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Aquinas’ Fifth Way and Science

Atheism, Defending the Faith, Faith and Reason, Science, , , , ,

While St. Thomas thought his First Way for proving the existence of God was “the most manifest” in his own day, it is the Fifth Way that is the most accessible to modern man.  Among the Five Ways, the Argument from Finality speaks most clearly modern man’s anti-metaphysical language.  In fact, one modern philosopher, Immanuel Kant, thought the Fifth Way oldest, clearest and the most accordant with the common reason of mankind.”  This is a powerful endorsement coming from the man who killed metaphysics and thought that there could be no objective proofs for God’s existence.  Given its accessibility therefore, it is instructive for us to examine it more closely.

The Argument from Finality is often mistakenly confused with its doppelganger, the Argument from Design.  St. Thomas’ proof is deductive and demonstrative while all the variations of the Intelligent Design Arguments are inductive and probabilistic.  The latter always leaves open the possibility, even if it is remote, that there is in fact no Intelligent Designer.  The Argument from Finality, while it too comes to the same conclusion, it proceeds in a logically sound manner leaving no doubt as to the existence of a Supreme Intelligence Who created and sustains all things in existence.

The two types of proofs are different in another important way.  Like the other Four Ways, St. Thomas’ proof is not really concerned with creation, but preservation.  It is concerned primarily with why things are the way they are right now.  In other words, it eliminates the possibility of deism that plagues all of the Intelligent Design-type arguments. 

The Argument

With that said, let us turn to St. Thomas’ rather brief argument directly.

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end.  Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.                   

  ST I, q.2 a.3

Proceeding from direct sense experience of the world, St. Thomas posits that since non-intelligent beings always (or at least when not impeded) act for an end, that is, act intelligently, there must be an intelligence “underwriting” their intelligent activity.

On the one hand this is common sense.  In fact, this is such a “given” that empirical science treats it as a first principle.  In order for science to proceed, it has to assume that the object of its study is intelligible.  Intelligibility requires intelligence.  Prediction requires predictability which requires a governing intelligence. 

But common sense, especially if it conflicts with a scientistic worldview, is not so common.  This makes philosophical inquiry necessary.  Framing the discussion within philosophical terms such as final causality makes the argument clearer.  Recall that a being can be explained with regard to its four causes.  The first two causes, the material cause, or what it is made out of, and the formal cause, or what makes the thing what it is, are intrinsic.  The other two, efficient and final causes, are extrinsic.  The efficient cause is the external cause that brings about the existence of a thing or a new way of existence.  This need not point to a First Cause (at least directly), but can refer to secondary causes.  The efficient cause of new oak tree is an acorn.  Looked at from the perspective of the acorn, we can say that the final cause of the acorn is to become an oak tree.  Given all the right conditions, it will develop into an oak tree and not anything else like a rosebush or a donkey.  This is always the case, so much so that we can say that the acorn acts towards this end and not another.

This connection between a thing acting as an efficient cause and fulfilling its own final cause is very important for modern science.  For modern science seeks to study efficient causality.  In developing predictive models for inert matter, it seeks to explain what causes changes in matter.  It does not concern itself so much with final causes, but they are always lurking in the background because of this inherent connection between the two extrinsic causes.  Even if it does not so much care about final causes, the modern scientist cannot act as if they don’t exist without simultaneously denying efficient causes.  It is like sawing off the branch you are sitting upon. 

Why There Must be a Final Cause

Because the acorn lacks intelligence, this inner directedness of the acorn to develop into an oak tree must have an extrinsic intelligent cause.  This becomes evident when we realize that Aquinas is talking, not about creation but preservation.  Why does the acorn, here and now, have as its end or telos, the oak tree?  And why must there be Intelligence for this to be the case?  In order for a final cause to be a true cause, then the effect must be in the cause.  To see how this works, we will draw an analogy with a human artifact, say a house.  The builder is the efficient cause of the house, but he is also what is called the exemplary cause.  It is his idea of what the house will look like that is the final cause.  That cause does not exist in the house, but in the mind of the builder.  So if we return to our acorn, we can ask where the final cause exists.  When we do, we realize that it exists as a divine idea.  Now we see why the final cause cannot exist without an intelligence.  It must first exist as an exemplar in order to be a true final cause.  It must exist not just at creation, but also in the here and now.   

