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True Devotion to the Saints

Communion of Saints, Heaven, Saints, ,

Before he died, St. Ignatius, yielding to pressure from his assistant and secretary Fr. Luis Gonzalez de Camara, dictated a spiritual biography.  The future saint knew just how important it was to study the lives of the saints, especially because God had brought him to conversion through his exposure to different hagiographies.  At one pivotal point Ignatius, led by the grace of God, began to “think and reason to himself.  ‘Suppose that I should do what St. Francis did, what St. Dominic did?’ He thus let his thoughts run over many things that seemed good to him, always putting before himself things that were difficult and important which seemed to him easy to accomplish when he proposed them. But all his thought was to tell himself ‘St. Dominic did this, therefore, I must do it. St. Francis did this, therefore, I must do it.’”   In this way, St. Ignatius could be the Patron Saint of studying the lives of the saints.

In coming to read the lives of the saints, many of us seem to take a similar approach to Ignatius.  We are moved by their exploits and try to model our spiritual lives after theirs.  We think St. Dominic preached the Rosary, therefore I must preach the Rosary.  St. Francis went to great lengths to tame “Brother Ass” (the epithet he gave his body), so I too must regularly fast by eating nothing several times a week.  The problem with this, as Ignatius later hinted at, is that it has all the makings of a self-help trap in which we risk running out ahead of grace instead of cooperating with it.

The Importance of the Floating Pronouns

Ignatius understood the deeper meaning of the floating pronouns this and it when he was moved by the Holy Spirit to think “because Francis or Dominic did this, therefore I must do it.”  The this is not the specific exploits.  Ignatius was wholly incapable of doing those things because the great and holy things that Francis and Dominic did were done under the influence of grace.  They were impossible no matter how determined Ignatius was.  But moved by supernatural grace, they made the extraordinary seem ordinary and sanctity achievable.  It becomes the key and by it Ignatius meant cooperating with grace.  What made Francis and Dominic, and ultimately Ignatius, saints was not what they did specifically, but their habit of never missing a single grace that God sent to them.  They were, according to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, inhabitants of the Third Class of Men who “seek only to will and not will as God Our Lord inspires them.”  They didn’t just do good, but they did the good that God wanted.

To study the saints then we should understand that everything they did was because they were docile to grace.  We ought to begin, not by being amazed at their exploits, but by being amazed at what grace can do to an ordinary person who desires to always cooperate with it.  That is what we should seek to imitate first and foremost.

True Imitation of the Saints

The reason why this is important is because we are each given different graces.  We are all commanded to fast and thus given the grace to carry out that commandment, but only some of us are given the grace to fast in the manner of Francis.  It would be wrong for us to imitate Francis in that regard unless we have been told and equipped—”to will and not will as God Our Lord inspires us.”  The first question we must ask is not what Francis would do, but whether God is asking it of us.  Too often we get ideas to do something extraordinary that turn out to be of our own (or the Enemy’s) making. It is important to discern those graces because God will equip us to do the extraordinary, but unless we have the necessary sensitivity to grace we will miss it.  We should be regularly asking for the grace of being faithful and docile to grace.

It is important to stress that this is not the only reason we should study the lives of the saints.  It is simply what our initial approach should be aimed at.  Armed with the realization of what grace can turn us into, we now ought to turn to their example personally.  Each of the Saints is still, perhaps even more, alive and active in the Church today.  Our eternal destiny is not just a “me and Jesus” twostep, but to be united to the Holy Trinity and the Saints.  This is the Communion of Saints.  We will know each of them personally.  That friendship is based on mutual devotion.  We study their lives because we cannot love who we don’t know.  But when we do get to know them, we not only grow to love them, but also come to rely on them.  They become devoted to us as well. 

One of the things that most of the Saints did during their earthly sojourn was to develop relationships with the Saints who had gone before them.  St. Thomas relied on St. Paul to explain to him the difficult parts of his letters.  St. Gemma relied on St. Margaret Mary Alocoque to help her in her suffering with spinal meningitis and to teach her devotion to the Sacred Heart.  Because St. Margaret Mary had received the unique grace of knowing and understanding the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she became a distributor of that grace when she entered into her eternal reward.  St. Gemma knew this about St. Margaret Mary and so she knew to go to her when she wanted the grace of devotion to the Sacred Heart.  This is why we must also come to treat the notion of patron saints as much more than a mere talisman and part and parcel with holy friendship.  God gave each saint very specific graces in his lifetime so that he in turn could become a distributor of that grace from heaven.  Please God that we too might take those special graces that He gives us and become His distributor from heaven. 

Better Off Dead?

Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, , , ,

One of the greatest challenges confronting the Church today is embracing the realization that the majority of people, including most Christians, think with a post-Christian mindset.  The opposition to the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill in England comes to mind as the most recent example.  The Catholic Bishops of England vociferously opposed the bill, even though the passage of the bill was fully expected.  Yet their reasoning would really only be convincing to someone deeply rooted in a Christian culture.  That is why they are forced to keep saying “The Catholic Church teaches…”  To use language that speaks of the dignity of the human person, while true, falls rather flat in a culture of death.   In fact, you could argue that it is really at the crux of the issue.  When people no longer practically believe in God, there is little interest in protecting His image in man.  My proposal then is to update our approach by going backwards.

In many ways St. Augustine is a perfect model for our times.  He lived in an era when Christianity was mostly tolerated but the Christian mindset was nowhere to be found.  What he did was to address social evils using the examples and thought patterns of the day.  He would then show how they fit with the understanding of the Church.  In fact he was so good at it, that he wrote a thousand+ page book that has remained intact for nearly 1500 years that uses this technique throughout called The City of God.

Augustine on Suicide

What makes his approach especially relevant is that he tackles the question of suicide in Book I.  The Romans tended to view suicide as something noble.  Augustine examines two famous examples to make his point.  The first was Lucretia who was a Roman noblewoman who had been raped.  After her brother and husband exacted revenge on the offender, she killed herself to avoid the shame.  The second was Marcus Cato who strongly opposed Julius Caesar so that once Caesar came into power, he killed himself rather than submitting.  The Romans looked to both of them as models of nobility.

Rather than leading with the dignity of the human person or the Commandments, Augustine first attacks the value the Romans found in suicide, namely its nobility.  He shows how it is anything but noble.  He calls Lucretia weak and a coward: “it is not even right to call it greatness of soul when someone kills himself because he is not strong enough to endure hardships or other people’s sins.”  Because he is questioning whether or not it is truly noble to run away from hardship, he now has the Romans’ ears.  They value nobility and Augustine has called into question what is truly noble.

Likewise, he calls Cato a coward especially because he and his friends admitted that when his son killed himself it “was an act showing weakness unable to bear adversity rather than honor on guard against disgrace.”  He then goes on to say he prefers a different Marcus, one surnamed Regulus, whom the Romans “offer none better for their outstanding virtue”.  He, rather taking his own life after losing to the Carthaginians, remained patient and bore the shame and bad fortune.  Only then does he offer up the example of Job asking the reader whether he would prefer to be Job or Cato.

Challenging on Their Terms

All of this is pertinent because one of the arguments in favor of assisted suicide is that, just as in the propaganda ad above, there is something noble in taking one’s life.  In order to meet the anti-lifers on their terms we must call it out for what it is; it is most decidedly an act of cowardice on the part of the person and those who surround him.  We all know this, but very few are willing to say it and call it out.  We may think we are being kind by not pointing out the obvious, but it is a false compassion.  There is true nobility in bearing suffering well and facing it head on.  There is true nobility in being Simon of Cyrene and courageously allowing another’s suffering to spill over onto you.  The false compassion that leads to silence is not much better than the false compassion that leads to support of deadly bills like this.

Imagine the difference between offering a person facing suffering and death a pill versus offering them support to lean into it.  When given the choice, wouldn’t any one of us rather be St. Paul than King Saul?  We cannot be afraid to challenge people directly, especially when they have suffering in front of them.  Ask them how they want to be remembered: as someone who went out on their own terms or someone who fought to the very end?  Telling the stories of great saints who endured suffering, especially modern day examples like St. Maximillian Kolbe, St. John Paul II and St. Teresa Benedicta, can be sources of inspiration.  It is a natural transition from them as sources of inspiration to their Source of inspiration. 

Part of the dignity of the human person and a sign of man’s greatness is the fact that he can see suffering coming and can plow right into, and Lord willing, through it.  The reason many will choose to end their lives is because they have not met Christ crucified.  We must not be afraid to preach the truth that because He suffered, suffering now has eternal value.  The Lord suffered so that no suffering is ever meaningless, and the only real “sweet death” is the one that He has set aside for each of us.

A Porch to Christianity?

Church, Culture, Evangelization, Faith and Reason, Paganism, , , , ,

Although it is not clear who first pointed this out, it is most certainly true that there is a certain law of undulation at play in every time and every culture related to the quality of the men: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”  We are, by almost any accounting, living in hard times, plagued by weak men.  Historically speaking it is hard to say how long the hard times must go on before the strong men emerge, but there is a growing awareness among many men in our culture that something is amiss with manhood.  This awareness helps to explain the growing popularity of Stoicism, especially among young Catholic men.  Because of Stoicism’s emphasis on virtue, most assume that Stoicism and Catholicism are compatible.  It is worthwhile then to examine whether this is true.

Sitting on the Porch

Stoicism has a long history that extends back to ancient Greece and the lectures that Zeno of Citium gave to his students on his porch or stoa.  It lay mostly dormant until around the 1st Century AD when it was revived by Epictetus and Seneca, followed by the first philosopher king, Marcus Aurelius.  It is marketed as a practical philosophy (i.e. ethics) based on the pursuit of virtue.  According to Epictetus this pursuit is governed by two principles.  First, “In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choice.”  This dichotomy of control is supplemented by a second principle aimed at our response. “What hurts this man is not the occurrence itself…but the view he chooses to take of it.”   Essentially this means that there is nothing good or bad in itself, only our attitude towards it gives it an ethical color.  We have the opportunity to see everything that happens as a means grow virtue.  Although it is often described as such, Stoicism is also not an emotionless ethic.  Because of its emphasis on virtue, it is about bringing our emotions under the control of reason.

