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The Diabolists Among Us

September 15, 2009

caricaturegkc1

G. K. Chesterton
When Plain Folk, such as you or I,
See the Sun sinking in the sky,
We think it is the Setting Sun,
But Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
Is not so easily misled.
He calmly stands upon his head,
And upside down obtains a new
And Chestertonian point of view,
Observing thus, how from his toes
The sun creeps nearer to his nose,
He cries with wonder and delight,
“How Grand the sunrise is to-night!”
by Oliver Herford
from Confessions of a Caricaturist

“What I have now to relate really happened; yet there was no element in it of practical politics or of personal danger. It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with another man. But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life….

The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school. An art school is different from almost all other schools or colleges in this respect: that, being of new and crude creation and of lax discipline, it presents a specially strong contrast between the industrious and the idle. People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work or do no work at all. I belonged, along with other charming people, to the latter class; and this threw me often into the society of men who were very different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different from mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied; I was engaged about that time in discovering, to my own extreme and lasting astonishment, that I was not an atheist. But there were others also at loose ends who were engaged in discovering what Carlyle called (I think with needless delicacy) the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth….

Along the front of the big building of which our school was a part ran a huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think, than those that lead up to St. Paul’s Cathedral. On a black wintry evening he and I were wandering on these cold heights, which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under the stars. The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning and blowing fire; for some gardener (I suppose) was burning something in the grounds, and from time to time the red sparks went whirling past us like a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark. Above us also it was gloom; but if one stared long enough at that upper darkness, one saw vertical stripes of grey in the black and then became conscious of the colossal facade of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as if Heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism.

The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said it, I really had not known that I was; but the moment he had said it I knew it to be literally true. And the process had been so long and full that I answered him at once out of existing stores of explanation.

“I am becoming orthodox,” I said, “because I have come, rightly or wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes. An Imperialist is worse than a pirate. For an Imperialist keeps a school for pirates; he teaches piracy disinterestedly and without an adequate salary. A Free Lover is worse than a profligate. For a profligate is serious and reckless even in his shortest love; while a Free Lover is cautious and irresponsible even in his longest devotion. I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous.”

“You mean dangerous to morality,” he said in a voice of wonderful gentleness. “I expect you are right. But why do you care about morality?”

I glanced at his face quickly. He had thrust out his neck as he had a trick of doing; and so brought his face abruptly into the light of the bonfire from below, like a face in the footlights. His long chin and high cheek-bones were lit up infernally from underneath; so that he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit. I had an unmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness; and even as I paused a burst of red sparks broke past.

“Aren’t those sparks splendid?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“That is all that I ask you to admit,” said I. “Give me those few red specks and I will deduce Christian morality. Once I thought like you, that one’s pleasure in a flying spark was a thing that could come and go with that spark. Once I thought that the delight was as free as the fire. Once I thought that red star we see was alone in space. But now I know that the red star is only on the apex of an invisible pyramid of virtues. That red fire is only the flower on a stalk of living habits, which you cannot see. Only because your mother made you say ‘Thank you’ for a bun are you now able to thank Nature or chaos for those red stars of an instant or for the white stars of all time. Only because you were humble before fireworks on the fifth of November do you now enjoy any fireworks that you chance to see. You only like them being red because you were told about the blood of the martyrs; you only like them being bright because brightness is a glory. That flame flowered out of virtues, and it will fade with virtues. Seduce a woman, and that spark will be less bright. Shed blood, and that spark will be less red. Be really bad, and they will be to you like the spots on a wall-paper.”

He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy: but he admitted both. He only said, “But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out: will not the expanding pleasure of ruin …”

“Do you see that fire ?” I asked. “If we had a real fighting democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are.”

“Perhaps,” he said, in his tired, fair way. “Only what you call evil I call good.”

He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the steps swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, but the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled: then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying, “Nobody can possibly know.” And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diabolist say, “I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan’t know the difference between right and wrong.” I rushed out without daring to pause; and as I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.”
Reading Selection The Diabolist by G.K. Chesterton

A Commentary by Garry Wills:
“The line of argument shows what straits Chesterton was in. He had come to the shocking awareness of evil, and this had pushed his solipsism to its most terrible state. If the world was his own illusion, all evil had its source in him, along with all “reality.” That is why he identifies moral restrictions and the intellectual bounds of reality –virgins seduced and stars dissolve, The “pyramid” is really a swaying tower for him, and the slightest relaxation or “relativism” will topple it. Chesterton was creating “the star” with his arguments; the spark’s foundation is a huge pyramid of symbolism hung in empty air.

The art student shattered the entire fabric of Chesterton’s argument by admitting the indictment: he wanted to quench stars. Here was a desire not touched by the “justifying” arguments, the mutually supporting but mutually enclosed ideas of Chesterton’s discourse. It entered the scheme of things like a destructive blast from another world. “What you call evil, I call good.” The Diabolist said, inverting the entire cosmos in Chesterton’s mind. As the student went down the stairs to meet his friends, he left a stunned and defeated enemy behind him. But as Chesterton followed him down the stairs, he half heard whispered plans of some proposed innovation in evil, to which the Diabolist replied, in the words which Chesterton remembers with a compelled accuracy, “If I do that, I shan’t know the difference between right and wrong.”

I rushed out without daring to pause, and as I passed fire I didn’t know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.”

This is what happens when you enter into modern internet forums and choose to debate abortion, homosexuality (gay marriage) or atheism. You meet those who literally can’t tell the difference between right and wrong, the descendants of GKC’s diabolist. Historically their arguments were also encountered and rejected during the great nineteenth century debate over slavery in Lincoln/Douglas. Then as now the arguments are the same, rooted in a moral relativism. “I wouldn’t choose to have a (slave/abortion) but I wouldn’t want to restrict you’re right to choose.”

Recently I have been debating abortion with the usual suspects on an internet forum. After some jousting over who abortion really benefits (that it fundamentally is a sexist injustice against women and children), I followed up with a jibe against President Obama and his pro-abortion policies. “Pro-abortion” gets the juices running for it flies in the face of the greatest conceit of “pro-choice” advocates: that somehow they are advocating for some kind of freedom or expansion of a benefit. Read this rant and file under “Lies The Liberal Media Spreads: Nobody is Pro-abortion.” What leaps off the page is that the argument is advanced by Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion – there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember – abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

I want to thank all of you who protect this blessing – who do this work every day: the health care providers, doctors, nurses, technicians, receptionists, who put your lives on the line to care for others (you are heroes — in my eyes, you are saints); the escorts and the activists; the lobbyists and the clinic defenders; all of you. You’re engaged in holy work.

This is an argument rooted in moral relativism and that uses religiously charged terms (“holy,” “blessing,” “Saints,” “God’s gift”) in a blasphemous disregard for the religious and their beliefs. That it comes from someone who is the Dean of a Divinity School simply illustrates further the sad decline of the Episcopal Church in America. I would offer that the baiting going on in that quote is directed toward Fundamentalists but serves to insult all religious. I don’t get the point of any of it, except for its self promotion. Want a pro-choice religious speaker at your next abortion clinic promotion? Contact Reverend Kathy at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. Specially discounted summer rates now available.

Now many if not most pro-life advocates are traditional religious believers and see the gravely unjust or immoral acts of abortion to be sins. They understand sins precisely as offenses against God. That is their reason for opposing abortion; and thus it is God’s reason in their view, the unjust taking of innocent human life, which motivates them to oppose abortion and requires that human communities protect their unborn members against it. But there is a difference between Fundamentalists who might cite scripture (“in thy mother’s womb I formed thee” Jeremiah 1:5) as their chief or even sole reason to oppose abortion, and other pro-life advocates (my hero, Robert P. George, for example). The latter are unwilling to cede the scientific or philosophical to the pseudo intellectual sophists who populate the left, and apply human intelligence to the question. 

Before we assign a value to the sanctity or value of human life, we need to understand it, they say. When does human life begin, at birth, at the fetal stage, at some “ensoulment” of the human – perhaps a certain kind of brain wave that might indicate a unique type of human intelligence? Roll those PBS science tapes, Jerome.

Robert George explains the science behind his position on abortion: “A human being is conceived when a human sperm containing twenty-three chromosomes fuses with a human egg also containing twenty-three chromosomes (albeit of a different kind) producing a a single-cell human zygote containing , in the normal case, forty-six chromosomes that are massed differently from the forty-six chromosomes as found in the mother or father. Unlike the gametes (that is, the sperm and the egg), the zygote is genetically unique and distinct from its parents. Biologically, it is a separate organism. It produces, as the gametes do not, specifically human enzymes and proteins. It possesses, as they do not, the active capacity or potency to develop itself into a human embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult.

Assuming that it is not conceived in vitro, the zygote is, of course, in a state of dependence on its mother. But independence should not be confused with distinctness. From the beginning, the newly conceived human being, not its mother, directs its integral organic functioning. It takes in its nourishment and converts it to energy. Given a hospitable environment, it will, as Dianne Nutwell Irving says, “develop continuously without any biological interruptions, or gaps, throughout the embryonic, fetal, neo-natal, childhood and adulthood stages – until the death of the organism…

The significance of genetic completeness for the status of newly conceived human beings is that no outside genetic material is required to enable the zygote to mature into an embryo, the embryo into a fetus, the fetus into an infant, the infant into a child, the child into an adolescent, the adolescent into an adult. What the zygote needs to function as a distinct self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses.”

Some have attacked this argument as the “gradualness of gestation,” but it is not the “gradualness” but the “continuous,” that is, the continuous development of a single lasting (fully human) being…. As the human zygote matures, in utero and ex utero, it does not “become” a human being, for it is a human being already, albeit an immature human being, just as a newborn infant is an immature human being who will undergo quite dramatic growth and development over time.” If no arbitrary line separates the hues of green and red, shall we conclude that green is red? This is what the left calls for that science simply refutes by the very nature of the human being.

The sophists of the left love to divert the argument into stages of human development or personhood or to get the Fundamentalists lost in debating when “ensoulment” occurs. The bald fact of the matter is that they do not believe that all human beings are persons, or have fundamental rights. They are not scandalized by the concept of a “human non-person” and “post-personal” human beings (as well as severely retarded human beings who never were and never will be “persons,” as they are pleased to define the term) to whom the promises of basic rights and equality under the law do not apply. The same arguments were applied to blacks under slavery. Recall that it was Lincoln who cut through the moral relativism of the slave owning class to mark the high ground in the argument. Slavery was simply wrong he argued, the way that abortion is wrong today.

How strange that the man who upheld his intrinsic worth, who fought for his right to be free returns the favor by co-opting his benefactor’s Family Bible during his Presidential inauguration, turning his back on his hero and fighting for the confederacy in the abortion wars. We live in interesting times. Obama is the Anti-Lincoln.

These are the same folks who wish to establish the grim doctrine that homosexuality is simply a matter of fate, and the dehumanizing idea that one’s core identity is determined by one’s sexual desires. We are more, immeasurably more, than our sexual desires. And morally disordered desires are hardly limited to homosexuality or to sexual desires of any kind. Those who succumb to homosexual desires are, like all sinners, to be loved and assured of the transforming power of God’s forgiveness. In law and social practice, they should not be subjected to unjust discrimination, but neither should the practices that define “the gay community” be put on a social or moral par with the union of man and woman in marriage. Yet speak to these truths on an online forum and you will be castigated as “homophobic.”

Peter Kreeft writes: “Beneath a moral difference you always find some moral argument. Otherwise it’s not a moral argument. Because all argument needs a common premise. You can’t even imagine a totally new morality any more than you can imagine a totally new universe, or set of numbers or colors….Try to imagine a society where honesty and justice and courage and self-control and faith and hope and charity are evil, and lying and cheating and stealing and cowardice and betrayal and addiction and despair and hate are all good.  You just can’t do it….You can create different acceptable rules for driving and speech and clothing and eating drinking…but we are not free to make murder or rape or slavery or treason right, or charity and justice wrong. We can create different mores but not different morals….We know from experience that we’re free to choose to hate, but we’re not free to experience a moral obligation to hate, only to love.”

Affirm the Gay conceit that homosexuality defines your humanity? Condemn the queer to living a life out of congruence with his faith? Turn your back on mothers and children who need something other than the violence of an abortion? Give a war induced quadriplegic a pamphlet with a contact for the hemlock society? Those who support such aberrations begin with common logic: So we can agree that there are relative scales of value, and that the value of a life can be understood as varying based on context, and can be compared to the values of other things. The difference between someone who is “anti-life” and someone who is “anti-choice”, then, isn’t in their belief in value — it’s in the way they measure and evaluate it, and the way they adjudicate the value of a life in a given context with the value of other things…

And the answer is No. No, we can’t agree. To the young, the early dead and their survivors, the baffled, the defeated, I don’t think we can be tender enough. These are the ones the left ideologues prey upon with their glib moral relativism. Only the Church defends against them.

Posted in Commentary, G. K. Chesterton, Jousting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

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Theodicy and the Idea of Salvation

September 11, 2009

salvationAt the end of my approaches to God post the other day, I threw in my personal approach to God, the notion that a conclusive argument for theodicy makes it hard to find room for the idea of redemption and obviates the need for Jesus’ ministry. I found that idea in Fr. Aidan Nichols’ marvelous book, The Shape of Catholic Theology, a text that most of my fellow students disliked – thereby creating an almost automatic condition under which I would grow to love it.

As a Yokohama Taiyo Whales fan in Tokyo, I seem to have an almost innate sense of aman’ jaku, as one of my Japanese students thoughtfully ascribed to me. I had to go to the dictionary for that one and came up with the English equivalent, perverse. Having grown up a Yankee’s fan in Boston, I had thought I was just normal. Didn’t everyone loathe the home team?

I wish I could say I had come up with linking theodicy and salvation on my own but I’m not that bright, only smart enough to recognize a good idea when I read it. Elsewhere on this blog you will see the readings I have collected on the nature of evil: Evil and Joy   or  Do Not Go Near These Wounds  to mention the two main ones. There is a lesser body of reflections on sin which embodies more than evil, a participation in it, and those are all maintained in a category on payingattentiontothesky.

Rather than just leaving the statement on theodicy and salvation out there, I thought I would give you the historical churning that accompanied those far smarter than I arriving at this conclusion. One thing I love about my Catholic faith is how it opposes the notion of sola scriptura, the Protestant doctrine that the Bible is the only infallible or inerrant authority for Christian faith, and that it contains all knowledge necessary for salvation and holiness.

It is worth repeating here that the biblical materials for a concept of God do not organize themselves. They do not automatically arrange themselves into a satisfactory form. They achieve that form only when the human mind, seeking to understand its own faith, begins to work on them and to set them out in more intelligible ways. To organize the biblical materials, we soon find that we need to draw on such philosophical categories as good and evil, freedom and necessity, person and nature, mind and will, essence and existence, being and knowing. Of course, the application of these notions to God is an attempt to speak of what lies beyond the world within terms drawn from this world, and so is only justified if we always add a postscript to that effect. Warning: This Paper Contains Metaphysical Arguments or something like that so that our atheist friends can keep their superior scientific minds free from contamination.

So the Catholic Church has over the years struggled with heresies and Scripture, relying on sacred Tradition and the Magisterium to guide us through the rough spots. Infallible is a version of perfect and rarely pressed into use, when the Church needs to fly on automatic pilot as it were. So here are the notes from the chapter on Theodicy and Salvation, a walk through the park of Evil, God’s Justice, Redemption And Salvation.

Preambles of Faith
We have encountered philosophy in the process of aiding and abetting fundamental theology by its contribution to the preamble of faith on the topic of God’s existence. At the same time, we predicted that philosophy would also assist systematic theology by making a contribution to the concept of God — giving us a valuable pre-understanding of what God is like, an inkling which can throw light on what we find in the sources of revelation. Naturally, most of us come to all this the other way round: we get to know the revealed God through Christ’s Church, and only then do we enquire into the philosophical basis of the concept of God. But this only tells us something that is true about our autobiographies, not something true about the structure of the concept of God in itself.

A Second Preamble Of Faith – Theodicy
Another area of the preamble of faith closely connected with a discussion of the existence and concept of God, and this is theodicy — or what is often referred to as the “problem of evil.” As we shall see, theodicy (from theos and dike, “justice,” hence “enquiry into the divine justice”) is also doubly relevant, in theology, to fundamentals and to systematics. In fundamental theology, theodicy is important because we need to show that the existence of God is compatible with the existence of evil, of what we can call the “major defects” of the world. In systematic theology, theodicy is important because our grasp of what could (logically) be remedied among these major defects will give us a pre-understanding of the idea of salvation; and the theme of salvation is well-nigh the central motif of revelation’s sources, Scripture and Tradition.

