —- who died and sanctified in a Man — also Jesus — who goes on living.. As out of Jesus’ affliction came a new sense of God’s love, and a new basis for love between men, so out of our affliction we may grasp a the splendor of God’s love and how to love one another. Thus the consummation of the two commandments was on Golgotha; and the cross is at once their image and their fulfillment. “It is affliction itself.”

Simone Weil writes, ‘that the splendor of God’s mercy shines; from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness.’ We feel ourselves to be forsaken, as Jesus momentarily did on the Cross; and if then we persevere in our love, we end by coming into contact with something which is neither joy nor sorrow, something necessary, pure and essential; something apart form the senses, partaking of both joy and sorrow. Then, at last , triumphantly, we know what it is to love God and looking outwards from within this love, we see our fellow men, all of them, the sick and the well, the beautiful and the plain, the stupid and the clever, mongols and beauty queens, and imbeciles and athletes, every variety and category of humankind; see them all as brothers and sisters, members of one family, at once enfolded in God’s love and chained together by it, as though they were His galley–slaves, and this servitude their perfect freedom.

Jesus And Jerusalem
In his [Jesus’] only recorded personal outburst, he cried out at his first glimpse of Jerusalem in the distance, set amidst the hills, so strangely and beautifully aloof, as though floating in the sky, and more like a visionary city than an actual one: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!

The Cloud Of Unknowing: Quotation
Love is such a great power that it maketh all things to be shared. Therefore love Jesus, and all things that he hath, it is thine. He by his Godhead is maker and giver of time. He by his Manhood is the true heeder of time. And he by his Godhead and Manhood together, is the truest judge and the asker of account of the spending of time. Knit thee therefore to him, by love and by belief.

Judas
And Judas?…Was he the most skeptical of them all about Jesus’ Messianic pretensions and the powers that went therewith, and so the readier to be a paid renegade? Or was he the most understanding of them all, the one with the greatest certainty that Jesus was indeed all he claimed to be, Incarnate God, which made Judas feel he must at all costs get rid of him The method he chose suggests as much – betraying Jesus to the Sanhedrin gang for a paltry sum of money, thirty pieces of silver, which at the then market rate was less than the cost of a mediocre slave.

As does also the manner he chose to identify Jesus — with a kiss. After all there were plenty of other means of identification than a kiss; such as pointing Jesus out and pronouncing a Devil’s version of Ecce Homo—Behold the Man! Surely that kiss was an indication that Judas betrayed Jesus, not because he hated him, but because he loved him.

A Stupendous Riddle
They call him Master and rightly so, but in washing their feet the Master deliberately abases himself in order to demonstrate that greatness lies not in self–assertion, but in self–abnegation. Earthly authority displays itself in giving orders, in magnificent apparel, in hordes of servitors, in sycophantic addresses; the authority Jesus disposes of is, by contrast, spiritual, and expresses itself in serving, not in being served, in seeking to be the least instead of the greatest, the last instead of the first, in finding wisdom in the innocence of children and truth in the foolishness of men rather than in those who pass for being sagacious and experienced in the world’s ways. When we want to adulate men, we say they are godlike; but when God became Man, it was in the lineaments of the least of men…

If the greatest of all, Incarnate God, chooses to be the servant of all, who will wish to be the master? If he receives orders, who will venture to give them? If those who climb are descending, and those who descend, climbing, who will aspire after eminence? These are the questions Jesus leaves with us; not to answer — because they have no answer — but to live with and by. Christianity is a stupendous riddle without a solution; a stupendous joke without a point; a stupendous song without a tune; a stupendous waking dream that we lose in sleeping; a death in life and a life in death.

The Way, The Truth, The Life
Thomas, the doubter, asked, not unreasonably, how, if they did not know where Jesus was going, they could possibly be expected to follow after him. It was then that Jesus came out with one of his greatest sayings — that he was himself the way, the truth, and the life. For his followers, to know him is to know where they’re going, and why they are going there, and to be vouchsafed the strength to follow the way to the end where Jesus awaits them. There are many signposts, but he is the way. There are many words and meanings, but he is the truth; there are many ways of living and dying, but He is life itself.

The Trinity
First God the Father who is everywhere and nowhere; the oneness of all things rather than any particular thing. It is material or temporal beauty? Surely not. Not the brilliance of earthly light, the sweet melody of harmony and song, the fragrance of the flowers, and perfumes; not manna or honey or limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is none of these he loves when he loves his God. Yet, in loving God he also loves them; but in his inner self, when the soul is bathed in illimitable light, when it breathes fragrance not borne away on the wind, listens to sounds that never die away, clings to an embrace not severed by desire’s fulfillment.

What then is his God? He asks the earth, and it answers: I am not God. Likewise he asks the sea, the winds that blow, the sky , the sun, the moon and the stars, all things that can be admitted by the door of the senses, and the answer is of one and all is the same – they are not God. Where then is God And the answer is at the very core of creation, and in all its parts God is creation’s soul, and because we have souls which are components of His as the tiniest particle of moisture in sea spray is a component of the ocean, we are one with God and God is one with us.

So Augustine triumphantly concludes: ‘He is the life of the life of my soul.’ …Between the earthly city and the heavenly city there is a deep impassable chasm ….Jesus is the suspension bridge to God the Father. Through him we may know God truly as a Father; through him the universal becomes the particular, the immanent becomes the transcendent, the implicit becomes the explicit. Always becomes now. The pure of heart are blessed because thy may know God the Father; but thanks to God the Son, so may the impure of heart through knowing Jesus.

It was for this purpose – to open up a way for sinners to know God – that Jesus came amongst us. By the same token, this was the offense for which he was crucified. God the Son is God the Father’s probation officer to a fallen world, who, by his death on the Cross, expiated Adam’s sin, and reversed the fall. Under the dispensation of God the Father, Adam brought death into the world; under the dispensation of God the Son, Jesus abolished death….