Once this link between final causes and intelligence is made, we see why St. Thomas’ argument is true.  The fact that we observe anything that acts as an efficient cause is also acting upon its own final causality.  Because these things act towards ends, and not just any ends, but very specific ends, there must be an intelligence behind it.  “Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.”

Understanding what St. Thomas is really arguing for then becomes important because it differentiates it from other Intelligent Design arguments.  This demonstrative proof is protected from the “God in gaps” arguments that usually plague these types of arguments.  Sharing the same assumptions as modern science, it also makes it especially potent against those who reject God based on scientism.

Relativism, the Supreme Court and Descartes

Abortion, Apologetics, Church, Culture, Defending the Faith, Politics, Relativism, , , ,

GK Chesterton once said that America was the only country built upon a creed.   He thought the American Founders had united the country around certain self-evident truths.  The founding credo has been replaced by a more modern one that is aptly captured by the Supreme Court in their 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood vs Casey.  Writing for the majority in defense of abortion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”  Freedom to choose trumps even reality itself, and relativism in all its forms was enshrined as dogma.  The only self-evident truth is that there is no objective truth.  Such an exaltation of freedom gives society no foundation upon which men and women may be united.  All that is left to bind the people is force, either through the coercion of political correctness or “the compulsion of the State”.

Quite obviously it is not enough to merely identify the problem.  We must do something about it.  But unless we are going to meet force with force, the only way to correct the problem is to correct the bad ideas that caused it.  Some errors are like weeds. It is not enough to merely pluck the leaves of consequences, but we must attack the roots of the ideas that caused the consequences.  Relativism is the weed that threatens society so that if we are to give society room to flower, then we must tear out its roots.

The Three Words

Three words was all it took to start the avalanche that would overthrow the Christian World Order.  Unwilling to face the Scientistic Zeitgeist head on by restating the higher metaphysical truths of reality, Rene Descartes decided to play the skeptic’s game.  Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am”, set the tenor for modern thought and paved the way for the coronation of Relativism.

Good intentions never cover for bad ideas, even if those ideas are “clear and distinct”.  Descartes sought to defend philosophy against the full frontal attack of empirical science.  When you have physics, why do you need metaphysics?  But rather than fixing the problem, he created a crisis in knowledge.  All this because he rejected Scholastic realism, that is, the epistemological position that all knowledge comes in and through the senses.  We come to form ideas based on the perceptions we receive from our encounter with reality.  Our ideas are true only insofar as they conform to reality.  In short, our ideas are means by which we come to knowledge of the highest and lowest things.

Rather than being measured by reality, Descartes thought man was the measure of reality.  Knowledge of reality is an impossibility.  Instead we can only have knowledge of our own ideas.  And not just any ideas, but only those are clear and distinct, the first of which was that he is thinking.  In his own words, “I think therefore I am…In this first knowledge doubtless, there is nothing that gives me assurance of its truth except the clear and distinct perception of what I affirm…and accordingly it seems to me that I may now take as a general rule, that all that is very clearly and distinctly apprehended (conceived) is true” (Descartes,First Meditation).

The Scholastics thought that existence was self-evident and could not be proven.  Our senses drew data only from those things that existed.  This could not be doubted and this was the starting point for all knowledge.  Descartes, rather than starting with the senses, began with the one thing he could not doubt, namely his own thought.  And this formed the basis for his discovering the truth; having a clear and distinct idea.  But because ideas are subjective, truth is no longer objective.  Truth reveals not the outside world, but the state of the mind of the thinker. 