Our Pre-Understanding Of Soteriology
To exemplify the point, we might wish to argue that adolescence, though often painful, is built into the very idea of humanity. We could not conceive of adult persons who were fully human but never had to go through the process of becoming an independent self, a process we call growing up. If this is so, then we cannot use the tribulations of adolescence, real as these are, to cast doubt on the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God — always assuming that we regard the creation of Homo sapiens as a boon to the cosmos. On the other hand, we might well regard the destruction of the innocent (say, of babies by leukemia) as evidence against the postulate of God. Thus, if we decide that despite such counter-indications we can accept, as theodicists, the reality of God, these counter-indications will pass over into another category, namely, our pre-understanding of soteriology, the idea of salvation. Putting a stop to the suffering of the innocent is the kind of thing we would expect the Creator to do if ever he began to relate to the world in a new way — not as Creator but as Redeemer. Here I am anticipating my argument, but so as to give the reader a glimpse of the importance of this area.

The Chief Intellectual Obstacle To Christian Theism
Theodicy is a problem which has exercised Christian minds through the ages when wrestling with the issue of the existence of God. St. Thomas, for instance, gives it as the chief intellectual obstacle to Christian theism. He formulates the objection in his customary sharp way:

“It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the name ‘God’ means that he is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.”[Thomas Aquinas, Summit theologiae Ta, q. 2, a. 3] To understand why evil is a philosophical problem of this magnitude for the Christian, we must remind ourselves of the Church’s basic confession about God. Christianity, here reflecting its own source in Judaism, ascribes to God both all-powerfulness and all-goodness. And indeed, quite apart from the fact that this is the (overall) witness of Old and New Testaments, a number of the arguments for the existence of God touched on in the last chapter also point to these qualities as characteristic of transcendence. For example, to say that God is the infinite ground of the world is to come fairly close to saying that he is almighty; and to say that he is the explanation of our sense of absolute moral obligation comes fairly close to saying that he is all-good.

Lactantius’ Dilemma
Given, then, that both a pre-theological and a specifically Christian consensus points to God as enjoying both these characteristics (and both ancient and modern deviations there from have had a frosty reception by Catholic believers), the problem of evil must be confronted. Ever since the ancient Greeks it has been formulated as a dilemma; we possess a lapidary example from the pen of the Latin Christian apologist Lactantius: “God either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or he is able, and is unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able, or he is both willing and able. If he is willing and is unable, he is feeble—which is not in accordance with the character of God. If he is able and unwilling, he is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if he is neither willing nor able, he is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if he is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does he not remove them?” [Lactantius, De ira Dei, 13]

St. Augustine’s Solution
What kind of reflection has there been on this issue in the tradition of Christian thought? From time to time Christians have attempted to resolve Lactantius’ dilemma while writing strictly as philosophers; thus, for instance, we find the highly original system of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) or in a Thomist idiom in our own time, the work of the late Père Ambroise Sertillanges. But it has become customary, at least in the English-speaking world, to identify the two most ubiquitous “solutions” by reference to two Church Fathers and therefore to writers in whom there is as yet no clear or systematic distinction between philosophy and theology. The more influential of these two types of theodicy is that associated with St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) This Augustinian theodicy consists basically of four points.

  1. First, it is argued that evil is not a positive reality in its own right. It is not an infusion, but it is a kind of negative reality, a privation or deprivation of something that should have been there but is not. Because evil is such a privatio boni, an absence of the good, Augustinians argue that it cannot be an element in the ultimate reality, which is God.
  2. Second, having proposed an ontological statute for evil, we must give an account of its origin. So far as evil conceived and executed by finite minds (moral evil) is concerned, its source may be located in free will. If God has created finite spirits endowed with free will, it must be expected that this free will is going to be abused. From such sin there flows certain other aspects of human suffering, such as the physical pain inflicted by evil people, or the fear and anxiety which good people undergo when faced with the prospect of evil people. From moral evil there may also follow kinds of suffering which could be seen as divine punishment for sin (natural disasters and the like).
  3. Third, while it may be true that the essential limitedness of everything created (metaphysical evil) is responsible for many of the imperfections of this world, Augustinians affirm that it was nevertheless right that God should have made such a world as ours. To show why this is so, they appeal to what has been called a “principle of plenitude.” The principle of plenitude states that the richest and most desirable universe contains every possible kind of existence: lower and higher, imperfect and (relatively) perfect, ugly and beautiful, cholera germs and humming-birds.
  4. Finally, and connected with this third point, the Augustinian type of theodicy is often said to be “aesthetic” in character. By this is not meant that its exponents express themselves rather prettily but that they see all realities and events as englobed within a universal harmony. Even sin and its punishment belongs to this harmony, just as in music a discordant note, when resolved, makes a work more satisfying. Unfortunately, this harmony is only fully audible to God.

Father St. Irenaeus’ Solution
The second and less influential theodicy has been referred to as “Irenaean,” after the Greek Father St. Irenaeus, who was martyred as bishop of Lyons around the year 200. This alternative theodicy sees the world as essentially an environment, a difficult, sometimes agonizingly difficult environment in which the human spirit is refined by fire. The world is a “vale for soul making.” Irenaeus saw moral evil not as an interior catastrophe but as a matter of weakness and immaturity.

Accordingly, Irenaeans regard the natural evil present in this world not so much as a divine punishment for the abuse of free will, but rather as an aspect of a divinely appointed milieu, an ambience of mingled good and evil, which is just what we need for growth toward perfection. In this way, the Irenaean theodicy appears to place the ultimate responsibility for much of the world’s evil on the shoulders of its Creator. But at the same time it seeks to show that it was for a good reason that he created a world where evil is built in.

The ultimate purpose of creation is the production of fully matured persons interacting in charity and so reflecting the life of God himself. At the end of historical time, finite persons will be greater and better because of their conifict with evil than they would be otherwise. The claim that there cannot be an all-powerful and all-good God because the creation as we know it is partly hostile to human happiness is misconceived in that it implicitly defines happiness as “having a grand old time.” This world was not meant to be a paradise, a garden enclosed, but a milieu in which the most valuable potentialities of persons are drawn out by the challenges, often terrible challenges, which that milieu contains. Any otherview of the character of human life, so Irenaeans maintain, would turn us from persons into pampered animals or spoiled brats.

God As Providence Can Draw Good Out Of Evil
The Irenaean theodicy joins hands with its main competitor by echoing the Augustinian idea that God as Providence can draw good out of evil — itself posited philosophically, as we have seen, in Marcel’s argument to God from the phenomenon of hope. Irenaeans argue that it is precisely the sort of world we have that an all-powerful and all-good God would have made, and that While we cannot at present visualize the final state of affairs that will justify the presence of evil in the world’s history, we can see that to expect such a final satisfactory resolution of the story is not irrational.

A Conclusive Theodicy Makes It Hard To Find Room For Redemption
Needless to say, not all of these arguments have met with an equally glowing reception. Before considering the main criticisms that may be launched against them, we should note that were they in themselves an adequate and total vindication of the “justice of God,” it would be exceedingly hard to find room for the theological concept of redemption, a concept which, however, lies at the heart of Christian faith. Thus Christian theodicists, aiming for total victory, swing their sabers and cut off their own heads. With this caveat in mind, let us return to the two types of theodicy, beginning with the Augustinian and its four pillars of wisdom: the privative theory of evil, the free will defense, the principle of plenitude, and the notion of cosmic harmony.

Counter Arguments To St. Augustine And St. Irenaeus
The idea that evil is essentially an absence of what ought to be a presence, that, for instance, blindness is a failure in the proper action of the eye, not an extra reality added to the eye’s reality, certainly succeeds in dispensing us from having to ascribe evil to the Creator. Evil is not something God has made because evil is not something. It is important to notice that this meontic “not being” account of evil is a metaphysical and not an empirical or observational affair [Note: Meontic and Mimetic Modes: Art is involved with "experienced reality. --or with the 'representation of reality'-- the way it is involved is divided into two contrasted relationships. In the first, art imitates what is there in reality; in the second, it imitates what is not there.

 The mimetic mirror reproduces and focuses on experienced reality; the meontic mode attempts to reproduce "what is not there" or what is imagined. The mimetic and meontic modes, though offering contrasting ways of depicting reality, should be viewed in terms of a continuum, rather than absolute opposition, to illuminate things of the spirit rather than material phenomena.]. That is, it does not claim to tell us what evil feels like. A tidal wave, one imagines, feels like very far from nothing, and the same may be said of the personality of Adolf Hitler.

However, we might wish to ask whether a theory of the ontological status of evil can depart too far from the facts of experience and still stay credible. The meontic theory is fine when trying to explain what happens when a carton of cream turns sour, but it is less successful in coping with the individual who says “Evil, be thou my good,” and then seeks what is evil with extraordinary energy and determination. One may wonder whether John Milton is not closer to the truth when in Paradise Lost he appears to portray Satan as a mind whose powers are rendered more formidable by alliance with what is evil.

Original Sin — Utterly Mysterious And Philosophically Certain
Again, Augustine’s account of the abuse of freedom has not convinced all the commentators. It is hard to see why spirits that were perfectly happy and good at the first moment of their existence (such as Augustine supposes all finite spirits to be) should fall victim to temptation. Any causal account one might give of how this could happen would seem to presuppose that they had fallen already; thus, if it were pride which made them fall, then they had already fallen into the sin of pride. It is noteworthy that Kant regarded original sin as both utterly mysterious and philosophically certain. See Fr. Edward Oakes excellent meditation on this here .

The Problem With Plenitude
Next comes the principle of plenitude. It has been pointed out that the Creator has not in fact placed in this world the total imaginable number of different species. No matter how many varieties of humming-bird there are, we can always say that God could have made twice as many, and if this would involve the doubling in size of the Amazon basin, then so be it. But then it is not easy to defend the existence of cholera germs on the grounds that they had to be there since without them one expression of the divine aeativity would be missing.

The Problem With Cosmic Harmony
Finally, there is the notion of cosmic harmony. Even from our limited standpoint in historical time, the theme of cosmic harmony is audible from lime to time. For instance, if we think of the world as a unitary design, a cosmos, the transience of nature does not seem to be an evil after all, whereas if we restrict our attention to the withering of this orchid, or the expiring of that pet rabbit, decay and death in the nonhuman world strike us as sad and regrettable. Taking a wider view, the dissolution of plants and animals into their component parts is a condition for the fashioning of fresh plants and animals. The real difficulty with the cosmic harmony theme is when we come to moral evil. An incautious statement of the aesthetic picture of evil would lead us to say that sin is necessary to the perfection of the universe, since it is beautifully counterposed by divine justice, a point of view which (presumably) few people would be keen on putting forward as a philosophical defense of Christian faith.

The Excessiveness Or Redundancy Of Evil
The Irenaean theodicy, unlike the Augustinian, rests essentially upon a single thought, the conclusion of which is, to remind you, that to predict a final justificatory resolution of evil in terms of matured souls is not counter-rational. But many will say that it is precisely this which is at issue. The extent of evil is far greater than a challenging environment would require. Evil is more than cold showers to encourage manliness, The excessiveness or redundancy of evil discourages us from positing a final state of affairs to justify the myriad succeeding states of affairs the world has so far known.

If There Were A Complete Theodicy Then There Would Be No Need For Salvation
The conclusion which emerges, therefore, is that the argumentation found in the history of theodicy goes some way toward releasing Lactantius from his dilemma, but by no means all the way. Enough has been said to convince one that evil phenomena are not an insuperable obstacles to believing in a God of the kind that philosophy and faith (as found in fundamental theology) require. On the other hand, not everything has been cleared up. But as I have remarked, if in theodicy we could clear up the problem of evil to our complete satisfaction, then there would be no need for salvation as presented in Christian revelation. God comes in his incarnate Son as the world’s Redeemer, and by his Spirit as its Renewer, so as to repair the world’s defects. But there would be no point in redemption if these defects could be shown to be either not defects at all or things built into the very idea of having a world in the first place.

The Inexplicable Elements In Theodicy
We can list some of the inexplicable elements in theodicy, which must be taken over, then, into a pre-understanding of what might be involved in the story of salvation.

  1. First, there is the strange potency of evil, given that evil should be regarded metaphysically as privation.
  2. Second, there is the fall of finite spirits, who came forth from an all-holy divine ground even if, in the case of Homo sapiens, they were culturally and psychologically immature.
  3. Third, there is the apparent escape of nature from the rational control of Providence as evidenced in say, the suffering of the innocent in natural disasters. To these three factors we may add
  4. Fourth, namely, the fact that we have not been able to solve the problem of theodicy. We can call this factor the absence of sufficient meaning, our inability to make anything like complete sense of the world

Features Of Salvation
Here, then, we have some features of the idea of salvation. If the Creator entered our world as the Redeemer, he must, it seems, do four things.

  1. He must conquer and neutralize the potency of evil in its fundamental ground.
  2. He must give finite spirits a new supernatural principle of action to replace that given them by original sin.
  3. He must provide for the harmonization of nature with human happiness.
  4. He must overcome the ambiguity, or absence of sufficient meaning, in human life as we know it. But if there is to be such a redemptive action by God, then there must be some way in which we can apprehend his involvement with the world. Divine revelation must be possible. This is the next aspect of the preamble of faith in the elucidation of which philosophy has a role to play.

 

We must never forget this date so read this to fulfill your duty to its memory.

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Book Recommendation: The Drama Of Atheistic Humanism — Henri De Lubac, S.J

September 10, 2009

drama of atheistic humanismFr. De Lubac traced the origin of 19th century attempts to construct a humanism apart from God and Christianity, the beginnings of contemporary atheism which claims to have “moved beyond God.” In the 20th and 21st we’ve moved into a scientific materialism that parades itself as a creative individualism. There is no institutional memory for atheism that corresponds to what the Catholic Church does for its believers. This leaves most atheists I know free to deny the any and all sources. It’s a shame because if this were available in some form, it might help those not to be seduced by the latest incarnation of an old heresy. Read this, one would like to say, learn your sordid, blood-soaked past.

“The three persons Fr. De Lubac focuses on are Feuerbach, who greatly influenced Marx; Nietzsche, who represents nihilism; and Comte, who is the father of all forms of positivism. He then shows that the only one who really responded to this ideology was Dostoevsky, a kind of prophet who criticizes in his novels this attempt to have a society without God. Despite their historical and scholarly appearance, de Lubac’s work clearly refers to the present.”

When I read this I really felt that atheistic humanism still existed but the more I converse with atheists, particularly the twenty or thirty something college graduates, I realize they have no connection with the atheistic humanism that Fr. De Lubac traced here. Most are totally unaware of it. Their teachers would know of it and most of them probably subscribed to it at one point. The newer atheists are a TV/internet phenomena,  more Hollywood than literary, riding on the faux intellectualism of a scientific conceit that one sees in Richard Dawkins. Bill Maher has created more of these lost souls than we could possibly imagine.

As is my habit, reading selections follow:

Know Thyself
“Man, Know Thyself!”  Taking up, after Epicetetus,  the Socratic gnothii sauton, the Church transformed and deepened it, so that what had been chiefly a piece of moral advice became an exhortation to form a metaphysical judgment. Know yourself, said the Church, that is to say, know your nobility and your dignity, understand the greatness of your being and your vocation, of that vocation which constitutes your being. Learn how to see in yourself the spirit, which is a reflection of God, made for God. “Oh man, scorn not that which is admirable in you! Your are a poor thing in your own eyes, but I would teach you in reality you are a great thing!…Realize what you are! Consider your royal dignity! The heavens have not been made in God’s image as you have, nor the moon, nor the sun, nor anything to be seen in creation…Behold, of all that exists there is nothing that can contain your greatness.” [Gregory of Nyssa]

The Rise of Atheistic Humanism
…The time came when man was no longer moved by it [His relation to God and worth]. On the contrary, he began to think that henceforward he would forfeit his self-esteem and be unable to develop in freedom unless he broke first with the Church and then with the Transcendent Being upon whom, according to Christian tradition, he was dependent. At first assuming the aspect of a reversion to paganism, this urge to cut loose increased in scope and momentum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until after many phases and many vicissitudes, it came to a head in the most daring and destructive form of modern atheism: absolute humanism, which claims to be the genuine kind and inevitably regards Christian humanism as absurd.