It is ultimately this pathway to an inner freedom that comes about by focusing only on those things that we can control that makes it appealing to modern men.  The hard times make the battlefield seem so large and many men struggle to pick their battles and end up in a holding pattern.  But there is more to Stoicism than just this.  Stoicism ultimately is a pantheistic religion.  The reason why the Stoic can practice the necessary detachment is because he believes that everything that happens is necessary and good serving the Good of the whole.  There are no physical evils and the only moral evil is personal vice and folly. 

Ideas Have Consequences

That I labeled Stoicism as a pantheistic religion anticipates the fact that it is not wholly compatible with Catholicism.  But in truth, the two cannot be reconciled at all.  Its insistence that it is only our reaction to what happens that makes something good or evil leads to a subtle form of moral subjectivism.  There are many evils in the world that we cannot control and yet we must offer resistance or even fight against.  Detachment to things we cannot control is great until we are confronted with the suffering of another person.  Their suffering is only because they are thinking about it wrongly and thus empathy and compassion are folly.  Epictetus unashamedly counsels a fake compassion when he says,

“When you see a person weeping in sorrow, either when a child goes abroad, or when he is dead, or when the man has lost his property, take care that the appearance do not hurry you away with it as if he were suffering in external things. But straightway make a distinction in your mind, and be in readiness to say, it is not that which has happened that afflicts this man, for it does not afflict another, but it is the opinion about this thing which afflicts the man. So far as words, then, do not be unwilling to show him sympathy, and even if it happens so, to lament with him. But take care that you do not lament internally also.”

This fits with my experience with many men who practice Stoicism, Christian or not—they are usually the most judgmental and disinterested especially towards those who they deem not as strong-willed as themselves.

This brings up a necessary, although slightly tangential point.  The reason the Church maintained the Index of Forbidden Books for so long was not just to protect the Faithful from heresies.  There is a very real way in which false teachers of religion and philosophy can put an enchantment on the reader.  They have a tendency to draw the reader in and make him question reality, even when he is only curious or trying to adopt certain aspects of that philosophy/religion.  In this regard Stoicism is no different.  Read enough of it with an open mind, even while trying to filter it through a Catholic sieve, and it will “magically” cause you to see the Faith differently.  It seems that there is a fine line between reading a prayer and saying a prayer—a line that may be safe when it comes to the Faith but when encountering false belief systems becomes perilous.  This is why Augustine ultimately rejects Stoicism in his City of God (Book XIX, CH.4); because Cato came under its spell and committed suicide out of pride.

Stepping Off the Porch

In truth it does not actually help the person grow in virtue either.  First, it has a false view of human nature that borders on dualism.  It sees an evil that is done to body as not being done to the person.  The only evil is what is done to the soul.  Furthermore, because everything that happens is good, it rejects any negative emotions.  The 2nd Century Stoic Aulus Gellius tells the story of a Stoic philosopher who is at sea when a terrible storm breaks out.  Because he cannot control the storm, it is wrong for him to fear.  Likewise, it is wrong to be angry or sadness.  The emotions are good and especially important in hard times as they serve to propel the battle against evil.  

Because it denies the negative emotions, it ultimately pins our problems, like Buddhism, on our desires.  Epictetus tells the stoic, “Therefore altogether restrain desire…Demand not that events should happen as you wish but wish them to happen as they do happen.”  The last thing men of hard times need is to become men without chests.  That is exactly what happens when you stamp out desire and create a whole group of men who are aloof. 

Ultimately then the Cross and the Porch are incompatible.  Stoicism’s emphasis on virtue may seem like a good thing, but it is wholly unnecessary for those who accept the counsel of Christ to “take up your cross and follow Me.”

Transgenderism and Transhumanism

Defending the Faith, Evolution, Magisterium, ,

There is a sense that the cultural tide is shifting away from widescale acceptance of transgenderism.  One gets the feeling that yesterday’s advocates are turning into today’s skeptics.  That the ideologues were willing to sacrifice children on the altar of “gender affirmation” certainly sped up the process, but there is another reason why ideological support is waning.  For the intellectual elite and their ilk transgenderism was always meant to be a port of entry into a Brave New World and nothing more; an on-ramp to the Transhumanist superhighway.  Once the court of public opinion begins voting to convict, the “Transgender Moment” will have outlived its usefulness and they will begin to sever their ties to it, leaving thousands of victims in their wake.

Linking them Up

Transgenderism and transhumanism may only seem to be tangentially linked, but a closer examination shows the transgenderism to be fruit from the transhumanist tree.  At the heart of the transgender ideology is a shift in identity.  We are not body and soul composites, but minds operating in bodies. The body is viewed as no more than gendered machines that can be modified to suit the sexual intuition of the individual.  What it found out rather quickly is that no amount of technological tinkering can alter the machine so that a man might really become a fully-functioning woman and vice versa.  “Gender affirming care” became quite the opposite and left its victims in sexual limbo by becoming permanently disfigured, resembling neither sex.

From this perspective it appears to have been a failure.  But that was never really the point.  The point was to sell an intellectual bill of goods and the culture was found willing to pay the dues.  Not only does it show that most people view themselves as ghosts in a machine, but that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature. 

This is not mere speculation, but the plan of one of the planners himself.  Martine Rothblatt is one of Forbes’ Top 50 richest self-made women .  He is so successful that not being a woman isn’t an obstacle to appearing on a list of the most successful women.  Rothblatt shows his hand when, in his 2011 book Transgender to Transhumanism, he says:

“I came to realize that choosing one’s gender is merely an important subset of choosing one’s form. By form, I mean that which encloses our beingness … I came to this realization by understanding that 21st century software made it technologically possible to separate our minds from our bodies. This can be accomplished by downloading enough of our neural connection contents and patterns into a sufficiently advanced computer and merging the resultant mindfile with sufficiently advanced software—call it ‘mindware.’…”

If you can choose a body to house your gendered mind, then why must we ultimately choose a body at all?  Why couldn’t we choose an avatar that avoids all the messiness of the body like pain, sickness and ultimately death?  What if we just linked our minds with some computer or some other hive mind? 

Building on this point, Rothblatt connects the dots further by saying:  

“In a similar fashion I now see that it is also too constraining for there to be but two legal forms, human and non-human. There can be limitless variation of forms from full fleshed to purely software with bodies and mind being made up of all degrees of electronic circuitry between. To be transhuman one has to be willing to accept that they have a unique personal identity beyond flesh or software and that this unique personal identity cannot be happily expressed as either human or not.  It requires a unique transhuman expression.”

If gender is not binary, then, Rothblatt contends, any aspect of personality is also on a spectrum.  This leads him to conclude that we should view humanity itself as a spectrum.  This is at the heart of the Transhumanist project, expanding the spectrum towards some post-human ideal. 

The Connection to Evolution

It also shows a willingness to abandon biology in favor of evolution.  What I mean by this is that biology really doesn’t matter when you can grab the evolutionary reins for yourself.  This is, according to the popular author Yuval Noah Harrari account in Homo Deus, the great project of the 21st Century:

“In the twenty-first century, the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. This third project obviously subsumes the first two projects, and is fueled by them. We want the ability to re-engineer our bodies and minds in order, above all, to escape old age, death and misery, but once we have it, who knows what else we might do with such ability? So we may well think of the new human agenda as consisting really of only one project (with many branches): attaining divinity…Now humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design, and to extend life from the organic realm into the inorganic.”

Herein ultimately lies the reason that the Church was caught flat-footed during the transgender moment and will remain so as the Transhumanist train leaves the station: an unwillingness to address the false evolutionary paradigm that animates the posthuman agenda.  Because God is Logos, there can be no disconnect between the physical laws and the moral law.  The physical laws can even be instructive of the moral law.  For human beings to cooperate with the physical laws constitutes a morally good act.  Now, if (macro)evolution is true, then it would not be wrong to cooperate with it or even to aid in the process.  More specifically, if evolution is true, then there really is nothing wrong with men trying to enhance humanity so as to bring about the next evolutionary step. 

In order to combat it then, we must go to the source of the error—evolution.  The Church, still gun shy from the Galileo affair 500 years ago, is scared to confront the theological, metaphysical and moral errors of evolution.  Instead, her members try to remain neutral and some even go so far as to reinterpret Scripture to make it fit.  This simply cannot go on any further and it is time to reach back into Tradition and refute this error head on.

Forgiving from the Heart

Mercy, , ,

When Our Lord teaches the disciples to pray the Our Father, He connects the forgiveness of sins with our capacity to forgive others.  Just to make sure that the point was understood, it follows up the prayer by making it more explicit: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Mt 6:14-15).  This commandment is shocking, especially for those of us who assume that God’s forgiveness is unconditional as long as we are sorry for our own sins.  Upon reflection however, to put such a restriction on forgiveness however, like all of Christ’s commandments, is for our good and it turns out that the necessity is more closely related to our capacity to receive forgiveness than to give it.

To grasp the meaning of the dictate then we must first reflect on forgiveness itself.  When a person purposely does real harm to us in some way, we are “spiritually” wounded by that person.  That is why we often say “I was hurt when you said/did X”.  It is important to note that this is a perfectly natural reaction to a perceived injustice; a reaction that is accompanied by sorrow and sometimes even anger.  In other words, to dismiss it as “nothing” is irrational.  It is something and it has done something both to you and the offender that needs to be addressed for the good of both of you.

The Dangers of Unforgiveness

Only forgiveness can heal this wound.  Unforgiveness allows the wound to fester meaning that the person is unable to turn away the suffering of the injury.  Demons, keenly aware of the wound, will tempt the person to focus on the wrong in order for the wound to remain open and keep them trapped in a state of sorrow and anger.  Because he dialogues with the Tempter, he slowly gains more and more control over the person especially concerning anything related to the wound.  A stronghold is developing and forgiveness becomes even more difficult because the person is now beginning to identify himself as a victim.

This “victim” status now blocks him from receiving forgiveness from God. This is the point of the parable that Our Lord tells about the Unforgiving Servant later in Matthew’s gospel (Mt 18:21-35).  The man is offered forgiveness but because he is so focused on the slights against him, he is unable to generate the sadness (or the gratitude for forgiveness) necessary for the Master forgiving him.  Unforgiveness then makes it impossible for God to forgive us because all of our sorrow and anger is directed at the slights against us rather than at the wrongs we have done.