Connecting the Dots

It may not yet be clear how Descartes connects to Casey until we trace out the consequences of Descartes’ thoughts.  We encounter reality in and through our senses and then form ideas about it.  Those ideas are called true which correspond to reality as it really is. Truth, then, is the correspondence of reality and idea.  For Descartes and his intellectual progeny (Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hume and so on), truth consists only in having clear ideas.  Rather than measuring ideas against reality, they are measured by the mind itself and judged true if they are “clear and distinct”.  True comes to mean “true for me” and “true for you.”  All ideas are equally true, so long as they are sincerely held.  This leads to a contradiction because if every opinion is equally true, then the following opinion is also equally true, namely that not every opinion is equally true.

We have grown accustomed to the cognitive dissonance and navigate it the best we can.  We learn to “tolerate” different opinions about reality.  The problem though is that if each of us is living in a world he has constructed on his own, then there is no means by which a society can be formed.  There may be small pockets of “like-minded” people but no real unity.  The seemingly esoteric philosophical problem becomes the source of a gigantic social problem. 

That is why the solution must also be a social one.  There must be a reintroduction of Medieval Philosophy.  We must go back to just before the train went off the rails and set it back on the tracks.  It starts by properly training the young to think clearly about reality as it really is.  We cannot, like Descartes, pick up the scraps of truth on the hems of the Zeitgeist and expect to build anything solid.  Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences.  We must go back to St. Thomas and learn from him truly how to think.  We must teach our children to go back to St. Thomas.  Catholic schools need to be true houses of intellectual formation and not merely alternatives to the public schools.  St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Praying with Christ

Grace, Passion of Christ, Prayer, , , , ,

At various points along the Christian journey, believers must confront questions related to the true identity of Jesus Christ.  Those who persevere and grow, learn to plow through them one by one and in so doing, more deeply discover the personality of the Incarnate Son of God.  Among these questions there is one that is particularly illuminating, especially because it deals with something that has very practical implications for our own spiritual life.  Articulated in various forms, the question goes something like this: “If Jesus was God, then why did He pray?”

The question of the identity of Jesus is not just something that plagues the neophyte, but it was also a question that the Early Church had to face head on.  Although worked out over centuries, we can summarize their findings by articulating a single principle—the distinction between person and nature. 

The Person/Nature Distinction

In his encounter with individual objects in the world, man is confronted with a powerful question: “what is this?”  The answer as to the thing’s what-ness is its nature.  But a nature determines not just what a thing is, but what a thing can do.  A bird can fly because it has a bird nature, an elephant, because it has an elephant nature cannot.  Man can pray because he has a human nature, but a mantis’ nature limits him to merely posturing. 

When the object of one’s inquiry is also a subject, this innate tendency gives rise to a second question: “who is this?”  No longer concerned with the fact that the object has a human nature, the interlocutor turns their gaze to the person himself.  The human nature may determine what the person can do, but it is always the person who performs the action.  The nature, in a very real sense, limits what the person can do.

When we extend the person/nature distinction to the Incarnation, it is especially helpful in addressing our initial question.  The Divine Son, the Word Incarnate is a Person, but He is a Person Who has two natures or two modes of operation.  At any given time we can observe Him using one of those two natures.  He can change bread and wine into His Body and Blood using His Divine Nature, but He can pray using His human nature.  But in either case, it is always the same Divine Person who performs the action.  He simply has two modes of operation.  This is theologically referred to a the Hypostatic Union.

Christ then prayed using His human nature and not His divine.  He prayed as Man and not as God.  And Christ’s prayer, because it is the prayer of a Divine Person, is one of the means that He Providentially determined would be the cause of certain graces to flow into the world.  And in that way His prayer was always effective.  Two examples from His Passion are particularly instructive in this regard.

Two Dominical Examples

The first example of Christ praying shows us something that we naturally intuit.  If Christ prays as man and nevertheless it is God Himself who utters the words, then we should expect His prayer to do something.   During the Last Supper He tells Peter that “Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat.  But I have prayed for you that your faith will not fail so that when you have turned back you will strengthen your brothers” (Lk 22:32).  It is Our Lord’s prayer, expressed in an absolute manner, that is the cause of Peter’s repentance. 