Then there is the Holy Spirit…this is the conception the most nebulous, but in terms of experience, the most actual. The Holy Spirit first descended upon the disciples in the Acts of Apostles, on the first Pentecost, fifty days after Passover, on what is celebrated by Christians as Whit Sunday…Whatever may have been the precise intimations and nature of the experience, it s certainly the case that thenceforth these hitherto easily scared, rather quarrelsome and confused men became worthy and effective servants of their Master; propagandists of genius and martyrs of indomitable heroism…

Posted in Book Recommendations | Tagged Faith, Determinism, Malcolm Muggeridge, St. Augustine, The Trinity, Pascal, Jesus, Tolstoy On The Gospels, Fantasy, Truth And The Eye, Blake, Simone Weil, Jesus Through Art, The Meaning of The Incarnation, Prophecy, Western Man Has Decided To Abolish Himself, Freedom And Prophecy, Wisdom, A Religion Of Slaves, Sinners’s Knowledge, Salvation For Individuals, Adam And Jesus, C.H.Dodd, The Christian Life, Christianity Is An Experience, Our Transformation At Death, Jesus And Jerusalem, Loving God, Judas, The Way, The Truth, The Life | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections From The Great Liberal Death Wish — Malcolm Muggeridge

December 14, 2009

Malcolm Muggeridge

In 1979 Malcolm Muggeridge gave a short speech at Hilsdale College that more or less repeated some thoughts he had published in various essays before. There he reflected over his life and upbringing to underline how deep his connections with the liberal community had been.

Muggeridge was one of a small cadre of western journalists who recognized the evil of Soviet Communism when most were still entranced by the Marxist utopia.He relates some of that experience below.

For his honest reporting on the Stalinist show trials he lost his job and was blacklisted for a time. Happily he never lost his critical touch. In the 1980’s Malcolm Muggeridge emerged, along with his friend William F. Buckle,y as one of the most delightful, articulate, brilliant thinkers and conversationalists in the world. His career (related below) has included journalist and Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian; agent for British Intelligence in Africa during World War II; Liaison – Officer with the Free French; Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph; Editor of Punch; and Book Reviewer for Esquire. In addition to several anthologies of his own writings, he is a published novelist and playwright. His television career began when television began, and has continued in the United States, the United Kingdom and throughout the English-speaking world. In England he had worked extensively with the B.B.C. and in the U.S. with PBS.

In 1970 Muggeridge went to Calcutta to do a special documentary on Mother Teresa for the BBC-TV. At the time Muggeridge was Europe’s Tom Brokaw. On that fated morning of their meeting (a morning that would change him for the rest of his life) he met her as she was working out in the streets with sick and poor people in a ghetto like he had never seen before, amid stench, filth, garbage, disease, and poverty that was just unbelievable. But what struck Muggeridge more than anything else, even there in that awful squalor and decadence, was the deep, warm glow on Mother Teresa’s face and the deep, warm love in her eyes.

“Do you do this every day?” he began his interview.

“Oh, yes,” she replied, “it is my mission. It is how I serve and love my Lord.”

“How long have you been doing this? How many months?”

“Months?” said Mother Teresa. “Not months, but years. Maybe eighteen years.”

“Eighteen years!” exclaimed Muggeridge. “You’ve been working here in these streets for eighteen years?”

“Yes,” she said simply and yet joyfully. “It is my privilege to be here. These are my people. These are the ones my Lord has given me to love.”

“Do you ever get tired? Do you ever feel like quitting and letting someone else take over your ministry? After all, you are beginning to get older.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “this is where the Lord wants me, and this is where I am happy to be. I feel young when I am here. The Lord is so good to me. How privileged I am to serve him.”

Later, Malcolm Muggeridge said, “I will never forget that little lady as long as I live. The face, the glow, the eyes, the love-it was all so pure and so beautiful. I shall never forget it. It was like being in the presence of an angel. It changed my life. I have not been the same person since. It is more than I can describe.”

After Malcolm Muggeridge made those comments, Mother Teresa continued to serve in that sacrificial way until the end of her life-nearly twenty-seven years later.

The Great Liberal Death Wish
The Great Liberal Death Wish” is a subject that I’ve given a lot of thought to and have written about, and it would be easy for me to read to you a long piece that I’ve written on the subject. But somehow in the atmosphere of this delightful college, I want to have a shot at just talking about this notion of the great liberal death wish as it has arisen in my life, as I’ve seen it, and the deductions I’ve made from it. I should also plead guilty to being responsible for the general heading of these lectures, namely, “The Humane Holocaust: The Auschwitz Formula. “

Later on I want to say something about all this, showing how this humane holocaust, this dreadful slaughter that began with 50 million babies last year, will undoubtedly be extended to the senile old and the mentally afflicted and mongoloid children, and so on, because of the large amount of money that maintaining them costs. (DJ – If that is not prophetic, I don’t know what is)

It is all the more ironical when one thinks about the holocaust western audiences, and the German population in particular, have been shuddering over, as it has been presented on their TV and cinema screens. Note this compassionate or humane holocaust, if, as I fear, it gains momentum, will quite put that other in the shade. And, as I shall try to explain, what is even more ironical, the actual considerations that led to the German holocaust were not, as is commonly suggested, due to Nazi terrorism, but were based upon the sort of legislation that advocates of euthanasia, or “mercy killing,” in this country and in western Europe, are trying to get enacted. It’s not true that the German holocaust was simply a war crime, as it was judged to be at Nuremberg. In point of fact, it was based upon a perfectly coherent, legally enacted decree approved and operated by the German medical profession before the Nazis took over power. In other words, from the point of view of the Guinness Book of Records you can say that in our mad world it takes about thirty years to transform a war crime into a compassionate act.

The Dostoevsky Connection
But I’m going to deal with that later. I want first of all to look at this question of the great liberal death wish. And I was very delighted that you should have got here for this CCA program the film on Dostoevsky for which I did the commentary, because his novel The Devils [More commonly translated as The Possessed] is the most extraordinary piece of prophecy about this great liberal death wish. All the characters in it, the circumstances of it, irresistibly recall what we mean by the great liberal death wish. You cannot imagine what a strange experience it was doing that filming in the USSR. I quoted extensively from the speech that Dostoevsky delivered when the Pushkin Memorial was unveiled in Moscow, and his words were considered to be, in terms of then current ideologies, about the most reactionary words ever spoken. They amounted to a tremendous onslaught on this very thing that we’re talking about, this great liberal death wish, as it existed in Russia in the latter part of the last century.

The characters in the book match very well the cast of the liberal death wish in our society and in our time. You even have the interesting fact that the old liberal, Stephan Trofimovich Verkovensky, who is a sort of male impersonator of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, with all the sentimental notions that go therewith, is the father of Peter Verkovensky, a Baader Meinhof character, based on a Russian nihilist of Dostoevsky’s time, Sergey Nechayef. To me, it’s one of the most extraordinary pieces of modern prophecy that has ever been. Especially when Peter Verkovensky says, as he does, that what we need are a few generations of debauchery – debauchery at its most vicious and most horrible – followed by a little sweet bloodletting, and then the turmoil will begin. I put it to you that this bears a rather uneasy resemblance to the sort of thing that is happening at this moment in the western world.