How to Forgive

Given how important forgiveness is for us then it is worth reflecting on how we can, as Our Lord commands “forgive your brother from your heart” (Mt 18:35).  First, we make the distinction between what might be termed volitional forgiveness and emotional forgiveness.  Because we are fallen and our emotions do not always follow our will, they are often separate acts.  The easier of the two is volitional, especially because the demons cannot touch our will.  To forgive in the will is to release the person from the debt of justice and turn them over to God so that He might deliver a just punishment.  This can sound and feel like wishing for a smiting and so you should always pray that God forgives them as well. It is this latter step that provides the most healing for the one that has been offended.  It is important to remember that Christ does not merely issue commandments but promises the grace to fulfill that commandment as well.  It is important to always pray for the grace to have forgiveness in your heart.

Emotional forgiveness is often the harder of the two because we must break the association of the pain caused with the person.  This is why it is always easier to forgive someone who apologizes.  When he bears the burden of the sorrow he caused by expressing that sorrow, it lessens the burden on the offended person.  This solidarity in sorrow also acts as a unitive force strengthening the communion between them.  Love always means saying your sorry.

While it is easier when the offender expresses sorrow, it is not automatic.  Nor is it, obviously, automatic when the offender shows no remorse.  In that case, it often takes repeated acts of the will in order to bring the emotions in line with the will.  Each time the thoughts drift towards the hurt, it is necessary for the offended to make the same act of the will until the emotion subsides.  What will begin to emerge are feelings associated with mercy and compassion.  This again is extremely difficult and is at the heart of Our Lord’s admonition to Peter that he must forgive his brother seventy times seven times.  It may actually take 490 (or more) acts of the will to fully heal the emotional wound that has been inflicted.

In closing, it is important to reiterate the fact that “forgiveness is divine”.  Christ never commands without equipping.  Many times unforgiveness traps us in a web of guilt because we feel like we are powerless to forgive.  The first step in the process, like in every process, is to ask for the grace to forgive, knowing that was one of the graces He won for you on Calvary when, in the face of those who weren’t sorry, He asked “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Are We Alone in the Universe?

Angels, End Times, Redemption, Science, , , ,

There was a time, not too long ago, when mentioning Area 51 or aliens, invited ridicule as a conspiracy theorist.  But the difference between a conspiracy theory and reality is currently measuring about four years so that many Americans (2/3 according to a 2021 Pew Research study) now believe that extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) exists.  Interestingly enough, American Catholics believe at a slightly higher rate than Americans as a whole.  One can only speculate why that might be, but the Church has not spoken definitively on the subject leaving Catholics somewhat free to follow the evidence.  It is the qualifier “somewhat” that I would like to use as the launching pad for a discussion of ETI given that Divine Revelation gives us some guardrails for investigation as to both the possibility and the likelihood.

It is worth mentioning at least at the outset that we already have proof that we are not alone in the universe.  Angels and their fallen counterparts are constantly acting within material creation, even in visible ways.  It is certainly possible that the UFO sightings and even the discovery of “non-human biologics” are simply diabolical manifestations.  But it is contemptuous to insist upon this as the only possible explanation.

Setting Up the Guardrails

The temptation when dealing with the question is to leave it to “science” to determine the possibility and likelihood of intelligent life.  This approach neglects the fact that theology is also a science.  Because its first principles come from God Who can neither deceive nor be deceived, it is the highest of the sciences. 

By looking to theology, we are able to eliminate some possibilities.  The ETI must be of a completely different race from mankind in that they have a different line of descent.  The Church has condemned polygenism and so there must be more than mere accidental differences between human and the other race of ETIs.  They must be a different substance altogether.  In other words, they would have to be biologically distinct humanoids with a rational soul.  Scripture and the Magisterium both describe the “human race” as descended from Adam so that it at least seems possible (an argument from silence) that there could be another race or races in the universe.

Once we allow at least for the possibility, then we must examine the ETIs relationship to Christ.  For everything that exists, exists in relationship to Christ Who “is the center of the universe and of history” (Pope St. John Paul II,Redemptoris Hominis, 1 ).  St Paul tells the Colossians that “in Him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:16-20).  This point is vital not only in considering ETI, but in understanding reality as a whole.  Everything that exists, does so for His sake (not only for His sake but primarily).  Fig trees were created for Him to curse, trees for crosses and water for baptism.  Most importantly, human nature exists for His sake so that He might take on human flesh.

The fact that Christ took on human flesh gives to the human race a special dignity such that “all material creatures[exist] for the good of the human race” (CCC 353).  This would include ETI who, even if rational beings existing for their own sake, would exist in a similar manner to the angels, acting in service to the race of Adam.  This might be an argument against the existence of ETI in that we appear not to have received any benefit from them.  This is likely an argument St Thomas would have made in light of his contention that to speak of a universe in any meaningful way is to assume that the elements must form an ordered an interactive whole.  If there were no communication among the citizens, then the civil good could not be perfected (c.f ST I q.47, a.3).  Communication could still come later, but it is hard to imagine why it would be so delayed.

Building on the principle that the ETI must be related to Christ, then we can examine the relation of the race itself.  First, we would posit that they were, like the angels and mankind, created in a probationary state of grace.  As St. Thomas says, “It pertains to divine freedom to infuse grace into all who are capable of grace, unless something resisting is found in them, much more than he gives natural form to any disposed matter” (Commentary Sentences, 4, q.1 art.3).  The question would then be what the outcome of their testing was.

Fallen or Unfallen?

One thing that becomes immediately clear in reading the New Testament is that in the act of redemption, God willed a correspondence between the fallen and the Redeemer “since the children share the same blood and flesh, he too shared equally in it, so that by his death he could…set free those who had been held in slavery all their lives by fear of death” (Heb. 2:14).  This means that if the ETI were fallen, they would need a separate incarnation.  A second incarnation however would be incompatible with the Faith according to an infallible teaching found in Dominus Iesus: “Therefore, the theory which would attribute, after the incarnation as well, a salvific activity to the Logos as such in his divinity, exercised ‘in addition to’‌ or ‘beyond’‌ the humanity of Christ, is not compatible with the Catholic faith” (DI, 10).  The Son’s sole redemptive act is through His human nature.  Therefore, there can be no other fallen race in existence.

This leaves open only one possibility; that there is a heretofore unknown, unfallen race of intelligent creatures in the universe.  Like the Angels, Christ would be their Lord and Head, but not their Redeemer.  In His human nature Christ is “the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:12-13).

St Thomas says that if Adam had not fallen then he would immediately attain “that happy state of seeing God in His Essence, he would have become spiritual in soul and body; and his animal life would have ceased, wherein alone there is generation” (ST I q.100, a.2).  Likewise, because they would have passed their probationary period, the ETI would have spiritual bodies (which might help to explain the manner in which UFOs seem to move) and would not reproduce.  Of course one could also ask why, if they have passed their probationary period, they don’t immediately receive their reward in the beatific vision. 

According to Paul Thigpen in his book Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith, St Padre Pio once told a reporter that “The Lord certainly did not limit his glory to this small Earth. On other planets other beings exist who did not sin and fall as we did.”  Despite this saintly endorsement, I think another saint provides the logic for why they do not exist.  When speaking of how Providence guides even our sins, St Thomas says that because the angels contain a higher perfection than men, a far fewer number of them fell as compared to mankind (Sentences I D.39 q.2 A.2).  It would seem that if there were a race of men that did not fall, this test of proportionality would fail and the ladder of perfection of the universe upended.  It is for this reason that I ultimately find the existence of ETI very unlikely. 

Before closing, I want to mention another resource that I found very helpful in addressing the existence of ETI; Marie George’s Christianity and Extraterrestrials.  Part of the challenge in thinking theologically about this issue is being able to formulate the questions correctly and frame it from the perspective of Divine Providence.  She does both.  I might weigh her conclusions differently than she did, but her framing of the issue is invaluable for anyone who wants to approach the issue from a Catholic perspective.

Gender as a Mental Construct

Marxism, Natural Law, Sexual Ethics, , , ,

In his Poverty of Philosophy, Karl Marx attacked eternal truths and natural law as nothing more than constructs of the bourgeoisie to repress the working class.  This has powered the campaign of his intellectual progeny to take everything that is natural and paint it as a “social construct” that fuels the engine of repression.  The most recent, and perhaps the most pernicious example of this is gender.  By labeling it as a social construct, all natural differences between the sexes, including complementarity, explained away as effects of changing social conditions.  All that needs to be done is to construct the right social conditions and equality and androgyny will usher in a sexual utopia.  

WHO Should We Listen To?

In combating the social contagion of transgenderism, we must first irradicate the mind virus that leads to it.  Ironically, this global mind virus has spread even into the World Health Organization who  defines gender as a social construct in this way:

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.  This includes norms, behaviors and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time. Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities…Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs… Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

Notice first the circular nature of the experts’ definition.  They say it “interacts” with sex but is different than sex.  Its definition is teaming with sexual terms—“women, men, girls, and boys”  Those terms are only meaningful in relation to each other.  A women is a human being whose body is ordered towards the gestation of new life while a man is human being whose body is ordered towards the gestation of new life in another.  Girls and boys are merely immature versions of those two.  No amount of verbal gymnastics of degrading a woman by reducing her to her function as a “birthing person” will change this inherent sexual relationality.  The fact that WHO advocates for transition “treatment” modalities such as hormones and surgery which make the person “look” more like the opposite sex also betrays the fact gender and sex are inseparable.  Is it really a social construct that men have beards and women have breasts?  If it is not, then why would it be necessary for a woman to “transition” to a man physically?  If gender and sex can be different, then why all the effort to match them up?  If gender identity is “person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender”, then why is it necessary to touch the external at all?