The Essence Of Christianity/Ludwig Feuerbach
Wisdom, will, justice and love, says Feuerbach, are so many infinite attributes which constitute man’s own being and which nevertheless affect him “as if he were another being.” Thus he spontaneously projects them beyond himself and objectifies them in a fantastic form, the pure product of his imagination, to which he gives the name of God. In this way he defrauds his own self. “it is one and the same act which strips the world of its content and transfers that content to God. The poor man possesses a rich God.” or to be more accurate, he impoverishes himself by enriching his God, in filling whom he empties himself. “Religion is transformed into a vampire which feeds upon the substance of mankind, its flesh and its blood.”…The turning point of history will be he moment when man (the community of, not the individual) becomes aware that the only God of man is man himself…rightly understood, religion “ceremoniously unveils the hidden treasures of man’s nature; it is the avowal of his inmost thoughts, it is the public revelation the secrets, the mysteries of his love.” Thus, far from being unfaithful to the spirit of Christianity, which is the perfect religion, we shall at last explain its mystery…

Marx Echoes Feuerbach
Man is not an abstract being outside the real world,. Man is the world of men, the State, the society. The State and this society produce religion, a mistaken attitude to the world, because themselves constitute a false world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its popular logic, its spiritual point of honor, its inspiration, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its general consoling and justifying reason…It is the imaginative realization the human essence, because that essence has no rue reality. The misery of religion is, on the one hand, the expression of real misery and, on the other, a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by unhappiness, the soul of a world that has no  heart, as it is the end of an era that has no mind. It is the opium of the people….Karl Marx

God Is Dead
Religion is conceived as the result of a kind of psychological duplication,. God, according to Nietzsche is nothing more than the mirror of man, who, in certain intense, exceptional states, becomes aware of the power that is in him, or of the love that exalts him. But, as these sensations take him more or less by surprise and he does not seem to be accountable for them, man, not daring to ascribe such power to himself, makes them the attributes of a superhuman being who is a stranger to him. He accordingly divides the two aspects of his own nature between two spheres, the ordinary weak and pitiable aspect appertaining to the sphere which he calls “man”, while the rare, strong and surprising aspect belongs to the sphere which he calls ”God”.

Thus by his own action, he is defrauded of what is best in him. “Religion is a matter of adulteration of the personality.” [Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day:  “There are now perhaps ten to twenty million men among the different peoples of Europe who ‘no longer believe in God’. Is it asking too much that they should get in touch with one another?”] It is a process by which man is debased.  The whole essence of the human problem will therefore consist in remounting that fatal slope so as “gradually to regain possession of those lofty proud states of the soul” of which we have wrongfully despoiled ourselves….The way to get rid of [God] is not so much to refute the proofs of his existence as to show how such an idea came to be formed and how it succeeded in establishing itself in the human mind and in “gaining weight’ there…Whatever antecedents may have been…”the death of God”… on Nietzsche’s lips…expresses a choice…”now, it is our preference that decides against Christianity — not arguments. It is an act…as definite and brutal as that of a murderer…”the death of God is not merely a terrible fact, it is something willed by him…if God is dead, it is we who have killed him….We are the assassins of God….Since there ceased to be a God, loneliness has become intolerable; the man who overtops the rest must set to work”…”How shall we console ourselves, murderers that we are…Who will cleanse us of this blood?…Shall we to have to become Gods ourselves imply to seem worthy of it…There was never a more stupendous effort…God will again find himself in man, beyond good and evil…“I am alone and would have it so”, said Zarathrusta. “Alone with a clear mind and an open sea.”

The Death Of God
“There will be wars such as the world has never yet seen”; Europe will be enveloped in darkness; we shall watch the “rising of a black tide” “Thanks to me,” Nietzsche wrote, “ a catastrophe is at hand.. It will be the coming of nihilism…Thought comes before action as lightning before thunder…The death of God…[has caused] the self-destruction of humanism. We are proving that where there is no God, there is no man either…The godhead is reflected in the slime of the earth like the image in a mirror…If, in everything that takes place in our sublunary world, the relation to eternity is destroyed, it needs no more than that to destroy , at the same time, all depth and all real content in this world. For man, God is not only a norm which is imposed upon him and, by guiding him, lifts him up again: God is the absolute upon which he rests, the Magnet which draws him, the Beyond which calls him, the Eternal which provides him with the only atmosphere in which he can breathe and, in some sort, that third dimension in which man finds his depths….Critical atheism, liberal atheism, atheism resulting from laicism [The freeing from ecclesiastical control; giving over to laypeople…The process of changing to lay status; secularization.] , all these are marks of an age that is dying…Spirit, Truth, Brotherhood, Justice: these great things which ancient paganism had half perceived and  Christianity had instituted, quickly became unreal when no longer seen as a radiation from God…They became empty forms. Kantism has clean hands only it has no hands….A new middle ages has begun for our era.

Faith
To be sitting in a boat in calm weather is not an image of faith. But when the boat has sprung a leak, to keep it afloat by enthusiastically manning the pumps, yet with no thought of returning to port — that is an image of faith…While the understanding, like a desperate passenger, stretches out its arms to terra firma but in vain, faith works with all its might in the deep waters: joyfully and triumphantly, it saves the soul…

The Spiritual Battle
It is the whole of Christianity they are setting aside — and replacing…Jesus had brought about a reversal of values, it is a reversal of values that they are undertaking in their turn. …“it is the spirit and the moral tendency that constitute the essence of a religion , and not the myths in which it is clothed” [Schopenhauer]…another exposition of Nietzschean antichristianism: the call to a powerful, heroic, creative life; the morality of strength and hardness; the accusation of “resentment” brought against the founders of Christian ethics and their precursors, the great prophets of Israel; the confronting of the baseness of the Christian slave” with the “nobility” of the Greek hero; the exaltation of Dionysus, the god of orgiastic and perpetually renascent life, in contrast to his scorn of the Crucified who, on the tree of the Cross, “the most poisonous of all trees“, is “a malediction upon life.”  Suffice it to note the seriousness the very serious nature of  the attack. It is not like others, directed against a few specialists in history or metaphysics; its action is not at first confined to intellectual circles; without needing men of science as its interpreters, it comes to shake souls. It is aimed at the spiritual elite and, when it has attained its aim, it succeeds in perverting that elite while sparing them the sensation of having fallen. Like everything else that  is of the spirit,  it is at he same time ubiquitous in its infiltration and very difficult to nail down, so that it has time to spread great havoc before the first warning is sounded. Under the cover of impeccable enunciations of faith, sometimes even screened by an apparent increase of orthodoxy, souls may already be gangrened…

Neo-Paganism
Neo-paganism is the great spiritual phenomenon of our age…(the young) Ranier Maria Rilke after enthusiastically reading the new prophet (Nietzsche): “He whom men worship as the Messiah turns the whole world into an infirmary. He calls the weak, the unfortunate, the disabled His children and His loved ones. What about the strong? How are we ourselves to climb if we lend our strength to the unfortunate and the oppressed, to idle rogues with no with an no energy. Let them fall, let them die, alone and wretched. Be hard be terrible, be pitiless! You must thrust yourselves forward, forward! A few men, but great ones, will build a world with their strong , muscular, masterful arms on the corpses of the weak, the sick and the infirm.” ….and others (Hugues Rebell, minor French author) “Nietzsche predicts the return of an ideal…To understand this ideal there will be a category of free minds, fortified by war, solitude and danger. They will know the wind, the glaciers, the alpine snows; they will be able to plumb the deepest gulfs without wavering. Endowed with a kind of sublime perversity, they will deliver us from loving our neighbors and from the desire of nothingness, that the earth may recover its purpose and men their hopes.”

Christianity Today (published in 1944)
Christianity is dying…people no longer know why our towns are still surmounted by those spires which are no longer the prayers of any of us; they don’t know what is he point of those great buildings, which are now hemmed in by railway stations and hospitals and from which the people themselves have expelled the monks; they don’t now why the graveyards display pretentious stucco crosses of execrable design.. Truth is not concerned with how many people it convinces…”[Jacque Riveier 1907]…Some of the harshest reproaches leveled against us [Christians] come both from its worst enemies and from men of good will…too many grow more inert, daily adding to their blasphemy of the Savior to whom they still pay lip service, though understanding him less and less; while pious circles, “edifying” circles so often reveal such a mediocre level of culture and spiritual life…

Rediscovering Christianity
Christianity must be given back its strength in us [Christians] which means, first and foremost, that we must discover it as it is in itself, in its purity and authenticity. In the last analysis, what is needed is not a Christianity that is more virile, more efficacious or more heroic or stronger; it is that we must should live our Christianity with more virility, more efficacy, more strength, and, if necessary, more heroism — but we must live it as it is. There is nothing that should be changed in it, nothing that should be added to (this does not mean that there is not a continual need to keep its channels from silting up), nothing that should be corrected; it is not a case of adapting it to the fashion of the day. It must come into its own again in our souls. We must give our souls back to it….But heroism will not consist of talking about heroism and raving about the virtue of strength. It will consist, above all, in resisting with courage, in face of the world and perhaps against one’s own self, the lures and seductions of the false ideal, and in proudly maintaining, in their paradoxical intransigence the Christian values which are threatened and derided. Maintaining them with humble pride. For, if Christianity can and should assume the virtues of ancient paganism, the Christian who would remain faithful is bound to reject with a categorical NO a neo-paganism which set itself up against Christ. Gentleness and goodness, considerateness toward the lowly, pity for those who suffer, rejection of perverse methods, protection for the oppressed, unostentatious self-sacrifice, resistance to lies, the courage to call evil by its proper name, love of justice, the spirit of peace and concord, open-heartedness, mindfulness of heaven: those are the things Christian  heroism will rescue…Christians have mot been promised they will remain in the majority…nor that hey will always seem the strongest and that men will never be conquered by another ideal than theirs…but Christianity will never have any real efficacy, it will never have nay real existence or make any real conquests, except by the strength of its own spirit., by the strength of charity.

The Absolute Principle of the NeoPaganism
[The reign of God] was only a regency corresponding to “the long minority of mankind”. Now that mankind is grown up, the only absolute principle that is real shines forth in all its brilliance: “everything is relative”; and this principle rules out forever all spurious problems…

A Necessary Consequence of Denial of God
If one rules out the hypothesis of a God who is master of the world… I cannot see on what reality you can base the notion of a right enabling the individual as an isolated monad, to set himself up in front of the other beings around him and to say to them: ‘There is something intangible in me which I conjure you to respect because its principle is independent of you.”…If there is no Absolute how can there be anything absolute in man? God’s cause in the human conscience and man’s cause in society are bound up with each other. …If man, in his moral being, is crushed by society, it is because in his essence, he is first crushed by the universe…

Optimistic Theology
With Ivan, Doestoevsky rebels “against all optimistic theology shorn of its tragic element with evil appearing only as a necessary note in the universal harmony, while the ways of Providence fit in only too well with philosophic reason”. Rather than a theodicy he would propose a satanodicy. And when Ivan musters the force of his argument in the thought of the little girl, ill-treated and weeping with grief and shame, Doestoevksy is thinking in the depths of his heart that, on the plane of reason, there is no answer. Christ did not  come to explain suffering or solve the problem of evil: he took evil upon his shoulders to deliver us from it.

Comparing Nietzsche And Doestoevky
There is something else, too, in Ivan…diabolical pride which will not brook the existence of a God: a yearning for irresponsibility in human conduct; the idea, too, that man would be able to do more as soon as he specter of the deity had been removed form his horizon….since Nietzsche and with Nietzsche a new question has arisen: What is man (and mankind) capable of?…Where Nietzsche hails the apogee, Doestoevky foresees bankruptcy. These two men came to a fork in the road that proceeds from man and while one yielded to the path ostensibly leading to man who has become a god — to the superman — the other took the way which leads to God who has been made man.

Doestoevky’s Characters
“I do not know whether the spirit of God controls this power. I only know that I am myself a Karamazov…I am a monk, a monk…You said just now that I was a monk.”

“Yes, I did say that.”

“Well perhaps I don’t believe in God.”

“You don’t believe? What are you saying?” Lisa murmured with constraint. But Aloysha made no reply. In those sudden words there was something mysterious, something too subjective perhaps, which he could not account for and which worried him.”

The cry that there is nothing mingles with a serene and joyful affirmation of life…Through the characters in his novels, who all have something of himself in them, he delivers himself from his temptations and by this we know that, though has not been insensible to the power of denial, that power has not conquered him.

Dostoevsky’s Profession Of Faith I
Lastly there is his own testimony. Shortly before his death, he noted in his diary, in connection with criticisms of his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov: “The dolts have ridiculed my obscurantism and the reactionary character of my faith. These fools could not even coceive of so strong a denial of God as the one to which I have given expression…the whole book is an answer to that. You might search Europe in vain for so powerful an expression of atheism. Thus it is not like a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has come forth from the crucible of doubt“.…Dostoevsky does not separate faith in God from faith in Christ.

Dostoevsky’s Profession Of Faith II
In the convict prison, Dostoevsky encountered Christ. That is the cardinal fact that without which his work cannot be explained. He was to be a sinner. He was to go through agonies of doubt. He knew that in advance — he did not hope to find the peace vouchsafed to simple believers. He explains this to Mme. Von Wisne in an impressive letter, the first one written after his release: “And yet god sometimes sends me moments of complete serenity. It is in such moments that I have composed in my mind a profession of faith, in which everything is clear and holy. This profession of faith is very simple. This is what it is: to believe that ther is nothing finer, deeper, more loveable, more reasonable, braver and more perfect than Christ; and not only there is nothing, but I tell myself with a jealous love, there cannot be anything. More than that: if anyone had told me that Christ is outside truth, and if it had really been established hat truth is outside Christ, I should have preferred to stay with Christ rather than with truth.

Dostoevsky’s Profession Of Faith III
Dostoevsky also says: “We continually go astray if we have not Christ and his faith to guide us”; “repudiate Christ, and the human mind can arrive at the most astounding conclusions.” “The West has lost Christ and that is why it is dying; that is the only reason.” This is the idea that underlies The Possessed. He expresses it quite clearly in the notes which served as a preparation for the book: “True, it is possible to argue, and even to assert, that Christianity will not fall to the ground if Christ is regarded as no more than a man, as a philosopher who goes about doing good, and that, moreover, Christianity is neither a necessity for mankind nor a source of living life…but that it is a science that will be able to vitalize life and set up a perfect ideal. The world is full of these discussions. But we know, as you do, that all that is utterly absurd; we know that Christ, considered as merely a man, is not the saviour and source of life; we know that no science will serve to realize the human ideal and that, for mankind, peace, the source of life and salvation and the indispensable condition for the existence of the whole world, is contained in the saying: “The word was made flesh.”, and in faith in that saying.

The great humanists — Shakespeare and Goethe, for instance — are generally pagans and there is an established prejudice that anyone who goes deep in his exploration of a man must needs be a pagan. If by any chance he happens to be a Christian, this can only be a veneer; or else he became a Christian as the result of a n acute attack of pessimism which made him renounce man and all his riches. But what kind of Christianity is that?

The Need For A Universal Ant-Hill
According to the Grand Inquisitor (character in Dostoevsky, novel of the same name) Mankind is tormented by a need for universal union and , if all welcome him with gratitude, it is because they find in him not only a master, not a depositary of their consciences, but “a being which supplies them with the means of uniting into one great ant hill” Dostoevsky knows that this is a real need in the human heart. But he also knows that the ant hill ,the great uniform ant hill, in no way satisfies that need. There is no union worthy of that name except between persons and, where there is no freedom, there are no persons; just as without god, there is no freedom. The animals forming a flock are not united. The law of the world that, rejects god is a ruthless law of partitioning and isolation, which is more marked in proportion as social links form a closer mesh. In this age the whole thing has been split up; “everyone keeps away from his fellows and keeps them away from him; instead of giving expression to their personality they fall into a complete solitude” then “men’s efforts lead to nothing but total suicide. “ This terrible isolation will certainly come to an end one day, but that day will be the one on which the sign of he son of man appears in the heavens.

Dostoevsky’s Eternal Thought
Far more than he needs happiness, man needs to know and to believe, every minute, that somewhere else is a perfect, quiet happiness for each and all…The whole of human existence consists in this: that man can at all times bow before something infinitely great. If human beings came to be deprived of this infinitely great something, they would no longer want to live and would die in despair. The incommensurable and the infinite are as necessary to man as the little planet on which he moves…God is necessary to me because He is the only being whom one can love eternally.

