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Forgiveness

August 17, 2009

forgiveness

The importance of forgiveness should be obvious from the Gospels themselves where it is centrally featured in both the preaching and praxis of Jesus. The forgiveness even of enemies is insisted upon in the Sermon on the Mount, and the pardoning of those who trespass against us is at the heart of the prayer that Jesus taught his church. But more to the point, Jesus’ own startling practice of forgiving the sins of others emerges as one of the distinctive and most controversial elements in his ministry: “Why does this fellow speak this way? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7). And both rhetoric and practice reach their fullest expression when the crucified Jesus asks the Father to forgive those who are torturing him to death and when the risen Jesus says “Shalom” to those who have abandoned him, We speak the truth because Jesus is the Truth; we forgive because he forgave.

But what exactly is forgiveness? We must not, despite our typically modern tendency to do so, subjectivize and interiorize forgiveness, as though it amounted to little more than a conviction or a resolution. To say, “I have put that offense out of my mind and have resolved to move on” is not forgiveness; even to feel no further anger at someone who has hurt me and to refrain from harming that person is not tantamount to real forgiveness. Forgiveness, in the full New Testament sense of the term, is an act and not an attitude. It is the active and embodied repairing of a broken relationship, even in the face of opposition, violence, or indifference. When a relationship is severed, each party should, in justice, do his part to reestablish the bond, Forgiveness — which of necessity transcends justice — is the bearing of the other person’s burden, moving toward her, even when she refuses to move an inch toward you. There is something relentless, even aggressive, about forgiveness, since it amounts to a refusal ever to give up on a relationship. “Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother? Seven times?” Simon Peter asks Jesus; comes the reply: “I assure you, not seven times, but seventy times seven times.” Christians should never cease in our efforts to establish love.

Stanley Hauerwas relates a terrible story of authentic forgiveness. There was an Amish family — a father, a mother, and their teenaged son — riding along, as was their custom, in a horse-drawn buggy. Behind them came a car filled with rowdy and impatient young people. Annoyed at the slow-moving carriage, they honked the horn and waved their fists in aggravation. Finally, in a swirl of dust, they rushed around the Amish. As they passed, one of the young men in the car hurled a stone in the direction of the horse, hoping just to harass the family. Instead, the stone hit the Amish boy in the head, killing him instantly. The town was outraged, and the young killer came to trial for manslaughter. To everyone’s amazement, the parents of the slain teenager, still crippled by grief, appeared to testify on behalf of the stone-thrower. Despite this testimony, the young man was condemned and sent to prison. Now, every month, the Amish parents come to the jail and visit their son’s slayer, comforting him, encouraging him, seeking to bring him back eventually into the community. That is forgiveness.

A similar story unfolded in Chicago in 1995. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was accused of having sexually abused a young man, Steven Cook, years before, when Cook was a seminarian and the cardinal was archbishop of Cincinnati. When the story became public, the cardinal appeared before dozens of cameras and hundreds of reporters at a wrenching news conference. As his image and the terrible charge were transmitted all over the world, he had to endure the most humiliating and intrusive questions, under the literally glaring light of publicity. In the ensuing weeks, he endured a sort of Garden of Gethsemane. Following his usual busy public schedule, he would appear at Masses, gatherings, and social events, and, as the people turned to face him, he knew, to his infinite shame, that many of them probably believed the charge against him. During that period, the cardinal came to Mundelein Seminary where I teach, and he addressed the seminarians. He told them that when he prayed, he now stretched himself out full on the floor and begged God to take this suffering from him.

Eventually Steven Cook admitted that his accusations were groundless, and the charges were withdrawn. At this point, who would have blamed Cardinal Bernardin if he had lashed out in anger, condemning Cook and the media, perhaps threatening to countersue? And wouldn’t we have praised him if he had quietly said, “Well, I am going to let this go and move on”? But he did neither of these things; instead, he chose to forgive. He visited Steven Cook in his home, embraced him, celebrated Mass with him, gave him a gift of the Bible, anointed him, and prayed with him. Bernardin bore absolutely no responsibility for the severed relationship between himself and Cook; it was brought about exclusively through the efforts of his accuser. In strict justice, therefore, he was obliged to do nothing to repair it. But, as the Scripture says, “mercy mocks justice.” Bearing his accuser’s burden, the cardinal made the overture that the young man was unable to make — and in doing that, he forgave.

Why do I relate this radical practice to the second path of holiness, of knowing that you are a sinner? To walk this second path is to know that we are sinners and that we, accordingly, stand in constant need of forgiveness. What makes our forgiveness of others necessary is their sin; but what makes it possible is our deep gratitude for having been first forgiven ourselves. This becomes clear in the Gospel story of the. penitent prostitute in the house of Simon the Pharisee. To the shock of the gathered company, a woman of ill-repute approaches the rabbi from Nazareth, weeping onto his feet and anointing them with oil. Furious at the woman and disappointed in the altogether too permissive rabbi, Simon reacts violently: “If this man were a prophet, he would have know who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him — that she is a sinner” (Luke 7:39). But Jesus gently corrects his host: “I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. . . . Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love” (Luke 7:44—47). Simon is so spiritually cramped, so unable to love, because he has not yet felt the power of being forgiven; the woman overflows with love because she has felt to the bottom of her soul that her many sins have been wiped away. As Paul Tillich pointed out in his sermon on this passage, it is not that she loves and is therefore forgiven; rather, it is that she is forgiven and therefore loves.

In accordance with the governing intuition of path two, when we know that we are forgiven sinners, we become agents of divine forgiveness in the world, grateful bearers of others’ burdens, bold speakers of the hard truth.
The Strangest Way – Fr. Robert Barron

The Practice Of Forgiveness
The difficulty of the practice of forgiveness should not be underestimated. We may think we are forgiving, when all we are doing is denying that we have hurt or been hurt by sin. We may think we are forgiving when we have only grown weary of the fear and danger generated by hurt, and have accommodated ourselves to the presence of sin in ourselves or others. We may think we are forgiving when we are only acquiescing in sin against ourselves or against others. We learn the true nature of forgiveness from the way in which God forgives us. Because God knows us completely, God is also able to see that we are not totally identified with our sinful behavior, even if we think of ourselves as defined by sin. God is able to see and summon a self that we perhaps are not able to see. God calls into being that which is as yet only potential within us, namely a self that is not a sinner. In this sense, God forgives us rather than the sin. The sinful self is allowed to die. The self that can live to righteousness is raised by God. When we are able to trust that God so forgives us, we are able then to “turn” or “convert” to the self that God sees and calls into being, and can ourselves activate the self that lives again to righteousness.

We can learn to forgive each other from the way in which God forgives us. We can cultivate the habit of seeing in other s a self that is not defined by their sin. We can seek that self and call it into being, encouraging the growth of that larger self that is capable of living in communion. And as we learn this discipline of genuine forgiveness, we also grow larger – both because we are forgiven in turn and because we increasingly see our neighbors as God perceives them.

But let us also always be aware that we are not God, and cannot forgive as God forgives. We do not see the other truly and completely. There are hurts that we are not able, either individually or communally, to get around or grow past – to forgive or accept forgiveness for. And it is precisely in this humble condition of inadequacy and failure and even sin that we most truly implore the merciful God to forgive us, so that we might someday approach forgiving others as, we trust, God now already forgives them.
Anon

The Gift Of Forgiveness
In answer to those who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But he has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does….That forgiveness can be vouchsafed only to the one who want it, or at least is willing to accept it, is perfectly obvious to everyone. If someone who were to be forgiven who does not want forgiveness, that would mean declaring him literally incapable of assuming responsibility of himself. …If we realize that perfectly consummated human guilt finally means a decision against God, and ultimately against Him alone, then it will suddenly dawn on us that man’s sin – despite his contrition and confession of guilt – can really only be extinguished by one act, by one act alone: the gift of forgiveness freely bestowed on us by God himself.
The Concept of Sin – Josef Pieper

Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was a German Catholic philosopher, at the forefront of the Neo-Thomistic wave in twentieth century Catholic philosophy. Among his most notable works are The Four Cardinal Virtues, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, The Philosophical Act, and Guide to Thomas Aquinas

Forgive Us Our Trespasses
The fifth petition of the Our Father presupposes a world in which there is trespass – trespass of men in relation to other men, trespass in relation to God. Every instance of trespass among men involves some kind of injury to truth and to love and thus opposed to God, who is truth and love…Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more than a matter of ignoring, of merely trying to forget. Guilt must be worked through, handled , and thus overcome. Forgiveness exacts a price – first of all from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him; he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in so doing renew himself. As a result, he also involves the other, the trespasser, in this process of transformation, of inner purification, and both parties, suffering all the way through and overcoming evil are made new.

The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today. That the Lord “has borne our diseases and taken upon himself sorrows,” that “he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities,” and that “with his wounds we are healed”[Isaiah 53:4-6] no longer seems possible to us today. Militating against this on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we that the horrors of human history, especially of the most recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man. But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individual image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by the being of the one, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing….Cardinal John Henry Newman once said that while God could create the whole world out of nothing with just one word, he could overcome men’s guilt and suffering only by bringing himself into play, by becoming in his Son a sufferer who carried this burden and overcame it through his self-surrender. The overcoming of guilt has a price: We must put our heart – or, better, our whole existence – on the line. And even this act is insufficient; it can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all.

The petition for forgiveness is more than a moral exhortation – though it is that as well, and as such it challenges us anew every day. But as its deepest core, it is – like the other petitions – a Christological prayer. It reminds us of he who allowed forgiveness to cost him descent into the hardship of human existence and death on the Cross. It calls us first and foremost to thankfulness for that, and then, with him, to work through and suffer through evil by means of love, And while we must acknowledge day by day how little our capacities suffice for that task, and how often we ourselves keep falling into guilt, this petition gives us the great consolation that our prayer is held safe within the power of his love – with which , though which and in which it can still become a power of healing.
Jesus of Nazareth – Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

The True Gravity Of Sin, The Free Grace Of Forgiveness
Now here is the point I wish to make, because this is the thought that came to me as I was putting all this before the Lord. Existence is the essential thing and the holy thing. If the Lord chooses to make nothing of our transgression then they are nothing. Or whatever reality they have is trivial and conditional beside the exquisite primary fact of existence. Of course the Lord would wipe them away, just as I wipe dirt from your face, or tears. After all, why should the Lord bother much over these smirches that are no part of His Creation.

Well, there are a good many reasons why He should. We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep. I am aware that significant confusion enters my thinking at this point. I’m tired — that may be some part of the problem. Though I recall even in my prime foundering whenever I see the true gravity of sin over against the free grace of forgiveness. If young Boughton is my son, then by the same reasoning that child of his was also my daughter, and it was just terrible what happened to her, and that’s a fact. As I am a Christian man, I could never say otherwise.
Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Reinhold Niebuhr

Posted in Reflections | Tagged Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, forgiveness, Fr. Robert Barron, Gilead, Jesus of Nazareth, Josef Pieper, knowing you are a sinner, Luke 7:44—47, Marilynne Robinson, Pope Benedict XVI, Stanley Hauerwas, Steven Cook, The Concept of Sin, The Free Grace Of Forgiveness, The Gift Of Forgiveness, The Practice Of Forgiveness, The Strangest Way, The True Gravity Of Sin | 1 Comment »

The Majesty of St. Augustine

August 14, 2009

The Triumph of Saint Augustine by Claudio Coello

Sometimes you come across references to St. Augustine in other readings – sort of “asides” that illuminate a lot of what Augustine was or meant to the writer. These are some instances that I encountered the past several years and probably resulted in my reading even more deeply into the man and his thought. When you survey the depth of these observations, it makes you stand in awe of the man that Augustine was.

Chesterton told her the story of Augustine strolling along the beach meditating on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Suddenly the saint saw a small boy scooping water from the sea and putting it into a hole. Upon asking the child to explain what he was doing, St Augustine received the reply that he was putting the sea into the hole in the sand. The Saint smiled at the sight of the vast sea and the small hole and the child said to him: ‘As easy to put the sea into a hole as the mystery of the infinite God into a human mind.’
Wisdom and Innocence – Joseph Pearse

Heart Faith
Faith begins in that obscure mysterious center of our being that Scripture calls the “heart.” Heart in Scripture (and in Augustine) does not mean feeling or sentiment or emotion, but the absolute center of the soul, as the physical heart is at the center of the body. The heart is where God the Holy Spirit works in us. This is not specifiable as a kind of interior object, as emotions, intellect and will are, because it is the very self, the I, the subject, the one whose emotions and mind and will they are. “Keep your heart with all vigilance for from it will flow the springs of life.”(Proverbs4:23) With the heart we choose our “fundamental option” of yes or not to God, and thereby determine our eternal identity and destiny…The faith works controversy that sparked the Protestant Reformation was due largely to equivocation on the word “faith”…If we use it to mean intellectual faith – as Paul did in 1 Corinthians 13 [If I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing] – then faith alone is not enough for salvation for “Even the demons believe and shudder James(2:19). But if we use faith as Luther did and as Paul did in Romans and Galatians, that is as heart-faith, then this is saving faith. It is sufficient for salvation for it necessarily produces the good works of love just as a good tree necessarily produces good fruit. Protestants and Catholics agree on this.
Handbook of Christian Apologetics – Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli

A Christian Paradox: Being In The World And Not Of It
Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him, For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life; which is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away and the concupiscence thereof: but he that doth the will of God abideth forever.
1 John 2:15-17

How is it possible to be in the world without being of it? That is the problem that has haunted the Christian conscience since the foundation of the Church and which looms particularly large with regard to our intelligence….There will always be among us souls desirous of fleeing from the world, but it is by no means certain that the world will always permit them to flee from it; for not only does the world affirm itself, it does not even want to admit that some renounce it….