Why We Shouldn’t Give Them a Hearing

Once we grasp that the purpose of labeling gender a social construct is to apply the magical Marxian dialectic to it, then we are more apt to defend it in a way that combats this directly.  We need to actively reaffirm what is natural.  First there is the fact that we are social creatures which means that society, rather than being a vehicle of oppression is a necessary element of our fulfillment.  Boys and girls are first formed in masculinity and femininity (and their interaction with each other) in the social setting of the family.  They learn how they have a unique capacity for self-giving based on their sex and they enter into society as a whole and form families of their own in order to fulfill this capacity. A further element that must be combated is the overt dualism that animates most people’s thinking.  Because we are a body/soul composite, the inner experience can never be divorced from the outer reality.  Any attempt to do so ultimately leads to a disintegration of the person which manifests itself externally in the mutilation of the body.  Hylomorphism means that essentially everything we consciously experience has its foundation in material reality  We might imagine something like a unicorn, but that image must come from our experience in the real world of either a picture we have seen of a unicorn (from someone else’s imagination) or a mixture of our own images of a white horse with a horn.  Likewise we might imagine what it was like to be Louis XVI, but could never fully imagine what he felt like when he was about to be guillotined.  It is simply outside of our experience.  The philosopher Thomas Nagel has an essay entitled What Is It Like to be a Bat? in which he gives a deeper explanation of this limitation of consciousness in relation to the “inner” experience of other beings.   

The point is that a man feeling like a woman is by definition outside of his range of experience.  He only has experience of being a man who feels like a woman (which is by definition still a man).  He may know what it feels like to be confused, but he is confused as a man.  How can a man struggling with gender dysphoria know that what he is experiencing is “feeling like a woman”?  Doesn’t someone have to be a woman to feel like a woman?   How does he know that what he feels like is exactly what a man should feels like?  This is why he must go to the cultural priests (psychologists) and receive their blessing that his feelings are authentic.

The fact that an expert must authenticate the experience returns us back to the fundamental truth that transgenderism is ultimately a mental construct by those who are seeking to eliminate all hierarchies by destroying nature itself.  It is designed to power the latest instance of the Marxist dialectic.  This is not to trivialize the experience of those who suffer from gender dysphoria but to discredit the so-called experts who are willing to sacrifice them to their ideology.

Fulfillment of the Law

Bible, Church, Church and State, Natural Law, The Life of Jesus, ,

As Moses departed from the people of Israel, he promised that God would send another prophet just like him (Dt 18:15).  This prophet would not only lead them into the True Promised Land, but would give them a new law.  So the Jews were constantly on the lookout for this “new Moses” and the early Church repeatedly preached Jesus as the Mosaic prophet they were looking for (c.f. Acts 3:22, 7:37).  It is no surprise then that Our Lord, just after beginning His public ministry in Matthew’s gospel (addressed to the Jews), climbs a mountain and delivers the Sermon on the Mount.  For just like Moses who had to climb Mount Sinai to bring the law from God down to the people, the new Moses, God Himself, speaks directly from the mountain about the Law.

Chronologically and culturally removed from the Sermon on the Mount, it is often confusing for us when the Bible speaks of “the Law”.  What exactly does that mean and, more specifically, what does it mean when Our Lord tells those gathered that “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Mt 5:17)?

The Old Law

In his treatise on Law in the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas enumerates three kinds of precepts of the Old Law: moral, ceremonial, and judicial.  By placing all of the Old Law within these three broad categories, we are able to better understand both our relationship to the law and the manner in which Christ can say that He did not abolish it but came to fulfill.

When most people think of the “Old Law” the Ten Commandments immediately come to mind.  It serves as the foundation for all the moral precepts contained within the Old Law.  The Decalogue is in a certain sense superimposed upon the Natural Law, making the precepts of the Natural Law specific.  Some of the precepts are easily discernible based on the natural law—“thou shall not kill…thou shall not bear false witness”.  Other precepts require wisdom and reflection such as “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”  Still others, especially those of the first tablet require Divine instruction.  Nevertheless, they do all relate to what can be known from the natural law.

Second, there are the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law.  These pertain to Divine Worship.  This would include things like sacrifices, sacred things such as the tabernacle, Old Testament “sacraments” such as Seder Meals and circumcision, and observances that distinguished them as worshippers of the True God (not eating pork, etc.).

Finally, there is judicial law.  Judicial law is similar to civil law in that it determines the way that a People is governed.  It maintains the sovereignty of the People, it governs relations within the People, and governs how citizens interact with non-citizens.  Much of the book of Leviticus lays out in detail how Israel is to govern itself in these areas.  Israel was to be a “light to the Gentiles” but must remain a distinct People because “salvation comes from the Jews.” 

Fulfillment of the Law

With three types or precepts of the Old Law, there are also three ways in which Christ fulfilled them.  When we speak of “fulfillment” we must first grasp intention.  The moral precepts, reflected in the Ten Commandments, are the direct intention of God with respect to how we are to relate to Him (1st-3rd Commandment) and to each other (4th-10th Commandment).  As St. Thomas says, there can only be dispensation of the law when the letter of the law frustrates the intention of the Lawgiver.  Therefore, there is no abrogation of the moral precepts of the Old Law.

Christ, nevertheless, fulfills the moral precepts in Himself.  He perfectly follows the moral law.  In so doing, He wins graces for His followers such that they are empowered to do the same thing.  It is as if He gives us the power to “re-read” the Decalogue not in terms of rules but as a prophecy.  “in Christ you shall not make false idols…in Christ you shall not covet your neighbor’s goods” etc.   

Christ likewise fulfilled all the ceremonial precepts.  The purpose of the ceremonial precepts was to prefigure and act as a foreshadowing of the mystery of Christ.  All of the sacrifices find their meaning and fulfillment in His sacrifice on the Cross.  He is the true tabernacle.  Baptism becomes the “new” circumcision.  All dietary laws are abrogated because the Bread of Life has become man’s true food.

The judicial precepts had as their purpose setting apart the Jews for the sake of the Messiah.  In Christ there is no distinction between Gentile and Jew so that the judicial precepts are no longer binding (Heb 7:12).  The catholicity of the New Israel means that the theodicy of the Old Israel has ended and the principles of the New Covenant can guide men in civil life, regardless of the form of government they take.  Church and State work together, each within its respective sphere, to bring men to salvation, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s” (Mk 12:17).

 We see then how Christ came not to abolish but to fulfill the Law.  He fulfills the moral, ceremonial, and judicial precepts of the Law, but each in a unique way.  The moral by empowering men to live according to God’s law.  The ceremonial by giving us Himself on the Cross and through the Sacraments.  And the judicial precepts through the Church.    

Sin and the Dimensions of Providence

Sin, Spiritual Warfare

One of the themes that St. Paul reflects upon in his letter to the Romans is the role that Sin plays in Divine Providence.  He does not say it using those terms directly, but it is clear from his statement that God “where sin abounds, grace superabounded” (Rom 5:20) that there is an important reflection for the Romans (and us) to make related to Sin in their own lives.  It is this theme that I would like to take up here.

Recall what has been said a number of times previously in regards to Providence.  It has two dimensions or aspects.  The first relates to God’s overall plan for Creation.  At the center of the plan is Christ.  This is why St. Paul keeps coming back to the typological relationship between Christ and Adam in Romans 5-7.  The sin of Adam becomes the type of all sin and becomes in a very real sense the cause of the Incarnation.  I am not taking sides in the Scholastic debate over whether the Son would have become man if there was no sin, only dealing with reality as we have it.

Adam’s Sin and God’s Providence

What we very often don’t think about is that God could have stopped Adam from sinning.  And He could have done so in a way that still protected Adam’s freedom of choice.  He could have stopped the Devil from entering into the Garden.  He could have given Adam an actual grace by which his intellect or will were strengthened against the temptation of the Devil.  He could have inspired Adam to pray against the temptation.  He could have sent His Guardian Angel to crush the head of the serpent.  He could have continually done this so that Adam never sinned (this is exactly what he did with Mary) and Adam would have been the freest human person ever.

So, then we must ask why God permitted Adam to sin.  Permitted is the key word because God did not cause Him to sin.  Yet He chose not to stop him and so there must have been some good that otherwise would not have been.  That good was the Incarnation of His Only Begotten Son.  Again, this is not an answer to the debate, but a fact that it was better for the Son of Man to save us from our sins than to be merely incarnated.  It reveals something of God and His glory that otherwise would not have been shown forth.

It is also a fact that God permitted that particular sin of Adam.  Again, Adam could have fallen any number of ways.  But God allowed that particular sin with all its circumstances for a very specific reason.  Adam sinned exactly as he did because it brought about and prefigured the specific act of redemption God wanted. Felix culpa!  “O happy fault that merited so great of a Redeemer.”

But Adam was not a mere pawn or instrument in the divine economy.  God also had Adam’s good in mind when He permitted him to fall exactly as he did.  This does not mean that Adam received the good, only that God allowed his sin in order to give him some good.  It is impossible to know what the specific good or goods that God would give to Adam as a consequence of that particular sin, but one can readily see how this would be possible.  For Adam needed humility and trust in God’s Providence, both of which could have been given to him as a consequence of his sin.  God would not permit the sin to happen if there was not some personal good that was also possible. 

Admitting the possibility though does not mean that Adam received the consequent goods.  Repentance is the gateway to receiving those goods.  This is what St. Paul means when he cautions the Romans not to think that grace was a direct result of the sin (Romans 6:1). It is a result of God’s omnipotence that He can bring good from our sins.  For sin is literally nothing and only God can bring good from nothing.  Try as we might, we can never do evil and expect good to come from it.

Providence’s Second Dimension

What we have been discussing is the other way in which sin plays a role in God’s Providence—personally.  God’s Providence is not just in His governance of the world as a whole, but also His governance of the world as if you are the only one that matters.  He will not cease providing you and me with what we need at each and every moment of our lives.  It is a direct effect of His wisdom and His love; wisdom in His governance of all things for my personal benefit and His ceaseless willing of my good.  God doesn’t just will my good generically, but personally and at each and every moment of my life.

While we might intellectually assent to this, we cannot realize it without asking why God permits us to fall into some sins and not others?   Most certainly there are sins from which we personally could never escape.  Those seem not to plague.  Others keep us humble and aware enough of our faults that we do not sin in more serious ways.  Others help us eventually to see that we have been trapped by a lie of the Evil One.  Not sure why God permitted it, ask Him.