The second Example shows us something deeper that if we are not diligent we might miss.  In the Garden of Gethsemane we find Christ, again in His human nature, praying that the cup be removed from Him only if it be in accord with the Divine will.  In so doing, Christ is praying in a conditional manner as far as the direct outcome is concerned.  But His prayer is always effective so that it accomplishes something, namely that those who are united to Him through faith and charity be awarded the graces for us to pray boldly and to endure those moments when prayer is not answered according to our will but the will of the Father. 

What this shows us is not just that Christ’s prayer was infallibly effective, but that our prayer is really just a participation in His prayer.  Every grace that we are given through our prayer was first merited by Christ in His.  Because He is God, He saw every instance of our prayer, all of our intentions, spoken and not, when He prayed.  It was in His moments of prayer that He won the necessary graces for us.  It remains for us to simply enter into His prayer with Him and receive what He intended to give us when He invited us in to begin with.

St. Cyril once said, “that which was not assumed, was not redeemed.” What he meant by this is that Christ took to Himself a true human nature with all its needs and redeemed every aspect of our nature. This includes our prayer. Christ prayed so that our prayer was efficacious. This union of Christ’s prayer with our own helps us to understand exactly what we mean when we pray “through Christ Our Lord.”  Our prayer insofar as it is genuine is always through His prayer.  He lives forever to intercede for us because time and eternity have met in the Incarnation.

Most of us are moved deeply by the Gospel accounts of Christ praying even if we are not able to articulate why.  If we merely see it as an example, which of course it is, then we will miss the invitation.  Christ’s prayer is an invitation for all of us to come and pray with Him.  He may have gone off alone to pray, but each one of us was there with Him. 

On Spiritual Communion

Eucharist, Grace, Sacraments, Spiritual Life, , , , ,

Gratis vilis, that is, cheap grace, the supposed grace we receive when we treat the grace of the Sacraments as something automatically received is an ever-present danger of the Church.  Although the Sacraments do objectively contain grace, the reception of these graces depend upon the disposition of the receiver.  To think otherwise is to treat the Sacraments as if they were magic.  This “magical thinking” was discussed in a previous post and some of its ecclesiastical manifestations were brought forward in illustration.  It was briefly mentioned that all of us can fall into this mentality if we are not diligent.  In this post, I would like to discuss how to avoid allowing this Sacramental presumption to creep in.

The Occidental Accident

Despite the fact that the religious freedom is waning in the West, most occidental Catholics have ready access to the Sacraments.  They only need to get in their car and drive to their local Parish which is only a few miles away and they can go to Mass or Confession.  This blessing carries with it a curse—it can create a Sacramental routine by which they do not always discern how great a gift the Sacraments really are.  But this occidental blessing is merely accidental.  Catholics in the Middle East and in China, for example, by no means share the same privilege.  Neither did the Catholics trapped behind the Iron Curtain nor those in Revolutionary France nor Elizabethan England nor the Early Church.  Perhaps the Western “vocations crisis” will get far worse than it already has and availing ourselves of the Sacraments will become far harder.  The point is that this privilege is not always a given and it is something that we need to be constantly grateful for.

This Sacramental ease of access can cause us to make their reception routine only if we allow it to.  There is a sure-fire way to avoid this by adopting a practice that many of the Catholics (or at least those who remained Catholic) did in those times of Sacramental scantiness—Spiritual Communion. 