Christianity is a radical condemnation of the world, but it is at the same time an unreserved approbation of nature; for the world is not nature, it is nature shaping its course without God….

What is true of nature is eminently true of the intelligence, the crown of nature. In the evening of the creation, God looked at His work and He judged, says the Scripture, that all that was very good,. But what was best in His work was man, created to His image and likeness; and if we seek the basis of this divine likeness, we find it, says St. Augustine, in mente: in thought. …

To seize truth here below by the intelligence, be it in an obscure and partial manner, while waiting to see it in its complete splendor – such is man’s destiny according to Christianity. Indeed, far from scorning knowledge, it cherishes it: intellectum valde ama ["love intelligence greatly"]. …

There is a love of the intelligence which consists in turning it toward visible and transient things; but there is another which consists in turning it toward the invisible and eternal: that belongs to Christians. It is therefore, ours; and if we prefer it to the first, it is because it does not deny us anything the first would give us, and yet it overwhelms us with everything while the other is incapable of giving us
A Gilson Reader – Etienne Gilson

The Active Life And The Church
There is a fundamental error about the Church’s attitude to the Active Life — a persistent assumption that Catholic Christianity, like any Oriental Gnosticism, despises the flesh and enjoins a complete detachment for all secular activities. Such a view is altogether heretical. No religion that centers about a Divine Incarnation can take up such an attitude as that. What the Church enjoins is quite different: namely, that all the good things of this world are to be loved because God loves them, as God loves them, for the love of God, and for no other reason. That is the right ordering of love, about which so much is said in the Purgatorio. A full Active Life, rightly ordered, is therefore in no way incompatible with holiness or even with a rich Contemplative Life. Indeed many of the greatest Contemplatives have been masterly men and women of business – one need only instance St. Augustine of Hippo, St Theresa of Avila, or St Gregory the Great.
Introductory Papers On Dante – Dorothy Sayers

This series of selections comes from A Third Testament by Malcolm Muggeridge:

A Kind Of Fraudulent Ecstasy
We also know that to a temperament as sensual and imaginative as Augustine’s, sexual indulgence makes the greatest appeal precisely because it offers a kind of fraudulent ecstasy – joys that expire when the neon lights go out. “There is nothing so powerful,” he said when he was a Bishop, “in drawing the spirit of man downwards as the caresses of a woman.”

Augustine: The Process Leading Up To His Conversion
The climax of Augustine’s conversion occurred in a garden in Milan and its fulfillment in another garden in the country. I think he must have loved gardens, where for him the truth stood out most clearly. First, however, there was one episode in the process leading up to his conversion which received special mention in his Confessions:
My misery was complete and I remember how one day You made me realize how utterly wretched I was. I was preparing a speech in praise of the Emperor, intending that it should include a great many lies which would certainly be applauded by an audience who know well enough how far from the truth they were. I was greatly preoccupied by this task, my mind was feverishly busy with its harassing problems, As I walked along one of the streets of Milan, I noticed a poor beggar who must, I supposed, have had his fill of food and drink, since he was laughing and joking.
Contrasting their two conditions, his own so troubled, the beggar’s so cheerful, he cried out in desperation,
Will I never cease setting my heart on shadows and following a lie?

Augustine: Spend No More Thought On Nature And Nature’s Appetites
In this mood he “suddenly heard the sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house, Whether it was the voice of a boy or a girl, I can’t say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, ‘Take it and read it, take it and read it.’” So he rushed to where he had left a copy of the Gospels open at Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and read: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries, rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. Spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.”
Augustine continued: “I had no wish to read more and no need to do so, for in an instant as I came to the end of the sentence it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness and doubt was dispelled.”
No one must suppose that this great conversion which had befallen Augustine, this light which had shone into his life and would never again leave it, had turned him away from this world. On the contrary, it made him more conscious than ever before of its joys and beauties, more aware than ever before of the terrific privilege it was to be allowed to exist in time. There is a passage that I love in the Confessions, in which he asks, “the earth itself, the winds that blow, and the whole air, and all that lives in it… ‘What is my God?’ Likewise he asks the sky, the moon and the stars: ‘What is my God’ None of these was God, he was told. He went on to speak to ‘all of things that are about me, all that can be admitted by the door of the senses.’ They, too, he was told, were not God. Then at last he understood: their beauty was all the answer they could give, and the only answer he needed to hear.”

Augustine: The Eternal Wisdom
It was while they were waiting in Ostia that Augustine and Monica had an extraordinary, mystical experience which is described in the Confessions with incomparable artistry and skill. They were looking out of the window of the house in which they were staying into the courtyard below, talking together serenely and joyfully about the eternal life of the saints, which, they agreed, “no bodily pleasure, however great it might be and whatever earthly light might shed luster upon it, was worthy of comparison or even mention.” As they talked, ranging over the whole compass of material things in the various degrees, up to the very heavens themselves,” they came to survey “the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it,” Augustine said, “with all the strength of our hearts.”

Then they reached out and touched this eternal Wisdom, which like eternity itself is neither in the past nor the future, but just is. Touched it only to return, leaving, Augustine writes “our spiritual harvest bound to it, to the sound of our own speech, in which each word has a beginning and an end; far different from Your Word, our Lord, Who abides in Himself forever, yet never grows old and gives new life to all things.” Whoever has tried to give expression in words with a beginning and an end, the perspectives and shape of this creation in which we live, cannot fail to feel awed that so great a writer as Augustine would suffer a like predicament.

Augustine: The World Is Losing Its Grip
“This is the door of the Lord, the righteous shall enter in,” was written on the lintel of a church in Numidia. However, “The man who enters,” Augustine wrote,

is bound to see drunkards, misers, tricksters, gamblers, adulterers, fornicators, people wearing amulets, assiduous clients of sorcerers, astrologers. He must be warned that the same crowds that press into the churches on Christian festivals also fill the theaters on pagan holidays…
Wherever the towering mass of the theatre is erected, there the foundations of Christian virtue are undermined, and while this insane expenditure gives to the sponsors a glorious result, men mock at the works of mercy….

It is only charity that distinguishes the children of God from the children of the Devil. They all make the sign of the Cross and answer “Amen” and sing alleluia, they all go to church and build up the walls of the basilicas…

Take away the barriers afforded by the laws! Men’s brazen capacity to do harm, their urge to self-indulgence would rage to the full. No king in his kingdom, no general with his troops…no husband with his wife, no father with his son, could hope to stop, by any threat or punishment, the license that would follow the sheer sweet taste of sinning….

Give me a man in love; he knows what I mean, give me one who yearns; give me one who is hungry; give me one far away in this desert, who is thirty and sighs for the spring of the Eternal Country. Give me that sort of man; he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just doesn’t know what I’m talking about…

You are surprised that the world is losing its grip? That the world is grown old? Don’t hold onto the old man, the world; don’t 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. Don’t fear, they youth shall be renewed as san eagle.”

Augustine: You Neglect To Seek Out What It Is That Makes You Ignorant
It will not be held against you that you are ignorant against your will, but that you neglect to seek out what it is that makes you ignorant; not that you cannot bring together your wounded limbs, but that you reject Him that would heal them.

Augustine: I No Longer Wished For A Better World
I no longer wished for a better world because I was thinking of the whole of creation, and in the light of this clearer discernment I have come to see that, though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone. See how Augustine effects a soul transformation by changing his perception of the world. More on this thought here.

Augustine: His Profoundest Conclusion
We live perforce, and always must, in earthly cities. They are our location, our set, with history for our script. At the same time, in all creation we are unique in being capable of envisaging a Heavenly City not susceptible to the ravages of time, existing beyond the dark jungle of the human will. As Saint Paul had said and Augustine had echoed: “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.

Pursuing his theme, Augustine ranged over the whole of human history as then understood, His conclusions have lost none of their force in the light of whatever has been invented, concluded and speculated upon in the subsequent fifteen centuries:

The centuries of past history would have rolled by like empty jars if Christ had not been foretold by them…
These were the two motives which drove the Romans to their wonderful achievements: liberty, and passion for the praise of men….
What else was there for them to love save glory? For, through glory, they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised them…
The Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity…
Take Aristotle, put him near to the Rock of Christ and he fades away into nothingness. Who is Aristotle? When he hears the words, “Christ said,” then he shakes in hell. “Pythagoras said this.” “Plato said that.” Put them near the Rock and compare these arrogant people with Him who was crucified.
In our fallen state, our imperfection, we can conceive perfection. Through the Incarnation, the presence of God among us in the lineaments of Man, we have a window in the walls of time which looks out on to this Heavenly City.

This was Augustine’s profoundest conclusion, and in his greatest work he enshrined it imperishably, to be a comfort and a light in the dark days that lay ahead, when in the year 430, the triumphant Vandals would cross into Africa, reaching the walls of Hippo itself, as he lay dying there.

Augustine: The Heavenly City
Today our earthly city looks even larger, the point where it may be said to have taken over the heavenly one. Turning away from God, blown up with the arrogance generated by their fabulous success in exploring and harnessing the mechanism of life, men believe themselves to be at last in charge of their own destiny. As we survey the disastrous consequences of such an attitude, the chaos and destruction it has brought, as Augustine did the fall of Rome and its aftermath, his words on that other occasion still stand applicable , as he says to all circumstances and conditions of men:

In its sojourn here, the Heavenly City makes use of the peace provided by the earthly city. In all that relates to the mortal nature of man it preserves and indeed seeks the concordance of human wills. It refers the earthly peace to the heavenly peace, which is truly such peace that it alone can be described as peace, for it is the highest degree of ordered and harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God and of another in God. When this stage is reached then there will be life, not life subject death but life that is clearly … and assuredly life-giving. There will be a body, not a body which is animal weighing down the soul as it decays, but a spiritual body experiencing no need and subordinated in every part to the will. This is the peace that the Heavenly City has while it sojourns here in faith and in this faith it lives a life of righteousness. To the establishing of that peace it refers all its good actions, whether they be towards God or toward one’s neighbor, for the life of the City is utterly and entirely a life of fellowship.

Posted in St. Augustine | Tagged 1 John 2:15-17, Dorothy Sayers, Etienne Gilson, G. K. Chesterton, intellectum valde ama, Joseph Pearse, Malcolm Muggeridge, Peter Kreeft, St. Augustine, The Heavenly City, The World Is Losing Its Grip | 2 Comments »

A Short Biography of Saint Augustine

August 13, 2009

St. Augustine

The following is a reading selection from Samuel Enoch Stumpf’s classic history of philosophy, Socrates to Sartre. The chapter on Augustine has a pithy overview of St. Augustine’s life. I offer it as a companion piece to yesterday’s reading selections from Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo.

“St. Augustine’s intense concern over his personal destiny provided the driving force for his philosophic activity. From his early youth, he suffered from a deep moral turmoil, which drove him to a life-long quest for true wisdom and spiritual peace. He was born in Tagaste in the African province of Numidia in 354 AD. His father was a pagan, but his mother, Monica, was a devout Christian. At the age of sixteen, Augustine began the study of rhetoric in Carthage, a port city given to licentious ways. Though his mother had instilled in him the ways of Christian thought and behavior, he threw off this religious faith and morality, taking at this time a mistress by whom he had a son and with whom he lived for a decade. At the same time, his thirst for knowledge impelled his extremely able mind to rigorous study, and he became a successful student of rhetoric.

A series of personal experiences led him to his unique approach to philosophy. He was nineteen years old when he read the Hortensius of Cicero, which was an exhortation to achieve philosophical wisdom. These words of Cicero kindled his passion for learning, but he was left with the problem of where to find intellectual certainty. His Christian ideas seemed unsatisfactory to him. He was particularly perplexed by the ever-present problem of moral evil. How can one explain the existence of evil in human experience? The Christians had said that God is the creator of all things and also that God is good. How, then, is it possible for evil to arise out of a world that a perfectly good God had created?

Because Augustine could find no answer in the Christianity he learned as a youth, he turned to a group called the Manicheans, who were sympathetic to much of Christianity but who, boasting of their intellectual superiority, rejected the basic monotheism of the Old Testament and with it the doctrine that the Creator and Redeemer of man are one and the same. Instead, the Manichaean’s taught a doctrine of dualism, according to which there were two basic principles in the universe, the principle of light or goodness, on the one hand, and the principle of darkness or evil, on the other. These two principles were held to be equally eternal and were seen as eternally in conflict with each other. This conflict was reflected in human life in the conflict between the soul, composed of light, and the body, composed of darkness. At first this theory of dualism seemed to provide the answer to the problem of evil; it overcame the contradiction between the presence of evil in a world created by a good God. Augustine could now attribute his sensual desires to the external power of darkness.

Although this dualism seemed to solve the contradiction of evil in a God-created world, it raised new problems. For one thing, how could one explain why there are two conflicting principles in nature? If no convincing reason could be given, is intellectual certitude possible? Far more serious was his awareness that it did not help to solve his moral turmoil to say that it was all engendered by some external force. The presence of fierce passion was no less unsettling just because the “blame” for it had been shifted to something outside of himself, What had originally attracted him to the Manichaeans was their boast that they could provide him with truth that could be discussed and made plain, not requiring, as the Christians did, “faith before reason.”