This is a spiritually fruitful practice not just because it helps us to grow in self-knowledge, but also because it helps us to see what God wants to give us and heal us from.  In order for this to happen we cannot hide in shame from our sins or try to rationalize them away.  Trusting in God’s mercy we must face them head-on in a spirit of repentance.  Once repented, we are opened to receiving the greater grace within God’s permission.  As St. Thomas says in a gloss on Romans 5, some sinners “by the help of divine grace are humbled when they consider their sins and so obtain a greater grace (Ps 16:4)”.  In short, when we sin we must run to repentance and filled with both sorrow and love, anticipate the good that God has for us

On Dating Christmas

Advent, Apologetics, Christmas, History, Scripture, , , ,

Each Christmas a friend of mine sends me a text wishing me “seasons greetings”.  He casts a wide net capturing the “spirit” of the season wishing me a “Merry Christmas, Merry Natalis Solis Invictus, and Happy Kwanza” and, just in case, throws in a “Happy Festivus” for the rest of us.  Rather than continually engaging him each year, I now simply respond “Merry Christmas…and as for the rest, I have already aired my grievances.”  His point is rather clear—Christmas is just as made up as the rest of them.  It is an indirect attack on the historicity of Christ, but also a direct attack on the dating of Christmas as December 25th.  Having addressed the indirect attack in other posts, it is the direct attack I would like to address in this post.

The Problem of Accuracy

One of the problems we must admit right away is related to the accuracy of the date.  The Church Fathers are not unanimous in the dating of Christmas and very few mention December 25th.  It is not until much later that the Church selected that date to mark the Solemnity of Christmas.  Part of the problem is the abundance of calendars used in the ancient world.  The two most commonly ones that were used Egyptian and the Julian Calendar.  The Jews also used a calendar based on the lunar cycles (354 days) rather than on the solar cycle (365).  These were considered obsolete when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in the 1500s (although the Orthodox still mark Christmas on January 7th which is the equivalent to December 25th on the Julian Calendar).  The point is that our December 25th is not the same day as the December 25th using the Julian Calendar, which was the one in use in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ.  We have to admit that there is a “translation” problem that makes the exacting dating difficult.

This does not mean, however, that the selection of December 25th is arbitrary and meaningless.  But this is to yield to the sentiment that somehow accuracy and meaning are synonymous.  Just because we cannot accurately calculate the date of Christ’s birth doesn’t mean December 25th is arbitrary.  In fact, it is the most fitting date to celebrate the historical reality of Christ’s nativity because it preserves the meaning of Christ’s birth.

There is a principle at play in the discussion that, in our Big Bang/Evolutionary ideal, is often forgotten.  Nothing within Creation is arbitrary.  Even the tiniest activity is charged with meaning, not because of the Butterfly Effect, but because of Christ.  To put it in biblical terms, “in Him were created all things in heaven and on earth…all things were created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:16, emphasis added).  At the center of Creation, at the center of history, is Christ.  All of Creation points to Him and all of Creation finds its meaning in Him.  Christ really is the answer.  He is, to use Aristotelian terms, the Final Cause of each thing in Creation.  This was His reason for creating so many natural images so that He might use them to describe Himself and His Kingdom. 

The Fittingness of December 25th

With this in mind, why is December 25th fitting then?  To grasp this we must go back to “the beginning”.  Many of the Jews and ancient Christians believed that the Sun was created on March 25th.  It is assumed that when God created the Sun to “separate day from night” (Gn 1:14), this separation was equal.  This only occurs on two dates throughout the year—the two equinoxes in the Spring and the Fall.  The date for the Vernal Equinox in the Julian Calendar was March 25th.  God chose the fourth day for the creation of the sun because it was the day in which the “sun of righteousness” (Mal 4:2) was to come into the world.  Its creation is for the sake of God Himself entering Creation.  This entering into Creation occurred when the Holy Spirit overshadowed His Mother at the Annunciation.  It is for this reason To mark Christ’s conception the Church celebrates the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25th .

As an aside, March 25th is also believed by many Church Fathers to be the day Christ died.  “On the third day, He rose again” and man was re-made.  Again, we see the parallel with Creation.  The Sun is created on the 4th day and then “on the third day” (Day 6) man is first made.  This only seems like a stretch when we forget the principle articulated above.  If all things really were made for Christ, then this is exactly what you would expect.

If Christ was conceived on March 25th, then it would be reasonable to celebrate His birth nine months later on December 25th.  This is the reason for the December 25th celebration.  In support of this date we also have the witness of nature itself.  “The true light which has come into the world” (Jn 1:9), comes right after the Winter Solstice, when the amount of light coming into the world from the Sun begins to increase.  December 25th is most certainly fitting.

The three Wise Men knew all of this.  This is why they followed the Star.  They knew nature points to the True King.  The choice of December 25th is a defense of the primacy of Christ, not just over Solis Invictus, but over all of Creation.  We too would be wise to pay attention to this principle.

On Marrying Young

marriage, Natural Law, , ,

Over the past 40 years, the median age of men and women getting married in the US has risen steeply.  Catholics, it seems, are no different in this regard.  A Pew Research Center study in 2014 found that only 14% of Catholics between the ages of 18-29 were married.  Marrying at a much later age has become the “new normal”.  Statistics are helpful, but they do not answer the most important question as to whether this is a good thing or not.  The answer, not surprisingly, is a resounding “No”.

To see why this question is answered in the negative, we must first make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural.  Normality expresses to what degree a man conforms to a cultural norm.  These norms are always relative to the culture in which they are established.  In the best of all possible worlds, they are also relative to what is natural.  It is when the natural and the normal coincide that the behavior in question leads to true flourishing and happiness (in the fullest sense).  While it may be normal to get married older, it is questionable whether it conforms to what is natural.

A Natural Time to Get Married?

Marriage in itself is natural for the human person, but the question is whether the nature of marriage itself demands that the spouses wait until they are older to marry.  To address this question we must first ask how we determine what is natural.

One way that we can do this is by looking at the biological reality of the human body.  What I mean by this can be best illustrated by an example.  We know that, despite being deeply immersed in a Freudian-Kinseyan paradigm, children are not sexual beings.  If they were, then they would develop sexual capacities before the normal age of puberty (12-16).  This is why, as I have written previously, something like Drag Queen Story Hour is an abuse of childhood. 

While we might readily admit that biology reveals the grievous nature of sexualizing children, we tend to make a the same error when it comes to marriage and sexual development.  Is it reasonable to think that God made men and women sexually mature by their late teens and early 20s only to have them enter a holding pattern for up to a decade?  Perhaps you could say yes, except for the fact that they also experience their strongest libido at the same time. 

Sexual desire is the strongest desire we experience because it is meant to fuel the courage to make the necessary gift of self necessary for marriage and family life.  It is at its strongest at such an early age because it is meant to propel the man and woman out from their parents so as to become parents themselves.  The problem is that we now tell young adults that, despite the fact that they experience strong sexual desire, they are too young for marriage.  There is the obvious disconnect then between God’s design and lived reality.    

With these considerations in mind, it becomes clear that there is something contra-natural about waiting so long to get married.  As mentioned, marriage in and of itself at any age is natural so we cannot say it is against nature.  It does however tend towards being contrary to the nature of marriage itself, especially because it is the foundation of the Family.  Rather than making it possible to be “fruitful and multiply” it contributes to what would more accurately be called the modern “fruitful and maintain” paradigm.  Again to be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with waiting to marry in individual cases, but in the general trend and attitude towards the later marriages.

Marriage as a Life Accesory

Once we are able to grasp that younger marriages conform with God’s design for marriage, we can begin to ask why many people fail to see this.  To say that “Marriage is natural” means that it is one of the things that fulfills our nature (i.e. become virtuous).  This fulfillment comes not just because we biologically passed on our genes, but because Marriage and the Family are foundational for our moral growth.  The Family is a school of virtue, not just for children, but for the man and woman as both husband and wife and then father and mother. 

Our culture, on the other hand, treats marriage as if it is merely an add-on.  The professional has taken precedence over the personal.  Marriage is not even considered until a certain level of professional success is achieved.  The person trains himself to link fulfilment with professional achievement.  They also become very set in their ways and their capacity for self-giving in marriage and family is diminished.  We should expect the age to continue to increase unless a fundamental shift in attitude occurs.  The longer the person waits, the less they are “ready” for marriage. 

This putting of the occupational cart before the conjugal horse fails to acknowledge that, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out, the communion of persons in marriage is a fundamental human good upon which all human goods are built (Veritatis Splendor 14).  To add it into an already settled life is to risk disintegration because the true accessories have been placed before the essential.  Professional decisions are for the sake of supporting a family.  Rather than seeing education and careers as means to supporting a spouse and family, they have become competitors.  The attitude is “once I go to school and get a job, then I will think about marriage” rather than “I am choosing to be trained in this profession because it will allow me to take care of my family.”  And this attitude is encouraged even by well-meaning Catholics.

The Muddled Creationist

Evolution, Faith and Reason, Science, Scripture, , ,

There is perhaps no movement in the Church that has been more destructive to confidence in Sacred Scripture than Theistic Evolution.  Proponents usually defend their position by saying “truth cannot contradict truth” so that the lens of science can be applied to the biblical account of origins confidently.  But the amount of exegetical gymnastics that it requires ultimately destroys faith in the truth and historicity of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  Once faith is shaken in the beginnings of the Bible, it is not long before other books fall victim to the same fate. 

At first glance it seems to be a reasonable position especially with our modern disdain of fundamentalism, no matter what position they actually take.  As Christians, the full evolutionary explanation, one marked by a completely material explanation of the origins of life, is unacceptable.  But rather than rejecting it outright as false, they attempt to tweak it so as to avoid being lumped in the fundamentalist creationist camp.  They insert God into the gaps in evolution by saying that either He guided it or stepped in at certain points.  The evolutionary fence-sitting seems like a compromise but all it ends up doing is compromising the Faith itself.

Avoiding the Evolutionary Creep Deep into Genesis

I mentioned the first eleven chapters of Genesis as being in the crosshairs.  We should not be surprised about this because St. Peter warned us that scoffers in the end times would deny the truth of the Flood.  He even tells us how they will deny it—by saying ‘all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.’ (2 Peter 3:3-7).  This describes what has become known as uniformitarianism.  This “theory” posits that all geological features can be interpreted in terms of slow-and-gradual processes.  Layers of sediment and the natural processes all proceed at exactly the same pace throughout the history of the world enabling us to somewhat accurately measure time based on the fossil record.  If those processes are not uniform then really nothing can be said as far as timing.  If there was, say a world-wide flood, burying the surface of the Earth for 100 days, the receding of the waters would not only profoundly change the face of the earth but also lay down layer upon layer of sediment almost all at once.  This would mess up the “biological clock” and leave evolution without enough time to work itself out.  Combine this with other similar catastrophes that were not as large and any dating of the Earth would certainly be overestimated.