We are all familiar with the idea what is commonly referred to as a Baptism of Desire.  A person may receive the effects of Sacramental Baptism when, unable for some reason to actually receive the Sacrament, they express either an implicit or explicit desire for baptism.  This “Sacrament by Desire” is by no means limited to Baptism.  In truth the effects of all of the Sacraments can be experienced when a person expresses a desire for the Sacrament but because of some reason outside of their own control they are unable to receive it.  As St. Thomas puts it in the Summa Theologiae “This sacrament has of itself the power of bestowing grace; nor does anyone possess grace before receiving this sacrament except from some desire thereof; from his own desire, as in the case of the adult. or from the Church’s desire in the case of children, as stated above (III:73:3). Hence it is due to the efficacy of its power, that even from desire thereof a man procures grace whereby he is enabled to lead the spiritual life. It remains, then, that when the sacrament itself is really received, grace is increased, and the spiritual life perfected: yet in different fashion from the sacrament of Confirmation, in which grace is increased and perfected for resisting the outward assaults of Christ’s enemies. But by this sacrament grace receives increase, and the spiritual life is perfected, so that man may stand perfect in himself by union with God” (ST III q.79 a.1 ad 3).

Communion of Desire

The list of “Sacraments of Desire” is not limited to just Baptism and Confirmation, but also includes, in a very special way, the Eucharist.  For a baptized person to express a desire to be baptized would be non-sensical, but for a Catholic who has received the Eucharist in the past to express a desire to receive it again not only makes good sense but is an important spiritual practice.  In fact, the Council of Trent said that there are actually three ways in which a person might receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the first two of which are Sacramentally and Spiritually.  “Now as to the use of this holy sacrament, our Fathers have rightly and wisely distinguished three ways of receiving it. For they have taught that some receive it sacramentally only, to wit sinners: others spiritually only, those to wit who eating in desire that heavenly bread which is set before them, are, by a lively faith which worketh by charity, made sensible of the fruit and usefulness thereof…”( Council of Trent Session 13, Chapter VIII).

It is the third way of receiving that most interests us here.  The Council taught that “the third (class) receive it both sacramentally and spiritually, and these are they who so prove and prepare themselves beforehand, as to approach to this divine table clothed with the wedding garment” (ibid).  And in so doing they linked Spiritual Communion with Sacramental Communion.  Those who routinely express a desire to receive the Eucharist when they are unable, not only receive the effects of the Eucharist in expressing the desire, but more perfectly receive the effect of union with Christ and the Church in faith and charity when they do receive the Eucharist sacramentally.  In short, the regular practice of Spiritual Communion is not only for those who are living in times of Sacramental deprivation, but also those who can’t, for whatever reason, receive Our Lord in the Eucharist, whenever and wherever the desire arises within them. 

This is a theme that St. John Paul II included in his encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia :“ Precisely for this reason it is good to cultivate in our hearts a constant desire for the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was the origin of the practice of ‘spiritual communion’, which has happily been established in the Church for centuries and recommended by saints who were masters of the spiritual life. Saint Teresa of Jesus wrote: ‘When you do not receive communion and you do not attend Mass, you can make a spiritual communion, which is a most beneficial practice; by it the love of God will be greatly impressed on you’.” (EE,34).

Before discussing how to make a Spiritual Communion, it is good to discuss a few caveats.  First, while it is good to receive the Sacrament by desire, the Sacraments were established to be taken in full reality.  Spiritual Communion is never a substitute for Sacramental Communion, but only a “holding over” until actually receiving the Eucharist is possible.  Secondly, only a person who is properly disposed to receive the effects of the Sacramental Communion can truly express the desire that is a Spiritual Communion.  Certainly, a person who is not disposed may still desire it, but it is not yet efficacious because they lack the perfect contrition (expressed through Sacramental Confession) necessary to receive its effects.

St. Alphonsus Liguori was an enthusiastic proponent of Spiritual Communion, so much so that he wrote an entire book explaining how to do it along with a meditation for each day of the month.  I cannot encourage the reader enough to grab a copy of this book, but in the meantime, and in closing, I offer the simple prayer that the Doctor of Church left us for articulating our desire in prayer:

My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love You above all things, and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot at this moment receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You.  Amen.