He therefore broke with the Manicheans, feeling that “those philosophers whom they call Academics [Skeptics] were wiser than the rest in thinking that we ought to doubt everything, and that no truth can be comprehended by man.” He was now attracted to Skepticism, though at the same time he retained some belief in God. He maintained a materialistic view of things and on this account doubted the existence of immaterial substances and the immortality of the soul.

Hoping for a more effective career in rhetoric, Augustine left Africa for Rome and shortly thereafter moved to Milan, where he became municipal professor of rhetoric in 384. Here he was profoundly influenced by Ambrose, who was then Bishop of Milan. From Ambrose Augustine derived not so much the techniques of rhetoric, but somewhat unexpectedly a greater appreciation of Christianity. While in Milan, Augustine took another mistress, having left his first one in Africa. It was here also that Augustine came upon certain forms of Platonism, especially the Neo-Platonism found in the Enneads of Plotinus.

There was much in Neo-Platonism that caught his imagination, particularly the conception of an immaterial world totally separate from the material world and the belief that man possesses a spiritual sense that enables him to know God and the immaterial world. Moreover, from Plotinus Augustine derived the conception that evil is not a positive reality but is rather a matter of privation, the absence of good. Above all, Neoplatonism overcame Augustine’s former skepticism, materialism, and dualism. Through Platonic thought he was able to understand that not all activity is physical, that there is a spiritual as well as a physical reality. He could now see the unity of the world without having to assume the existence of two principles behind soul and body, for Plotinus had presented the picture of reality as a single graduated system in which matter is simply on a lower level.

Intellectually, Neo-Platonism provided what Augustine had been looking for, but it left his moral problem still unsolved. What he needed now was moral strength to match his intellectual insight. This he found by way of Ambrose’s sermons. Neoplatonism had finally made Christianity reasonable to him, and now he was also able to exercise the act of faith and thereby derive the power of the spirit without feeling that he was lapsing into some form of superstition. His dramatic conversion occurred in 386, when he gave “real assent” to abandoning his profession of rhetoric and giving his life totally to the pursuit of philosophy, which, for him, also meant the knowledge of God. He now saw Platonism and Christianity as virtually one, seeing in Neoplatonism the philosophical expression of Christianity, saying that “I am confident that among the Platonists I shall find what is not opposed to the teachings of our religion.” He therefore set out on what he called “my whole program” of achieving wisdom, saying that “from this moment forward, it is my resolve never to depart from the authority of Christ, for I find none that is stronger.” Still, he emphasized that “I must follow after this with the greatest subtlety of reason.”

For Augustine, true philosophy was inconceivable without a confluence of faith and reason. To him, wisdom was Christian wisdom. Reason without revelation was certainly possible, but it would never be complete. This was true particularly for Augustine, since he came to believe that there is no such thing as a purely natural man without some ultimate spiritual destiny. Consequently, to understand the concrete condition of man, he must be considered from the point of view of the Christian faith, and this in turn requires that the whole world be considered from the vantage point of faith. There could be, for Augustine, no distinction between theology and philosophy. Indeed, he believed that one could not properly philosophize until his will was transformed, that clear thinking was possible only under the influence of God’s grace. In this way, Augustine set the dominant mood and style of Christian wisdom of the Middle Ages, although Aquinas in the thirteenth century altered some of its assumptions.

It is therefore not possible to discuss Augustine’s philosophy without at the same time considering his theological viewpoint. Indeed, Augustine wrote no purely philosophical works in the contemporary sense of that term. He was an incredibly prolific writer, and as he became a noted leader in the Catholic Church, he was inevitably involved in writing as a protagonist of the faith and a defender against heresy. In 396 he became Bishop of Hippo, the seaport near his native town of Tagaste. Among his many opponents was Pelagius, with whom he entered into a celebrated controversy. Pelagius had taught that all men possess the natural ability to achieve a righteous life, thereby denying the doctrine of original sin. This led, according to Augustine, to misunderstanding the true nature of man by assuming that man’s will is of itself capable of achieving his salvation and thereby minimizing the function of God’s grace.

This controversy illuminates Augustine’s mode of thought perfectly, for it indicates again his insistence that all knowledge upon all subjects must take into account the revealed truth of Scripture along with the insights of philosophy. Since all knowledge aimed at helping man understand God, this religious dimension had clearly a priority in his reflections, As Aquinas said about him later, “Whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrine of the Platonists, found in their writings anything consistent with the faith, he adopted it; and whatever he found contrary to the faith he amended.” Still it was Platonism that had rescued Augustine from skepticism, made the Christian faith reasonable and, indeed, powerful for him, and set off one of the great literary achievements in theology and philosophy. As if to symbolize his tempestuous life, Augustine died in 430 at the age of seventy-five in the posture of reciting the Penitential Psalms as the Vandals besieged Hippo.”

Psalm of Repentance (Psalm 51) Augustine Read Awaiting His Death
Have pity on me, God,
Pity to match the greatness of your mercy
And the multitude of your kindnesses:
Erase my wickedness.

For I know my wickedness
And my sin stares me ever in the face.

I was conceived in wickedness
And in sin my mother conceived me.

You have loved the truth
And you have revealed to me the unknown
And hidden sides of your wisdom

God will not turn away a worn and humbled heart.
From Augustine by James J. O’Donnell

Posted in Readings | Tagged Augustine, Manicheans, Neo-Platonism, Pelagius, Plotinus, Psalm of Repentance, Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Socrates to Sartre, St. Ambrose | 2 Comments »

Peter Brown’s “Augustine of Hippo”

August 12, 2009

AugustineOfHippo “Augustine of Hippo” was first published in 1967 and then recently revised in 2000, with a new epilogue that dealt with a whole new breed of archeological evidence that emerged between the two dates. Augustine lived from 354-430 AD. While this may seem distant from the modern consciousness, Brown has a special gift for immersing us in Augustine’s writing style (which is timeless) and relating it to the history and culture of the period. Another wonderful technique of Brown’s biography is to let Augustine, for the most part, speak for himself — what one reader described as an “almost like a mediated autobiography, an expanded “Confessions,” if you will.”

It makes for a great summer read because the chapters are short and to the point allowing the reader to forge his way through it. It is however that great book (500+ pages) that makes for a wonderful vacation read. One of the things I think you will find in it is a correlation between Augustine’s times and our own: note the “three fold Christian task” below and tell me if that has not changed at all.

One anecdote I recently read about its creation is even more fascinating and should be told to every masters thesis research scholar: “Turns out that Brown had not developed any special interest in Augustine until the end of his undergraduate studies. Being pressed for a thesis topic, with a deadline approaching, he picked Augustine almost at random. He then set about to master Augustine, and in just two years ended up writing the definitive bio that changed the field forever.” Is that a hoot or what? Another vote for “Follow your passion.”

The bibliography takes up eighteen pages and in a triumph of scholarship Brown uses primary sources in Latin, as well as, scholarly works in English, German and French. He is also a master of the anecdote and of the memorable “obscure” fact which makes him a favorite of mine. For instance, he tells us that in the Fourth century the image of Christ was that of a teacher, and a philosopher. There were no crucifixes in the Fourth century, and the concept of the suffering Savior did not exist.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed but my way of reviewing a book is to share the reading selections I made from it. So here is a few of what I considered the best of Peter Brown’s “Augustine of Hippo:”

The Importance of Confession
“It will not be held against you, that you are ignorant against your will, but that you neglected to seek out what it is that makes you ignorant not that you cannot bring together your wounded limbs, that you reject Him that would heal them. No man that has been deprived of his ability to know that it is essential to find out what it is that it is damaging not to be aware of; and to know that he should confess his weakness so that He can help him who seeks hard and confesses.”

Delight, The Mainspring of Human Action
Augustine came to view “delight” as the mainspring of human action; but this delight escaped his self-control. Delight is discontinuous, startlingly erratic: Augustine now moves in a world of ‘love at first sight’, of chance encounters, and , just as important, of sudden, equally inexplicable patches of deadness: ’Who can embrace wholeheartedly what gives him no delight? But who can determine for himself that what will delight him should come his way, and, when it comes, that it should, in fact, delight him’

Influence of Neo-Platonism in the Confessions
…these incidents are always placed in relation to the most profound philosophic concepts available to a Late Antique Man… the great themes of the Neo-Platonic tradition in its Christian form; they are suffused with a sense of the omnipresence of God, and they illustrate the fatal play of forces in a wandering soul, the tragedy of a man ‘disintegrated’ by the passing of time. Augustine allows his past self to grow in the dimensions of a ‘classic’ hero: for these experiences summed up for him, the condition of ‘my race, the human race’. Every incident in the book, therefore, is charged with the poignancy of a Chinese landscape — a vivid detail perched against infinite distances.

The Will and ‘Delight’
..the will is now seen as dependent on a capacity for ‘delight’, and conscious actions as the result of a mysterious alliance of intellect and feeling: they are merely the final outgrowth of hidden processes, the processes by which the ‘heart’ is ‘stirred’, is ‘massaged and set’ by the hand of God.

Delight in the Truth…Progress in Wisdom
For Augustine, progress in wisdom, measured now by the yardstick of his understanding of the Holy Scriptures , could only depend upon progress in self-awareness…Like a planet in opposition, he has come as near to us, in Book Ten of the Confessions, as the vast gulf that separates a modern man from the culture and religion of the Later Empire can allow: Ecce enim delexisti veritatem, quondam qui facit eam venit ad lucem ‘For behold you have taken delight in the truth; and he that does truth comes to the light. I desire to do truth in my heart, before Thee, by confession: with my pen, before many witnesses…

A Revelation of Limitations
The experience had come to him as a galling revelation of his own limitations: I found it far, far more than I had thought…I just had not known my powers: I still thought they counted for something. ‘But the lord laughed me to scorn and, by real experience, wished to show me to myself.’

Avoiding Contempt of Your Fellow Man
‘The man you cannot put right is still yours: he is part of you; either as a fellow human being, or very often as a member of your church, he is inside with you; what are you going to do?…do not think ill of your brother. Strive humbly to be what you would have him be; and you will not think that he is what you are not.’

A World Of Becoming
Augustine however was a man steeped in Neo-Platonic thought. The whole world appeared to him as a world of ‘becoming’, as a hierarchy of imperfectly-realized forms, which depended for their quality, on ‘participating’ in an Intelligible World of Ideal Forms. This universe was in a state of constant, dynamic tension in which the imperfect forms of matter strove to ‘realize their fixed, ideal structure, grasped by the mind alone…The rites of the church were undeniable ‘holy’, because of the objective holiness of a Church which ‘participated’ in Christ. The ‘true Church’ of Augustine … is not only the ‘body of Christ’, the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, it is also deeply tinged with the metaphysical ideals of Plotinus: it is the ‘reality’ of which the concrete church on earth is only an imperfect shadow. Thus, the men who received and administered these rites merely strove imperfectly to realize this holiness ‘according to a certain shadow of the reality’.

A Three-Fold Christian Task
For as Augustine saw it, the Donatists (an early ‘purist’ Christian sect) had solved the problem of evil in the men around them, merely by refusing to establish any relationship with it….For Augustine, innocence was not enough. It was only ‘one-third’ of the full range of human relationships to which the good Christian had to expose himself. He must perform a three-fold task: he must himself become holy; he must coexist with sinners in the same community as himself, a task involving humility and integrity; but he must also be prepared, actively, to rebuke and correct them.

The Augustinian Community
We should never forget that Augustine, in founding his monastery, wished to recreate around him exactly the same community, as the Apostles had created when they received this gift of the Holy Spirit.

The Fallen Human Mind
Augustine’s view of the fall of mankind determined his attitude to society. Fallen men had come to need restraint. Even man’s greatest achievement had been made possible only by a ‘strait-jacket’ of unremitting harshness. Augustine was a great intellect, with a healthy respect for the achievements of human reason. Yet he was obsessed by the difficulties of thought, and by the long, coercive processes, reaching back into the horrors of his schooldays, that had made the intellectual activity possible; so ‘ready to lie down’ was the fallen human mind; for they were part of the awesome discipline of God ‘from the schoolmasters’ canes to the agonies of the martyrs’ by which human being were recalled, by suffering, from their own disastrous inclinations.

An Inner Struggle
The idea of a world cut off from perfection and shared by human beings with hostile ‘powers’, was ‘part of the religious topography’ of all Late Antique men. Augustine merely turned the Christian struggle inward; its amphitheatre was the ‘heart’; it was an inner struggle against forces in the soul. The ‘Lord of the World’ becomes the ‘Lord of desires’ — of the desires of those who love the world, and so come to resemble demons committed to the same emotions as themselves. ‘The Devil is not to be blamed for everything; there are times when a man is his own devil.’

The Yearning of the Transient
…the world is by definition, for the Neo-Platonic philosophers, incomplete, transient, overshadowed by Eternity. All of the sadness of he ancient philosophers will flood into Augustine’s language as he talks of this transience. Human existence is a speck of rain compared with Eternity…The Christian must come with the yearning of the uncomplete to be filled….a sense of the loss of a loved one…there is only one thing a lover fears…”I shall never look at you again.”

Fear of the Lord
Do not be slow to turn to the Lord, nor delay from day today, for His wrath shall come when you know not…Filled with fear myself, I fill you with fear.

The Bible
For Augustine and his hearers, the Bible was literally the ‘word’ of God. It was regarded as a single communication, as single message in an intricate code, and not as an exceedingly heterogeneous collection of separate books. Above all it was a communication that was intrinsically so far above the pitch of human minds, that to be made available to our senses at all, this ‘Word’ had to be communicated by means of an intricate game of ‘signs’ (very much as a modern therapist makes contact with the inner world of a child in terms of significant patterns emerging in play with sand, water, and bricks. Wisdom’s way of teaching chooses to hint at how divine things should be thought of by certain images and analogies available to the senses.