Darwin himself recognized that the Flood must go— “Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure” (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species).

Even if we ignore the fact that fossils only form when something is buried quickly, uniformitarianism has been called into question as a scientific theory.  Many geologists, especially those who don’t have an atheistic axe to grind, agree that  it should retired.  We have many recent examples of catastrophes that have resulted in an “aged” landscape.  A good example that refutes uniformitarianism is near Spirit Lake in Mt. St Helens in Washington state that was created in a mere few hours and has the “appearance of being millions of years old.  Nevertheless, it is nowhere near being as sure a theory as it is often portrayed. 

What is sad is that many theistic evolutionists feel obligated to adjust their interpretation of Noah’s Flood by making it either a mythical event or just a small local flood because it does not fit with evolution.  This is non-sensical unless you are also willing to explain away all the animals on board (why is this necessary?) and God’s promise never to do it again (there are local floods all the time).  Darwin had at least this right—if the Flood really did occur then it is practically impossible that evolution is true. 

Not a Science Textbook

There are those who willingly accept the historical truth of the Flood yet still claim that we should accept evolution because Genesis is not a science book.  This is a bit of a non-sequitur because no one claims that it is.  Science could not explain creation for the simple fact that it is a supernatural event.  The Six Days of Creation describe supernatural actions performed directly by God (Wisdom 9:1).  It definitely explains how  it was done, even if it doesn’t do so using scientific language.  It is a dogma of the Faith that each thing was created out of nothing by God’s Word (“through Him all things were made”) and not through any secondary causes (more on this in a second).  Science could no more explain how God did it than it could explain how Christ turned water into wine or rose from the dead.  Science can only explain natural phenomena.  The fact that it is a supernatural event explains the rather oblique language, but it does not clear the way for an evolutionary interpretation.  The language is meant to add clarity not obscurity.  To say that the “dust of the earth” really means “ a monkey’s body” or that the birds being formed on the fifth day before the reptiles on the sixth day isn’t really meaningful since evolutionary theory has birds evolving from reptiles or the fact that the whales and other sea-going mammals were formed on the fifth day before the land animals on the sixth day from which they supposedly evolved also doesn’t matter is putting the evolutionary cart before the scriptural horse.  It may not be a science textbook, but there is no reason to use oblique language when there is a perfectly understandable explanation.  Truth cannot contradict truth indeed.  Why would we assume that the Scriptural text should be adjusted when it is clear that there is little more than a scientific hypothesis that reptiles evolved into birds?  It is almost as if God anticipated the Theory of Evolution and directly refuted it through the order in which things were created.

As promised, we will return to the dogmatic declaration that all things were created directly by God and find a rather large stumbling block for theistic evolution.  The First Vatican Council declared

“If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God; or holds that God did not create by his will free from all necessity, but as necessarily as he necessarily loves himself; or denies that the world was created for the glory of God: let him be anathema.” (Vatican I, Dei Fillius, Canon 5).

The bold text means that God did not use any secondary agents to create each new kind of living thing.  This Biblical kind is distinct from biological species (a nebulous term anyway), but it does leave the door open for microevolution even broadly speaking (say for a horse to become a zebra for example).  But it closes the door on is macroevolution because it does not permit any belief that one kind (say reptile) became another kind (say bird).  Evolution, even guided, also necessitates on God’s part an adherence during creation to natural laws.  This too draws the Church’s anathema upon the theistic evolutionist.

Ultimately then the theistic evolutionist can only subscribe to a microevolutionary theory of variation with biblical kinds and requires God to regularly intervene in creation whenever a new kind is made.  What they don’t realize is that this ultimately makes them muddled Creationists.  They concede that God created each new thing, but then mix in microevolution to explain all the variation.  I say muddled because they are confusing what St. Thomas describes as the Creation/Providence paradigm.  During the days of Creation God created each thing according to its kind.  On the Seventh Day and beyond, no new kinds of creatures come into being (God rests from creating on the 7th day), but through reproduction and multiplication we might see distinct scientific species arise (think of my horse and zebra hypothetical).  But this really isn’t evolution at all, at least not as Darwinists define it.  Certainly, you could read Genesis literally and there would be no conflict with microevolution at all (this is why I have written about the need to not fall for the evolutionary bait and switch).

It turns out then that Theistic Evolution is nothing more than a Faustian Bargain.  In order to be intellectually honest to the Evolutionary explanation, Faith in Genesis must be replaced with faith in Darwin.  There is no compromise to be made between the two worldviews that does not leave the compromiser compromised.

Christ Living in Me

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In the midst of his battle against the Arians, St. Athanasius once pithily said, “that which Christ did not assume, has not been healed.”  The point that the Father of Orthodoxy was making was that Our Lord assumed the entirety of our human condition in order to redeem and renew us (2 Cor 5:17).  He did not just generically redeem our actions, in lived them in order that they might be sanctified.  He became a worker, in order to redeem our work.  He entered a family in order to redeem family life.  He had friends in order to redeem friendship.  He ate in order to redeem eating.  He suffered in order to redeem suffering.  He died in order to redeem death.  The list can go on and on, but the point is that whatever He did, He did as the Divine Redeemer, taking both ordinary and extraordinary actions and supercharging them with sanctifying power.

Realizing Our Beliefs

This principle helps us to understand why He lived the “Hidden Years” of His life, seemingly doing nothing but living an ordinary life.  He did not just one day, as Pope Benedict XVI is fond of saying, pick up the mantle of Redeemer.  It was Who He was the moment He took flesh to Himself.  We might be tempted to file this away as an interesting reflection on the truth of the Incarnation, as something that we simply believe, without taking the time to realize it.

The necessity of allowing our beliefs to be realized is at the heart of theology.  What I mean by this is that it is not enough to merely intellectually assent to some truth (that is belief), it must become realized by becoming an active principle by which we live our lives.  St. Thomas Aquinas is not a saint because he wrote the Summa, he is a saint because he lived the Summa.  He modeled his life after the Church’s first theologian, St. Paul.

St. Paul believed in Christ’s full redemption and made it the principle by which he lived his life.  By way of the Galatians, he instructs us to do the same thing when he said “it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me; the life that I live in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God…”

We must first fully grasp that when St. Paul says this, he means it literally.  He is not talking about how he tried really hard to imitate Christ and got so good at it that he acts a lot like Him.  He means it quite literally that it is no longer his own life that animates him, but instead the life of Christ.  By exercising his faith in Christ as full-time Redeemer, he has become another Christ in the world and calls us to imitate him in order that we too might say the same thing.

Linking Our Lives to Christ’s

In short, the secret is that we must link our lives to Christ.  This happens not in some abstract way, but by linking each moment of our everyday lives to the moment in Christ’s earthly life that “matches” it.  This might still sound a little too abstract, so let’s take an example.

Let’s suppose that I just found out that a friend of mine has told a group of people something that I wanted to remain a secret.  I feel betrayed.  Rather than wallowing in that, I go to Christ in His moment of betrayal and speak with Him about the situation.  When He experienced His betrayal, being God, He also foresaw this moment in which I would be betrayed.  He submitted to it in order to redeem this moment for me.  He has already won for me whatever graces I am most in need of. I simply need to show up with my divinely bestowed claim ticket to receive it.  Still, it is His life, not just in the abstract, but really which moves me to respond in accord with the Divine Will. 

Returning back to Athanasius’ point, you cannot find a single moment of your life that does not link up to Christ’s.  Studying His life in the gospels is obviously helpful in making the connection, but it is not absolutely necessary.  You can just as easily tell Our Lord, “I unite myself to that moment in Your life when you were hungry and ask for the grace not to be hangry in my situation” as go to Him when He is hungry after fasting in the desert.  In either case, my willingness to go where Christ has already “remembered” me is the cause of the redemption and sanctification of the present moment.  This is why every saint counsels the necessity of meditating upon the life of Christ.  *****

Doing this occasionally is very fruitful, but once it becomes habitual, you will become a saint.  The life of Christ and your life become practically indistinguishable as you draw all of your movement from His life such that Christ re-lives His life in you.  This is what St. Paul was talking about.  He started by exercising Faith in the Jesus as the Son of God Who died for him and then carries all of that to its logical conclusion by uniting His  life at each moment with Christ’s.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me!    

***Seeing each moment of Christ’s life as a mystery in which I participate through prayer and receive graces He has already won for me specifically is at the heart of adopting this habit.  It is Blessed Columba Marmion who has worked out the theology surrounding this, but I have summarized his thought in a previous post.

Faith and the Suspicion of God

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Are you suspicious of God?  This is a rather strange question to open an essay, especially one written by a believer.  It seems to be the question of the skeptic.  If we are honest, we will admit that, yes, on some level, I am suspicious of God. That level of honesty is difficult because it shatters the image each of us has of himself as a Christian.  Nevertheless, it is there.  God has willed it (even if only permissively) as an effect of the Fall.  We have each inherited from Eve a suspicion that God might not totally have our best interest at heart.  Satan placed the question of whether God was holding out on her in her heart and its echoes have been heard in the hearts of her progeny ever since.

There is further proof that suspicion is part of our default condition.  In those children whom He has adopted in Baptism, God has placed the remedy—Faith.  Without it we will eternally go on questioning God’s motives.  With it, suspicion is wiped away.  The point is that Faith is not natural, not something we can obtain or, once we have it, even increase on our own.  It is beyond our natural capacities and is totally supernatural.  Upon hearing of the power of Faith (Lk 17:5, Mt 17:20), the disciples do not say “Lord we will try harder to believe”, but “Increase our Faith.” 

Despite its supernatural origin, it is nevertheless a habit infused into our souls that we have the power to use.  But in order to use it properly, we must become more aware of its mode of operation. 

Natural vs Supernatural Faith

Oftentimes we equate supernatural Faith with human faith and think it simply means trust.  Like supernatural Faith, natural faith is a form of belief based on trust.  We might have faith that a pilot has been properly trained and therefore get on a flight even if we are anxious about flying.  Natural faith is based on reasons—the airline would not want to put inexperienced pilots in the air because it is too great of a liability, we know someone who is a pilot and he went through years of flight school, the FAA unlike most government agencies is effective in monitoring airlines, etc.  Ultimately there is a leap of faith involved, but the leap is based upon solid reasoning.