Limbo and the Fate of Unbaptized Infants

Abortion, Church Fathers, Faith and Reason, Heaven, Mercy, Purgatory, Redemption, Relativism, Sacraments, , , , , ,

In an age of exaggerated mercy there is perhaps no doctrine that is more reprehensible than that of Limbo.  Developed early on in the Church’s history, it is the belief that children who die without receiving baptism go to a place of natural bliss in which they do not share in the Beatific Vision given to the Blessed in Heaven.  Treated as a theological pariah, this belief is summarily dismissed as harsh and medieval but no alternative is given to tackle the difficult question of the everlasting destiny of these children.  When millions of children are lost every year because of abortion it would seem that it should be treated with some theological urgency so that the Church might find a true means of salvation to these children.

Original Sin and Hell

Properly framing the problem helps us first to see why it is a problem of particular urgency.  All of humanity at the moment of conception is plagued with Original Sin.  This condition is not one of actual guilt per se, but of deprivation.  A child is conceived and remains devoid of sanctifying grace until they are reborn in the waters of Baptism (c.f. John 3:5).  Why this matters is because without sanctifying grace, a soul cannot enter into the Vision of God.  This is not because God is a stickler for rules but because Heaven is not natural for human beings such that in order to enter into the presence of the Consuming Fire that is God, a man must be properly clothed (c.f. Mt 22:11) with the “spiritual fire suit” that makes him capable of partaking of the Divine nature (c.f. 2Pt 1:4).

The fact that Heaven is not the natural destiny of mankind is also important for understanding Limbo.  Because no one sees the face of God and lives (c.f. Ex. 33:20), that is by nature man cannot stand before the face of God, it is a supernatural gift that God bestows upon men.  It is a free gift offered to all men, but only those who have been given the gift and maintained it, can actually receive it.  That it is a gift means that to be deprived of the gift is not exactly the same thing as having been punished.

We see an example of this among the righteous men of the Old Testament.  Prior to Christ’s descent into hell, which is understood not as the hell of the damned but as the limbus of Abraham’s Bosom, these men and women were in a state of natural bliss.  They enjoyed God, not face to face and as He really is, but according to their natural knowledge of Him that was illuminated by their faith in His revelation up to that point.  This was a temporary state so that once they saw the Messiah God had promised they were immediately given the Beatific Vision. 

This example is illustrative because it offers us glimpse of what a permanent state of the Limbus Infantium would be like.  Although laboring under the constraints of Original Sin, the children have no actual sin and thus do not deserve to be punished.  That is, they avoid the two punishments of hell: the pain of sense and the pain of loss.  Even though they are deprived of the Beatific Vision (usually considered to be the pain of loss in adults), they have no supernatural knowledge of glory and thus do not know what they are missing.  Because they do not have the natural capacity to achieve it, they do not grieve its loss.  No man grieves the loss of his inability to fly because it is not within his natural capacity to do so.  Instead they experience a natural joy in that they achieve a natural end—contemplation of God by natural means.  As St. Alphonsus puts it:

“children will not only not grieve for the loss of eternal happiness, but will, moreover, have pleasure in their natural gifts; and will even in some way enjoy God, so far as is implied in natural knowledge, and in natural love: ‘Rather will they rejoice in this, that they will participate much in the divine goodness, and in natural perfections.’( St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, q.5, a.3)  And he immediately adds, that although they will be separated from God, as regards the union of glory, nevertheless ‘they will be united with him by participation of natural gifts; and so will even be able to rejoice in him with a natural knowledge and love.’”

The Great Means of Salvation and Perfection

“A Possible Theological Opinion”

Despite falling into theological disfavor, the theory of Limbo remains a “possible theological opinion” according to the International Theological Commission in their 2007 document Hope of Salvation of Infants Who Die without Baptism.  It remains possible because it offers a very reasonable solution to the problem.  It remains possible because it is also very hopeful in that it does not condemn otherwise innocent children to the hell of the damned.  It remains possible because it is really only a reasonable solution to the problem of which Revelation never treats directly and any solution would require us to piece together many different doctrines.  But the point is that we should also not be so quick to dismiss it because it is the best solution we have right now because it fits many, if not all, of the pieces together.  It is the best solution because it is the one that has the backing of numerous doctors of the Church, two of whom we have already mentioned—St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus. 