The Mystical Body of Christ
Augustine lived through the emotions to which he appealed. In his middle age he became increasingly preoccupied with the idea of a ‘Mystical body’ of Christ: a body of which Christ was the Head and all true believers the members. For a Platonist, the unity of a body was, above all, a unity of sensations: the soul was the core of the body, for it alone was the center in which all the emotions of the body were experienced…For seen in this light the Psalms were the record of the emotions of Christ and his members. Just as he had taken on human flesh, so had Christ of his own free will, opened himself to Human Feeling. These feelings are only hinted at in the Gospels. Often the Christ of Augustine’s sermons is the pale impassive figure of a Late Roman mosaic; His crucifixion is a solemn, measured act of power — ‘the sleep of a lion’. But when he turns to the Psalms, Augustine will draw from them an immensely rich deposit of human emotions; for here was Christ, speaking directly in the person of the passionate King David. The song of the desperate fugitive from the wrath of Saul, is the inner story of the Passion: Heaviness fell upon me; and I slept.’ ‘His voice in he Psalms — a voice singing happily, a voice groaning, a voice rejoicing in hope, sighing in its present state — we should know this voice thoroughly and make it our own.

The Necessity of Allegory: Freud and Augustine
Augustine produced a singularly comprehensive explanation of why allegory should have been necessary in the first place. The need for such a language of ‘signs’ was the result of a specific dislocation of the human consciousness…Augustine takes up a position analogous to that of Freud. In dreams also, a powerful and direct message is said to be deliberately diffracted by some psychic mechanism, into a multiplicity of ‘signs’ quite as intricate and absurd, yet just as capable of interpretation, as the ‘absurd’ or ‘obscure’ passages in the Bible. Both (Freud and Augustine) assume that the proliferation of images is due to some precise event, to the development of some geographical fault across a hitherto undivided consciousness: for Freud, it is the creation of an unconsciousness by repression; for Augustine, it is the outcome of the Fall.

Understanding Scripture
No one can truly understand a book, Proust has said, unless he has already been able to ‘allow the equivalents to ripen slowly in his own heart.’ This profoundly human truth is what Augustine will always tell his readers: they must look into the Scriptures, ‘the eyes of their heart on its heart’. …let the scriptures be ‘the countenance of God’…a mind that once hoped to train itself for the vision of God by means of the Liberal Arts, would now come to rest on the solid intractable mass of the Christian Bible…Complete your work in me O Lord and open those pages to me‘… Seek His Face Evermore …Therefore let everyone who reads these pages proceed further with me, when he is equally certain as I am; let him make enquiries with me when he is as hesitant as I…Thus let us enter together, in the path of charity, in search of Him of Whom it is said: seek his face evermore.

Renewal In Old Age
You are surprised the world is losing its grip? That the world is grown old? Think of a man: he is born, he grows up, he becomes old. Old age has its many complaints: coughing, shaking, failing eyesight, anxious, terribly tired. A man grows old; he is full of complaints, The world is old; it is full of 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.”

Demons
Augustine believed in demons; .‘a species of beings, superior to men, living forever, their bodies as active and as subtle as the air, endowed with supernatural powers of perception; and ,as fallen angels, the sworn enemies of the true happiness of the human race. Their powers of influence were enormous; they could so interfere with the physical basis of the mind as to produce illusions…they could take on human shape to start a plague or a riot…the nexus between men and demons was purely psychological. Men got the demons they deserved…

The Two Cities
Augustine used a theme that had already become a commonplace among African Christians; he had met it first, perhaps, in the work of a Donatist, Tyconius. Since the Fall of Adam, the human race had always been divided into two great ‘cities’, civitates; that is into two great pyramids of loyalty. The one ‘city’ served God along with His loyal angels; the other served the rebel angels, the Devil and his demons. Although the two cities seemed inextricably mixed, within the church as in the world they would be separated at the Last Judgment. Christ would speak the words of judgment; the two cities — Babylon and Jerusalem — would then appear plainly, the one on the left, the other on the right.

Babylon And Jerusalem
Now it is the poignant longing of the psalms that Augustine fastens on. Babylon had meant ‘confusion’ a merging of the identity in the things of the world. The citizens of Jerusalem also depended on this world, but they became distinct from Babylon by their capacity to yearn for something else: Let us pine brothers for the City where we are citizens…By pining we are already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on that coast. I sing of somewhere else, not of here: for I sing with my heart, not my flesh. The citizens of Babylon hear the sound of the flesh, the Founder of Jerusalem hears the tune of our heart’

The Process of Human History
Augustine’s great commentary on Genesis adapts a traditional solution to the problem [of reconciling change and permanence in the world of nature]: God had implanted in each organism a constant, organizing principle, a ratio seminalis, that would ensure that change happened, not arbitrarily, but in accordance with a latent pattern laid down, once and for all, at the Creation….In this process the human race could be conceived of as a vast organism, like a single man, that changed according to a pattern of growth that was inaccessible to the human mind, yet clear to God…Seen as a whole human history was ‘that stretch of time in which the new born oust the dying‘, a great river slipping towards death. What had fascinated Augustine, was the language of God, distant and opaque as a liturgy. It is the significance of this language, suddenly uncovered in the appearance of Christ among men, that poured meaning into a small part at least of this disquieting inanity: The centuries of past history would have rolled by like empty jars, if Christ had not been foretold by means of them.…Prophetic history was exclusively religious history and showed the hints of division between an ‘earthly’ and ‘heavenly’ city.

Progress: The Capacity To Know and Feel
Augustine often uses the world ‘progress’ during his old age…it implies a consciousness of having left behind the superfluous, and of having become increasingly certain of the essential…The Christian life, as seen by Augustine, could only be a long process of healing…the nature and source of a fully good, creative action…marked the culmination of an inner [Christian] evolution…an act of choice is not just a matter of knowing what to choose: it is a matter in which loving and feeling are involved. And in men, this capacity to know and to feel in a single, involved whole, has been extremely dislocated: The understanding flies ahead, and there follows, oh, so slowly, and sometimes not at all, our weakened human capacity for feeling. Men choose because they love; but Augustine had been certain for some twenty years, that they could not, of themselves, choose to love. The vital capacity to unite feeling and knowledge comes from an area outside man’s powers of self-determination: From a depth that we do not see, comes everything that you can see. I know O Lord, that the way of a man is not in his power; nor is it for him to walk and direct his own steps… the relation of grace and freedom: that it is the healthy man is one in whom knowledge and feeling have become united; and that only such a man is capable of allowing himself to be ‘drawn’ to an act by the sheer irresistible pleasure of the object of his love: The soul of men shall hope under the shadow of thy wings; they shall be made drunk with the fullness of Thy house; and of the torrents of Thy pleasures Thou wilt give them to drink; for in Thee is the Fountain of Life and in thy Light shall we see the light?…Give me a man in love: he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns, give me one who is hungry; give me one who is far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the Eternal country. Give me that sort of man: he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about.

Peter Brown’s monumental work will put you in touch with that yearning again: a gift to all Catholics.

Posted in Book Recommendations | Tagged Augustine of Hippo, Babylon And Jerusalem, becoming certain of the essential, Fear of the Lord, Freud and Augustine, Peter Brown, progress in wisdom, Seek His Face Evermore, the countenance of God, The Will and ‘Delight’, the world is grown old | 3 Comments »

Two Reflections on Sin

August 11, 2009

Sin and Satan In Paradise Lost

More than any other passage, Moses’ farewell speech in Deuteronomy 30:15-20 brings out the real nature and tragedy of sin. “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”

In all its forms, sin consists in turning away from God with what is described as “a hardened heart” or “stiffened neck” (Psalms 95:8; Jeremiah 7:24-26). It is the “No” to eternal life and to the author of that life. In a sense it is the most obvious in human nature yet it remains shrouded by layers of self deception and wishful thinking. It seems as if one of the undertakings of our secular state is to deny the innate moral weakness of its citizens. Here is a passage from Fr. Robert Barron’s And Now I See and John Paul II’s meditation on the Psalm 51, the Miserere.

“So the project is knowing that we are sinners, but what, exactly, is sin? This is a much more difficult question than it seems, because sin is a negativity, a dysfunction, and hence cannot be looked at directly. Henri de Lubac spoke of it as cette claudication mysterieuse, this mysterious limp, and thereby caught its elusive, derivative, and parasitic quality. We might begin to shed some light on the issue by distinguishing, in accord with biblical instincts, between Sin and sins, that is to say, between the underlying disease and its many symptoms. When, at the end of his career, the Curé d’Ars was asked what wisdom he had gained about human nature from his many years of hearing confessions, he responded, “people are much sadder than they seem.”

Blaise Pascal rests his apologetic for Christianity on the simple fact that all people are unhappy. This universal, enduring, and stubborn sadness is Sin. Now this does not mean that Sin is identical to psychological depression. The worst sinners can be the most psychologically well-adjusted people, and the greatest saints can be, by any ordinary measure, quite unhappy. When I speak of sadness in this context, I mean the deep sense of un-fulfillment. We want the Truth and we get it, if at all, in dribs and drabs; we want the Good, and we achieve it only rarely; we seem to know what we ought to be, but we are in fact something else. This spiritual frustration, this inner warfare, this debility of soul, is Sin.

It is nowhere better described than in the seventh chapter of the letter that Paul wrote to the Romans toward the end of his life. The passage begins simply and magnificently: “I do not understand my own actions” (Romans 7:14). Paul knows, even twenty years after his conversion to Christ, that he remains an enigma to himself. And the mystery is clearly articulated: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). Paul lives at cross purposes to himself, his best inclinations stymied, his highest thoughts countered by his lowest desires, his good will giving rise to sordid acts. Sounding like an alcoholic who knows that taking a drink is the very worst thing he could do precisely as he raises the glass to his lips, Paul continues, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it” (Romans. 7:18). When he looks within, he sees, not an ordered harmony, but a battlefield: “for I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind” (Romans 7:23). And the conclusion of this bit of brutally honest introspection is an anguished statement and an equally anguished question: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). The Apostle to the Gentiles …sees the truth of his situation with awful clarity his spiritual life is a civil war, and no amount of fighting will resolve the conflict.

Pascal mines further this Pauline vein when he says, “We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness.”This is both our greatness (we know what we ought to have) and our wretchedness (we cannot achieve it). In one of the best known of his Pensees, Pascal says, “Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast.” In other words, when we convince ourselves that all is basically well with us and that through our efforts of mind, will, imagination, can work our way out of our wretchedness, we do not resolve our dysfunction; we intensify it. Part of the mythology of the Enlightenment was just this confidence in auto-salvation.

Many nineteenth-century thinkers, including some Christians, held that our technological advances, our improvements in medicine, our growing political wisdom would conduce, finally, to the emergence of the kingdom. The prophets from Kierkegaard to Barth pointed out the dangerous hubris behind this assumption, and the horrors of the twentieth century — two global wars, several attempts at genocide, the nuclear threat, and the beginning of terrorism — have shown the truth of Pascal’s dictum. The perpetrators of the greatest violence in human history were not those who believed in the fall but precisely those who denied it.

Every Advent Christians sing a haunting song whose words and tune go back to the ninth century, but I wonder how carefully they aver to the lyrics:

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appears.

In the ancient world, people were tremendously afraid of being kidnapped and held for ransom, Alone, far from home, malnourished, often tortured, hostages could only hope against hope that their deliverance might come. This is the situation evoked by that well-known song: Israel, the people of God, are held for ransom in their lonely exile, and they cry out for their savior, the Son of God. To be in Sin is to know the truth and to feel the texture of this imprisonment.

In his homilies on the book of Exodus, Origen proposes an allegorical reading of the battle between the children of Israel and the Egyptians. The Israelites, he says, symbolize all of the positive powers of the soul — creativity, intelligence, energy, love — while Pharaoh (and his minions) stand for the negative forces of fear, hatred, and violence. What has happened in our fallen state is that Pharaoh has come to dominate Israel, that is to say, the power of Sin has co-opted and mastered for its purposes our positive energies. Now our minds (which remain hungry for the Truth) are placed in service of falsity; and our wills (which still love the Good) are pressed into service for evil; and our creativity (which still longs for the beautiful) is harnessed to ugly purposes. According to Exodus, Pharaoh compels the Israelites to build fortified cities and monuments to himself. And so, following the allegory, our sinner’s souls are given over to producing fortifications to protect the ego and monuments to trumpet its prominence. This enslavement of our best to our worst is Sin.

Augustine offers one of the pithiest definitions of Sin: it is the state of being incurvatus in se (caved in on oneself). The powers of the soul, which are meant to orient us to nature and other human beings and the cosmos and finally the infinite mystery of God, are focused in on the tiny and infinitely uninteresting ego. Like a black hole, the sinful soul draws all of the light and energy around it into itself. Dante illustrates this Augustinian insight by placing Satan at the pit of Hell, frozen in ice, incapable of movement, and weeping from all six of his eyes.’The Devil’s angel wings (now devolved into unsightly bat wings) beat the air furiously, but he can go nowhere: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” Trying to fly while stuck in the ice; driving your car with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake: that is the dysfunction, the frustration, that the Bible calls “Sin.”