Supernatural Faith is not quite the same.  Like natural faith it involves first believing someone (trust) before believing in his testimony.  But with Faith there is no leap of faith involved.  God has picked us up and placed us across the chasm of mistrust and doubt.  He has given us a share in the trust that Christ had in the Father.  Now, Christ did not have Faith because He had the Beatific Vision from the moment of His conception, but nevertheless He merited for us the foundation of Faith—trust.  The problem is that we often put the cart before the horse and focus on what is revealed before we address the issue of trust in the Revealer.

There truly is no such thing as an “intellectual conversion”.  You can think all of the doctrines of the Faith are reasonable and still not have Faith.  You simply have right opinion.  That is a good thing, but it is not Faith.  Faith consists first in trusting the Divine Person and then, knowing that He cannot deceive or be deceived, you believe everything that He says. 

There is a great recent example of this in an interview Jordan Peterson gave.  Anyone following him over the last few years will see that he is coming to think like a Christian.  He even admits to seeing Christ as an important historical figure who lived.  But he does not, and never will be able to, convince himself that Christ lives.  He still sees Him as living in the past and only influencing today through some natural progression of His doctrines.  This is natural faith, but, as I have said previously, one does not graduate from natural faith to supernatural Faith.  Pray that he receive the gift of Faith.

Disposing Ourselves to Receive Faith

We can detect our own tendency to naturalize Faith by how we respond to the interaction between Christ and the Apostles when He tells them it was because of little Faith that they could not cast out the demons (Mt 17:20).  Most of us read that as a rebuke.  But how can He rebuke them for something that they don’t naturally have?  Instead He is making them aware both of the power of Faith (it can move a mountain) and their need to ask and ready themselves to receive an increase (Lk 17:5). 

Because Faith is the foundation of the spiritual life and thus the deeper the foundation the taller the edifice that can be built upon it—but we said it was a gift and thus we cannot strictly speaking increase our faith we can ask for more faith and do certain things which dispose us for a reception of stronger Faith.  As St. John Henry Newman says :

“…with good dispositions faith is easy; and that without good dispositions, faith is not easy; and that those who were praised for their faith, were such as had already the good dispositions, and that those who were blamed for their unbelief, were such as were wanting in this respect, and would have believed, or believed sooner, had they possessed the necessary dispositions for believing, or a greater share of the them.”

St. John Henry Newman, Dispositions for Faith, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.

There are two things in particular we can do to dispose ourselves to receive an increase in Faith.  First and most importantly is to ask.  Admit your unbelief and ask for an increase in Faith (Mk 9:24).  Second, exercise the virtue of Faith.  When you exercise the “muscle” of faith through its exercise, you will be ready for the Divine Spotter to add more weight on the bar of Faith.  The three exercises that are particularly helpful are:

  1. Make acts of faith, especially by reciting the Creed.  But also in general by affirming that you believe any particular doctrine you happen to come across in your spiritual reading or discussion.  I find this practice particularly helpful during homilies that otherwise would not move me.
  2. Study the Faith.  When you also understand you are able to make a firmer assent to what is believed.
  3. Teach the Faith or openly profess the Faith in front of others.  This requires first a trust in God that He rewards those who proclaim Him and then a trust that He has spoken truthfully.

Scriptural Bingo

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In Book VIII of his Confessions, St. Augustine details his conversion.  After begging the Lord to finally free him from enslavement to sin, he began to weep with bitter sorrow because he felt powerless to overcome it.  He suddenly hears the voice of a child, almost in a sing-song voice, say “Take and read, take and read.”  He reasoned that the voice had a divine source and immediately opened a book of the Epistles of St. Paul.  Happening upon Romans 13:13-14, “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires”, the saint was immediately converted to Christ with “all the darkness of uncertainty vanishing away” (VIII, 29).

Augustine had learned this approach from St. Antony of the Desert whom he had read about.  Antony entered a church and upon hearing the words of Christ to the Rich Young Man to sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mt 19:21) did exactly as he was told.  We might be tempted to think the men superstitious, playing a form of Scriptural Bingo.  Except, that is, for the fact that we are talking about two saints.  Let us then examine exactly what is going on there.

Faith in Sacred Scripture

In his Encyclical on Sacred Scripture, Providentissimus Deus, warned that “a thirst for novelty and unrestrained freedom” in Scriptural interpretation represented a great threat the belief in Sacred Scripture as the true Word of God.  Scripture itself became victim to the cult of the expert and Scripture Scholars, rather than the Church, became authentic interpreters.  The average Catholic comes to think Scripture above his paygrade so that, confused by the experts, he sets it aside.  Faith in Sacred Scripture as the authentic Word of God, addressed not just to experts but to every man, was toppled.

The saints, including Antony and Augustine, believed in the public revelation contained in Sacred Scripture.  But because it is God Who speaks, they also believed that Scripture was a vehicle of private revelation as well.  This does not make them closet Protestants but fully Catholic.  They believed that God also revealed Himself and His will to them personally through Sacred Scripture.  To grasp this fully, we have to do some theology.  “Doing” theology means that we take something we believe and work out the implications of it so that it becomes a real principle in our lives.  We move from just believing it to real-izing it.

Real-izing Our Belief in Sacred Scripture

Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit is the true author of Sacred Scripture.  To real-ize this we must first set aside the question of how inspiration works.  It is not that this is an unimportant question, but that there is a tendency to over-play the hand that man plays in it.  However it worked, we have to know that the Holy Spirit inspired the Sacred Author to say exactly what He wanted to say and how it was to be said.  In other words, the Holy Spirit is the One Who is speaking, even if He is using a human mouthpiece.  From this we can draw a couple of principles

  • Every single word is both inspired—“all Scripture is inspired by God”  (2Tim 3:16) and true—“He cannot deny Himself”(2Tim 2:13)
  • Because it is God Who is doing the speaking Scripture is “living and active” (Heb 4:13)

This second principle likewise bears some explanation.  Because it is God Who was speaking through St. Paul, He had foreknowledge of the fact that St. Augustine would read Romans 13 on the fateful day.  The words contained within their meaning exactly what Augustine needed to hear to move his heart, opening it up to receive the grace of conversion.  It is as if God Himself in that very moment spoke directly to St. Augustine telling him what to do.

The words therefore are more than a dead letter, they are also active.  This means that like all of God’s words they are performative.  They effect what they command.  Augustine was not just reading something directed to him personally, the words themselves contained the power for him to “make no provision for the flesh.”  It is the words themselves that move Augustine to convert.  Whenever God commands, He also equips. 

Augustine as Everyman

What happened to Augustine is really not unique in that regard.  It is the same thing that is supposed to happen to each one of us every time we open our Bibles.  Each time Christ told the Apostles “have no fear”, He wasn’t just telling them to calm down, but He was also taking away their fear.  But not just their fear, but everyone who ever laid the eyes of faith upon Mark 6:45-52 while in a state of anxiety.

The Apostles knew Christ’s words had power because He had commanded a storm to cease with a single rebuke.  We too must come to believe that same power flows from the same Word found in Sacred Scripture.  This is what I mean by faith in Sacred Scripture.  Once you real-ize that it truly is living—directed to you personally from the seat of Eternity—you can expect it to be active by causing something to change in you. 

The problem is that there are forces at work trying to undermine this by turning Scripture into an academic subject and subjecting it to literary criticism without having faith in it living power.  Ultimately this undermines faith by echoing Satan’s “did God really say?”.  God really is speaking through Sacred Scripture, not just to mankind but to me here and now.  Pray for the grace of an increase in faith in Sacred Scripture!    

Our Lady and Temptation

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In 1926, Our Lord appeared to the last surviving Fatima visionary, Sr. Lucia, in order to ask her to spread the First Saturday Devotion.  In particular, He wanted the Faithful to fervently offer reparation for the blasphemies committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  Of special concern were blasphemies committed by those who “publicly implant in the hearts of children indifference, disrespect, and even hate against the Immaculate Mother.”  This wave of indifference and disrespect is fueled mostly by those who attempt to reduce Mary to the point that she is just like the rest of us.  We must oppose this tendency of what most aptly be called “over-naturalizing” Our Lady to the point of diminishing the transformative power of supernatural grace.

One way we can combat this is to highlight those areas of her spiritual life that were markedly different from us.  A good place to start is with Our Lady’s experience of temptations.  The reductionist says Our Lady suffered temptations just like the rest of us.  We might not know for sure whether or not she was tempted but we can say with assurance that her experience would have been profoundly different from our own.

On Being Tempted

Traditionally understood, temptations have their origin in three sources—the Devil, the World and the Flesh.  The Devil’s temptations take the form of suggestions to us.  They “arise from those things towards which each one has an inclination” (ST III q. 41, art. 4).  This means that he can “see” what we are inclined towards at a given time and then suggest to us to act upon that inclination in a disordered way.  As an example, when Our Lord was fasting in the desert we are told “He was hungry” and so Satan tempts Him first by trying to take advantage of his hunger. 

With Our Lord, the inclination towards food was natural and not disordered in any way.  For the rest of us, we have disordered inclinations that fall broadly into the categories of the World and the Flesh.  These both come about as a result of the wounding of Original Sin.  The World represents inordinate attachments to the things of this world to varying degrees.  It is a tendency to look upon the things that are made and not seeing the One Who made them.  Likewise, when we speak of the Flesh, we mean an inordinate love of sensual pleasure that manifests itself either in a horror of suffering or an insatiable desire for pleasure. 

While the Devil is active in tempting us by taking advantage of these inclinations, not all our temptations come from him.  These inclinations are “natural” in our fallen state and thus we can succumb to them without any instigation.  This is the “sin” that acts like “a law of my members” that St. Paul tells the Romans is constantly at war with his inward man (Romans 7:19-23).

Our Lady and Temptations

Our Lady then, because she was singularly privileged to be conceived without Original Sin, experienced temptations differently than we do.  She did not experience temptations from the Flesh or from the World.  In other words, she could only experience temptations that were suggested to her by the Devil.  The question then is whether she did in fact experience these temptations.