Muggeridge’s Father
Now I want to throw my mind back to my childhood, to the sitting room in the little suburban house in south London where I grew up. On Saturday evenings my father and his cronies would assemble there, and they would plan together the downfall of the capitalist system and the replacement of it by one which was just and humane and egalitarian and peaceable, etc. These were my first memories of a serious conversation about our circumstances in the world. I used to hide in a big chair and hope not to be noticed, because I was so interested. And I accepted completely the views of these good men, that once they were able to shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect state of affairs in which peace would reign, prosperity would expand, men would be brotherly, and considerate, and there would be no exploitation of man by man, nor any ruthless oppression of individuals. And I firmly believed that, once their plans were fulfilled, we would realize an idyllic state of affairs of such a nature. They were good men, they were honest men, they were sincere men. Unlike their prototypes on the continent of Europe, they were men from the chapels. It was a sort of spillover from the practice of nonconformist Christianity, not a brutal ideology, and I was entirely convinced that such a brotherly, contented, loving society would come to pass once they were able to establish themselves in power.

My father used to speak a lot at open air meetings, and when I was very small I used to follow him around because I adored him, as I still do. He was a very wonderful and good man. He’d had a very harsh upbringing himself, and this was his dream of how you could transform human society so that human beings, instead of maltreating one another and exploiting one another, would be like brothers. I remember he used to make quite good jokes at these outdoor meetings when we had set up our little platform, and a few small children and one or two passers-by had gathered briefly to listen. One joke I particularly appreciated and used to wait for even though I had heard a hundred times ran like this: “Well ladies and gentlemen,” my father would begin, “you tell me one thing. Why is it that it is his majesty’s navy and his majesty’s stationery office and his majesty’s customs but it’s the national debt? Why isn’t the debt his majesty’s?” It always brought the house down.

The Fabian Society
Such was my baptism into the notion of a kingdom of Heaven on earth, into what I was going to understand ultimately to be the great liberal death wish. Inevitably, my father’s heroes were the great intellectuals of the time, who banded themselves together in what was called the Fabian Society, of which he was a member – a very active member. For instance, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, people of that sort. All the leftist elite, like Sydney – and Beatrice Webb, belonged to this Fabian Society, and in my father’s eyes they were princes among men. I accepted his judgment.

Once I had a slight shock when he took me to a meeting of the Fabian Society where H. G. Wells was speaking, and I can remember vividly his high squeaky voice as he said – and it stuck in my mind long afterward -”We haven’t got time to read the Bible. We haven’t got time to read the history of this obscure nomadic tribe in the Middle East.” Subsequently, when I learned of the things that Wells had got time for, the observation broke upon me in all its richness.

Education: An Overrated Experience?
Anyway, that for me was how my impressions of life began. I was sent to Cambridge University, which of course in those days consisted very largely of boys from what we call public schools, and you call private schools. Altogether, it was for me a quite different sort of milieu, where the word socialist in those days – this was in 1920 when I went to Cambridge at 17 – was almost unknown. We who had been to a government secondary school and then to Cambridge were regarded as an extraordinary and rather distasteful phenomenon. But my views about how the world was going to be made better remained firmly entrenched in the talk of my father and his cronies. Of course, in the meantime had come the First World War, to be followed by an almost insane outburst of expectations that henceforth peace would prevail in the world, that we would have a League of Nations to ensure that there would be no more wars, and gradually everybody would get more prosperous and everything would be better and better. That rather lugubrious figure Woodrow Wilson arrived on the scene, to be treated with the utmost veneration. I can see him now, lantern-jawed, wearing his tall hat – somehow for me he didn’t fill the bill of a knight in shining armor who was going to lead us to everlasting peace. Somehow the flavor of Princeton about him detracted from that picture, but still I accepted him as an awesome figure.

My time at Cambridge was a rather desolate time. I never much enjoyed being educated, and have continued to believe that education is a rather overrated experience. Perhaps this isn’t the most suitable place in the world to say that, but such is my opinion. I think that it is part of the liberal dream that somehow or other – and it was certainly my father’s view – people, in becoming educated, instead of on Sundays racing their dogs or studying racing forms, or anything like that, would take to singing madrigals or reading Paradise Lost aloud. This is another dream that didn’t quite come true.

Teaching in India
Anyway, from Cambridge I went off to India, to teach at a Christian college there, and I must say it was an extremely agreeable experience. The college was in a remote part of what was then Travancore, but is now Kerala. It was not one of the missionary colleges, but associated with the indigenous Syrian Church, which you may know is a very ancient church, dating back to the fourth century, and now there are a million or more Syrian Christians. In its way it was quite an idyllic existence, but of course one came up against naked power for the first time. I had never thought of power before as something separate from the rest of life. But in India, under the British raj, with a relatively few white men ruling over three or four hundred million Indians, I came face to face with power unrelated to elections or any other representative device in the great liberal dream that became the great liberal death wish.

However, it was a pleasant time, and of course the Indian nationalist movement was beginning, and Ghandi came to the college where I was teaching. This extraordinary little gargoyle of a man appeared, and held forth, and everybody got tremendously excited, and shouted against Imperialism, and the Empire in which at that time the great majority of the British people firmly believed, and which they thought would continue forever. If you ventured to say, as I did on the boat going to India, that it might come to an end before long, they laughed you to scorn, being firmly convinced that God had decided that the British should rule over a quarter of the world, and that nothing could ever change this state of affairs. Which again opened up a new vista about what this business of power signified, and how it worked, not as a theory, but in practice. We used to boast in those days that we had an Empire on which the sun never set, and now we have a commonwealth on which it never rises, and I can’t quite say which concept strikes me as being the more derisory.

Marriage, Egypt, The Guardian and Hasheesh
That was India, and then I came back to England and for a time taught in an elementary school in Birmingham, and married my wife Kitty. (I wish she were here today because she’s very nice. We’ve been married now for 51 years, so I am entitled to speak well of her.) She was the niece of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, so it was like marrying into a sort of aristocracy of the Left. After our wedding, we went off to Egypt, where I taught at the University of Cairo, and it was there that the dreadful infection of journalism got into my system. Turning aside from the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with less than one man one vote and all that went therewith. I never heard any Egyptian say that this was his position, but I used to watch those old pashas in Groppi’s cafe’ smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, and imagined that under their tabooshes was a strong feeling that they would never for an instant countenance anything less than full representative government. That at least was what I wrote in my articles, and they went flying over to England, and, like homing pigeons, in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester, at that time a high citadel of liberalism. That was where the truth was being expounded, that was where enlightenment reigned. In due course I was asked to join the editorial staff of the Guardian, which to me was a most marvelous thing. I may say that the work of teaching at Cairo University was not an arduous job, essentially for three reasons. One was that the students didn’t understand English; the second that they were nearly always on strike or otherwise engaged in political demonstrations, and thirdly they were often stupified with hashish. So I had a lot of leisure on my hands.