But we mustn’t despair, even after surveying this depressing series of images and metaphors, for we have a savior. We cannot set this condition right (“who will deliver me from this body of death?”), but there is someone who can. Paul’s lament ends with an exultant proclamation: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25). Christianity affirms that Emmanuel (God with us) has come and has gone right to the bottom of Sin in order to defeat it. In his full humanity, Jesus entered into the complex nexus of Sin, and in his full divinity, he did something about it. He stood shoulder to shoulder with us in the muddy Jordan waters of our egotism, but he was not simply a fellow sufferer, He also lifted us out of those waters and offered us transfiguration. And it is none other than those so lifted up and so transfigured that can look with confidence, and even a touch of humor, at the mess from which they are being saved. It is the saints who know that they are sinners.”
Fr. Robert Barron, And Now I See

On The Miserere
1. We have just heard the Miserere, one of the most famous prayers of the Psalter, the most intense and commonly used penitential psalm, the hymn of sin and pardon, a profound meditation on guilt and grace. The Liturgy of the Hours makes us pray it at Lauds every Friday. For centuries the prayer has risen to heaven from the hearts of many faithful Jews and Christians as a sigh of repentance and hope poured out to a merciful God.

From David to prophetic awareness of new heart created by the Spirit
The Jewish tradition placed the psalm on the lips of David, who was called to repentance by the severe words of the prophet Nathan (cf. vv. 1-2; 2 Sam 11-12), who rebuked him for his adultery with Bathsheba and for having had her husband Uriah killed. The psalm, however, was enriched in later centuries, by the prayer of so many other sinners, who recovered the themes of the “new heart” and of the “Spirit” of God placed within the redeemed human person, according to the teaching of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel (cf. v. 12; Jeremiah 1-34; Ezekiel: 11,19. 36,24-28).

Original Sin
2. Psalm 50 (51) outlines two horizons. First, there is the dark region of sin (cf. vv. 3-11) in which man is placed from the beginning of his existence: “Behold in guilt I was born, a sinner was I conceived” (v. 7). Even if this declaration cannot be taken as an explicit formulation of the doctrine of original sin as it was defined by Christian theology, undoubtedly it corresponds to it: indeed, it expresses the profound dimension of the innate moral weakness of the human person. The first part of the Psalm appears to be an analysis of sin, taking place before God. Three Hebrew terms are used to define this sad reality, which comes from the evil use of human freedom.

Three Hebrew terms for sin
3. The first term, hattá, literally means “falling short of the target”: sin is an aberration which leads us far from God, the fundamental goal of our relations, and, consequently, also from our neighbour.

The second Hebrew term is “awôn, which takes us back to the image of “twisting” or of “curving”. Sin is a tortuous deviation from the straight path; it is an inversion, a distortion, deformation of good and of evil; in the sense declared by Isaiah: “Woe to those who call good evil and evil good, who change darkness into light and light into darkness” (Is 5,20). Certainly, for this reason in the Bible conversion is indicated as a “return” (in Hebrew shûb) to the right way, correcting one’s course.

The third term the psalmist uses to speak of sin is peshá. It expresses the rebellion of the subject toward his sovereign and therefore an open challenge addressed to God and to his plan for human history.

Saving justice of God recreates sinful humanity
4. If, however, man confesses his sin, the saving justice of God is ready to purify him radically. Thus we come to the second spiritual part of the psalm, the luminous realm of grace (cf. vv. 12-19). By the confession of sins, for the person who prays there opens an horizon of light where God is at work. The Lord does not just act negatively, eliminating sin, but recreates sinful humanity by means of his life-giving Spirit: he places in the human person a new and pure “heart”, namely, a renewed conscience, and opens to him the possibility of a limpid faith and worship pleasing to God.

Origen spoke of a divine therapy, which the Lord carries out by his word and by the healing work of Christ: “As God prepares remedies for the body from therapeutic herbs wisely mixed together, so he also prepared for the soul medicines with the words he infused, scattering them in the divine Scriptures…. God gave yet another medical aid of which the Lord is the Archetype who says of himself: “It is not the healthy who have need of a physician but the sick“. He is the excellent physician able to heal every weakness, and illness” (Origen, Homilies on the Psalms, From the Italian edition, Omelie sui Salmi, Florence, 1991, pp. 247-249).

Sense of sin: “against you alone have I sinned” and appeal to mercy
5. The richness of Psalm 50 (51) merits a careful exegesis of every line. It is what we will do when we will meet it again at Lauds on successive Fridays. The overall view, which we have taken of this great Biblical supplication, reveals several fundamental components of a spirituality which should permeate the daily life of the faithful. There is above all a lively sense of sin, seen as a free choice, with a negative connotation on the moral and theological level: “Against you, you alone, have I sinned, I have done what is evil in your sight” (v. 6).

There is also in the psalm a lively sense of the possibility of conversion: the sinner, sincerely repentant, (cf. v 5), comes before God in his misery and nakedness, begging him not to cast him out from his presence (v. 13).

Finally, in the Miserere, a rooted conviction of divine pardon ” cancels, washes, cleanses” the sinner (cf. vv. 3-4) and is able to transform him into a new creature who has a transfigured spirit, tongue, lips and heart (cf. 4-19). “Even if our sins were as black as the night, divine mercy is greater than our misery. Only one thing is needed: the sinner has to leave the door to his heart ajar…. God can do the rest…. Everything begins and ends with his mercy”, so writes St Faustina Kowalska (M. Winowska, The Ikon of Divine Mercy, the Message of Sister Faustina, from the Italian version, L’Icona dell’Amore Misericordioso. Il messaggio di Suor Faustina, Rome, 1981, p. 271).
Against You Alone Have I Sinned by Pope John Paul II

Posted in Understanding Sin | Tagged And Now I See, awôn, Blaise Pascal, Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Fr. Robert Barron, hattá, Henri de Lubac, Miserere, Origen, Original Sin, peshá, Pope John Paul II, Satan, Sin, St. Augustine, St. Paul | Leave a Comment »

An Unmasking Of Human Nature

August 10, 2009

Good Shepherd Icon

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away — and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.”
John 10:7-15

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. “Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Luke 15 1-10

A tremendous thought breaks in on us: Jesus is saying that the bond between himself and us is the same bond which binds him to the Father, in that perfect intimacy and understanding of life shared in its entirety side by side. John speaks of this union in his opening words: “…and the Word was with God.”

…Now we understand better that humble and yet so exalted name that the Messiah goes by: Son of Man. No one is so warmly, so intimately, so excellently human as he. That is why he knows us, why his words strike the intrinsic in us. That is why man is more profoundly understood by Christ than he ever could understand himself. No wonder he can call his sheep by name! But then what about those others who also wish to help mankind — to teach wisdom, lead the way, fight for the truth behind our existence? Jesus says: I am the door to the sheepfold — door and shepherd. The shepherd comes in through the door. All others are thieves who sneak in to steal and kill and destroy.

He alone is the gateway to the essence of human existence. Anyone who would reach that essence must come through him. This is not meant figuratively, but literally. The intrinsic form of all Christian being is Jesus himself. He who would penetrate to man’s heart, to the core where all true decisions form, must pass through Christ. The thoughts of any other must be purged to blend with Christ’s thoughts, his words with Christ’s words. Then that other will think and speak truly, and his teaching will strike home. His intentions must be carried out as Christ would have wished them; his will must be fused with Christ’s love. It must be Jesus Christ who speaks, not he; Jesus Christ who is presented, and not other. Then the depths of the soul, which “know” the Lord and obey his voice, will respond. That the metaphor of the door might swing its full weight, Jesus declares categorically: All others are “thieves and robbers.” Terrible sentence! Nothing else is acknowledged, neither wisdom nor goodness, nor cleverness, nor pedagogy, nor pity.

Everything outside of Christ is swept aside. Obviously, ultimate reality is at stake, and no confusion with human attributes — even the noblest — can be countenanced. Compared with the coming of the Messiah, the advent of any mere human is theft, robbery, violence and murder. What an unmasking of human nature! We do well to waste no time wondering whether also Abraham is meant, Moses and the prophets – “all” others; the words are there in black and white. But never mind the others, see to yourself. God has declared what you are when you to others with your worldly wisdom; take his word for it!
The Lord — Romano Guardini

Man Is A Lost And Erring Creature
Somewhere in Mark we find the sentence: “And when he landed, Jesus saw a large crowd, and had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” How well we understand these words: whenever we meet a crowd we are reminded of sheep without a shepherd. Man is a lost and erring creature who has forsaken the very fundaments of his being. Not because there are too few efficient or conscientious people who bother about the others — more would only mitigate the loneliness and isolation within existence. What is meant here is a sense of forsakenness that goes back much further. Existence itself is forsaken because it is as it is: estranged from God and sinking into nothingness. No human can rescue here, only Christ, the Godman, who has overcome the void.
The Lord — Romano Guardini

While he is still a long way off (still to some degree in the land of exile), his father catches sight of him (he had obviously been looking for him) and is “filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The word used in the Greek here for the feeling of compassion is esplagnisthe, meaning literally that the father’s guts are moved (gut wrenching?), the visceral connection to his child stirred up. This same term is applied in the New Testament to the feelings of Jesus himself: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). This powerful feeling leads to an extraordinary gesture. As many have pointed out, in ancient Jewish society, it was considered terribly unseemly for an elderly man to run to meet someone; rather, he was the one to whom others would come in a spirit of respect and obeisance. So the Father’s running, throwing caution and respectability to the wind, is an act of almost shocking condescension and other orientation.
The Priority of Christ – Fr. Robert Barron

The Shepherd Discourse
A third essential motif of the Shepherd discourse is the idea that the shepherd and his flock know each other: “The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” [John: 10:3] “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.” [John 10:14]

These verses present two striking sets of interrelated ideas that we need to consider if we are to understand what is meant by “knowing.” First of all, knowing and belonging are interrelated. The shepherd knows the sheep because they belong to him, and they know him precisely because they are his. Knowing and belonging are actually one and the same thing. The true shepherd does not possess the sheep as if they were a thing to be used and consumed; rather, they “belong” to him, in the context of their knowing each other, and this knowing is an inner acceptance. It signifies an inner belonging that goes much deeper than the possession of things. …

Herein lies the distinction between the owner, the true Shepherd, and the robber. For the robber, for the ideologues and the dictators, human beings are merely a thing that they possess. For the true Shepherd, they are free in relation to truth and love; the Shepherd proves that they belong to him precisely by knowing and loving them, by wishing them to be in the freedom of the truth. They belong to him through the oneness of “knowing,” though the communion in the truth that the Shepherd himself is. This is why he does not use them, but gives his life for them. Just as Logos and Incarnation, Logos and Passion belong together, so too knowing and self-giving are ultimately one. ….

The mutual knowing of the shepherd and sheep is interwoven with the mutual knowing of Father and Son. The knowing that links Jesus with “his own” exists within the space opened up by his “knowing” oneness with the Father. Jesus’ own are woven into the Trinitarian dialogue….This will help us to see that the Church and Trinity are mutually interwoven. This interpenetration of two levels of knowing is crucial for understanding the essence of the knowing of which John’s gospel speaks.

Applying all of the above to the world in which we live, we can say this: It is only in God and in light of God that we rightly know any man. Any “self-knowledge” that restricts man to the empirical and tangible fails to engage with man’s true depth. Man knows himself only when he learns to understand himself in light of God, and he knows others only when he sees the mystery of God in them.
Jesus of Nazareth – Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

Posted in Variety | Tagged esplagnisthe, Fr. Robert Barron, Fr. Romano Guardini, Jesus of Nazareth, John 10:7-15, Luke 15 1-10, Pope Benedict XVI, The Lord, The Priority of Christ | Leave a Comment »

Original Sin: A Disputation – by Fr. Edward T. Oakes

August 7, 2009

Original Sin at the Museum of National Arts of Popular Traditions Paris, France

“No doctrine inside the precincts of the Christian Church is received with greater reserve and hesitation, even to the point of outright denial, than the doctrine of original sin. Of course in a secular culture like ours, any number of Christian doctrines will be disputed by outsiders, from the existence of God to the resurrection of Jesus. But even in those denominations that pride themselves on their adherence to the orthodox dogmas of the once-universal Church, the doctrine of original sin is met with either embarrassed silence, outright denial, or at a minimum a kind of halfhearted lip service that does not exactly deny the doctrine but has no idea how to place it inside the devout life. Even the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, surprisingly enough, calls original sin a “sin” only in an analogous sense (#404), because unlike other (presumably real?) sins it is only contracted and not committed — a concession that would certainly have surprised Augustine, who had a vivid and almost physical/biological understanding of the First Sin.”

So begins Fr. Edward T. Oakes engaging essay on Original Sin. He continues:

“Clearly, Augustine’s authority notwithstanding, the doctrine is in crisis, a crisis different in kind from the challenge that secular modernity hurls at the totality of the Christian message. Secular culture undeniably plays a part here as well, with its doctrine of evolution or its belief in progress (now a rather tattered and shopworn belief, though one that still lurks in certain editorials and books). But much more severe is the outright discomfort believers feel in the doctrine because of what seems to them its internal inconsistency: how can guilt, an ethical and spiritual category, be inheritable, a category drawn from nature? As with the doctrine of predestination, to which it is often married, there seems to be a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” aura to the theology of original sin: Free will may be free, declares Augustine without apparent embarrassment, only it is not free to do good. “How then do miserable men dare to be proud of free will before, or of their own strength after, they are liberated?” But no sooner does Augustine fear that the concept of original sin might threaten the idea of human responsibility than he quickly turns around and becomes free will’s best advocate, again without a trace of embarrassment: “Let no man dare to deny the freedom of the will as to excuse sin.” In other words, if you do a good deed, that is God’s doing; if you commit a wrong, it is your doing.”