Dostoevsky: The Essence Of Religious Feeling Eludes All Arguments
“If God is driven away from the earth, we shall meet him under the earth! From the bowels of the earth the subterranean men will raise a tragic hymn to the God of joy!” That is always the point to which Dostoevsky returns. After having said: “If God is nothing, everything is permitted.” we have man finding that “If God is nothing, everything is a matter of indifference”, and in this terrible certainty, this taste of death, temptation vanishes. Man is a theotropic [growing towards God] being. Violently attacked on all sides, faith is indestructible in his heart. The atheists muster impeccable arguments: the true believer does not worry if he cannot answer them, for it always seems to him a case of ignoratio elenchi. …”She was quite a young woman and the child would be about six weeks old. It was smiling at its mother — for the first time in its life she said. I saw her cross herself with the utmost piety. ‘why do you do that, my dear?’, I said to her. At that time I was forever asking questions. All the joy that a mother feels when she sees her child smiling for the first time,’ she replied, ‘God feels every time He sees, from up there in heaven, a sinner praying to him from the bottom of his heart.’ Those are practically the very words which that simple woman said to me; she expressed this deep, subtle and purely religious thought in which the whole essences of Christianity is summed up, which recognizes in God a heavenly father rejoicing at the sight of man as a father at the sight of his child. It is the fundamental idea of Christ. A simple woman of the people! True she was a mother…Listen Parfen. Just now you asked me a question. This is my answer: The essence of religious feeling eludes all arguments; no misdeeds, no crime, no form of atheism can touch it. In this feeling there is and always be something that cannot be grasped, something beyond the reach of atheist reasoning.

Aspects Of Oneself
I have in me my nature, my temperament, my character, containing elements many of which I proscribe, some of which I ratify  and some of which I endure. There are characteristics which I have inherited and those which I have made for myself. There are the things I hide from myself ,and the things for which I yearn without possessing them, but which are a moulding influence because they attract me. How many simplistic, would be profound explanations there are a about it all!…One is apt to forget that the life of the conscience cannot be grasped objectively and it is assumed that complete sincerity excludes any other effort than the courage to read oneself. Moreover, these simplistic explanations, which take themselves for the last word in psychology and ethics, lead to absurd conclusions: the possibilities which swarm in us, more or less preformed, are varied, and contradictory: must we, to be sincere, put them all into practice? And will sincerity also demand that we never think, except in accordance with what we are? Or might it occasionally consist unrecognizing that hat we are is not in accordance with what we think?

Dostoevsky: The Prophet Of The Other Life
Dostoevsky is the prophet of the other life…[His truth] bears no resemblance to a positivist truth…it sets itself against any attempt on the part of man to establish an eternal life in this world; its purpose is not to leave him weighed down by a miserable lot. It is to reclaim him from a path that leads nowhere. He is the prophet of unity, which presupposes a breach to be healed; the prophet of a resurrection, which presupposes experience of death

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Approaches To God’s Existence

September 9, 2009

pi-cover18Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
Albert Einstein

The Christian faith presupposes certain truths of reason and of history. Without these it cannot make sense and its theology cannot take root. The first of these is that the Christian faith presupposes that there is a God: it’s of little use telling people that Jesus is the Son of God if they do not believe in God in the first place. Of course, the concept of God which a pagan possesses will need to be modified in the light of the account of God offered in the Church’s preaching. So for many atheists were they to wish to embrace the Church, they arrive at the scene without even the presuppositions of faith.

Within the Church there is no general consensus among Catholic writers as to the best way of establishing the existence of God, the supreme presupposition of our faith. To complicate matters more, The First Vatican Council, in the course of the document Del Filius declared “The one and true God, our Creator and Lord, can be known through the creation by the natural light of human reason.” The council’s teaching is that images of the divine found in natural religion in all cultures can be modified or purified so as to produce a concept of God as the Creator Lord, the source of nature and history alike. At this point our hypothetical atheist (ever snarky) is probably thinking: “Ah, so there is a God and it can be proved by human reason, but nobody has found Him yet. Nice.”

The biblical materials for a concept of God do not organize themselves. They do not automatically arrange themselves into a satisfactory form. They achieve that form only when the human mind, seeking to understand its own faith, begins to work on them and to set them out in more intelligible ways. To organize the biblical materials, we soon find that we need to draw on such philosophical categories as good and evil, freedom and necessity, person and nature, mind and will, essence and existence, being and knowing. Of course, the application of these notions to God is an attempt to speak of what lies beyond the world within terms drawn from this world, and so is only justified if we always add a postscript to that effect.

But as Karl Rahner once put it, definitions are much less an end than a beginning. Where the atheist might see the beginning of a practical joke, the theologian sees the right to choose those materials from which he or she hopes to construct an approach to God’s existence. Some choose not to even engage the question — particularly if their right to reason is restricted to the scientific method (which bans the supernatural or the metaphysical from hypotheses).

Yet over the Church’s history the reasoning from the Scriptural sources of revelation to the nature of the divine has brought us several approaches to God’s existence. The great Doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, is famous for his five “proofs” of God’s existence but his proofs are not scientific: there are no calculations or verifiable experiments one can run to establish the existence of the divine. They too are approaches to the divine.

Blaise Pascal once wrote: “The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd. Jesus Christ and St. Paul possess the order of charity, not of the mind, for they wished to humble, not to teach.” (Pensées 298)

Peter Kreeft has offered by way of interpretation: “It is a prejudice of rationalism (not reason) that rational order, the order of the mind, is the only kind of order. In fact, the heart’s order is just as much order, but a different kind. The head seeks truth, the heart seeks goodness. This is why reason’s order is that of a map or outline of truth, while the heart’s order is that of a journey to its goal, its heart’s desire….How can humbling be better than teaching? …In regard to nature, the highest stage of knowledge is knowledge. But in regard to God and his images, the highest stage of knowledge is love. We know God and man only by loving them.

St. Thomas says that it is better to know a stone than to love a stone but better to love God than to know God, because love conform the lover to the beloved, while knowledge conforms the known object to the way-of-knowing of the knower. When we love a dog, we become more doggy, but when we know a dog, we raise it up to our own level: thought. When we know God we drag him down to our anthropomorphic level, we make God more humanoid than he really is; but when we love God, we are raised up more closely to his level, we become more God-like than we were (for ‘God is love’).”

So Fr. Aidan Nichols cites in his magisterial work The Shape of Catholic Theology. six approaches to God’s existence, experiential signs and a kind of argument, that we hope the atheists among us can drop their narrow insistence on scientific method and try to relate to arguments of the heart for a change.

The Experience Of Wonder There is the experience of wonder at the fact that there is a world at all. All of us are familiar with wonder before certain particular things: the colors of dawn, the grace of an athlete, the intricate workings of an organ like the eye.

But sometimes we generalize this sense of wonder and extend it to the fact that there is a world at all. In this case the object of wonder is not the particular world we live in, which is a sum total of the particular things that exist, but the consideration that there should be any particular world at all. After all, there is nothing logically entailed in the concept of a world which makes us say, Of course, I realize that there had to be a world.

Writers as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. K. Chesterton have regarded this sort of experience as philosophically important. From it there emerges the argument that since the world is not self-explanatory, or ontologically self-sufficient, it requires us to postulate a ground for it. Such a ground would have to be transcendent vis-à-vis the world; that is, it could not be less than the world itself. But the notion of the transcendent ground of the world is at any rate a part of what people mean by God.

The Experience Of Moral Obligation Second, a very different kind of experience relevant here is the experience of moral obligation. From time to time we do things not because it is in our interest to do them but because they are intrinsically right. If we left them undone, we might say, we could not live with ourselves. The voice of conscience would not let us be.

In such a case, it is not just that as a matter of rational ethics we would knowingly have done the wrong thing. Beyond this, our sense of what is involved in doing -the wrong thing can be at times terrifying. It is almost as though we were in the presence of a judge of irreproachable character who saw us and was obliged by his own righteousness to condemn us.

Expressed less pictorially, the values we put into our system of values (whatever these may be) do not entirely behave as things we have created. We seem to be tributary to them, rather than the other way round. Those who do not care for the implications of such experiences of moral obligation may hypothesize that they derive from the effects of parental conditioning upon us. Either our own parents or that corporate parent we call society has put a taboo on certain ways of behaving, and the taboo sticks. When we defy it we are covered with feelings of guilt, just as if we have offended a wonderfully good and sensitive person.

But on the other hand, some of the most interesting examples of conscience must surely be those that occur to individuals who, having assessed facts and arguments, feel obliged to depart from some prior moral consensus and break through to a new level of moral awareness. Think of Lincoln’s appeal to conscience concerning slavery. So the experience of obligation is not so easily cut down to size, and it points toward the existence of a supremely holy one as its own ultimate explication. This was Newman’s own preferred approach to transcendence. C.S. Lewis uses this also in his landmark book Mere Christianity.

The Experience Of Our Own Dissatisfaction A third kind of experience relevant here is the experience of our own dissatisfaction. This may seem a strange sort of starting point for an argument in metaphysics, but dissatisfaction with any of the objects we can attain in this world must surely be the greatest single source of religious belief. Genetically, we are not programmed in such a way that we can know from the outset what objects will bring us satisfaction.

Of course we have certain drives—toward physical nourishment, sexual intimacy, and so forth. But the satisfaction of these drives is not exactly our satisfaction. We may satisfy them as much as we will , and yet when we are finished we are still left with such questions as What is the meaning of life? Where will I find lasting happiness? and so on. None of these questions, it may be said, finds any full solution within the world.

So the further question suggests itself, If a being exists who has no goal within the world, a being whose desire to know and need to love appears to be in some sense endless, then perhaps the goal of this creature’s striving lies beyond the world in what the religions of the world call God. The Greek Father Gregory of Nyssa already came near to this conative argument for God (vocab: from the Latin verb conare, “to strive”: we are striving for something beyond this world, and it seems more reasonable to posit that something as the ground of our striving rather than to write off our striving as absurd, something strictly unintelligible.) On Gregory’s crucial notion of epektasis.  

A modem form of the same notion is found in F. C. Copleston, Religion and Philosophy (Dublin: 1974), who writes that the search for a metaphysical ultimate is based on “an experience of limits, coupled with a reaching out towards that which transcends and grounds all limits.”

The Experience Of Hope A fourth dimension of human existence that fits in here is the experience of hope. We all have hopes for particular things. We hope for peace in our time, for nice friends, for a better website on exploring Catholic faith. But this is not the experience of hope Christians think of when they use the word “Hope”.

What Christians have in mind is that general attitude of hopefulness as a response to the future which so many people evince in quite impossible situations, and which seems almost a necessary condition for the survival of humanity in hard times. People hope against hope that tyranny will be ended; that their children’s children will live to inherit this planet.

But even if the worst happened, even if an evil government possessed itself of the world or a nuclear holocaust devoured the earth tomorrow, people would still go on hoping amidst the ruins. They would crawl out of the holes and burrows and start to pick up the pieces. This is natural to us because it is natural to us to hope. The question is, Does this point to anything metaphysical? It could be argued, as did French philosopher and dramatist Gabriel Marcel, that it suggests an unconscious grasp of the reality of God as the ground and guarantor of human history, of human destiny.

The Mystical Experience Another area that repays investigation in this regard is that of mystical experience. A large number of people in various cultures have laid claim to direct experience of the divine. Some of these people may have been mad, and some may have been bad. Their claims may have been made through self-delusion or by the deliberate desire to obtain power, prestige, or money. But where records are copious, in the case of figures who most impressed, therefore, their contemporaries, the mystics give an impression of integrity rather than its opposite.

Certainly, mystics have described their experiences in terms drawn from the religious tradition in which they were at home: Muslim mystics encounter Allah; Jewish mystics the Shekinah, or “Glory of the Lord”; Christian mystics the Trinity. But this does not necessarily invalidate their witness. We would expect that they would use concepts and images already familiar to them to interpret a reality by definition beyond concepts and images, namely God. Whether the concepts and images used by one mystic, for example St. Teresa of Avila, correspond more to the nature of the true God than do the concepts and images of another mystic, say, the Muslim al-Hallaj, would have to be decided on other grounds.

But all the mystics share the assertion that they have encountered what we can call the eternal reality — however they pictured the reality in question. Such a weight of human testimony from so many different cultures cannot easily be dismissed. This is, in part, the approach to God’s existence favored by the English Benedictine philosopher Iltyd Trethowan.

The Knowability Of The World Sixth and finally, I would draw attention to the epistemological argument for the existence of God associated with the late Fr. Bernard Lonergan of the Society of Jesus. Lonergan proposed that the main cue we need to move toward an affirmation of God’s existence is found in the very knowability of the world.

For some reason, the world has a structure such that the human mind can penetrate it by means of his own processes of thought. How can we account for this fact? It might have been the case that human beings had intelligence but that the world was not amenable to exploration by that intelligence. There could have been a lack of fit between the world and the human mind.

But in point of fact, there is not; on the contrary, there is considerable harmony between them as, among other things, the fruits of scientific knowledge in technology demonstrate. It is argued, therefore, that the world’s intelligibility requires us to posit the existence of a creative mind, analogous to but infinitely transcending the human mind, by which the cosmos was brought into being.

John Henry Newman’s Essay In Aid Of A Grammar Of Consent  So much for the six main kinds of approach that have historically been popular. The list is not exhaustive. It could be extended by, for example, reference to the fact that we have a language for perfection — better known as the “ontological argument.” Nothing prevents our combining these approaches on the principle that the sum total of a number of individually less-than-convincing arguments may be a convincing case. This was, as it happens, John Henry Newman’s strategy in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Consent, published during the First Vatican Council, in 1870.

There Newman offered a new context in which to display the various argumentative strategies and the strata of experience that are relevant to belief in God. Earlier, Newman had worked out a distinction between explicit and implicit reason, pointing out that in ordinary everyday affairs we make judgments about people and events without following arty strict logical progression, any mode of explicit reason. Instead, we gather together a whole series of experiential clues and pieces of argumentation. These fragments of experience and argument then act as signals that point us in the direction of a true conclusion, which is attained, therefore, by implicit reason.

In the Grammar of Assent Newman further refined this idea in relation to the basic tenets of Christian theism, dubbing such a manner of arriving at certitude about something or someone the “illative sense.” In a jigsaw, when you spread out the pieces on a table, all you seem to have is a complete jumble, an accidental collection of bits and pieces that tell you nothing. But put them together and you have a picture. So Newman’s suggestion is that we can defend belief in God by putting together a number of experiential signals and lines of thought, which converge on the conclusion that there is a God.

Following Newman, it may be suggested that while none of these arguments taken singly might be wholly compelling, taken cumulatively they amount to a very strong case. This case may fall short of strict demonstration. But no matter: at least it shows that it is more reasonable to believe in God’s existence than not. Clearly, if we were unable to show that it is at least as reasonable to believe in God’s existence as it is not to, being a believer at all would be an irrational exercise.

But more than this, as Catholic Christians with a duty to the Church’s conciliar tradition, we are expected to say that it is in fact more reasonable to believe in God’s existence. For whatever force is given to the assertion on this topic in Del Filius, it surely cannot mean less than this.

Argument From Evil And may I offer, finally, my own experience – one that I have explored in various pieces here in consideration of the nature of evil. There is no satisfying Christian theodicy, no one great argument that explains the coexistence of an all powerful loving God of goodness with the evil of this world. St. Thomas posed the problem in his Summa Theologiae: “It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the name ‘God’ means that he is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.”  

Man has wrestled with explaining the nature of evil in the world and the “justice of God.” But were they in themselves an adequate and total vindication any form of “Justice,” it would be exceedingly hard to find room for the idea of redemption, a concept which lies at the heart of Christian faith on the Cross. Jesus died for our sins. He died to redeem us. If there were some way, any way we could redeem ourselves or find justice in this shit hole of a world, I’m sure I would have found it. I’m a very resourceful guy, brighter than most and modest as all hell.

Atheists would have us believe you can get up each day and create your own meaning out of a meaningless void of scientific materialist matter. It works for a while. Until you get dragged kicking and screaming to the foot of the Cross and tears streaming down your face mumble those first words of prayer…”Please, God”….

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A Spiritual Reality Veiled From Us

September 8, 2009

quantumQuantum physics, which originated in work conducted by Max Planck and Albert Einstein at start of 20th Century, is a hugely successful theory: the predictions it makes about the behavior of subatomic particles are extraordinarily accurate. And yet, it raises profound puzzles about reality that remain as yet to be understood. Niels Bohr once said if quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.

In quantum mechanics any situation is a blend of every possible option of what might happen and this blend is called a wave function. This seems to work for light. Sometimes light can act as a particle and sometimes as a wave. Atoms, it has been found, seem to follow the same rules. As the world is made of atoms, the world must follow the rules of quantum mechanics. Obviously in the real world life doesn’t spend its time sitting on the fence, things just happen. But in quantum mechanics things happen only when this wave function collapses and only one possibility is left.

At some point a situation has to stop having every possible outcome. When an event is observed then all the other possibilities suddenly disappear. It’s like saying that the universe is based on chance. One enormous casino. What happens next is based on chance not on an absolute certainty. Imagine the universe as a horse race with lots of evenly matched horses. Until the race is over you can’t tell which horse is going to win. With quantum mechanics the idea is that the race isn’t over until someone decides to check on the result. This is where the science fiction idea of ‘parallel universes’ comes from. If every possible outcome is waiting to happen perhaps it really does happen in another quantum universe. Every horse wins in some reality.