Incidentally, to be serious for a moment, it seems to me a most extraordinary thing that at that time you wouldn’t have found anybody, Egyptian or English or anybody else, who wasn’t absolutely clear in his mind that hashish was a most appalling and disastrous addiction. So you can imagine how strange it was forty years later for me to hear life peeresses and people like that insisting that hashish didn’t do any harm to anybody, and was even beneficial. I see that in Canada it is going to be legalized, which will mean one more sad, unnecessary hazard comes into our world.

The Golden Days Of Liberalism
Anyway, these were the golden days of liberalism when the Manchester Guardian was widely read, and even believed. Despite all its misprints, you could make out roughly speaking what it was saying, and what we typed out was quite likely, to our great satisfaction, to be quoted in some paper in – Baghdad or Smyrna as being the opinion of our very influential organ of enlightened liberalism. I remember my first day I was there, and somehow it symbolizes the whole experience. I was asked to write a leader – a short leader of about 120 words – on corporal punishment. At some head-masters’ conference, it seemed, words had been spoken about corporal punishment and I was to produce appropriate comment. So I put my head into the room next to mine, and asked the man who was working there: “What’s our line on corporal punishment?” Without looking up from his type-writer, he replied: “The same as capital, only more so.” So I knew exactly what to tap out, you see. That was how I got into the shocking habit of pontificating about what was going on in the world; observing that the Greeks did not seem to want an orderly government, or that one despaired sometimes of the Irish having any concern for law and order; weighty pronouncement tapped out on a typewriter, deriving from nowhere, and for all one knew, concerning no one.

We were required to end anything we wrote on a hopeful note, because liberalism is a hopeful creed. And so, however appalling and black the situation that we described, we would always conclude with some sentence like: “It is greatly to be hoped that moderate men of all shades of opinion will draw together, and that wiser councils may yet prevail.” How many times I gave expression to such jejune hopes! Well, I soon grew weary of this, because it seemed to me that immoderate men were rather strongly in evidence, and I couldn’t see that wiser councils were prevailing anywhere.

The depression was on by that time, I’m talking now of 1932–33. It was on especially in Lancashire, and it seemed as though our whole way of life was cracking up, and, of course, I looked across at the USSR with a sort of longing, thinking that there was an alternative, some other way in which people could live, and I managed to maneuver matters so that I was sent to Moscow as the Guardian correspondent, arriving there fully prepared to see in the Soviet regime the answer to all our troubles, only to discover in a very short time that though it might be an answer, it was a very unattractive one.

Power As The Absolute And Ultimate Arbiter
It’s difficult to convey to you what a shock this was, realizing that what I had supposed to be the new brotherly way of life my father and his cronies had imagined long before, was simply on examination an appalling tyranny, in which the only thing that mattered, the only reality, was power. So again, like the British raj, in the USSR I was confronted with power as the absolute and ultimate arbiter. However, that was a thing that one could take in one’s stride. How I first came to conceive the notion of the great liberal death wish was not at all in consequence of what was happening in the USSR, which, as I came to reflect afterward, was simply the famous lines in the Magnificat working out, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek,” whereupon, of course, the humble and meek become mighty in their turn and have to be put down. That was just history, something that happens in the world; people achieve power, exercise power, abuse power, are booted out of power, and then it all begins again.

The thing that impressed me, and the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical. It’s impossible to exaggerate to you the impression that this made on me. Mrs. Webb had said to Kitty and me: “You’ll find that in the USSR Sydney and I are icons. ” As a matter of fact they were, Marxist icons.

Liberal Pundits And Fatuity
How could this be? How could this extraordinary credulity exist in the minds of people who were adulated by one and all as maestros of discernment and judgment? It was from that moment that I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I’d supposed it to be – a creative movement which would shape the future – but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutal-ly and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy?

I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded. I tell you, if ever you are looking for a good subject for a thesis, you could get a very fine one out of a study of the books that were written by people like the Dean of Canterbury, Julian Huxley, Harold Laski, Bernard Shaw, or the Webbs about the Soviet regime. In the process you would come upon a compendium of fatuity such as has seldom, if ever, existed on earth. And I would really recommend it; after all, the people who wrote these books were, and continue to be regarded as, pundits, whose words must be very, very seriously heeded and considered.

Mau-Mauing the Intelligentsia
I recall in their yellow jackets a famous collection in England called the Left Book Club. You would be amazed at the gullibility that’s expressed. We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk was given nursing mothers — things like that. If they put it in the articles they subsequently wrote, then you’d score a point.

One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn’t rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media’s prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still. That’s when I began to think seriously about the great liberal death wish.

News And Intelligence
In due course, I came back to England to await the Second World War, in the course of which I found myself engaged in Intelligence duties. And let me tell you that if there is one thing more fantastical than news, it is Intelligence. News itself is a sort of fantasy; and when you actually go collecting news, you realize that this is so. In a certain sense, you create news; you dream news up yourself and then send it. But that’s nothing to the fantasy of Intelligence. Of the two, I would say that news seems really quite a sober and considered commodity compared with your offerings when you’re an Intelligence agent.

In The Name Of Progress And Compassion
Anyway, when in 1945 I found myself a civilian again, I tried to sort out my thoughts about the great wave of optimism that followed the Second World War –or me, a repeat performance. It was then that I came to realize how, in the name of progress and compassion, the most terrible things were going to be done, preparing the way for the great humane holocaust, about which I have spoken. There was, it seemed to me, a built in propensity in this liberal world-view whereby the opposite of what was intended came to pass. Take the case of education. Education was the great mumbo–jumbo of progress, the assumption being that educating people would make them grow better and better, more and more objective and intelligent. Actually, as more and more money is spent on education, illiteracy is increasing. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it didn’t end up with virtually the whole revenue of the western countries being spent on education, and a condition of almost total illiteracy resulting therefrom. It’s quite on the cards.

The Humane Holocaust
Now I want to try to get to grips with this strange state of affairs. Let’s look again at the humane holocaust. What happened in Germany was that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called “mercy killing.” This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations. You see what I’m getting at?

On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. It’s to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires.

Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we’ve seen so many manifestations in our time – in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistibly, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory–farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well–being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That’s where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.