Fr. Oakes mounts a defense of Original Sin based on Thomas Aquinas’ treatments of “disputed questions” that are found in the Summa Theologiae. He begins with an exposition of the position and then moves to a Videtur quod section of the argument where he refutes it. Thomas stated his opponents positions so fairly and convincingly that sometimes he seemed to present a better argument than they did. Only after stating the case would he move to the Sed contra (“on the contrary”) section of the argument

This is confusing for the modern reader, particularly those who have been raised on the duotone for and against cable news version of discussion. In fact the essay provoked numerous responses and some were generated from the lack of familiarity with the disputatio format that Fr. Oakes used.

The core of his argument is here:

John Henry Newman, for one, always insisted that original sin is the only way believers can make sense of the world when they contrast that world to their faith in God. So powerful is his description of the meaning of this doctrine (it is probably the most famous passage in his Apologia pro vita sua) that it bears quoting in full:

If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator. . . . [To consider] the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turns out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, “having no hope and without God in the world”—all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence.

This remarkably modern passage does not, admittedly, present a full-throated defense of the doctrine of original sin, for it still allows a choice between atheism or a subscription to a belief in the Fall to account for the presence of evil in the world. But that is how the doctrine of original sin has in fact functioned in the history of the Church’s thought: it is a secondary implication arising from a prior belief in God’s goodness and omnipotence. Thus the waning of belief in God was bound to make the doctrine of original sin seem irrational. But that hardly makes it less indispensable, as Steven Duffy argued in an important 1988 article in Theological Studies:

In the twentieth century, when human beings have already killed well over one hundred million of their kind, disenchantment [with an optimistic view of human nature] has set in. Two world wars, the Gulags, the Holocaust, Korea, Vietnam, the nuclear and ecological threats form a somber litany that makes the optimism of the liberals ring hollow and naïve. Despite technological progress, evil, far from vanishing, has only become more powerful and more fiendish. . . . And artists like Conrad, Camus, Beckett, Golding, and Murdoch contend that because of our hearts of darkness there may be countless nice men and women but few if any genuinely good ones. In all these perspectives evil is held to be inherent, somehow structural, ingrained. And its terrible power defies explanation and solution. Paradoxically, the silver wings of science and technology, on which soared the hopes of the industrialized societies, carry the ultimate menace to the human prospect.

Nor is the doctrine, in its essence, tied to a “literal” interpretation of the narrative of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3, despite what so many people think. In fact, the ubiquitous evil of the world, when honestly considered, is not a reality that an honest person should see first and primarily as an abstract issue of speculative theodicy (“How can there be evil out there when God is good?”); rather it is one that should first arise from within the human heart itself (“Why do I do the evil I abhor?”).

What is more, the consequences of abandoning the doctrine are nothing short of disastrous. Indeed, perhaps the best way of defending the doctrine is to follow the career of modernity and see the consequences of not holding to the doctrine. I am reminded in this context of a shrewd observation by Anatole France to the effect that never have so many been murdered in the name of a doctrine as in the name of the principle that human beings are naturally good. When one glances over the catalogue of evils that have so pockmarked this century, it is extraordinary how many have come from doctrines founded on the notion of the perfectibility of man. As Niebuhr puts it so well:

The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture are really all derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin. This error . . . continually betrays modern men to equate the goodness of men with the virtue of their various schemes for social justice and international peace. When these schemes fail of realization or are realized only after tragic conflicts, modern men either turn from utopianism to disillusionment and despair, or they seek to place the onus of their failure upon some particular social group, . . . [which is why] both modern liberalism and modern Marxism are always facing the alternatives of moral futility or moral fanaticism. Liberalism in its pure form [that is, pacifism] usually succumbs to the peril of futility. It will not act against evil until it is able to find a vantage point of guiltlessness from which to operate. This means that it cannot act at all. Sometimes it imagines that this inaction is the guiltlessness for which it has been seeking. A minority of liberals and most of the Marxists solve the problem by assuming that they have found a position of guiltlessness in action. Thereby they are betrayed into the error of fanaticism.

This too, like Cardinal Newman’s defense of the doctrine, is not a positive “proof” in the technical sense but merely points to the consequences of abandoning the doctrine. But such a modest opening gambit at least blocks the way to an outright denial of the doctrine. For it is, after all, mostly because of Augustine’s own formulations of a perfect Paradise spoiled by a nearly unmotivated sin that make Christians feel stranded in their sense of the doctrine, especially in the light of evolution. On its own terms, the doctrine stands as a cipher pointing to what everyone senses in his or her own heart: that sin after Adam always takes the form of acquiescence and not of origination. We are born, that is, into a world where rebellion against God has already taken place, and the drift of it sweeps us along.

Nor, properly understood, is Augustine’s rosy scenario of Paradise (which John Milton used so effectively in Paradise Lost) all that absurd: the Catechism speaks of the “figurative language” of Genesis 3 (#390), and the same must therefore apply, a fortiori, to Augustine’s portrait of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The reason we are drawn, despite the theory of evolution, to Augustine’s and Milton’s portrait of Paradise before the Fall is the memory of that original justice we once had with God but lost through sin, as Pascal explains so well:

The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is called nature we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature now being like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his. For who is unhappy at not being a king except a deposed king? Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no one ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes; but anyone would be inconsolable at having none.

In other words, when Augustine and Milton paint their version of “paradise lost” with the genius of their theological imagination, they are putting into figurative language this elementary insight of Pascal’s, one that every human being can recognize. The Genesis story of the Fall even retains its validity when we admit into our purview the folkloric motif of the serpent. As Paul Ricoeur notes in his book The Symbolism of Evil, which along with Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man is perhaps the best book on this topic written in the twentieth century, the figure of the serpent symbolizes a seldom-stressed aspect of the doctrine of the Fall: that rebellion against God also pre-existed the human species: “It is noteworthy that the Adamic myth does not succeed,” says Ricoeur, “in concentrating and absorbing the origin of evil in the figure of a primordial man alone; it speaks also of the adversary, the Serpent, later [understood as] the devil.” In a way, the term “original sin,” at least when taken, as it usually is, to refer to what happened to humanity in Adam and Eve, is a misnomer, for it is crucial to the narrative that they were tempted, and indeed by an outside force or reality. Niebuhr also emphasizes this point:

The importance of biblical satanology lies in the two facts that: (1) the devil is not thought of as having been created evil. Rather his evil arises from his effort to transgress the bounds set for his life, an effort which places him in rebellion against God. (2) The devil fell before man fell, which is to say that man’s rebellion against God is not an act of sheer perversity, nor does it follow inevitably from the situation in which he stands.

The term “original” sin still retains its validity, though, even when applied to Adam and Eve, for the narrative definitely holds that, in St. Paul’s terms, sin entered the world through the sin of our first parents and henceforth takes on the specifically human form of “giving in,” of yielding to a force already heavily at work in the world of creation. This is why for the saints an asceticism of agere contra, literally “striving against,” was so crucial. For without a conscious effort to “stem the tide” of sin, acquiescence will sweep us along in its path.

…..

There is no doubt that original sin is a hard doctrine. For if we are infected with an original corruption to the very core of our natures, then there is a great deal of evil that cannot be uprooted—not an easy doctrine to accept in our activist times. Without the aid of God, unearned and unmerited, so this doctrine says, our misery is incurable.

No wonder, too, that Christians are more and more opting for a theology of universal reconciliation, hoping for an empty hell, a theological opinion most vigorously defended recently by the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. And while he is certainly right that there are certain biblical warrants for this hope, I also feel that the attraction that many Christians increasingly feel to that doctrine can be worrisome. In this accommodating climate perhaps the Church would do well to heed the admonition of Kolakowski:

It is hardly surprising that the optimistic philosophy of universal reconciliation should tempt contemporary Christianity so strongly. After the many failures it suffered through its inability to cope with a secular civilization and its mistrust of intellectual and social changes beyond its control, after its spurious success in overcoming the Modernist crisis at the beginning of this century, a Great Fear seems to have pervaded the Christian world—the fear of being trapped in an alien enclave within a basically un-Christian society. This Great Fear of being out-distanced and isolated now impels Christian thinking towards the idea that the most important task of Christianity is not only to be “within the world,” not only to participate in the efforts of secular culture, not only to modify the language of its teachings so that they are intelligible to all men, but to sanctify in advance almost any movement that arises spontaneously from natural human impulses. Universal suspicion seems to have been supplanted by universal approval; the dread of a forced retreat to the Christian culture of the Syllabus of Errors . . . appears to be stronger than that of losing one’s identity.

It is my deep conviction that any mitigation of the doctrine of original sin will prove disastrous for the health of the Church in the future, and for just the reasons that Kolakowski adduces. If the experience of human history from Rousseau to Stalin means anything, it must be that we are stuck, like it or not, with the doctrine—nay, the reality—of original sin. But as St. Paul knew, this need not be a morbid doctrine. For our diagnosis has come with a cure. Even Augustine’s formulation is perfectly understandable to people today, for he, perhaps even more than St. Paul, got to the heart of the issue when he noted that although (by virtue of our nature as human beings) we are free to do what we like, we are not free (by virtue of original sin) to like what we ought to like. And this insight is the beginning of the journey toward that holiness which God has destined for His Church. For as the Rev. N. P. Williams so wonderfully notes, “The ordinary man may feel ashamed of doing wrong: but the saint, endowed with a superior refinement of moral sensibility, and keener powers of introspection, is ashamed of being the kind of man who is liable to do wrong.”

….

My only argument here, against the whole plausible array of arguments against the doctrine, is that, despite its obvious paradoxicality, it proves to be more illuminating of the human condition than its competitors. As Pascal—who can set forth in two lines what it takes other theologians two books to show—says with his usual precision: “Doubtless there is nothing more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those who, being so removed from its source, seem incapable of participating in it. Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves.”

You will find the complete article here.

Posted in Understanding Sin | Tagged Augustine, Fr. Edward T. Oakes, Original Sin | 2 Comments »

Ordering a Life Wisely: A Poem/Prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas

August 6, 2009

Thomas Aquinas

This poem/prayer credited to St. Thomas Aquinas exists in various forms about the internet. I’m not sure where I came by this one but it happened early in my conversion and I have been thankful in so many ways ever since that it did.

The title I found it under was “Ordering a Life Wisely” but it is so much more than that, almost a catalogue of the attributes that go into making a wise and good life. Many of them are human qualities that I could never have cited before having been exposed to the prayer:

O Lord my God, make me
submissive without protest,
poor without discouragement,
chaste without regret,
patient without complaint,
humble without posturing,
cheerful without frivolity,
mature without gloom,
and quick-witted without flippancy

Who would have thought of linking chastity with regret or maturity and gloom and yet, upon even the slightest modicum of consideration, what is more reasonable? It also defined a relationship with the divine that was greatly comforting to me. As someone thrust into conversion with very little understanding of what I was doing, I needed a scorecard and phrases such as

Grant that I may know
what You require me to do.

and

Bestow upon me
the power to accomplish Your will,
as is necessary and fitting
for the salvation of my soul.

gave me a way to be in relation to the divine – what to expect, perhaps, or what to hope for.

I quickly saw the prayer spoke directly to the depressive in me:

Grant to me, O Lord my God,
that I may not falter in times
of prosperity or adversity,
so that I may not be exalted in the former,
nor dejected in the latter.

That is part of the nature of acedia: highs with no reason to be high, lows all out of context with what is reasonable. Did Thomas really recite this every day, as one introduction noted? And look at the list of qualities of the heart he chooses: watchful, noble, resolute, stalwart, temperate – defined both within and without so that there is no misunderstanding how he wants his training in divine obedience to result.

Chesterton once wrote about St.Thomas and St. Francis: “It seems to be strangely forgotten that both these saints were in actual fact imitating a Master, who was not Aristotle let alone Ovid, when they sanctified the senses or the simple things of nature; when St. Francis walked humbly among the beasts or St. Thomas debated courteously among the Gentiles.

Those who miss this, miss the point of the religion, even if it be a superstition; nay, they miss the very point they would call most superstitious. I mean the whole staggering story of the God-Man in the Gospels. A few even miss it touching St. Francis and his unmixed and unlearned appeal to the Gospels. They will talk of the readiness of St. Francis to learn from the flowers or the birds as something that can only point onward to the Pagan Renaissance.

Whereas the fact stares them in the face; first, that it points backwards to the New Testament, and second that it points forward, if it points to anything, to the Aristotelian realism of the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. They vaguely imagine that anybody who is humanizing divinity must be paganizing divinity without seeing that the humanizing of divinity is actually the strongest and starkest and most incredible dogma in the Creed. St. Francis was becoming more like Christ, and not merely more like Buddha, when he considered the lilies of the field or the fowls of the air; and St. Thomas was becoming more of a Christian, and not merely more of an Aristotelian, when he insisted that God and the image of God had come in contact through matter with a material world.

These saints were, in the most exact sense of the term, Humanists; because they were insisting on the immense importance of the human being in the theological scheme of things. But they were not Humanists marching along a path of progress that leads to Modernism and general skepticism; for in their very Humanism they were affirming a dogma now often regarded as the most superstitious Superhumanism. They were strengthening that staggering doctrine of Incarnation, which the skeptics find it hardest to believe. There cannot be a stiffer piece of Christian divinity than the divinity of Christ.”
[St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox]

I hope you will attempt to commit the prayer to memory because the slow process of that exercise is fitting to mastering its content:

Ordering a Life Wisely

O merciful God, grant that I may
desire ardently,
search prudently,
recognize truly,
and bring to perfect completion
whatever is pleasing to You
for the praise and glory of Your name.