Erwin Schrödinger was the man who first discovered the equations that quantum mechanics relies on. Even he couldn’t believe the idea that nothing happens until someone looks to check it. He invented the most famous cat in science – Schrödinger’s cat. If nothing happens until it is observed then imagine the following. A cat is put in a box with a small gadget that will release poison. This poison will be released by something that is controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics, for example radioactive decay. Radioactive atoms are ones that are unstable and spontaneously break down into smaller atoms. So there is a lump of radioactive material and a device to detect if an atom has broken down. This atomic break-up has a 50:50 chance of happening in one hour. According to quantum mechanics, until the box is opened an hour later both outcomes should co-exist. The cat should be both dead and alive at the same time until someone observes the result.

Despite what some people think, this story was meant to show how Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics was wrong. It was just an interpretation. There is an easier way of thinking about this. Quantum mechanics does seem to explain a lot of things about atoms and light. This craziness of a cat that is both dead and alive only applies if you stick to the idea that everything happens until it is measured by a person. There is no paradox if you just change to the idea that a quantum event happens when the result interacts with anything. When the radioactive atom in the box decays, the cat will only die when the radioactivity detector in the box detects it. When a particle that follows quantum mechanics interacts with anything it has to commit to being one thing or another. So a quantum mechanic event can set up a sequence of events that end up with a cat that is dead or alive without needing it be both at the same time.

All this cat really tells us about quantum mechanics is that trying to use quantum mechanics to explain normal day-to-day life doesn’t work. Understanding atoms doesn’t help you understand a whole cat, but then again understanding cats doesn’t help you understand atoms, so it works both ways (no matter what cats say). Einstein’s problem with quantum mechanics was summed in the idea that ‘God doesn’t play dice’. Everyone seems to remember that but do you know not what Niels Bohr said in reply: “It is not the job of scientists to prescribe to God how he should run the world.” (Some excellent advice, were that more of his fellow scientists followed it instead of penning best sellers on atheism.) 

At the end of the day quantum mechanics does make sense in its own realm and offers explanations for strange effects that have no other explanation. In the traditional interpretation of quantum theory –sometimes also called the “Copenhagen,” “standard,” or “orthodox” interpretation — one must, to avoid paradoxes or absurdities, posit the existence of so-called “observers” who lie, at least in part, outside of the description of the world provided by physics. That is, the mathematical formalism which quantum theory uses to make predictions about the physical world cannot be stretched to cover completely the person who is observing that world. What is it about the “observer” that lies beyond physical description? Careful analysis suggests that it is some aspect of the rational mind.

This has led some eminent physicists to say that quantum theory is inconsistent with a materialistic view of the human mind. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate in physics, stated flatly that materialism is not “logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.” Sir Rudolf Peierls, another leading twentieth–century physicist, said, on the basis of quantum theory, “The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being…including its knowledge, and its consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.”

Admittedly, this is a highly controversial view. That is only to be expected, especially given the materialist prejudice that affects a large part of the scientific community. Moreover, the traditional interpretation of quantum theory has aspects that many find disturbing or implausible. Some even think (wrongly, in Dr. Steven Barr’s opinion) that the role it assigns to observers leads to subjectivism or philosophical idealism. Dissatisfaction with the traditional interpretation has led to various rival interpretations and to attempts to modify quantum theory. However, these other ideas are equally controversial. The controversy over quantum theory will not be resolved any time soon, or perhaps ever. But, even if it is not, the fact will remain that there is an argument against materialism that comes from physics itself, an argument that has been advanced and defended by some leading physicists and never refuted.

Recently the Templeton Prize, awarded for contributions to “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”, has been won by French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, who has worked on quantum physics with some of the most famous names in modern science. d’Espagnat says a spiritual reality is veiled from us, and science offers a glimpse behind that veil. The bizarre nature of quantum physics has attracted some speculations that are wacky but the theory suggests to some serious scientists that reality, at its most basic, is perfectly compatible with what might be called a spiritual view of things. Some suggest that observers play a key part in determining the nature of things. Legendary physicist John Wheeler said the cosmos “has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon, until it has been observed to happen.”

D’Espagnat worked with Wheeler, though he himself reckons quantum theory suggests something different. For him, quantum physics shows us that reality is ultimately “veiled” from us. The equations and predictions of the science, super-accurate though they are, offer us only a glimpse behind that veil. Moreover, that hidden reality is, in some sense, divine. Along with some philosophers, he has called it “Being”.

The deeper questions in physics are bound to interact with the religious/philosophical assumptions of the physicist. So how do scientists investigating the fundamental nature of the universe assess any role of God? Mark Vernon, who writes science articles, did a little research and came up with the following:

1. THE ATHEIST

Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg is well-known as an atheist. For him, physics reflects the “chilling impersonality” of the universe. He would be thinking here of, say, the vast tracts of empty space, billions of light years across, that mock human meaning. He says: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

So for Weinberg, the notion that there might be an overlap between science and spirituality is entirely mistaken: “I have to admit that, even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go, when we have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the world, because we will still be left with the question ‘why?’ Why this theory, rather than some other theory? For example, why is the world described by quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is the one part of our present physics that is likely to survive intact in any future theory, but there is nothing logically inevitable about quantum mechanics; I can imagine a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics instead. So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate.

But religious theories of design have the same problem. Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don’t. If you don’t, then what are we talking about? If you do mean something definite by ‘God’ or ‘design,’ if for instance you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical, then you still must confront the question ‘why?’ A religion may assert that the universe is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other sort of God, and it may offer evidence for this belief, but it cannot explain why this should be so.”

2. THE SKEPTIC

The Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, shows a distinct reserve when speculating about what physics might mean, whether that be pointlessness or meaningfulness. He has “no strong opinions” on the interpretation of quantum theory: only time will tell whether the theory becomes better understood. “The implications of cosmology for these realms of thought may be profound, but diffidence prevents me from venturing into them,” he has written. In short, it is good to be humble in the face of the mysteries that physics throws up.

3. THE PLATONIST

Oxford physicist Roger Penrose differs again. He believes that mathematics suggests there is a world beyond the immediate, material one. Ask yourself this question: would one plus one equal two even if I didn’t think it? The answer is yes. Would it equal two even if no-one thought it? Again, presumably, yes. Would it equal two even if the universe didn’t exist? That is trickier to contemplate, but again, there are good grounds for a positive response. Penrose, therefore, argues that there is what can be called a Platonic world beyond the material world that “contains” mathematics and other abstractions.

4. THE BELIEVER

John Polkinghorne worked on quantum physics in the first part of his career, but then took up a different line of work: he was ordained an Anglican priest. For him, science and religion are entirely compatible. The ordered universe science reveals is only what you’d expect if it was made by an orderly God. However, the two disciplines are different. He calls them “intellectual cousins”. “Physics is showing the world to be both more supple and subtle, but you need to be careful,” he says. If you want to understand the meaning of things you have to go beyond science, and the religious direction is, he argues, the best.

5. THE PANTHEIST

Brian Swimme is a cosmologist, and with the theologian Thomas Berry, wrote a book called The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era. It is avidly read by individuals in New Age and ecological circles, and tells the scientific story of the universe, from the Big Bang to the emergence of human consciousness, but does so as a new sacred myth. Swimme believes that “the universe is attempting to be felt”, which makes him a pantheist, someone who believes the cosmos in its entirety can be called God.

The simple explanations of quantum theory come from a kids’ science blog called “journeybystarlight.”

The final post from Dr. Barr is here:

http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/05/27/annals-of-atheism-v-the-scientist-debunking-himself/

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Considering the Philosophy And Theology of Thomas Aquinas

September 4, 2009

Joos Gent Portrait of St. Thomas circa 1475

Joos Gent Portrait of St. Thomas circa 1475

Philosophy And Theology

Aquinas thought and wrote as a Christian. He was primarily a theologian. At the same time, he relied heavily upon the philosophy of Aristotle in writing his theological works. That he brought together philosophy and theology did not mean that he confused these two disciplines. On the contrary, it was his view that philosophy and theology played complementary roles in man’s quest for truth. Like his teacher Albert the Great, Aquinas went to great pains to delineate the boundaries between faith and reason, indicating what philosophy and theology respectively could and could not provide to the human mind.

That he wished to combine the insights of these two disciplines reflected the dominant religious orientation of thirteenth-century thought, in that knowledge of God was considered of decisive importance. What made the correct knowledge of God so essential was that any basic errors on this subject could affect the direction of a person’s life, directing him either toward or away from God, who is man’s ultimate end. Philosophy and theology were therefore viewed in relation to man’s end, being distinguished by their different ways of contributing to man’s knowledge of God. Philosophy proceeds from principles discovered by human reason, whereas theology is the rational ordering of principles received from authoritative revelation and held as a matter of faith. Aquinas’ philosophy, then, consists for the most part in that portion of his theology that we should call natural theology and that Aquinas considered rationally demonstrable.

Aquinas saw specific differences between philosophy and theology, between reason and faith. For one thing, philosophy begins with the immediate objects of sense experience and reasons upward to more general conceptions until, as in Aristotle’s case, the mind fastens upon the highest principles or first causes of being, ending in the conception of God. Theology, on the other hand, begins with a faith in God and interprets all things as creatures of God. There is here a basic difference in method, since the philosopher draws his conclusions from his rational description of the essences of things, whereas the theologian rests the demonstration of his conclusions upon the authority of revealed knowledge.

Again, theology and philosophy do not contradict each other, but not everything that philosophy discusses is significant for man’s religious end. Theology deals with what man needs to know for his salvation, and to ensure this knowledge, it was made available through revelation. Some of the truths of revelation could not ever be discovered by natural reason, whereas other elements of revealed truth could be known by reason alone but were revealed to ensure their being known, For this reason, there is some overlapping between philosophy and theology.

For the most part, however, philosophy and theology are two separate and independent disciplines. Wherever reason is capable of knowing something, faith, strictly speaking, is unnecessary, and what faith uniquely knows through revelation cannot be known by natural reason alone. Both philosophy and theology deal with God, but the philosopher can only infer that God exists and cannot by reflecting upon the objects of sensation understand God’s essential nature. There is, nevertheless, a coalescence of the object of philosophy and theology since they are both concerned with truth.

Aristotle had considered the object of philosophy the study of first principles and causes, the study of being and its causes, and this led to a First Mover, which he understood as the ground of truth in the universe. This is the philosophical way of saying what the theologian has set as his object of knowledge, namely, God’s being and the truth this reveals about the created world. To discover the chief aspects of Aquinas’ philosophy, then, it is necessary to take from his theological writings those portions of it in which he attempts to demonstrate truths in a purely rational way His philosophical approach is particularly evident in his attempts to demonstrate the existence of God

Proofs Of God’s Existence Aquinas formulated five proofs or ways of demonstrating the existence of God. His approach was the opposite of Anselm’s. Anselm began his proof with the idea of a perfect being “than which no greater can be conceived,” from which he inferred the existence of that being inasmuch as the actual existence is greater than the mere idea of a perfect being.

By contrast, Aquinas said that all knowledge must begin with our experience of sense objects. Instead of beginning with innate ideas of perfection, Aquinas rested all five of his proofs upon the ideas derived from a rational understanding of the ordinary objects that we experience with our senses. The chief characteristic of all sense objects is that their existence requires a cause. That every event or every object requires a cause is something the human intellect knows as a principle whenever, but not until, it comes in contact with experience. By the light of natural reason, the intellect knows, by experiencing events, that for every effect there must be a cause, that ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing. To demonstrate that God exists, Aquinas relied, then, first upon his analysis of sense objects and secondly upon his notion that the existence of these objects requires a finite series of causes and ultimately a First Cause, or God.

Proof from Motion We are certain, because it is evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. It is equally clear to us that whatever is in motion was moved by something else. If a thing is at rest, it wifi never move until something else moves it. When a thing is at rest, it is only potentially in motion. Motion occurs when something potentially in motion is moved and is then actually in motion; motion is the transformation of potentiality into actuality. Imagine a series of dominoes standing next to each other. When they are set up in a row, it can be said that they are all potentially in motion, though actually at rest.

Consider a particular domino. Its potentiality is that it will not move until it is knocked over by the one next to it. It will move only if it is moved by something actually moving. From this fact, Aquinas drew the general conclusion that nothing can be transformed from a state of potentiality by something that is also in a mere state of potentiality. A domino cannot be knocked over by another domino that is standing still. Potentiality means the absence of something and is therefore nothing; for this reason, potential motion in the neighboring domino cannot move the next one because it is nothing and you cannot derive motion from non-motion.

As Aquinas says, “nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality except by something in a state of actuality.” Moreover, it is not possible for the same thing, for example a domino, to be at the same time in actuality and potentiality regarding motion. What is actually at rest cannot be simultaneously in motion. This means that the particular domino cannot be simultaneously the that is moved and also the mover. Something potentially in motion cannot move itself. Whatever is moved must be moved by another. The last domino to fall was potentially in motion, but so was the next to the last. Each domino could become a mover only after it had been moved by the one prior to it.

Here we corne to Aquinas’ decisive point:  If we are to account for motion, we cannot do so by going back in an infinite regress. If we must say about each mover in this series that it in turn was moved by a prior mover, we would never discover the source of motion, because every mover would then be only potentially in motion Even if such a series went back infinitely, each one would still be only potential, and 1mm that no actual motion could ever emerge The fact is, however, that there is motion. There must therefore be a Mover, which is able to move things but which does not itself have to be moved, and this, says Aquinas, “everyone understands to be God.”

Two things need to be noticed about this proof: First, Aquinas does not limit his concept of motion to things such as dominoes, that is, to locomotion. He has in mind the broadest meaning of motion so as to include the idea of generation and creation. Secondly, for Aquinas the First Mover is not simply the first member of a long series of causes, as though such a Mover was just like the others, its only distinction being that it is the first. Clearly, this could not be the case, for then this Mover would also be only potentially in motion. The First Mover must therefore be pure Actuality without potentiality and is therefore First not in the series but in actuality.

Proof from Efficient Cause We experience various kinds of effects, and in every case we assign an efficient cause to each effect. The efficient cause of the statue is the work of the sculptor. If we took away the activity of the sculptor, we should not have the effect, the statue. flut there is an order of efficient causes; the parents of the sculptor are his efficient cause. Workers in the quarry are the efficient cause of this particular piece of marble’s availability to the sculptor. There is, in short, an intricate order of efficient causes traceable in a series.

Such a series of causes is demanded because no event can be its own cause; the sculptor does not cause himself, and the statue does not cause itself. A cause is prior to an effect. Nothing, then, can be prior to itself; hence, events demand a prior cause. Each prior cause must itself have its own cause, as parents must have their own parents. But it is impossible to go backward to infinity, because all the causes in the series depend upon a first efficient cause that has made all the other causes to be actual causes. There must then be a first efficient cause “to which everyone gives the name of God.”

Proof from Necessary versus Possible Being In nature we find that things are possible to be and not to be. Such things are possible or contingent because they do not always exist; they are generated and are corrupted. There was a time when a tree did not exist; it exists, and finally it goes out of existence. To say, then; that it is possible for the tree to exist, must mean that it is also possible for it not to exist. The possibility for the tree not to exist must be taken two ways; first, it is possible for the tree never to come into existence, and secondly, once the tree is in existence, there is the possibility that it will go out of existence. To say, then, that something is possible must mean that at both ends of its being, that is, before it comes into being and after it goes out of being, it does not exist, Possible being has this fundamental characteristic, namely, that it can not-be, It can not-be not only after having existed but more importantly before it is generated, caused, or moved. For this reason something that is possible, which can not-be, in fact “at some time is not.”

All possible beings, therefore, at one time did not exist, will exist for a time, and will finally pass out of existence. Once possible things do come into existence, they can cause other similar possible beings to be generated, as when parents beget children, and so on. But Aquinas is making this argument, namely, that possible beings do not have their existence in themselves or from their own essence; and that if all things in reality were only possible, that is, if about everything one could say that it could not-be both before it is and after it is, then at one time there was nothing in existence. But if there was a time when nothing existed then nothing could start to be, and even now there would be nothing in existence, “because that which does not exist begins to exist only through something already existing.” But since our experience clearly shows us that things do exist, this must mean that not all beings are merely possible. Aquinas concludes from this that “there must exist something the existence of which is necessary.” We must therefore admit, he says, “the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others this necessity. This all men speak of as God.”

Proof from the Degrees of Perfection In our experience we find that some beings are more and some less good, true, and noble. But these and other ways of comparing things are possible only because things resemble in their different ways something that is the maximum. There must be something that is truest, noblest, and best. Similarly, since it can be said about things that they have more or less being, or a lower or higher form of being, as when we compare a stone with a rational creature, there must also be “something which is most being.” Aquinas then argues that the maximum in any genus is the cause of everything in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things. From this, Aquinas concludes that “there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.”