Reasons Not To Despair
This might seem to be a despairing conclusion, but it isn’t, you know, actually. First of all, the fact that we can’t work out the liberal dream in practical terms is not bad news, but good news. Because if you could work it out, life would be too banal, too tenth-rate to be worth bothering about. Apart from that, we have been given the most extraordinary sign of the truth of things, which I continually find myself thinking about. This is that the most perfect and beautiful expressions of man’s spiritual aspirations come, not from the liberal dream in any of its manifestations, but from people in the forced labor camps of the USSR. And this is the most extraordinary phenomenon, and one that of course receives absolutely no attention in the media. From the media point of view it’s not news, and in any case the media do not want to know about it. But this is the fact for which there is a growing amount of evidence. I was reading about it in a long essay by a Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mihajlov [“Mystical Experience of the Labor Camps,” included in his excellent book Underground Notes], who spent some years in a prison in Yugoslavia.

He cites case after case of people who, like Solzhenitsyn, say that enlightenment came to them in the forced labor camps. They understood what freedom was when they had lost their freedom, they understood what the purpose of life was when they seemed to have no future. They say, moreover, that when it’s a question of choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body and soul.

He Who Hates His Life In This World…
In other words, fulfilling exactly what our Lord said, that he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all eternity, as those who love their lives in this world will assuredly lose them. Now, that’s where I see the light in our darkness. There’s an image I love – if the whole world were to be covered with concrete, there still would be some cracks in it, and through these cracks green shoots would come. The testimonies from the labor camps are the green shoots we can see in the world, breaking out from the monolithic power now dominating ever greater areas of it. In contradistinction, this is the liberal death wish, holding out the fallacious and ultimately destructive hope that we can construct a happy, fulfilled life in terms of our physical and material needs, and in the moral and intellectual dimensions of our mortality.

I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God’s purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand.

Augustine and Catastrophe
We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse – and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse — and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistibly growing power of materialism and materialist societies. But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said — and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: Well, if that’s happened, it’s a great catastrophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn’t build and can’t destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the City of God – the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.

This Limbo Between Life And Death
You know, it’s a funny thing, but when you’re old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won’t go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation, you are a participant in God’s purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.

Reality Means Knowing God
Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God’s love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth. All the rest is fantasy — whether the fantasy of power which we see in the authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second–class hotel.

Posted in Readings | Tagged Dostoevsky, He Who Hates His Life In This World…, Liberal Pundits And Fatuity, Malcolm Muggeridge, Mother Teresa, Reality Means Knowing God, The Fabian Society, The Golden Days Of Liberalism, The Great Liberal Death Wish, The Humane Holocaust, This Limbo Between Life And Death | Leave a Comment »

Book Recommendation: “What Catholics Believe” by Josef Pieper and Heinz Raskop

December 11, 2009

One of the earlier books I read after I had made up my mind to go through RCIA and join a parish was this wonderful little book by Josef Pieper. He has been one of my favorite Catholic authors. He lived to the ripe old age of 93 and passed away in 1997. A tribute published by First Things said:

“Pieper emphasizes the close connection between moral and intellectual virtue. Our minds do not — contrary to many views currently popular — create truth. Rather, they must be conformed to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process.

We have, he writes on one occasion, “lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity.” That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily — perhaps not often — be experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must — by God’s grace — undergo ‘perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying.’”

I remember turning pages in this little book thinking “Oh my God, I’ve signed on for THIS?!! Angels!!!” And then being reassured by Pieper’s marvelous intellect and wonderful interpretations. I felt so much smarter and reassured after I had finished. As is my custom, some memorable selections here:

Christian Life and Belief
Just as knowledge and competent action go hand in hand, so do faith and life. Christian life requires Christian faith as its foundation; and Christian faith bears its full fruit in Christian life. Christian life without Christian belief is impossible; Christian belief without Christina life is unfruitful.

Christian Faith
Christian faith is no mere matter of inner thoughts and feelings. It is an encounter with the reality of the Blessed Trinity…faith is supernatural because it exceeds our natural powers. Faith exceeds the nature of man, exceeding even the natural powers of his spirit. Luke 11:13 tells us that God our father is “ready to give from heaven his Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”…Faith necessarily includes the assent of the intellect to truths that are not clear, and so an assent that has its basis in the free will. Supernatural gift that it is , it becomes our personal possession only when we accept it voluntarily. We are free. The way lies open for us to say, “My natural eyes and ears and my natural reason are quite enough for me ; any reality I cannot perceive with them is of little consequence as far as I am concerned.”

Novarian, 3^rd Century AD
Human understanding can form no worthy concept of God’s essence nor of His magnitude nor of His attributes. The might of the human language cannot bring forth a single word to express His majesty. All ingenuity of speech and all intellectual acumen are helpless before His greatness. Even sheer thought alone does not suffice to grasp Him; if it did He would be smaller and the mind of man, whereas in reality He is more sublime that any word, beyond any expression of ours. Everything which he Himself has thought , is less than Him. The totality of human speech, compared to Him is puny in the extreme. Turning to Him in silence we can, it is true, have some inkling of Him; but as to how He is in Himself, that is beyond our utterance.

Call him light and you give a name rather to His creature than to Him. Call him power and you name not Him but that which his His . Call Him majesty, and you describe His glory rather than Him. He is more sublime that any sublimity, brighter that any light, stronger than any power, fairer than any beauty, truer than any truth, greater than all majesty. He is wiser than all wisdom, kinder than all loving kindness, more just than all of justice! Name whatever force you choose, it will be less than Him who is the God and father of all forces. Truly one can say: God is incomparable, God is beyond all that can be said.

Gregory Thaumaturgus (Bishop of the Third Century): The Trinity
There is one God, father of the Living Word, Father of Him who is wisdom, power and eternal prototype. He is the perfect begetter of the perfect offspring, Father of the only begotten son.. There is one Lord, only begotten of the only God, as much God as His Begetter is, perfect reflection and identical image of the Godhead. He is the wholly effective creative word, wisdom comprehending all things, Power putting all creation into existence. He is true son of the true father; as the Father is invisible so He is invisible; as everlasting, so everlasting; as immortal, so immortal; as eternal, so eternal.

And there is one Holy Spirit, a Person in the Divine Nature, and He appeared to men through the son. He is a perfect replica of the full being of the Son; He is the living Giver of life, holy Source and Dispenser of holiness. In Him is God the Father revealed, who is above all things and in all things; and in Him is God the Son revealed, who is an exemplar for all things. These three constitute a perfect Trinity in glory, eternity and royal dominion, without division and without separate being. There is nothing created or subordinate in the Trinity, nor is there anything that might have been added later. There never was the Father without the Son, or the Son without the spirit. Unchangeable and unalterable the same Trinity is forever.