Put my life in good order, O my God.

Grant that I may know
what You require me to do.

Bestow upon me
the power to accomplish Your will,
as is necessary and fitting
for the salvation of my soul.

Grant to me, O Lord my God,
that I may not falter in times
of prosperity or adversity,
so that I may not be exalted in the former,
nor dejected in the latter.

May I not rejoice in anything
unless it leads me to You;
may I not be saddened by anything
unless it turns me from You.

May I desire to please no one,
nor fear to displease anyone,
but You.

May all transitory things, O Lord,
be worthless to me
and may all things eternal
be ever cherished by me.

May any joy without You
be burdensome for me
and may I not desire anything else
besides You.

May all work, O Lord,
delight me when done for Your sake
and may all repose not centered in You
be ever wearisome for me.

Grant unto me, my God,
that I may direct my heart to You
and that in my failures
I may ever feel remorse for my sins
and never lose the resolve to change.

O Lord my God, let me
fear You without losing hope,
be truthful without guile,
do good works without presumption,
rebuke my neighbor without haughtiness,
and – without hypocrisy -
strengthen him by word and example.

Give to me, O Lord God,
a watchful heart,
which no capricious thought
can lure away from you.

Give to me
a noble heart
which no unworthy desire can debase.

Give to me
a resolute heart,
which no evil intention can divert.

Give to me
a stalwart heart,
which no tribulation can overcome.

Give to me
a temperate heart,
which no violent passion can enslave.

Give to me, O Lord my God,
understanding of You,
diligence in seeking You,
wisdom in finding You,
discourse ever pleasing to You,
perseverance in waiting for You,
and confidence in finally embracing You.

Grant that with Your hardships
I may be burdened in reparation here,
that Your benefits
I may use in gratitude upon the way,
that in Your joys
I may delight in glorifying You
in the Kingdom of Heaven.

You Who live and reign,
God, world without end.

Amen.

Posted in Poetry | Tagged being in relation to the divine, G. K. Chesterton, humanizing divinity, Ordering a Life Wisely, poem/prayer, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas | 1 Comment »

The Atheist Delusion: An Interview With Prof. John Haught

August 5, 2009

Theologian John Haught explains why science and God are not at odds, why Mike Huckabee worries him, and why Richard Dawkins and other “new atheists” are ignorant about religion. He was interviewed by Steve Paulson

Evolution often seems to be a sticking point between those who debate science and religion. As a Catholic who accepts Darwin and Evolution I could never understand what the conflict was and it wasn’t until I read John Haught’s critique of the new atheists where I found a spirited defense of Catholicism that resonated with my own understanding of my faith and science that acknowledges this truth found in John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio:

“The positive results achieved (by science) must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps toward a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened before that reason rather than voicing the human orientation toward truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.”

Here is Haught bringing the needed balance to the debate: “What response can the theologian make to these attempts to provide a Darwinian debunking of religious faith? I have no doubt that one way of understanding faith is to explore it through the tools of evolutionary science, and I am convinced that theology should encourage science to push evolutionary understanding as far as it can within the limits of scientific method. From a scientific point of view our capacity for religious faith has evolved like all other living phenomena, and biology can lend an interesting new light to religious studies. But, like almost everything else, religious phenomena also admit of a plurality of levels of explanation. The phony rivalry the new atheists posit between science and religion is the result of a myth, a myth that asserts — without any experimental evidence — that only a scientific frame of reference, or only what counts as “evidence” in scientific circles, can lead us reliably to truth.

Theology unlike scientism, wagers that we can contact the deepest truths only by relaxing the will to control and allowing ourselves to be grasped by a deeper dimension of reality than ordinary experience or science can access by itself. The state of allowing ourselves to be grasped and carried away by this dimension of depth is at least part of what theology means by “faith.” In spite of what their formal creed states, even scientific naturalists have had the experience of faith as understood in this fundamental sense.To be more specific, they too have made a worshipful bow toward the unconditional value of truth. I have no doubt that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens feel empowered to issue their bold edicts only because they firmly believe they are serving the noble cause of truth seeking. They probably have not noticed that, in order to serve this cause, they have tacitly allowed themselves to be taken captive, as it were, by their love of truth, an undeniable value that functions for them as a timeless good that will outlast them and their own brief success. Should they express outrage at what I have just said, this passionate reaction likewise could be justified only. by their appealing once again to the value of a deeper truth than they can find in my own reflections.

It is not too hard for any of us to notice that we are always being drawn toward deeper truth, even if we decide to run away from its attractive, but also disturbing, pull. If you find yourself questioning what I have just said, it is because you are allowing yourself to be drawn toward a yet deeper level of truth. So you prove my point. ‘What I mean by faith, therefore, is precisely this dynamic state of allowing yourself to be carried along toward a deeper understanding and truth than you have mastered up to this point. People have faith, therefore, not only because faith is adaptive in an evolutionary sense, not only because faith serves the cause of gene survival, not only because of ultrasensitive predator detection cerebral systems inherited from our remote evolutionary ancestors, not only because they have a need for pattern and meaning, and not only because their parietal lobes are overly active. Without denying that any of these factors may be at work, one may justifiably add that people have faith also because they are being drawn toward a dimension of depth. In theological language they are being addressed by and responding to the infinite mystery of being, meaning, truth, goodness, and beauty that theistic faiths call God. Such a claim is in no way opposed to evolutionary accounts of religion. Contrary to Dawkins, religious faith no more conflicts with science than does his own surrender to the value of truth.” [God And The New Atheism]

This strikes me as a lot better place to be than Stephen Jay Gould’s well known explanation of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria,” having nothing to do with each other. The latter struck me as a little too easy, a politically expedient ploy that almost cheapens the religious position. As a student of Catholicism, I knew the answer was “Both And,” that I should never be forced into a choice but always seek Chesterton’s paradox. Haught is a veteran interpreter of evolutionary theory as well as Christian theology. He is, like Stephen M. Barr whose essays I have also introduced on this site, perfectly situated to moderate this debate for Catholics. Haught has called Darwin “a gift to theology.” by forcing modern theologians to reject arguments about God as an intrusive designer. He does this by reclaiming the theology of his intellectual hero, Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who believed that “we live in a universe evolving toward ever greater complexity and, ultimately, to consciousness.” de Chardin was someone I had read about but was unfamiliar with.

However I was disposed to think favorably of him as Flannery was such a fan.

The interview I’m introducing here is a wide ranging one with Haught on the new atheists, Albert Camus, and how evolutionary biology can be a complement to faith. What makes this a great interview is Steve Paulson who brings a healthy curiosity and knowledge to the questioning on a wide range of issues: why Mike Huckabee worries him (this was done in 2007) and why science is ultimately not equipped to answer questions about love, consciousness and the Resurrection.

Some teasers:

Paulson: But it seems to me that Camus had a different project. He thought there was no God or transcendent reality, and the great existential struggle was for humans to create meaning themselves, without appealing to some higher reality. This wasn’t a cop-out at all. It was a profound struggle for him.

Haught: Yes, it was. But his earlier life was somewhat different from his later writings. In “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus,” he argues that in the absence of God, there’s no hope. And we have to learn to live without hope. His figure of Sisyphus is the image of living without hope. And whatever happiness Camus thought we could attain comes from the sense of strength and courage that we feel in ourselves when we shake our fist at the gods. But none of the atheists — whether the hardcore or the new atheists — really examine where this courage comes from. What is its source? I think a theologian like Paul Tillich, who wrestled with the atheism of Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, put his finger on the real issue. How do we account for the courage to go on living in the absence of hope? As you move to the later writings of Camus and Sartre, those books are saying it’s difficult to live without hope. What I want to show in my own work — as an alternative to the new atheists — is a universe in which hope is possible.

Paulson: But why can’t you have hope if you don’t believe in God?

Haught: You can have hope. But the question is, can you justify the hope? I don’t have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason.”

You see Paulson really holding up his end of the conversation there. And this exchange where he introduces “layered explanations”:

I would think the biggest challenge that evolutionary theory poses to most religions is the sense that there’s no inherent meaning in the world. If you look at the process of natural selection — this apparently random series of genetic mutations — it would seem that there’s no place for ultimate purpose. Human beings may just be an evolutionary accident.

Yes, in the new scientific understanding of the universe, there are no sharp breaks between lifeless matter and life, between life and mind. It seems to many people that the new evolutionary picture places everything in the context of a meaningless smudge of stuff, of atoms reshuffling themselves over the course of time. The traditional view was that nature emanates from on high, so that when you get down to matter, you have the least important level. Above that there’s life and mind and God. But in the new cosmography, it seems that mindless matter dominates the whole picture. And many scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, have said evolution has destroyed the notion of purpose. So one thing I do in my theology is to say that’s not necessarily true.

Isn’t there a simple response to the materialist argument? You can say “purpose” is simply not a scientific idea. Instead, it’s an idea for theologians and philosophers to debate. Do you accept that distinction?

I sure do. But that distinction is usually violated in scientific literature and in much discussion of evolution. From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn’t going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things. And science has every right to be that way. But that principle of scientific Puritanism is often violated by scientists who think that by dint of their scientific expertise, they are able to comment on such things as purpose. I consider that to be a great violation.

Who are these scientists who extrapolate about purpose from science?

A good example is the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. In his book “Dreams of a Final Theory,” he asks, will we find God once science gets down to what he calls the fundamental levels of reality? It’s almost as if he assumes that science itself has the capacity and the power to comment on things like that. Similarly, Dawkins, in “The God Delusion,” has stated that science has the right to deal with the question of God and other religious issues, and everything has to be settled according to the canons of the scientific method.

But Dawkins argues that a lot of claims made on behalf of God — about how God created the world and interacts with people — are ultimately questions about nature. Unless you say God has nothing to do with nature, those become scientific questions.

Well, I approach these issues by making a case for what I call “layered explanation.” For example, if a pot of tea is boiling on the stove, and someone asks you why it’s boiling, one answer is to say it’s boiling because H2O molecules are moving around excitedly, making a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. And that’s a very good answer. But you could also say it’s boiling because my wife turned the gas on. Or you could say it’s boiling because I want tea. Here you have three levels of explanation which are approaching phenomena from different points of view. This is how I see the relationship of theology to science. Of course I think theology is relevant to discussing the question, what is nature? What is the world? It would talk about it in terms of being a gift from the Creator, and having a promise built into it for the future. Science should not touch upon that level of understanding. But it doesn’t contradict what evolutionary biology and the other sciences are telling us about nature. They’re just different levels of understanding.

And a great exchange on transcendence, which I’ve been batting about recently with some very bright folks:

What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?

The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there’s no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself — that evidence is necessary — holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there’s the deeper worldview — it’s a kind of dogma — that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It’s a deep faith commitment because there’s no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It’s a creed.

Are you’re saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?

The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. They have a belief, which I call “scientific naturalism,” that there’s nothing beyond nature — no transcendent dimension — that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there’s no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There’s no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don’t want to go that far. So there’s a self-contradiction there.

Do you accept Gould’s idea of “non-overlapping magisteria” — that science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the universe, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value?

I think he’s too simplistic. I don’t think we want to remain stuck in this standoff position. First of all, Gould defines religion as simply concern about values and meanings. He implicitly denies that religion can put us in touch with truth.

By truth, are you talking about reality?

Yes, I’m talking about what is real, or what has being. The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There’s going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language — in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.

We can’t get our minds around this transcendent reality because we’re limited by our language and our brains?

We have to refer to it in the oblique and fuzzy but also the luxuriant and rich language of symbol and metaphor. But I still think we have the obligation today of asking how our new scientific understanding of the world fits into that religious discourse. I don’t accept Gould’s complete separation of science and faith. Theology is faith seeking understanding. We have every right to ask what God is doing by making this universe in such a slow way, by allowing life to come about in the evolutionary manner in which Darwinian biology has very richly set forth. So science cannot be divorced from faith. However, I think most people do resort to this non-overlapping magisteria as the default position. It’s an easy approach. It allows you to put all your ducks in a row. But it avoids the really interesting and perhaps dangerous issue of how to think about God after Darwin. In my view, after Darwin, after Einstein — just as after Galileo and Copernicus — we can’t have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.

Anyways, hope I’ve tempted you enough to follow the complete interview here.

Kudos to Salon for supporting Steve Paulson’s work.

Posted in Discussions, John F. Haught | Tagged Camus, Daniel Dennett, Darwin, evolutionary theory, God After Darwin, God and the New Atheism, God of the Gaps, John Haught, layered explanation, Mike Huckabee, Nietzsche, non-overlapping magisteria, Paul Tillich, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Richard Dawkins, Sartre, scientific naturalism, Steven Weinberg, transcendence | 6 Comments »

Learning from Sartre

August 4, 2009

Jean Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre is not, to put it mildly, very high on the reading list of those seeking to grow in Christian piety. Indeed, most would express mild shock at the suggestion that his writings could ever make such a list. His atheism would unsettle the tremulous soul, his contradictions would both confuse and infuriate the logical, and his unrestrained verbosity would bore everybody. Yet, while it is true that the greater part of his work is a terrible wasteland, curiously enough, there is a particular element in his thought that is valuable to believers-and in an area where help is greatly needed. This need is one that often goes unperceived by Christian writers, who, ironically, have let it fall to an unwitting atheist to address in depth. Allow me to explain.