Proof from the Order of the Universe We see that things such as parts of the natural world or parts of the human body, which do not possess intelligence, behave in an orderly manner. They act in special and predictable ways to achieve certain ends or functions. Because these things act to achieve ends always, or nearly always, in the same way and to achieve the best results, “it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly.” But things that lack intelligence, such as an ear or a lung, cannot carry out a function unless it be directed by something that does have intelligence, as the arrow is directed by the archer. Aquinas concludes, therefore, that “some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their ends; and this being we call God.”

Summary The two major characteristics of these five proofs are (1) their foundation in sense experience and (2) their reliance upon the notion of causality. In addition, the first three proofs do not as obviously lead to the idea of what all men call God, a personal being. These are, however, proofs that Aquinas considered philosophical corroborations of the religious notion of God, and they, it must be remembered, were composed in the context of his theological task.

Moreover, many of Aquinas’ illustrations, as, for example, that fire is the maximum of heat, and his assumptions, that order, for example, presupposes an intelligence independent of the natural process, raise for the modern mind critical questions. Still, Aquinas was deliberately employing the insights he had derived from Aristotle, Maimonides, and Albert the Great in order, by means of these philosophical arguments, to make the religious claim of God’s existence intellectually defensible.

His own view was that the argument from motion was the most obvious of all. The third one, comparing possible and necessary being, appears, however, to contain the most philosophical rigor and the basic assumption of all the other proofs, namely, that possible beings must derive their existence from something that has its existence necessarily in itself.

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Book Recommendation: Dante The Poetics of Conversion — John Freccero

September 3, 2009

frecerro boolAs followers of this site are familiar with, I post a lot on the topic of the Divine Comedy and over the years have read several books concerning it. One of my favorites is by John Freccero who has written and taught about Dante for years. The essays that form this book were originally published between 1959 and 1984 and are arranged to follow the order of the Comedy. Thus they form an excellent companion for a reader of the poem. A reader has commented “Freccero is the best contemporary critic of Dante. He is ….a critic of eclectic and not dogmatic persuasion. Throughout Freccero operates on the fundamental premise that there is always an intricate and crucial dialectic at work between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim, and that it is this dialectic that makes the work so profoundly dramatic, one of the great novels of the self.” I couldn’t agree more.  He keeps us focused on the big picture, never getting lost in the minutiae of theology or historical or cultural differences.

“T.S. Eliot wrote that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.” John Freccero has devoted his career to studying the former, but indicates that, given the opportunity, he’d rather hang out with the latter. Shakespeare, he says, would be the loud friend who’s quick to toss out a lewd remark or buy another round at the bar. Dante would be the quiet one in the corner looking on with a disapproving air. “You wouldn’t want to grab a beer with him. He’s so austere and rigid,” says Freccero, the country’s leading expert on Dante and The Divine Comedy. “When you read Dante and don’t understand it, you know it’s your fault.”

Here are a series of reading selections, things that slapped me upside the head as I read Dante The Poetics of Conversion.

Conversion
Conversion, a death and resurrection of self, is the experience that marks the difference between such confessions and facile counterfeits. In the poem, the difference between the attempt to scale the mountain, the journey that fails, and the successful journey that it prefigures is a descent in humility, a death of the self represented by the journey through hell.

Augustine’s Askesis
“And lo, there was I received by the scourge of bodily sickness, and I was going down to Hell, carrying all the sins which I had committed, both against Thee and against myself, and others, many grievous, over and above that bond of original sin, whereby we all die in Adam…So true, then, was the death of my soul, as that of His flesh seemed to me false; and how true the death of His body, so false was the life of my soul.”

This Inverted World
The descent into hell, whether metaphorical as in the Confessions, or dramatically real as in Dante’s poem, is the first step on the journey to the truth. It has the effect of shattering the inverted values of this life (which is death, according to Christian rhetoric) and transforming death into authentic life. The inversion of values…what seems up is in fact down; what seems transcendence is in fact descent…just as the reversed world of Plato’s myth in the Statesman represented a world of negative values…Augustine alludes to Plato’s myth when he describes his own spiritual world before conversion as a ‘regio dissimilitudinis’ (region of unlikeness)…Augustine turns to the light of the Platonic vision, only to discover he is too weak to endure it. He is beaten back by the light and falls, weeping, to the things of this world…(He asks himself) “why God had given him certain books of Napoleonic philosophy to read before leading him to Scripture.” (He answers) “So that I might know the difference between presumption and confession: between those who saw where they were to go, yet saw not the way, and the way itself, that led not to behold only, but to dwell in the beatific country.”…This is the dramatic purpose of Dante’s prologue scene.

The Wounded Will
No reader of Dante’s first canto can fail to remember that after resting his tired body, the pilgrim sets off to his objective “si che ‘l pie fermo sempre era ‘l piu basso”

And as he who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to look back on the dangerous waters, so my mind which was still fleeing turned back to gaze upon the pass  that never left anyone alive

The pie fermo signifies the pilgrim’s will, unable to respond to the promptings of the reason because of the Pauline malady, characteristic of the fallen man whose mind far outstrip the ability of a wounded will to attain the truth. The fallen will limps in its efforts to reach God…Augustine insists upon the inability of the will to complete the journey:

I was troubled in spirit, most vehemently indignant that I entered not into Thy Will
and Covenant, O my God, which all my bones cried out unto me to enter, and praised
it to the skies. And therein we did not enter by ships, or chariots, or feet, nor move not
so far as I had come from the house to that place where we were sitting. For, not to go
only, but to go in thither was nothing else but to will to go, but to will resolutely and
thoroughly; not to turn and toss, this way and that, a maimed and half-divided will,
struggling, with one part sinking as another rose.

Augustine Learns From His Weakness
The light of God, even perceived with the neoplatonic eyes of the soul, proves too much for Augustine…And thou didst beat back the weakness of my sight streaming forth Thy beams of light upon me most strongly, and I trembled with love and awe; and I perceived myself to be far off from Thee, in the region of unlikeness, as if I heard this Thy voice from on high ‘I am the food of grown men, grow and thou shalt feed upon Me..’

The Guide
The ancients saw no need for a guide on such a journey…Plotinius explicitly says that one requires self-confidence to reach the goal, rather than a guide. Augustine interpreted this as philosophical pride…the element that vitiated all such attempts…His own interior journey begins with an insistence upon hi need for help: “And being thence admonished to return to myself, I entered upon into my inward self, Thou being my guide; and I was able for thou were become my Helper. And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul (such as it was) above the same eye of my soul, above my mind, the Light Unchangeable.”

Humility
The theme of humility is the closest analogue to the landscape in which Dante begins his poem and is revealed in the final passage from Augustine’s seventh book of his Confessions: ‘They [the Platonists] disdain to learn of him [Christ], because he is gentle and humble of the earth; for these things has Thou hid from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. For it is one thing, from a wooded mountain-top to see the land of peace and to find no way thither; and in vain to essay through  ways impassable, opposed and beset by fugitives and deserters, under their captain the lion and the dragon: and another to keep on the way that leads thither, guarded by the host of the heavenly General; where they spoil not who have deserted the heavenly army.’

Dante’s Pilgrim and Augustine’s World
Compare the shadowy world of the pilgrim with Augustine’s region of unlikeness…vulnerati sumus ingredients mundum (we are already wounded when we enter the world)..Augustine distinguishes between  three types of philosophers. The first wander never far; yet find the place of tranquility and become beacons to their fellow men. The second, ‘deceived by the deceptive appearance of the sea, choose to set out on the open sea and dare to wander far from their country, often forgetting about it. If…the wind, which they deem favorable, keeps blowing from the poop, they enter proudly and rejoicing into an abyss of misery…What else can we wish them but… a violent tempest and contrary winds, to lead them in spite of their sighs and tears to certain and solid joys?’…Those of the third category…perceive certain signs which remind them of their dear homeland…and, either they find their home again without wandering or delay, or more often, they lose their way in the fog or fix upon stars that sink in the sea. Again they are sometimes held back by various seductions and miss the best time for setting sail. They wander for a long time and even risk shipwreck. It often happens to such men that some calamity, arising in the midst of their good fortune, like a tempest opposing their efforts, drives them back to the homeland of their desires and of their peace.

The Pilgrim and the Poet
The Pilgrim’s view is much like our own view of history and of ourselves: partial, perhaps confused, still in the making. But the poet’s view is far different, for it is global and comprehensive, the total view of a man who looks at the world, his neighborhood, and indeed himself with all the detachment of a cultural anthropologist. The process of the poem, which is to say the progress of the pilgrim, is transformation of the problematic and humanistic into the certain and transcendent, from novelistic involvement to epic detachment, from a synchronic view of he self in a dark  wood to a diachronic total view of the entire world as if it were, to use Dante’s powerful image, a humble threshing floor upon which a providential history will one day separate the wheat from the chaff.

Dante’s View From Paradise
The view from Paradise is a spatial translation what might be called a memory of universal history. The coherence of the whole poem may be grasped only with a view to its totality, a view from the ending, just as the coherence of the poet’s life could be grasped only in retrospect, for the perspective of totality in death…in the linear time that is ours such a perspective is impossible, for it implies a survival of our own death and the death of the world…For Dante and Augustine there was a death which enabled the mind to grasp such totalities, not by virtue of linear evolution, but rather by transcendence: a death of detachment…the cognition of the blessed…the position from which one could see one’s former self, in the totality that is present in God…a poem had to be understood as a unity, not because it was a ‘literary object’ but rather because its significance could be grasped only when its process was completed. This was not simply  a literary fact, but rather the outward sign of a spiritual reality…[From Augustine’s Confessions ‘I am about to repeat a Psalm I know. Before I begin, my expectation is extended over the totality; but when I have begun, however much of it I shall separate off into the past is extended along my memory…until the whole expectation be at length exhausted, when that whole action being ended, shall have passed into memory.. The same takes place in the whole life of man, whereof all the actions of man are parts; the same holds through the whole age of the sons of men, whereof all the lives of men are parts.

Convergence of Pilgrim And Poet
The synthesis of eternity and time is the goal of the entire journey: the vision of the Incarnation… the convergence of the pilgrim and the poet is matched by the conceptual convergence of humanity and the divine…Augustine’s biography is concerned with words.. the ending of the Christian autobiography is silence;  ‘For that voice passed by and passed away, began and ended; the syllables sounded and passed away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last after the rest, and silence after the last…And those Thy words created for a time. The outward ear reported to the intelligent soul, whose inward ear lay listening to Thy Eternal Word.’

Dante’s Pilgrim Awakening

E come quei che con lena affannata,
uscito fuor del pelago a la riva,
si volge a l'acqua perigliosa e guata,
così l'animo mio, ch'ancor fuggiva,
si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo
che non lasciò già mai persona viva.

And as he who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to look back on the dangerous waters, so my mind which was still fleeing turned back to gaze upon the pass which never left anyone alive.

Knowledge Without Virtue; Spirit Is Willing, Flesh Is Weak

Poi ch'èi posato un poco il corpo lasso,
ripresi via per la piaggia diserta,
sì che 'l piè fermo sempre era 'l più basso.

After I had rested my tired body a little, I again took up my way across the desert strand, so that the firm foot was always the lower.

The Movement Of The Soul
The poem is an itinerary, a “cammino”, of this life, made by a soul. Just as a body moves with its feet, so the body of the soul, so to speak, moves with twin powers, and to say that the two are not working in harmony as in normal movement is to say something very important about this first attempted journey, in an allegorical language that has a long tradition.

Augustinean Metaphor On The Movement Of The Soul
Let us hold true to what we have attained. This walking is not performed by corporeal feet, but by affections of mind and habits of life (mentis affectibus et vitae moribus) in order that they might be perfect possessors of righteousness whom advancing on the upright path of faith, renewing themselves from day to day, finally become wayfarers (viatores) in such justice.

Gregory The Great: More Feet Of The Soul Images
Commenting on Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, he identifies the feet as love of  God and love of the world. After contact with the absolute, Jacob limps, for his love for the world decays, just as the soul which holds on to the angel “supports itself, with all virtue, on the foot of the love of God alone. And it stands  on that foot alone because it now holds suspended above the earth the foot of the love of the world which it has been accustomed to placing on the ground.

St. Bonaventure’s “Syllogism of Sin”
The movements of the soul are analogous to the movement of the body…just as the heart is at once the end of one movement and the beginning of another, the act of choice, residing in the soul is the end of one movement (that of the mind) and he beginning of another (the appetite)…St. Bonaventure’s “Syllogism of Sin”: Our internal movements are short paths leading quickly to death because they contain only four steps by which the feet of the soul run to death. One foot is the movement of reason, the other the movement of appetite; the first is on the right, the second on the left, since the right foot is moved fist, and the left afterward, for “apprehension precedes appetite,” according to the Philosopher. The first step of the right foot is awareness of the sin, the second, that of the left foot, is desire, the third of the right foot deliberation, and the fourth of the left foot, choice.”

The Role Of Sanctifying Grace
We know here which foot it is that moves out toward the good, for the good is the object of the will, as the truth is the object of the reason. Perfect desire follows perfect intellection, and such perfection can only be te product of sanctifying grace. If one or the other of the feet is lacking or defective, the journey cannot end in success, for we have it on the authority of St. Thomas that the mind must move to God et per illectum et per affectum. Unfortunately for man in his fallen state, Thomas goes on to say, “the intellect is stronger in understanding (cognoscendo) than the affections in loving (diligendo), wherefore Augustine says that the intellect precedes and affections follow upon it, either slowly or not at all (sequitor tardus aut nullus affectus)

The Effects Of The Fall
Ever since Adam’s sin, man’s ability to see the good has outdistanced his ability to do it on his own, for in the life without the sanctifying grace, the middle ground of which St. Paul was so painfully aware, only one foot takes the forward step…The wounds of the feet were the residual  effect of the fall [of Adam]. The right foot intellectus, suffered the wound of ignorance; the left, affectus, that of concupiscence. ..by his sin [Adam] lost his double perfection and fell into ignorance and concupiscence: ignorantia boni et concupiscent mali. St Paul:  It must be noted that the ignorance of good and the concupiscence of evil, which are the effects of the sin of the first man, are the original sin for all those not reborn (baptized). But we must realize that the concupiscence of evil is called a burden because it is difficult to avoid the concupiscence of the carnal bond. Whence the Apostle said, “For the Good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”…

Concupiscence
Concupiscence in its broadest sense was the wound suffered by the affectus.. The loss of reason’s control over each of  the three powers of the faculty of appetite [malice, bestiality and incontinence the dispositions incarnate in fraud, violence and lust correspond to the disorders in the rational, irascible and concupiscent appetites]…in the allegory of Eden concupiscence plays the role of the serpent, and in many moments of he soul’s existence, the drama of Eden is reenacted…the serpent suggests a course of illicit action, and if it is not immediately suppressed the consequence is sin. Only grace can help suppress his first movement of concupiscence, but the movement itself can never be totally eradicated in this life.

The Origin of The Three Beasts: Three Categories Of Sin In The Inferno
The three beasts first seen in Jeremiah 5; Jeremiah 4:6 –

Therefore a lion from the forest will attack them,
a wolf from the desert will ravage them,
a leopard will lie in wait near their towns
to tear to pieces any who venture out,
for their rebellion is great
and their backslidings many. —

Represent man’s shortcomings, the shortcomings of human nature.

Exodus Failed
If this is so, then the journey without a guide, the frustrated attempt to climb the mountain in the first canto of the Inferno, must be considered an exodus that failed, a temporary escape that was not a definitive departure from “Egypt,” but merely a disastrous sortie. From the pilgrim’s perspective, the final barrier on the difficult road to the summit seems to be the world; the view from heaven, however, refers to another , equally formidable, barrier. So we must assume from the words of Lucy when she calls upon Beatrice to help the pilgrim who finds himself blocked, impedito, on the desert slope:

Non odi tu la pieta del suo pianto,
non vedi tu la morte che ‘l combatte
su la fiumana ove ‘l mar non ha vanto?”

Do you not see the river of death that assails him on
That river over which the sea has no boast?
Do you not hear the anguish in his cry?
Do you not see the death he wars against
upon that river ruthless as the sea?”