God And Creation
The process of creation of man and things never reaches a stage where man and things can exist solely of themselves and act solely of themselves. Rather God is constantly creating the world anew by conserving and sustaining all things in existence. But in no sense is the world God, neither as a whole nor in any of its parts. Nor is God in any way included in His creation. God’s creative process in the world and in all beings stems from His complete sovereignty over the world.

It is from God, utterly and completely above and outside the world that all created beings and things derive their origin and their continued existence. By the creative power of God, creation lives. All created things are infinitely distinct from the eternal and limitless God, their Creator. But God the Creator permeates everything with his divine essence and the all powerfulness of his love.

The Sensual-Intellectual Human Nature
Penetration to the deeper essence of things, not perceptible to the senses is possible only to the reasoning mind. The reasoning mind alone can relate itself to the whole of reality. To be able to establish an inner link with all creation is precisely what distinguishes the higher level on which man moves from the essentially lower level of the animal. Furthermore, only the reasoning mind is capable of an act of free will; and free will also distinguishes man essentially from all creatures lower than himself. Without freedom of choice and decision man could neither sin nor be converted nor be sanctified. However, the use of our mind requires the use of the senses to start with. Purely intellectual knowledge is not possible for man. Yet God so created our sensual-intellectual human nature as to make us able to see Him in the Beatific Vision in eternal life. The ultimate reason for man’s distinctive difference is the spiritual character of his soul.

Angels
Angels are bodiless spiritual beings completely independent of sense perceptions who perceive and grasp the whole of creation much more directly and much more thoroughly than it is possible to the human mind.

The Nature of the World and Of Man Is Good
The divinely created nature of the world is good in itself, the divinely created nature of man is good in itself. It needs neither justification nor apology. It is an act of injustice and contradiction against the Creator to disagree with Him and not find His creation good.

The Dignity of Human Nature Wondrously Restored
The first man pleased God in an infinitely higher way than did all the other created beings on earth. Adam was more than good, he was holy. That is to say he was filled with the Holy Spirit, he lived in supernatural community with God. The first man’s community of life with God was a gift from God, a gift infinitely exceeding man’s natural powers and anything due to man. What Adam’s arrogant and ungodly choice primarily and especially destroyed was this very thing, his holiness, his supernatural life shared with God, in a word his “grace.” …

Our Lord’s act of redemption, restoring human nature from original sin and winning back for us what we had lost, has bought us something much greater than we could ever have lost. “And where sins abounded, grace did more abound” (Romans5:20). Through Jesus Christ, who is the way to eternal life, anew creation was called into being. Man redeemed has become the brother and co-heir of the Son of God. This is why the Church begins one of her prayers in the Mass with the words, “O God, by whom the dignity of human nature was wondrously established and yet more wondrously restored.”… Original sin had destroyed man’s bridge of access to God, and only from God’s side could that bridge be rebuilt. Jesus /Christ rebuild it.

Mary
Mary is the only human being free from original sin and its consequences. …Mary from the first moment of her existence was in the state of grace united to God in supernatural community of life. The dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven is a further development and unfolding of this truth.

Other Consequence of Original Sin
The other consequence of original sin remain with us after the Redemption, –especially our internal conflict, our suffering, our physical death. But these things have now become transformed into healing remedies conducive to eternal life. In his own suffering, man is able to take part in the redeeming suffering of Christ — a suffering which the Church calls blessed. St Paul says: “Even as I write, I am glad of my suffering on your behalf, as in this mortal frame of mine, I help to pay off the debt which the afflictions of Christ have still to be paid, for the sake of his body, the Church.”

St. Hillary of Poitiers On the Eternal Word And Its Incarnation
I do not know nor do I enquire, but yet I find consolation. The archangels do not know it, the angels do not learn it, the millennia do not contain it, the prophetic spirit did not proclaim it, the Apostle did not ask it, the Son Himself has not relinquished it. Will you then, who do not know the origin of creation, not endure in quiet humility your ignorance about the birth of the Creator?

Jesus Christ, Priest And Lord
Christ is not only Priest , He is also Head and Lord of the whole human race. God “has put everything under his dominion, and made him the head to which the whole Church is joined, so that he Church is his body, the completion of him who everywhere and in all things is complete” (Ephesians 1:22)

Jesus’ Living Reality As Shown In The Apostles Creed
The creed’s way of calling attention to Christ’s transcendence of history is by changing the tense. Up to and including the Ascension the tenses are in the past – historical. But He “sitteth at the right hand of God the Father almighty” is present –eternal.

The Holy Spirit
The Church says that the Holy Spirit is the bond of love which embraces the Father and the Son and proceeds form them both. St. Augustine says that “as the Word of God is the Son of God, so the love of God is the Holy Spirit”. St Paul says that “the love of has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom we have received.”…

He is what binds the soul of man supernaturally to God the absolute First Cause of Life. Throughout this supernatural love man is made a Saint and a Son of God. Thus as the Father creates man and the Son redeems him, so the Holy Spirit sanctifies him, makes him holy. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, who is the focus of all supernatural life, creation and redemption are brought to their completion…It is the presence of he Holy Spirit that allows us to call God “Father.” …

On the first Pentecost (or Whitsunday) the Holy Spirit was sent to the young Church, as he Lord had promised. At that moment the Church entered definitely upon her full life. St Thomas Aquinas says that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the Church, and just as a man’s body is animated by his soul, so the Church lives by the virtue of he Holy Spirit whom Christ sent to her in the power of the Father.

Resurrection Of The Body
How our resurrection will happen or what the resurrected body will be like – this no man can know or say. The Apostle Paul gave his answer to questions of this kind in the first Epistle of the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:35-38) “But perhaps someone will ask, How can the dead rise up? What kind of body will they be wearing when they appear? Poor fool, when thou sowest seed in the ground, it must die before it can be brought to life; and what thou sowest is not the full body that is one day to be; it is only bare grain, of wheat, it may be, or some other crop; it is for God to embody it according to his will, each grain in the body that belongs to it.”

Eternal Life
In the creed “I believe in life everlasting.” expresses a mystery which no man will ever fully grasp as long as he lives on this earth. (1 John 3:2) “We are sons of God even now and what we shall be hereafter has not been made known as yet. But we know that when he comes we shall be like him; we shall see him, then, as he is.” And St Paul (1Corinthians 2:9) tells us that “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human heart conceived, the welcome God has prepared for those who love him.”