Anyone who has ever seriously committed himself to following Christ and conforming to His character quickly discovers how difficult it is to do. There are hindrances everywhere, but the greatest of these is the sin within the disciple himself. Indeed, the motivation for following Christ in the first place is to be rid, eventually, of the sin that destroys life and offends God. Hence we are exhorted to turn from our sin, which we do by ceasing from various activities that we know to be sinful and by undertaking others that we know to be good. So far so good, but there remains a nagging uneasiness. Our behavior may be better, but how much real growth in holiness has taken place? The feeling that we have only scratched the surface of this problem creates a deep desire to get to the bottom of our sin, to start attacking it at its very core. But how? What exactly is the very core of sin? If we knew this, we would certainly be better equipped for the attack.

Christian theologians have often addressed this question. The most notable example is Augustine’s description of his stealing pears in his youth, a passage that has long been widely read in the Western world. Augustine was struck that it was the very forbiddenness of the act that caused him to take such delight in it; the pears themselves were no attraction at all. His analysis is a chilling anticipation of Sartre:

So all men who put themselves far from [God] and set themselves up against [Him], are in fact attempting awkwardly to be like [Him]. And even in this imitating of [Him] they declare [Him] to be the creator of everything in existence and that consequently there can be no place in which one can in any way withdraw oneself from [Him]. . . . And was I thus, though a prisoner, making a show of a kind of truncated liberty, doing unpunished what I was not allowed to do and so producing a darkened image of omnipotence?

Augustine realized that the essence of sin is to place oneself in God’s rightful place, to attempt to be like Him in ways impossible for one of His creatures. Usually, such attempts involve a denial of God’s authority to command His creatures and to set limits on their behavior. Sometimes, all creaturely limitations are thrown off. Sartre, as we shall see, took the latter approach.

If the true nature of sin has been identified for so long, it might be asked, what can an atheist like Sartre possibly contribute to our understanding of it? His “contribution” consists in turning the very essence of sin into the foundation of a philosophical system. He concedes as much when he tells us that “Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position.” Or again, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.” As he develops his thought, we begin to see how sin has infected us in ways we are not even conscious of. This is handy information for anyone whose highest desire is to turn away from sin, and it keeps one focused on what sin really is. Sartre is, of course, perfectly oblivious to this assistance he is providing for the Christian church.

The cornerstone of his philosophy is the sovereignty of human freedom. He is quite frank about what he means by freedom. For Sartre, freedom is nothing less than the power to define one’s own being, to determine what one is. Anything outside oneself that exerts any influence over one’s being is by definition an obstacle to freedom. He explains: “It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are. Furthermore this absolute responsibility is not resignation: it is simply the logical requirement of the consequences of our freedom.”

This leads Sartre to distinguish between being-in-itself, which lacks freedom and cannot choose what it will be, and being-for-itself, which is continuously determining itself and hence has no fixed essence of its own. Man, says Sartre, is the latter: “There is no human nature, since there is no God to have a conception of it.” This means that Man is in a constant process of becoming what he now is not. Since Sartre cannot say that Man ever is anything at any particular time, he equates Man’s being-for-itself with nothingness. It is amusing to note that those who begin by assuming the sovereignty of human freedom must go on to conclude that they are as nothing. But it is more important to note that Sartre’s assumption is arbitrary. It is the starting point for his speculations, for which no defense is ever given.

The obvious objection at this point is that if Man always possesses such absolute existential freedom there should be no need to speak of obstacles to freedom. For, on the one hand, Sartre tells us “Man is condemned to be free,” which implies that it is not possible to lose our freedom. Yet on the other hand he is forever lamenting Man’s inability to overcome the things that deny him his freedom, such as his past, his surroundings, other people (more on this later), and especially death. This is precisely why Sartre uses the word “condemned.” He is really saying that we must forever struggle to retain a freedom that we can never lose.

But no one should expect consistency to arise from atheism. What is remarkable is the unrestrained usurpation of divine attributes that constitutes Sartre’s view of human freedom. S. U. Zuidema summarizes Sartre’s position:

In fact this amounts to the self’s “dis- realization” of its own contingency, and the incorporation of “reality” into the realm of the sovereign self; . . . to the actualization and realization of man’s lordship and form-creating power over reality; to the cultural duty of man, in which he puts reality at his own service, takes possession of reality, incorporates it, governs it, rules it, makes himself its undisputed master.

This is pure sin, if these two words may be put together without contradiction or blasphemy. Most people who hold a similar position look for a way to talk around it to make it appear less rebellious. But Sartre doesn’t mind coming right out and telling us that he wants to rule the world: “The best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God. . . . [M]an fundamentally is the desire to be God.” This is rather refreshing, in a convoluted way. It is a perfect articulation of Augustine’s “darkened image of omnipotence.” We don’t have to guess what he’s up to. But why, one might ask, shouldn’t we at this point just lay Sartre aside and pick up the Sunday comics? The answer is, because he goes on to analyze how the desire for omnipotence is manifested in life, and his analysis is important for anyone willing to acknowledge that this desire to be God still dwells within. It serves as a catalog of the symptoms one may expect to find whenever this disease breaks out.

Sartre also wrote of a third category of being, the being-for-other. This may seem at first glance to be an improvement over the other two, since it seems to say that Man has some purpose outside himself. But in Sartre’s world, being-for-other is a catastrophe. Sartre, remember, thinks he is omnipotent. The last thing such a person wants to be confronted with is something he has no control over, i.e., incontrovertible evidence of his own non-omnipotence.

Sartre is never directly confronted with God, so he gets away with denying Him (for a while), but other people are all around him, and each one possesses his or her own sovereign freedom in competition with Sartre’s. Intolerable! He becomes aware of other people when they look at him (though it is difficult to believe he is unaware of them otherwise). In any case, it is the glance of the other that so disturbs the delusion of omnipotence. Sartre is for himself pure subject; but the glance turns him into the object of another’s subjectivity, and so robs him of his delusion. He now exists for another, and sovereignly free beings just cannot live this way. Sartre cries out in his distress:

With the Other’s look the “situation” escapes me. To use an everyday expression which better expresses our thought, I am no longer master of my situation. . . . The appearance of the Other, on the contrary, causes the appearance in the situation of an aspect which I did not wish, of which I am not master, and which on principle escapes me since it is for the other.

What can be done about this? Stare back, of course, until one party wins the battle and becomes pure subject, while the loser becomes pure object. In Sartre’s own words, “the objectivation of the Other . . . is a defense on the part of my being which, precisely by conferring on the other a being for-me, frees me from my being-for the Other.” Though Sartre describes this action as a defense, it is really more of a counteroffensive. Zuidema gives another astute summary:

This all means, then, that the “world,” including the world within myself, is a battlefield, on which the continual struggle between myself and everyone else is fought out. It is a struggle for unending mastery over this world.

This is the sort of thinking that prompted Sartre’s famous quip, in his play No Exit, that “hell is other people.”

The silliness of this analysis is easy to expose and ridicule, but it must be remembered that this constant struggle actually goes on, all over the world, all the time (not in the form of a staring game, of course, but as the clash of conflicting desires). It is the inevitable result of sin, and sin is everywhere. It even serves as its own provisional judgment, alerting us all to the folly of our desire for control. Sartre was saying more than he knew when he said we are condemned to freedom. If we rightly recognize how silly Sartre’s analysis is, we also ought to recognize how accurately it identifies the root of all our own foolish and destructive behavior.

Sartre is also vaguely aware of the connection his philosophy has with sin, though his atheism precludes his holding any real concept of sin. He speaks of the feeling of shame as the immediate consequence of the other’s glance. He writes, “Shame . . . is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object.” Now shame figures prominently in Scripture as the immediate consequence of sin (Genesis 2:25, 3:7). The two are indeed connected, but Sartre cannot make the connection between his own view of others and sin. Marjorie Grene explains his view:

It is the transformation of myself from free agent shaping my own world to body seen by another that is the source of shame. Hence Sartre’s explanation . . . of original sin: it is the revelation of my body as a mere body that makes me ashamed; and that shame is at the root of the sense of sin.

Indeed, the revelation of the body is nakedness, and Scripture agrees that consciousness of nakedness was the original source of shame. If we didn’t know better, we might say Sartre is trying to point us to the Bible, and he is not unaware of this odd agreement himself, for he writes:

Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in a state of nakedness are only a symbolic specification of original shame; the body symbolizes here our defenseless state as objects. To put on clothes is to hide one’s object-state; it is to claim the right of seeing without being seen; that is, to be pure subject. This is why the biblical symbol of the fall after the original sin is the fact that Adam and Eve “know that they are naked.” The reaction to shame will consist exactly in apprehending as an object the one who apprehended my own object state.

But Sartre is merely trying to account for the feeling of shame after having assumed that there is no real sin on which it might have been based. This is why he speaks only of a “sense” of sin. He seeks a cause elsewhere, and he thinks he has found it in the assault on his freedom. As Grene explains, “the existence of an onlooker implies shame. Fear and shame are, for [Sartre], the two proper and immediate reactions to the intrusion of another person into my world.”

But rather than explaining shame, Sartre has explained it away. What is lacking in his argument is an adequate accounting for the sense of culpability that is essential to shame. A mere intrusion would only produce annoyance and a sense of mission: we must eliminate the intruder. When we are intruded upon, we do not feel ourselves to be culpable. But shame is not shame without just such a sense of culpability.

Sartre tries to deflect this objection by assuming that we do not feel shame until we are observed. He accepts it as a universal that “anyone may recognize . . . that immediate and burning presence of the Other’s look which has so often filled him with shame.” The implication is that solitary people know no shame. Wilfrid Desan explains: “The meaning of culpability arises through the Other: would culpability ever make sense without the existence of the Other? Is it not before the Other that I feel my abjectness, my nakedness?” The idea of culpability presupposes the existence of an “other” (i.e., a watcher), hence the “other,” according to Sartre, must be the cause of the shame. Now, it may be conceded that an absolutely solitary person cannot know shame. If I were the only person in the entire universe (as Sartre would like to be), it would be impossible for shame ever to arise in me. This proves that an observer is necessary for shame. But not that an observer is sufficient for shame. It is possible to be observed shamelessly. The glance of the Other will not generate shame unless it falls upon some sin that exists objectively within the shamed one. This is a perfect example of the false cause fallacy.

Furthermore, Sartre’s “observation” that shame implies an observer may be used against him. The only thing we must assume is that human beings can feel shame even when alone. Most people have had this experience, and would therefore not hesitate to grant our assumption. But who is the observer in such cases? He can only be the God Sartre denies. Yet his denial is also a concession: “God,” he says, “is only the concept of the Other pushed to the limit.” If Sartre were to admit that he even once experienced solitary shame, then his own philosophy would require him to become a theist. This might even constitute a new “proof” for the existence of God: the “proof from solitary shame,” perhaps? And we would owe it all to Jean-Paul Sartre.

Mostly, however, we owe Sartre for exposing the dreadfully absurd consequences of denying God by setting ourselves in His place. Sartre ends with an echo of the life lived apart from God as described in the book of Ecclesiastes. Desan summarizes:

The For-itself is a failure in its conquest of the world: it will never be what it wants to be, the For- itself-in-itself: i.e., God. “Human being is useless passion . . . and to intoxicate yourself alone in a bar or to conduct the nations is equally vain.”

The latter paraphrase is Sartre’s own conclusion to his Being and Nothingness, where most of the foregoing rebellion is laid out. This world of vanity and endless conflict that results from Sartre’s failed quest for sovereign freedom, however, is necessary only for those who insist upon embarking on it. Sad to say, this includes all of us. We can see reflections of Sartre’s quest in our own conflicts. They are all due to our own, or someone else’s, desire to rule the world.

Yet understanding this gets us below the surface of our sinful behavior to that sinful core which so often haunts and disturbs us. The deepest repentance must include the acknowledgment of creaturely limitations and the acceptance of divinely appointed limits. Sartre has done us the favor of showing us how our refusal to accept our limits is the root of our tendency to treat others as objects and to hate others for the ways in which they limit us.

In our relations with others, a simple acknowledgment that the “other” has been created as a subject along with us will prevent us from seeking to squash his subjectivity beneath our own. And neither should the thought of being an object cause such distress. It simply goes along with creatureliness. Others will necessarily incorporate us into their view of the world, but it is understood that, as creatures themselves, their view will be incomplete. It is only God’s view that need concern us, and for those who know that His glance comes with forgiveness and healing, all of Sartre’s terrors are reduced to nonsense.

Augustine concluded his analysis of his own depravity with the following expression of revulsion. It should be read with Sartre’s futile quest in mind:

Who can disentangle this most twisted and most inextricable knottiness? It is revolting: I hate to think of it; I hate to look at it. . . . I slipped from you and went astray, my God, in my youth, wandering too far from my upholder and my stay, and I became to myself a wasteland.

Ironically, those who, unlike Sartre, share Augustine’s revulsion, may look to Sartre for unwitting help in untying the knot.

John Mullen, the author, is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida.

Posted in Understanding Sin | Tagged Existentialism, human freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, S. U. Zuidema, St. Augustine, the essence of sin | 1 Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for August, 2009

Forgiveness

The Majesty of St. Augustine

A Short Biography of Saint Augustine

Peter Brown’s “Augustine of Hippo”

Two Reflections on Sin

An Unmasking Of Human Nature

Original Sin: A Disputation – by Fr. Edward T. Oakes

Ordering a Life Wisely: A Poem/Prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas

The Atheist Delusion: An Interview With Prof. John Haught

Learning from Sartre

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