The Figura In The Inferno
…as soon as we realize that the ”view” from paradise, being that of the ending of the poem, is the view of the poet himself. In as sense, the purpose of the entire journey is to write the poem, to attain the vantage point of Lucy and of all the blessed, from which to perceive the figura [medieval name for structural principle of Christian History] and the coherence in life, and to bear witness to that coherence for other men…The journey and the poem is itself are therefore inseparable; the figure of Exodus is not only the subject matter of the story, but also, in Dante’s view, a precondition for he existence of it. Since both the journey of the pilgrim and the struggle of the self to capture its own essence in retrospect depend on a conversion they may therefore be described according to the traditional biblical figure for such an experience — an Exodus from Egypt to Jerusalem — and they take place within the prescribed limits of Dante’s life….Only from Jerusalem could the Jews have written their national epic, for then the myriad extraneous details of the journey could be separated from  those events which seemed to reveal the providential structure of their exodus. Similarly the Book Of Exodus could be interpreted as prophetic only when read from the perspective of he New Testament as fulfillment of the Old.

The Narrative of The Book Of Exodus
It remains for Joshua to take command and to lead is people into Jerusalem. Once more, an act of God is required before this can occur, for the river Jordan is flooded and must be parted by another miracle before Israel can cross. Thus there are three stages along the way: the Red Sea, the desert, the river Jordan, and the journey cannot be complete until the last step has been taken…the last stage on he way to perfection is the most difficult to take, for …it is the work of sanctifying grace.

The River Jordan And Oceanos
The spiritual importance of the Jordan in the baptismal liturgy led very early to statements about its geographic “transcendency” in terms reminiscent of the descriptions of Oceanos [the father of all waters] in antiquity. Gregory of Nyssa for example, speaking of he Jordan insists upon its cosmic importance: “For indeed the river of grace flows everywhere. It does not rise in Palestine to disappear in some nearby sea. It spreads over the whole earth and floes into paradise, flowing in the opposite direction to those four rivers which come from Paradise and bringing in things far more precious that those which come forth.. The river Jordan qualifies as a Christian Oceanos and is for this reason superior to any other body of water.

Origen: The Souls Progress to Grace and Stages of the Exodus
And you who have just abandoned he darkness of idolatry.. then it is that you begin first to leave Egypt. When you have been included in the number of catechumens [those who are being taught the principles of Christianity] …you have passed over the Red Sea. And if you come to the sacred font of Baptism …you shall enter into the land of promise.

Thomas Aquinas: Crossing of the Red Sea And The River Jordan
It should be said that the crossing of the Red Sea prefigures baptism insofar as that baptism takes away sin But the crossing of the River Jordan insofar as it opens the gates of heaven, which is more important effect of baptism, can be fulfilled only by Christ. It is more fitting that Christ should be baptized in the Jordan rather than in the Sea.

St Bonaventure: The Typology of Baptism According To Conversion
There are three crossings, that is, the crossing that is the beginning (incipientum) and the crossing that is in the making (proficientium) and the crossing that is an arrival (pervenientium) …this then is the threefold paschal crossing, of which he first is through the sea of contrition, the second through the desert of religion, and the third through the Jordan of death; and thus we arrive at the promised land…It is clear from the words describing these crossings (incipientum, proficientium and pervenientium) that Bonaventure has the moral sense of exodus in mind, which in Dante’s words, the soul is brought out of the state of misery and grief into the state of grace, which is to say, sanctifying or “pervenient” grace.

Grace Death And Resurrection
..in the prologue scene , he is blocked on the shores of a fiumana which he cannot cross until, like Christ, he descends to the depths of the earth. The implication seems to be that the preparation for grace lies within the competence of man, in the purely natural order. However only Beatrice can bring the pilgrim the grace that is need to accomplish a death and resurrection…That is to state what we have known all along: were it not for Beatrice neither the journey nor the poem could have come into existence.

Extinction of A False Self
In a Christian context, all salvation is a consequence of  the death of the self. ..Unless one understands the death of the self involved in Dante’s experience (as pilgrim and author) there is no way of appreciating he drama of he Inferno. The fear expressed by the pilgrim along the way constitute the very askesis that make rebirth possible…Dante’s river of death represents exactly the same sort of limit-situation. Short of the barrier, progress is impossible; beyond here seems to be only extinction. The story is testimony of the fact that this extinction of a false self in an inverted world is a necessary step before authentic life, and the story  can be born…As readers of he story, we cannot know the experience of a death and resurrection. It is of this reason the story was written; as a confession of faith for other men.

Descent In Humility
Augustine expressed with the exhortation “Descend so that you may ascend.”  In the spiritual life, one must descend in humility before one an begin the ascent to truth, and in the physical world , according to both Dante and Aristotle, one must travel downward with respect to our hemisphere in order to rise. …The pilgrim in the prologue scene is a man left to himself, unable to order his appetites to his reason, This spiritual disorder, which Aristotle called “incontinence”, is represented by the pilgrim’s inability to move his feet consecutively, just as Plato represented disorder in the soul by the figure of the limping man. Unfortunately for man in his fallen state, the soul’s powers are not equal to the task  of moving toward God for  the intellect is stronger in knowing than is the will in loving, or to state the matter in another way, the affections bind the intellect…The Christian does not begin at zero point on his journey, but rather from the world of generation and corruption, a topsy-turvy world of inflated pride where directions and values are both inverted. Although the fall from grace left the natural light intact, it involved the will in a conversion to lower things, and the consequent distortion can be cured only by a descent in humility and an ascent to grace. Before the soul can make progress, the twisted course of the will must first be unwound. A passage attributed to St. Augustine expresses the situation in much the same terms:

The love of earthly things extinguished in me the delectation of the heavenly: the having of vice emptied in me the sense of the true gifts. From those gifts am I removed, in thee evils am I occupied; secluded from them included in these; from those am I unwound, in these wound up. Here is that prison and here are those chains, here is weight and darkness.

The Sin Of Usury
This is the only sin in Dante’s Inferno which the poet specifically tells us is against human industry, for it is the only sin which methodically and systematically reproduces the materials it began with in a parody of productivity which is in fact sterile.

The Progression To Supernatural Life
Continence is the suppression of the lower powers by the higher, then tense victory of humanity over sensuality. As the victory becomes more and more secure, continence gives way to temperance, and finally, with sanctifying grace, temperance becomes rooted in the supernatural life.

Plato, Ptolemy And The Christian View Of The Soul and Movement Of The Heavens
Nevertheless there is still a deficiency in the operation of  the soul’s powers. It has yet to reach the fulfillment of its intellectual desire and its love, thanks to sanctifying grace, outdistances the ability to understand. It is the will’s nature to remaining forever unsatisfied until it reaches God and it cannot reach Him until He is seen face to face….The intricacies and the profundity of the last cantos cannot be covered here. We may simply say that as the primum mobile moves with a desire for the Empyrean so the will revolves around God, and seeks to resemble Him as closely as it can. God, the circumference and or Empyrean, causes the outermost sphere it the physical world to spin with love for Himself, as god , the center of the spiritual world, causes the will to turn about Him in eternal joy. At the supreme moment the will’s revolution is exactly equal to the mind’s internal vision and resultant rotation, and the soul’s powers are fused into a spinning unity, by the exalted and equal nature of their Object….As Plato knew nothing about a sphere beyond that of the fixed stars, so he knew nothing of the supernatural movement of the soul. To explain stellar irregularities which his predecessors had not perceived, Ptolemy posited the existence of a starless primum mobile beyond the other spheres, moving at the fastest rate and whirling all the other circles around with it. So in a Christian context, there is a dimension of the soul which transcends the human, and is touched directly by the hand of God.

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How Is Scripture The Word Of God?

September 2, 2009

Inspiration

 The capacity of the Bible to suggest ever deeper interpretation is sometimes referred to as its carrying a “sensus plenior”. In Biblical exegesis, the phrase “sensus plenior” is used to describe the “deeper meaning intended by God” but not intended by the human author. The phrase originates from the Latin, and means “fuller sense,” the plenary sense in the mind of its divine author.

The theological basis of such a claim lies in the fact that the Bible has to serve as our guide in the life of faith right until the parousia. Thus we have to believe that God has placed in Scripture a fullness of meaning, which will help and satisfy people very different from ourselves in the future just as it has helped and satisfied people very different from ourselves in the past. Scripture transforms us by turning us toward our ultimate future, our salvation.

Scripture, the word of God, uses the human words, but in terms of transformative power it is infinitely more effective than any purely human language. The word of God in Scripture brings to birth a new person. In more characteristically Catholic language for the life of grace, it generates supernatural faith, hope, and love, and in this way radically alters the pattern of human existence.

It is in this sense that we see the Bible as the Word of God: a very human product that is also a divine gift. In a saying no less true for being oft repeated, the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men.

Aidan Nichols in The Shape of Catholic Theology explores how Catholics came to view Scripture. I have cut, pasted, stitched and summarized below:

Scriptural Inspiration
Ecstatic
The Church says that God is the source of Scripture.  If canonicity deals with the question of which books have divinely given authority for the theologian, then inspiration concerns the problem of how this authority is actually mediated or present in the books that the canon includes and there have been different solutions over the years to this problem. The earliest theory of biblical inspiration saw the writing of the Bible as ecstatic or even hypnotic in character. The origin of this way of looking at the subject seems to have been the Jewish philosopher Phio of Alexandria, who was writing in about A.D. 50. Philo imagined that the writer was possessed by God, losing ordinary consciousness and letting his personality be taken over by the divine power. He would write, therefore, ecstatically, or in a trance.

Problems with Ecstatic Theory The problem with this theory is that  it would no longer be possible to speak about the “literal sense” of the Bible, in other words, the meaning which the human author intended. If Scripture were a form of automatic writing, no such authorial intention would exist for us to appeal to. Nor would it be possible to speak of a historically original meaning to a biblical text, that is, a meaning constituted by the writer’s relationship to his own contemporaries.

Further the writing of Scripture would not be historically conditioned. It would only be historical in the sense that the persons used by God as mediums for the transcribing of his message lived at definite points in historical time. But, if there is no literal sense and so no historically original sense, then there would be no need for the theologian to bother with the study of Scripture using the historical, and more especially, the historical-critical method. In other words, ninety-five percent of modern biblical scholarship would become irrelevant at a stroke, leaving only the five percent which is concerned with establishing the best texts from the manuscripts available.

Verbal Dictation The first real alternative to the hypnotic theory was the theory of verbal dictation. The remote origins of this theory lie in the patristic period; it uses concepts drawn from the Scholastics, and especially St. Thomas. Nevertheless, in its mature form it is a product of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this theory God is said to communicate the language of Scripture to the human author, giving him supernaturally those words which best suit the writer’s individuality. The author’s task is simply to be as consciously receptive as possible to what God is doing. This theory may be seen in illustrated form in many Renaissance and baroque paintings of the evangelists. A dove representing the Holy Spirit hovers around the head of a man seated at a writing desk, his ears attentive to the dove and with pen at the ready. The relation of the divine author to the human writer is now seen in terms of what the Scholastics termed “instrumental causality.” The divine author is said to be the “principal efficient cause,” the human author the “instrumental efficient cause.” An instrumental efficient cause is one that truly acts, and with a power properly its own, yet only does so when moved or used by another, the principal efficient cause. The latter, by activating the potential of the former, enables it to have an effect quite beyond it when left to itself. The stock example is of a man writing with chalk. The piece of chalk I use at the blackboard in my classroom is soft and white. It is capable, then, of producing its own proper effect, namely thick white lines. Yet left to itself the chalk is inert. To produce an effect at all it must be picked up and used. When I activate the power of the chalk I give it the effect, otherwise beyond it, of producing intelligent writing, or at any rate intelligible writing. At the same time, the instrumental cause has truly acted with its own proper power, forming the thick white lines, which are a small thing, but its own.

Problems with Verbal Dictation What would follow for theology if the verbal dictation theory were true? To begin with, the literal sense could be reinstated. The intention of the divine author is represented (adequately if not exclusively) by the intention of the human author, because the divine author uses and elevates the capacity of an individual to be a writer of literature. Similarly, we could once again speak of a historically original meaning. Because if God accommodated himself to the styles of expression of a particular individual, he must also have accommodated himself to the styles of expression of a particular age and culture of which that individual was a part. And to understand these styles of expression we must look at the styles of expression found generally in the literature contemporary with the biblical books. We can thus use the expertise of Orientalists and ancient historians to help us gauge as theologians what is being said in the biblical corpus.

But this is not to say that there would be no theological inconveniences if we decided to opt for the dictation theory. First, although Scripture would have a literal sense, it would have that sense in a purely technical way. That is, the human author would not have acquired the intention to write on a certain subject in a certain way by natural means. That intention would simply be the effect of the divine intention. Thus, even though we could determine a historically original meaning coordinate with God’s accommodation of the revealed message to the writer’s individuality, we could not determine historically the author’s intention. And to this extent the literal sense would not be securely rooted in the soil of its historical context, thus rendering theological exegesis that much more difficult. Second, the verbal dictation theory would necessarily bind the theologian to a doctrine of verbal inerrancy. Every word in the Bible would have to represent prophetic knowledge, that is, either supernatural truth or supernaturally guided natural truth. It may safely be said that if theologians are obliged to defend the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, they will have neither time nor energies left for doing anything else with their lives. This is not to say that theologians are free to deny the inerrancy of Scripture as such. But, if possible, some view of inerrancy should be adopted which takes into account the intrinsic purposes of there being a Bible in the Church in the first place. And these purposes can have little to do with advising gardeners on how to grow hyssop.

Both the hypnotic theory and the dictation theory start from the conviction that God is the author of Scripture and then try to explain how God’s authorship comes to be humanly mediated. What they regard as problematic is the human side, not the divine side. This comes through dearly in references to God as the “principal author” of Scripture (St. Thomas) or as the “only author of Scripture in the strict sense” (Henry of Ghent, a slightly later Scholastic, who died in 1293.

Subsequent Approbation And Negative Assistance Two other theories on the mediation of Scripture start from the opposite assumption, namely that Scripture is manifestly human, and then try to work up to God from below. The first such theory to emerge was the so-called theory of subsequent approbation, first associated with the Dominican friar Sixtus of Siena (1520-69) and revived in the nineteenth century. This theory holds, in effect, that inspiration is retroactive. When the Church solemnly judges a book worthy of inclusion in the canon, then owing to the church’s infallibility, from that moment on the book can be known to be an expression of divine truth — in other words, it may henceforth be called “inspired.”

As one representative of this school put it: “A book is written in a purely human manner, but later is elevated, through reception into the canon, to be an expression of divine communication to men; the Spirit of God knew from the beginning that we would adopt this work, without, however, any direct intervention in the spirit of man.” But the idea of inspiration is not simply the idea of revealed truth. The subsequent approbation theory really reduces inspiration to canonicity, forgetting that when the Church declares a book to be part of the canon she does not render it inspired but, on the contrary, claims that God has already been operative in its making, that “merely giving one’s approval to what someone else has written does not make one the author of the canon.” So this theory falls down by claiming for the Church something the Church has never dared to claim for herself.

The second theory which starts from the human side is the theory of negative assistance, which originated at Louvain under the influence of the Jesuit theology of grace but which in the nineteenth century was particularly associated with a German Premonstratensian canon, Johann Jahn (1750_1816. According to this idea, God leaves the biblical writers alone unless he sees that they are about to commit some egregious error, in which case he intervenes negatively so as to prevent them. He gives them, in other words, negative assistance.

Problems But this theory really takes the stuffing out of inspiration by saying that unless something goes hopelessly wrong, the Scriptures are just ordinary human artifacts. Neither of these theories is now open to Catholic theologians. Both were rejected by the Catholic Church at the First Vatican Council. To cite Del Filius, the Church “holds these books to be sacred and canonical not because, having been carefully composed by mere human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority, nor because they merely contain revelation with no admixture of error, but because, having been written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their author and have been delivered as such to the Church herself.”[ Vatican Council I, Dei Filius 2, DS, 3006]

However, for the sake of completeness we can note the principal implications of these theories for theology, If, per impossibile, these theories were true, then there would be nothing other to Scripture than the literal sense. There would be no possibility of a sensus plenior, a further dimension of meaning intended by the divine author but not consciously grasped by the human author yet made available to us by such factors as the interrelation of the biblical books, their relation to Christ, the Church, and the Christian life, and their being read in light of Tradition. This further dimension, which makes all the difference between a purely historical-critical reading of the Bible and a fully theological reading, would no longer exist. The Church could of course still make whatever use she wanted of the Bible in preaching the faith, but in so doing she would as often as not be using the Scriptures by abusing them — accommodating them to purposes for which they were never intended by anyone, not even by God, since he, on these theories, is not their author.