We must admit that Scripture is silent, at least explicitly, as to whether she was tempted or not.  But there is at least enough implicit data to suggest that Our Lady was in fact tempted by the Devil.

First, there is the principle of typology by which the archetype is always greater than the type.  Because the Old Eve was tempted by the Devil and fell, the New Eve must also be tempted by the Devil and overcome him. 

Second, there is the promise of the Protoevangelium (Gn 3:15) by which the New Eve, animated by a spirit of enmity, shall bruise the head of the ancient serpent.  This suggests not just a passive role, but a personal one by which she engages the Devil in a one-on-one fashion.

Our Lady’s hand-to-hand combat is described in Revelation 12:13-17.  It presents the devil as relentless in pursuit of her by which he tries to sweep her away in a flood of temptations, but God continually comes to her aid by swallowing up the waters of temptation.  Inserting temptations into the narrative may seem like a stretch until we read in verse 17 where the serpent grew angry at the Woman and went off to wage war on the rest of her children.  The devil’s primary weapon in that war is temptation.

Why This Matters

People are often annoyed by speculative questions like this because they seem too “scholastic”.  But the purpose of speculative questions in theology is to affect us in the practical realm.  St. Thomas in the already quoted question in the Summa (III q.41) on Christ’s temptation in the desert tells us that there are two kinds of temptations.  First there are those whose origin are the World and the Flesh.  These we should flee as near occasions of sin.  The other are those that come from the Devil.  Aquinas says:

“[S]uch occasions of temptation are not to be avoided. Hence Chrysostom says: ‘Not only Christ was led into the desert by the Spirit, but all God’s children that have the Holy Ghost. For it is not enough for them to sit idle; the Holy Ghost urges them to endeavor to do something great: which is for them to be in the desert from the devil’s standpoint, for no unrighteousness, in which the devil delights, is there. Again, every good work, compared to the flesh and the world, is the desert; because it is not according to the will of the flesh and of the world.’ Now, there is no danger in giving the devil such an occasion of temptation; since the help of the Holy Ghost, who is the Author of the perfect deed, is more powerful* than the assault of the envious devil.”

ST III q.41, art.2 ad.2

The point is that when the Devil tempts us, as Christian warriors we should stand our ground.  This does not mean we should or even can fight on our own, but that we must arm ourselves with the Cross and invoke the power of the Holy Spirit Who has led us into the desert of temptation and battle. 

St. Paul tells the Corinthians that if we rely on grace then we will never be tempted beyond what we can handle (1 Cor 10:13).  Our Lady’s experience confirms this as true.  If we “over-naturalize” her then our hope of winning the battle is diminished.  But we also learn that we have a powerful ally because Our Lady is undefeated in her battle against the Devil.  She will never let one of her children that turn to her fall in battle. 

Opening Our Hearts

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It is somewhat apropos that the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease.  Not just because of our collective lifestyles but because of the fact that it symbolizes the much larger heart disease that afflicts even the physically healthiest among us.  We are, as CS Lewis once put it, “men without chests.”  Our hearts are dying from neglect and we are greatly in need of transplants so that we can live truly human lives.

Transplant seems like a bit of an exaggeration, until we ponder the number of times Sacred Scripture speaks of getting a new heart.  Psalm 51 “create in me a clean heart O God” and Ezekiel 36:26 “And I will give you a new heart” among others could be brought to mind.  The point is that what we are about to discuss is no mere self-improvement project but a complete rebuild by the Master Builder Himself.  Why we must be in a receptive position will become clear in a second, but we must belabor the point so as to grasp what God is offering to us in Christ. 

Redeeming the Emotions

St. Gregory Nazianzen said, “what has not been assumed has not been healed.”  His point is that Christ assumed a true human nature and lived a truly human life in order to redeem ours.  Our Lord came not just to redeem us, but to heal us.  Just as that redemption starts now, so too does the healing.  More to the point, Christ He was effective in redeeming our affectivity.  He lived the perfect affective human life so that we could be healed.  He didn’t just want us to love our neighbor in some dry volitional way, He wanted us to feel the love too. 

Christ didn’t just heal our emotions from afar, but He wept in the face of sadness.  He commanded His disciples to “rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Lk 10:20), but then showed them how to “rejoice at that very moment” (Lk 10:21).  One of the most beautiful parts of The Chosen series is the way in which they depict the sheer delight that Our Lord felt and expressed when He performed a miracle. 

Christ gave us new hearts in order to love the right things in the right way, but until we grasp that this love includes the affective dimension, our love will always be mediocre.  I might love my neighbor because I want to help him, but that love will always be cold unless I feel compassion in the face of his need.  In order to be truly effective my compassion must be affective.    

This does not mean I let the perfect become the enemy of the good and only do something good if I can feel it, but that Christ’s redemptive act includes my feelings.  I should expect that I would feel it and if I don’t I should ask Him to further heal my feelings.  I should not just ask for sorrow for my sins, but sorrow that is felt.  There is no such thing as peace or joy that is not in some way felt in our hearts.  Even if we are suspicious of our affective dimension, we should never allow that suspicion to turn into hatred.

Encountering the Beautiful

What these new hearts will enable us to do is to encounter the beautiful.  It is not surprising that a culture that moves away from God is also no longer able to encounter beauty.  Beauty is what fuels the heart.  It is beauty deprivation in our culture that has caused the endemic heart disease. suffering from beauty deprivation.  Reality is marked by three transcendentals, three categories of being that all being share and that we were given natural radar for.  Our intellects are built to truth.  Our wills are built to goodness.  Our hearts are built to beauty.  We know what truth and goodness are, but we struggle with beauty.  Even St. Thomas’ definition of beauty as “that when seen pleases” is rather elusive unless our hearts are alive.  The beautiful is the thing that once we see it, see not just with our eyes but with the “eye of the mind”, we are moved, but not in order to possess it but to take delight in its existence. 

Our affections are moved because of this encounter with the beautiful.  But the moment we turn our focus away from the object that moved us and towards the pleasure it causes inside of us, we lose both the pleasure and the beauty.  In short, we begin to neglect our hearts and slowly they begin to die.  The problem is not the pleasure—that is what keeps the heart pumping—but the love of the pleasure.  To love the pleasure is selfish, but to love the object that stirred us in the first place is true love.  The pleasure then is felt love.

It is perhaps easiest to see when it comes to married love.  A wife will often tell her husband who insists on her beauty, that he is blinded by love.  But it is actually love that opens his eyes to the beauty.  He is fixated on the object of his affections and not the affections themselves.  The man who does this will never stop feeling those affections and in fact they will only get deeper as his love deepens.  She “has his heart.”  But if he can only focus on the pleasure her smile brings and not on the beauty of the smile itself, his love will die and his heart atrophy.

God made our hearts this way because He wants us to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”  He wants us to feel the gift of reality by contemplating the beauty of created things.  In contemplating and not trying to manipulate them to maximize pleasure, they become signs of His Goodness and Love.

Redeeming Work

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Nearly every large company presents itself to potential employees as deeply concerned with helping the new employee achieve “Work/Life Balance.”  The particulars might be different for each company, but the promise is the same—we will teach you the calculus by which the scales of life can be balanced.  But in truth they offer little more than guilt management techniques enabling the employee to decide how much of his life he is willing to trade in order to be professionally successful.  This balancing act always feels like a compromise because balance really isn’t the problem.  The problem is work itself.  Or, at least the way we experience it living as we do in our post-Edenic world. 

Man the Worker

By examining the nature of work itself, we can also see how it can be integrated into a rich and full life.  Work is, as John Paul II said, “a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth” (Laborem Exercens, 4).  It is fundamental because it is part of his nature to work and be perfected by it.  The Book of Genesis reveals this through God’s commandment to “fulfill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28).  Man is a worker because he is made in the image of God the Creator.  He Who made all things, made those things so that man could bring them to their completion.  In perfecting things, man himself would be perfected.   

But we know that is not the end of the story.  In choosing to “become like God” (Gn 3:5) on his own terms, man damaged his true God-likeness.  Work was infected by the curse of the Fall and work became labor.  Work itself became disintegrated.  Plagued by thorns and thistles, man becomes overly focused about the perfecting of things and forgets that work is primarily meant to perfect him.  As Pius XI put it, “for dead matter comes forth from the factory ennobled, while men there are corrupted and degraded” (Quadragesimo Anno, 135).

Even this is not the end of the story however.  The Son of God made Himself a worker so that work would get caught up in the Redemption.  Rather than succumbing to the heavy burden of work, we can submit to the yoke of Christ.  Work is still labor, but by laboring in the Spirit of Christ, it is no longer an obstacle but a means of sanctification.  Christ was, as John Paul II called Him, “a man of work…Who preached the ‘gospel of work’” (LE 26).  Now by accepting the labor associated with work as punishment for our sins and offering it as reparation, work becomes redemptive.

The Two Dimensions

Work then has two dimensions—objective and subjective—and both must be good in order for the “gospel of work” to penetrate our work.  In the objective sense, work is the practical manner in which man “subdues the earth.”  This means that the work itself must in a very real way facilitate the Common Good.  The good produced must be good for society and the work done on the “intellectual toolbench” must be ordered to the truth.  For many of us, our professional work will be the place where we fulfill our obligation to the Common Good.  It must in some way help others to truly thrive.  That is the only way to ensure a proper return for the talents that the master gave to the servants.

John Paul II had great concern for the changes to the nature of work that were coming about because of technology.  He was not a troglodyte who feared technology but thought that efficiency was a dangerous measure.  He saw technological development as a great good if it facilitated man’s work and enabled him to grow in virtue.  But, “technology can cease to be man’s ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work “supplants” him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave” (LE, 5).

The subjective meaning of work is the pre-eminent dimension.  Works gains its value from the fact that it is a person who is doing it and not primarily by the work done.  Some work is objectively better than other, but good work is that work which makes the worker morally good.  The best work for any individual is the work that will make him grow in virtue.  This is why the work itself, as long as it is good, does not matter so much as its character building effect on the person.  If more emphasis is placed on the subjective dimension of work, then we will cease to value work merely for its pay.      

Realizing that the most important thing we make in work is ourselves, we can see why “Work/Life Balance” goes about the problem of disintegration in the wrong way.  It is a subtle attempt at redeeming work on our own, rather than allowing God’s original vision for work to permeate our actions.