Sanctifying Grace
Life activated by Christian faith consists in the Christian’s cooperation in the works of he Blessed Trinity. The central purpose of this life is that, sanctified by the Holy Spirit, we allow the creative work of the Father and the redemptive work of the Son to become fruitful and complete in us. …This share in the life of the Trinity is what we call sanctifying grace… It is utterly and completely a free gift of God. But at the same time it is truly an elevation, which man merits by reason of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, who is both God and Man; it lifts human nature into the Divine Nature, in order to live a life proceeding from the Holy Spirit, the threefold life of God Himself — (1John 3:1) we are called “children of God; and such we are.”

The Eucharist
The Eucharist is indeed the very mass itself. In the Mass Jesus Christ becomes really present, in order that His Sacrifice on the Cross by which he earned new life for man, may be offered again and again in the midst of His Church. The Mass is not just a commemorative celebration; nor is it merely a communal preparation for Holy Communion. The Mass is essentially a public sacrifice; and the reception of the Body of our Lord is essentially a sacrificial act, a sacrificial meal. Christ himself offers Himself to His Father as sacrifice for sinful mankind; and the Christian community likewise offers itself together with Christ in the same sacrifice to the Father. The priest is the instrument of he self-offering Christ , and at the same time he is the representative of the co-offering community, or congregation. By this continuing renewal of the Sacrifice of he Cross, its fruits are given to all who assist in offering the Mass….

In order to effect our eternal salvation, Christ willed to sacrifice Himself once to the Father upon the altar of he Cross. But his priesthood was not to cease at His death. Therefore at the Last Supper He offered His Body and Blood to the Father in the form of bread and wine, thus bequeathing to His Church a Sacrifice through which the Sacrifice of the Cross, once offered, is made present, its memory preserved until the end of he world, and His healing power applied to us for remission of the sins which we daily commit.” Every Christian should bear the meaning of the Mass in mind…The Mass is the public and common Sacrifice offered by the People of God.

The Properly Ordered Life
Man’s life is properly ordered when it is directed toward man’s true end – God as revealed to us in Christ. In order to live a life directed toward this end, we must know how to evaluate all other human aims and good and their true worth. Whoever does not know the final reason for man’s existence cannot know the true value of created things for man. Man’s proper relation to God, to the world, and to his fellowman is confused and destroyed by sin. Sin is a man’s willful straying from his true end. It is through this deeply mysterious and incomprehensible willful straying from God that all other relationships between man and the world and man and his fellow man fall into disorder. Crippled by sin, man does not live to his full capacity. He loses the fullness of his destined life – his life in God, his life of divine sonship.

Virtue
The Latin word virtus means manliness. The German word for virtue, Tugend, comes from taugen, to be fit and related to this is the English word doughty, now obsolete except in humor, but originally meaning able. Virtue makes a man fit and able to be what his Creator intends and to do what his Creator wills…A good man is more fit…He wants to do good and he can … he wills it. …Sin makes man unfit to do what he is intended to be and do….

Posted in Book Recommendations | Tagged "What Catholics Believe", Angels, Christian Faith, Christian Life and Belief, Consequences of Original Sin, Eternal Life, God And Creation, goodness, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Josef Pieper, Mary, Novarian, Resurrection Of The Body, Sanctifying Grace, St. Hillary of Poitiers, The Eucharist, The Holy Spirit, The Properly Ordered Life, The Sensual-Intellectual Human Nature, Virtue | Leave a Comment »

A Homosexualist Paradox

December 10, 2009

In Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright begins by noting how the Enlightenment project for the perfection of man and the elimination of evil has received some severe checks, from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the indiscriminate slaughter of the last century. Even so, the modern attempt to abolish original sin was never abandoned, although substitutes had to be found in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.

Postmodernism is not helpful on the subject, often branding as evil what it deems politically incorrect. We might add here that when Wright gets around to discussing the evils of the modern age, his list drips with the sort of ecclesial leftism one expects from the Anglican establishment: Third World debt, American military adventurism, capitalism, and industrial pollution. The author thinks the United States’ response to 9/11 “immature,” that we thought we could somehow “eliminate evil” by bombing the Taliban, but he proposes no alternative.

Despite these political hiccups, Wright’s discussion of evil is provocative. He begins by warning against the temptation to “solve” the problem of evil in any obvious way. Even the most sophisticated theodicies (attempts to justify God in the light of evil) run the risk of trivializing the problem. Evil is not a puzzle to be solved, but rather a question to be lived. A person who suffers the loss of a loved one does not want to hear what philosophers have to say on the subject; in fact, if that person suffers in the right way, he or she may be far closer to “solving” the problem of evil than any philosopher.

“What the Gospels offer,” according to Wright, “is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it is there, not a set of suggestions for how we might adjust our lifestyles so that evil will mysteriously disappear from the world, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it.” Which means that the ultimate “solution” to evil is the sufferings of Christ. God is not going to remove evil from His creation; He is not going to push the “restart” button. Rather, starting at Calvary, He is going to allow evil to be part of the solution. He is going to use it to help bring into existence the “new heaven and new earth” we read about in Revelation.

Wright points out that the blessed state on the other side of the Parousia, where evil will have no purchase whatsoever, is to be achieved only “through suffering love.” Until then, evil will remain present in our personal lives and in the world at large. Its role in our redemption will never be entirely comprehensible, and we have to take on faith the words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux that “God does not permit unnecessary suffering.” Being an Anglican, it is understandable that Wright’s discussion of evil mostly sticks to Scripture; but it may be that, until the beatific vision, the final word on the subject is to be found, not in any texts, but in the lives of the saints.

In this respect it may instructive to recall these words of John Paul II:

“It is significant that in their preaching the prophets link mercy, which they often refer to because of the people’s sins, with the incisive image of love on God’s part. The Lord loves Israel with the love of a special choosing, much like the love of a spouse, and for this reason He pardons its sins and even its infidelities and betrayals. When He finds repentance and true conversion, He brings His people back to grace. In the preaching of the prophets, mercy signifies a special power of love, which prevails over the sin and infidelity of the chosen people.

In this broad “social” context, mercy appears as a correlative to the interior experience of individuals languishing in a state of guilt or enduring every kind of suffering and misfortune. Both physical evil and moral evil, namely sin, cause the sons and daughters of Israel to turn to the Lord and beseech His mercy. In this way David turns to Him, conscious of the seriousness of his guilt; Job too, after his rebellion, turns to Him in his tremendous misfortune; so also does Esther, knowing the mortal threat to her own people. And we find still other examples in the books of the Old Testament.