Pope Leo XIII The modern Church understanding of mediation of Scripture emerged  in 1893 when Leo XIII (1810-1903) promulgated the first papal encyclical on the Bible, Providentissimus Deus, in which he noted that unless God has in some manner influenced the minds, wills, and writing abilities of the human authors, there is precious little point in calling him the author of Scripture at all.[ Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, DS, 393] The Second Vatican Council, in its remarks about inspiration, was content to endorse this unexceptionable statement.[ Vatican Council II, Dej verbum ii.] However, between the First Vatican Council and Pope Leo on the one hand, and the Second Vatican Council and ourselves on the other, a number of new theories of inspiration emerged, all sharing a good deal of common ground.

To begin with, it is accepted, following tradition, that Pope Leo’s core statement must be respected. Divine inspiration must mean divine influence on the minds and wills of biblical writers, or the words are so many vibrations of the air. Second, and following this time not the truth of tradition but the truth of established scholarly fact, the biblical writers remained people of their own time and place. It may be said that the problem of biblical inspiration consists in relating these two points in the most convincing and elegant way possible. In order to do this, theologians have sought enlightenment by comparing inspiration to our understanding of how God reveals himself to humans, as that is found in Christian doctrine as a whole. To do this is to appeal to the analogy of faith, to profit from the fact that the common faith of the Church is not a set of disparate teachings, each unconnected with the rest, but is a coherent, interconnected unity in which any one part can be illuminated by looking to the rest.

Chalcedonian Theories Of Biblical Inspiration Two points are relevant in a comparison of biblical inspiration with the general pattern of God’s self-disclosure to us. First, God as Creator can modify directly any aspect of his creation, and in particular the human mind and will, since these are intrinsically open to his action. But, second, God does not normally modify our minds and wills, bringing them to faith, without the cooperation of other creatures in this process.

My coming to faith was made up to two things: the preaching of the Church and so the cooperation of creatures on the one hand, and on the other interior divine grace, assisting me to recognize and respond to divine truth in that preaching. Using the analogy of faith, we can compare this to what goes on in biblical inspiration. To the church’s preaching would correspond the natural environment of the biblical author. This environment is providentially placed there by God, just as the pamphlets of the Catholic Truth Society have providentially awaited a convert poking about at the back of a Catholic church. To interiorize divine grace there would correspond, then, to the charism of inspiration, God assisting the biblical author to respond to the providential but natural environment in the way God wants.

The natural environment, or materials of the author, are all the relevant creaturely realities known to that person — nature, historical events, general human traditions, distinctively Jewish traditions, the words, actions, and sufferings of Jesus in his humanity, the common life of the early Church, and, finally, ideas about how to write a book concerned with some or all of these. The author responds in a normal authorial way to this human environment, but God so acts on the mind and will that the author’s response to his or her environment is the saving message that God wants to communicate. To resume the Christological comparison, the human life of Jesus is the life of the eternal Word as projected into space and time. So much for what is, I think, common ground to all Chalcedonian theories of biblical inspiration.

Three major but divergent perspectives on the common ground can be noted:

  1. First, there is the theory of formal inspiration put forward by the Austrian Jesuit Johann Baptist Cardinal Franzelin (1816-.86) Frauzelin’s theory of inspiration attained a vastly wider audience through its adoption in C. Perrone, Praelectiones theologicae, a work of foundational theology which went into thirty-one editions between 1835 and 1865] Franzelin argued that what God did in inspiring was to communicate the divine meaning of the relevant human realities. Thus inspiration is purely formal; it has no material content in terms of actual language in the way that the verbal dictation theory alleged. Somewhat confusingly, Franzelin’s theory is also called “idea” or “content” inspiration, because it holds thought content to be given by God, but not linguistic expression. But the trouble with this is that it is hard to see how a meaning could be communicated independently of language.
    A discarnate, unembodied meaning might be compared to the smile on the face of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland A world where smiles remain when the faces they have wreathed have disappeared can only be labelled “wonderland” Franzelin’s theory found itself criticized, therefore, as “Psychological vivisection”
  2. Second, there is directionalism, the idea of Eugene Lévesque (1855-1944), who was professor of exegesis at the great Parisian seminary of St. Sulpice from 1893 onwards. Lévesque suggested that the interior aspect of inspiration is an impulse to communicate one’s materials in a certain way, a certain “direction.” [E. Lévesque, in the Revue biblique for 1895.] This theory has much in common with the view of inspiration put forward by the late Père Pierre Benoit of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem For Benoit, the biblical author’s act of writing follows from a practical judgment; not a judgment which consists in starting to believe a particular thing, but a judgment which is a decision to do a particular thing, namely, to write a particular kind of book. Benoit points out that much of the Bible is not concerned with propositional truths or even with truth as such at all. A great deal of Scripture is made up of commands, exhortations, thanksgivings, acts of penitence, expressions of joy, and so forth, and these are kinds of human utterance which can only with difficulty be said to be true or false. But while speculative judgment, judgment about what to believe, is scarcely engaged in such texts, practical judgment, judgment about how to act, is. But Benoit admitted that, obviously, other parts of the Bible are concerned with intellectual truth, and here we must speak of God as inspiring a speculative judgment as well as the practical judgment.[ P. Benoit, Aspects of Biblical Inspiration (English trans., Chicago: 1965) 96-101. To some extent these ideas had been anticipated by a disciple of Lévesque: C. Crets, in his De divina Bibliorum inspiratione (Louvain: 1886). See also P. Synave and P. Benoit, Prophecy and inspiration (English trans., 1961).] In other words, Lévesque’s directionalism is not enough by itself. Biblical inspiration always gives the author a practical direction, but sometimes there must also be an illumination of the mind as well as a direction of the will.
  3. And this is where it is valuable to introduce a third variant, the illuminationism of Benoit’s greatest predecessor at the Ecole Biblique, Marie-Joseph Lagrange, a scholar who preserved the dignity of Catholic biblical studies in the hard times that fell upon them in the wake of the Modernist movement. Lagrange argued that the directly divine part in inspiration is simply an illumination of the mind of the biblical author, enabling the author to judge the natural materials in a way that conforms to God’s will. In effect, Lagrange was returning to the texts of St. Thomas and developing the notion of prophetic judgment he found there. We can say that Lévesque, Lagrange, and Benoit between them have produced a minimalizing but convincing and credible version of Thomas, in place of the maximalizing version that held sway between the Council of Trent and the First Vatican Council.

An Ontology Of Inspiration If we wished, we could write, therefore, an ontology of inspiration. Just as all things that exist share in being to different degrees and in ways that are analogically related, so the inspired men and women of the Old and New Testaments shared in different degrees in the gift of inspiration in ways that are analogically related. To each of these individuals, the analysis offered by such writers as Lévesque, Lagrange, and Benoit would apply in various ways. All of these ways would coincide, however, in being ordered to the final emergence of the canon. When the canon is closed, the charism of inspiration, like the Marxist state, withers away, its task completed. At that point, the Catholic Church ceases to be inspired, although it does not cease to be infallible, that is, to be able to preserve what it understood when it was inspired.  On such a theory, certain consequences would follow for theological method.

  1. First, the literal sense, what an author intended, would be both real and also accessible to historical investigation.
  2. Second, we should have to regard an individual book of the Bible as an accumulation of literal senses, of which the principal or super-ordinate literal sense would be that of the book in its final form, the sense of its final editor.
  3. Third, the ordering of inspiration to the canon, to the existence of a recognizable body of literature attesting what God has revealed and sufficiently comprehensive to guide the Church for the rest of time, would imply that the revealed meaning of a book must be sought beyond the literal sense of any individual book, in the interrelated corpus of biblical books as a whole.
  4. Fourth, the fact that inspiration is ultimately the charism of a divine society, Israel-Church which eventually produced the canon, implies that the interpretation of the revealed meaning found in that canon must be made within the tradition of the Church and not without it.
  5. Fifth and finally, the cumulative and indefinitely extensible nature of this entire process may be explained, humanly speaking, by referring to hermeneutics, that is, the study of how a text offers more and more new interpretations to its readers; yet theologically considered, the same facts raise the question of a sensus plenior, that is, of the ecclesially experienced difference between a limited human authorial intention and the fullness of the divine intention, granted that the Scriptures are meant to guide humanity until the parousia. No finite consciousness could have been elevated by God in such a way as to comprehend the total mystery of salvation. So we must postulate, then, a supernatural plus of meaning, which the Church unfolds until the end of time.

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A Short Biography of St. Thomas Aquinas

September 1, 2009

Card-_20-St-Thomas-Aquinas-frontBackground The great achievement of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was that he brought together into a formidable synthesis the insights of classical philosophy and Christian theology. More specifically, Aquinas “Christianized” the philosophy of Aristotle. Although his philosophical orientation was dominated by Aristotle, he was aware of the vast scope of thought produced by the ancients, the Christian fathers, and the earlier medieval writers, including the Arabian and Jewish writers. By the time he began his literary work, a large part of Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings had become available in Western Europe. Augustine had formulated an earlier synthesis of philosophy and theology by combining the Christian faith with elements of Plato’s thought, which he had discovered in the writings of the Neo-Platonist Plotinus. Shortly after Augustine, in the sixth century, Boethius made a portion of Aristotle’s works available in Latin for the first time and thereby stimulated philosophical speculation again.

From about the seventh to the thirteenth century there were several lines of development, leading toward differences and controversies between Platonists and Aristotelians. This conflict continued after the thirteenth century as a controversy between Augustinians and Thomists, insofar as each of these theologians built his thought around Plato and Aristotle, respectively.

In these formative centuries, medieval thinkers wrestled with the problem of relating philosophy and theology, expressing this problem as the relation between faith and reason, There was also the problem of universals, which not only reflected the different viewpoints of Plato and Aristotle but also had important ramifications for the Christian faith. On all these matters, Aquinas now exerted a decisive influence by clarifying the precise questions involved, acknowledging alternative solutions offered by different authorities, and answering the major objections to his Aristotelian-Christian solutions. In this way, Aquinas perfected the “scholastic method.”

The term scholasticism in this context is derived from the intellectual activity carried on in the medieval cathedral schools, and its proponents were called doctores scholastici. Eventually, scholasticism came to refer to the dominant system of thought developed by the doctors in the schools and to the special method they utilized in teaching philosophy. Scholastic philosophy was an attempt to put together a coherent system of traditional thought rather than a pursuit of genuinely novel forms of insight. The content of this system was for the most part a fusion of Christian theology and the philosophies of Plato and especially Aristotle. Most distinctive in scholasticism was its method, a process relying chiefly upon strict logical deduction, taking on the form of an intricate system and expressed in a dialectical or disputational form in which theology dominated philosophy.

His Life Thomas was born in 1225 near Naples. His father was a Count of Aquino who had hoped that his son would someday enjoy high ecclesiastical position. For this reason, Thomas was placed in the Abbey of Monte Cassino as a boy of five, and for the next nine years he pursued his studies in this Benedictine abbey. At the age of fourteen, he entered the University of Naples, but while in that city he was fascinated by the life of some Dominican friars at a nearby convent and decided to enter their Order. As the Dominicans were particularly dedicated to teaching, Thomas had, upon entering their Order, resolved to give himself to a religious and also a teaching vocation.

Four years later, in 1245, he entered the University of Paris, where he came under the influence of a prodigious scholar whose enormous intellectual achievements had earned him the names “Albert the Great” (Albertus Magnus) and the “Universal Teacher.” During his long and intimate association with Albert both at Paris and Cologne, Thomas’ mind was shaped in decisive ways by the vast range of Albert’s learning and by his views on particular problems.

Albert had recognized the significance of philosophy and science for grounding Christian faith and for developing the capacities of the human mind. While other theologians looked askance at secular learning, Albert concluded that the Christian thinker must master philosophical and scientific learning in all its forms. He had respect for all intellectual activity, and his writings attest to his acquaintance with a vast amount and variety of learning. He knew virtually all the ancient, Christian, Jewish, and Arabian writers. His mind was encyclopedic rather than creative. Still, it was Albert who had recognized the fundamental difference between philosophy and theology, sharpening more accurately than his predecessors had the boundaries between them.

Albert thought that such writers as Anselm and Abelard, for example, had ascribed too much competence to reason, not realizing that from a rigorous point of view much of what they ascribed to reason was in fact a matter of faith. Albert’s particular objective was to make Aristotle clearly understandable to all of Europe, hoping to put into Latin all of Aristotle’s works. He considered Aristotle the greatest of all philosophers, and much of the credit for the dominance of Aristotle’s thought in the thirteenth century must be given to him. It was inevitable, under these circumstances, that his pupil Thomas Aquinas would also see in Aristotle the most significant philosophical support for Christian theology.

Unlike Albert, who did not change anything in the philosophers he quoted in his works, Thomas used Aristotle more creatively, systematically, and with a more specific recognition of the harmony between what Aristotle said and the Christian faith. After an interval of teaching under the auspices of the Papal Court from 1259 to 1268, Thomas returned once again to Paris and became involved in the celebrated controversy with the Averroists. In 1274, Pope Gregory X called him to Lyons to participate in a council, and while on his way there, he died in a monastery between Naples and Rome, at the age of forty-nine.

Thomas left a huge literary legacy, the vastness of which is all the more remarkable when one recalls that it was all composed within a twenty-year span. Among his principal works are his commentaries on many of Aristotle’s writings, careful arguments against the errors of the Greeks and the Averroists, a brilliant early work on essence and existence, a political treatise on rulers, and many other notable works. His most renowned literary achievements are his two major theological works, the Summa contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica.

The University of Paris The first universities grew out of what were called “cathedral schools.” The University of Paris evolved from the Cathedral School of Notre Dame, its formal rules of organization and procedures being approved officially by the Papal representative in 1215. Originally, like all early universities, Paris consisted of masters and students without any special buildings or other features we now associate with universities, such as libraries and endowments. These were added in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the most important ingredients were there, namely, masters and students with a passion for learning. Being originally church institutions, universities shared a common theological doctrine. This meant, too, that of the four faculties, theology, law, medicine, and arts, the theological faculty enjoyed undisputed supremacy.

Besides its theological orientation, the University of Paris had a receptivity to universal knowledge. This accounts for the gradual acceptance and triumph of Aristotle’s philosophy at Paris. It is easily apparent, however, that the invasion of Aristotelianism would raise problems of orthodoxy. There was, however, not only the concern over the impact of Aristotle’s philosophy upon Christian thought, but also serious questions over whether Aristotle had been faithfully and accurately interpreted by the Arabians.

In addition, whereas Augustine and Platonism had triumphed at Oxford, this mode of thought, although not dominant at Paris, was nevertheless strongly represented there at this time by Bonaventura, a contemporary of Aquinas. Bonaventura was critical of Aristotle, holding that by denying the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, Aristotle’s thought would, if incorporated into theology, produce serious errors. For example, to deny the Platonic Ideas would mean that Cod does not possess in Himself the Ideas of all things and would therefore be ignorant of the concrete and particular world. In turn, this would deny God’s providence or His control over the universe. This would also mean that events occur either by chance or through mechanical necessity.

Even more serious was Bonaventura’s charge that if God does not think the Ideas of the world, He could not have created it. On this point Aquinas was later to have serious difficulties with the church authorities, for in following Aristotle, he could discover no decisive reason for denying that the world always existed instead of being created at a point in time. But, said Bonaventura, if the world always existed, there must have existed an infinite number of human beings, in which ease there must be either an infinite number of souls, or, as Averroists argued, there is only one soul or intellect, which all human beings share. If this Averroist argument were accepted, it would annul the doctrine of personal immortality. This was strongly urged by the leading Averroist of the thirteenth century, Siger de Brabant, who said that there is only one eternal intellect and that while individual men are born and the, this intellect or soul remains and always finds another human being in which to carry out its functions of organizing the body and the act of knowing. In short, there is only one intellect, which all men have in common.

Against Aristotelian philosophy, which Bonaventura considered dangerous to Christian faith because of all these errors it engendered, he offered the insights of Augustine and Platonism. Still, because Aristotle’s thought was so formidable and so systematic, particularly concerning matters of nature and science, its forward march was irresistible, and its triumph virtually inevitable. If most parts of the University were to be oriented to Aristotle’s thought, the theologians could not avoid coming to terms with this monumental thinker. If Aristotle was to be accepted, the specific task of the theologians would now be to harmonize his philosophy with Christianity, that is, they would have to “Christianize” Aristotle. This is what Aquinas set out to do, contending at the same time against Bonaventura’s Augustinianism and Siger de Brabant’s version of Aristotle.

We will next turn to how Aquinas dealt with philosophy and theology or between reason and faith and show his philosophical approach through his attempts to demonstrate the existence of God. Stay toon-ed. .I’m taking the material for this from “Socrates to Sartre” an older but oft used text in its day by Samuel Enoch Stumpf that I was recommended to and enjoyed. So much of theology requires a background in philosophy and Dr. Stumpf’s concise work gives the amateur enthusiast like myself all I need to know to look like fabulous genius (a modest goal of mine).

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