At the root of this many-sided conviction, which is both communal and personal, and which is demonstrated by the whole of the Old Testament down the centuries, is the basic experience of the chosen people at the Exodus: the Lord saw the affliction of His people reduced to slavery, heard their cry, knew their sufferings and decided to deliver them. In this act of salvation by the Lord, the prophet perceived his love and compassion. This is precisely the grounds upon which the people and each of its members based their certainty of the mercy of God, which can be invoked whenever tragedy strikes.

Added to this is the fact that sin too constitutes man’s misery. The people of the Old Covenant experienced this misery from the time of the Exodus, when they set up the golden calf. The Lord Himself triumphed over this act of breaking the covenant when He solemnly declared to Moses that He was a “God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” It is in this central revelation that the chosen people, and each of its members, will find, every time that they have sinned, the strength and the motive for turning to the Lord to remind Him of what He had exactly revealed about Himself and to beseech His forgiveness.

Thus, in deeds and in words, the Lord revealed His mercy from the very beginnings of the people which He chose for Himself; and, in the course of its history, this people continually entrusted itself, both when stricken with misfortune and when it became aware of its sin, to the God of mercies. All the subtleties of love become manifest in the Lord’s mercy towards those who are His own: He is their Father, for Israel is His firstborn son; the Lord is also the bridegroom of her whose new name the prophet proclaims: Ruhamah, “Beloved” or “she has obtained pity.”
Dives In Misericordia
John Paul II

I recently went on a very liberal discussion forum and attempted to advance the Church’s teachings as it applied to the Manhattan Declaration. I found the discussion on gay marriage at an immediate standstill and the cries of homophobia raining upon my head. And that for simply asking whether the words “healthy, happy, young and gay” didn’t present a kind of cognitive dissonance when encountered. While no one would take me to task for “young, successful and black” the cognitive dissonance of which would suggest that our society still suffers from racism in some form (that could be argued but not by me), the former was almost immediately smoked out as an attempt to “decry the problems of gay America — which are exaggerated anyway — and urge measures that can only prevent their amelioration.” I swear I hadn’t even breathed a “measure.”

My amazement with this forum is that some of those most active in heaping scorn and ridicule define themselves as Catholic. They are, of course, of the cafeteria variety who do not put gay marriage or abortion on their plates at the buffet. These apologists for homosexualism simply refuse to acknowledge the problems besetting our gay brothers in America. So “gay”, ipso facto, must be healthy when seen in one perspective; yet when advocating the ineluctable nature of the gay/lesbian fate, the homosexualists immediately don the guise of the suffering servant: “O Lord how can you accuse of choosing to be this way!” I’d gotten as far as presenting this paradox before the homophobic rain began to fall.

Andrew J. Sodergren, of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family presents supportive evidence this way:

“Those who argue that homosexual inclinations are “natural” utilize a problematic understanding of nature that needs to be challenged. This understanding of nature refers to that which is innate and unchosen within a person. “I did not choose to be the way I am.” “I discovered my homosexuality within me.” Moreover, a certain normative quality is attributed to this nature such that it can and should dictate my actions. Nature as such is good, or at least neutral in respect to ethics, so the modern mentality holds that whatever I am naturally disposed to do I should do as long as it does not involve violating the rights of others.

A Christian anthropology, however, comes to very different conclusions about “nature”. Human nature, in a Christian sense, does also have a normative content to it. As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says, “There can be no true promotion of man’s dignity unless the essential order of his nature is respected” (CDF, 1975, no. 3).

In creating the world, God inscribed a certain order in it. Thus, the true nature of things and their fulfillment can be understood only in light of God’s design. This is especially salient when we are speaking of desires that arise within the human heart for Christian revelation recognizes the reality of original sin.

At the start of human history, our first parents rebelled against God’s plan and by their action, brought disorder into the world: “Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state” (CCC, no. 404).

The Fathers of the Church taught that human nature is one and thus all human beings participate in the same nature. Thus, when our first parents marred their likeness to God through sin, the whole human family was affected by it. Thus, the human nature that each human being inherits is disordered. Original sin is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it; subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death; and inclined to sin – an inclination to evil that is called “concupiscence” (CCC, no. 405).

Every evil in the world is traceable back to this fundamental disruption at the beginning of time. Indeed, another crucial aspect of Christian anthropology is that human nature involves a unity of body and soul such that the human person is not wholly identifiable with either taken separately but exists as a composite of the two. In other words, the body and the soul are intrinsically united.

The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature (CCC, no. 365).

Therefore, when we say that original sin has wounded human nature, this includes both physical and spiritual effects. In this way, the doctrine of original sin can account for every sort of genetic or biological defect, disease, or disorder as well as all kinds of human suffering and inclinations to do evil. With this understanding of fallen human nature, a Christian anthropology would have no difficulty accommodating research (past or future) implicating a substantial inherited component to homosexuality.

Clearly, this understanding of original sin is essential when we are speaking of the moral quality of human inclinations. Because of original sin, a certain disorder resides in the human heart such that one often desires that which is contrary to the moral law. Therefore, even if homosexual inclinations are entirely inherited, this does not mean that they necessarily correspond with human nature in the original sense, as God intended it. Moreover, as Christ made clear in his preaching, it is the original, created order that has normative weight to it, not this transitory fallen state:

Some Pharisees approached him, and tested him, saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?” He said in reply, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate” (Mt 19.3-6).

Thus, the inclinations that arise in the human heart must be tested according to objective moral norms because the human nature we encounter in this age of history, though wounded by sin, is still called to the same norms of behavior intended by God “from the beginning.” Why? Because God created us “out of love for love” (John Paul II, 1981, no. 11); His wise, loving plan permeates all of created reality. Therefore, to follow the norms given to us by our Creator and Redeemer is in no way an imposition or alienation but a call to happiness. The moral law given to us by God is a blueprint by which human beings can achieve their fulfillment. This implies another fundamental truth of Christian anthropology: human nature is wounded, but it is not totally corrupted. Man still has freedom. Though weakened by sin and prone to misuse, the human person still possesses the ability to make free moral choices and, by cooperating with God’s grace, grow in holiness and maturity.

Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when direct toward God, our beatitude (CCC, no. 1731).

The proper, beatifying use of freedom requires God’s grace. Only with His help can we properly see the truth and act in accord with it. Thankfully, God desires all men to be saved and abundantly supplies the means for it to happen.

Which brings us very much back to what John Paul II was saying in support of N. T. Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God.

Posted in Apologetics | Tagged Andrew J. Sodergren, Dives In Misericordia, Evil and the Justice of God, gay marriage, John Paul II, N. T. Wright, Original Sin, unity of soul and body | 2 Comments »

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