Nevertheless, the Holy Innocents teach us that there are extra-sacramental ways in which children can be saved, especially via a baptism of blood.  Cajetan thought that children could be saved also through a vicarious baptism of desire or others have posited that the children are given the use of their reason just prior to death in order to choose. 

That we don’t know however should spur us to do two things.   First is never to delay baptism.  Baptism remains the ordinary means of salvation and the only sure way we know by which children can be saved.  We should not delay their baptism any longer than is absolutely necessary regardless of a fear of germs or familial convenience.  Second is that the Church has a whole needs to be praying for these children, especially those in the womb who are in danger of death. 

Why We Shouldn’t Dare to Hope

Apologetics, Church, Church Authority, Church Fathers, Devils, End Times, Last Things, Magisterium, , , , , , , ,

In a previous post, a theological and anthropological defense of the permanence of hell was offered.  A brief mention was made of the need to avoid hell in the right way—not by means of an infernal gymnastics, one that stretches the imagination and explains it away.  But the denial of hell’s everlastingness is only one of its manifestations.  There is another, perhaps more popular, strategy that could be called the “Dare We Hope” approach.  First put forward by Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar in the 1980s, Bishop Robert Barron has taken the baton and run with.  According to the Bishop, this approach posits two things:

  1. Given what God has accomplished in Christ through the power of the cross, we may reasonably hope that all people will be saved.
  2. The Church has never claimed to know if any humans are in hell, which leaves open the theoretical possibility of universal salvation.

We will deal with each of the two points and then discuss why, ultimately, to adopt does great harm to the Church’s salvific mission.

Hope or Optimism?

At first glance, there is nothing objectionable to the first point.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t exactly pass the Catholic smell test, especially when it is combined with the second.  That is because it suffers, like most modern theological statements, under the veil of ambiguity.  By using the theologically charged word “hope” it lends itself to being easily misunderstood and therefore misapplied.  Theological hope is something that is virtually certain based upon the merits of Christ and is not conditional in any way upon human response.  In his book, Balthasar says that there are only two responses to the question of whether there will be some men who refuse God’s gift of salvation. 

“To this there are two possible answers: the first says simply ‘Yes.’  It is the answer of the infernalists.  The second says: I do not know, But I think it is permissible to hope (on the basis of the first series of statements from Scripture) that the light of divine love will ultimately be able to penetrate every human darkness and refusal.” 

Dare We Hope, p.178

Notice that the hope that Balthasar is describing is dependent in no way upon human actions, but instead upon the power of God.  Under this viewpoint any soul that is lost is a failure on God’s part and so it must be certain rather than a mere desire for all men to be saved.

To be fair, Bishop Barron does take the time to define how he is using the term hope in the FAQs on his website: “we should recognize hope to mean a deep desire and longing, tied to love, for the salvation of all people, but without knowing all will be saved, thinking all will be saved, or even expecting all will be saved.”  Bishop Barron says he is using the term in the human sense meaning merely as desire.  It is puzzling why, if the Bishop simply means that out of love for God and neighbor he desires that all individual men be saved then why he doesn’t just say that.  It seems that he brings a whole lot of extra baggage into the discussion by uniting it with von Balthasar.  Because Balthasar appears to be using the term in the deep theological sense, Bishop Barron is wedding himself to the Balthasarian position.  He is indissolubility united to Balthasarian hope.  He says as much later on in the FAQs when he says that von Balthasar’s position reflects his own (“he does agree with Balthasar’s main thesis, affirmed by the Catechism, that we can pray and hope hell is empty of people.”). 

Part of the reason why Balthasar muddies the waters of salvation is because he rejects the classic distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will.  He reads 1 Tim 2:4, “God our savior who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” as an absolute statement that does not depend upon a human response.  The Church has long made the distinction between the fact that God wills all men be saved (called His antecedent will) and His consequent will which comes about because He also willed men to have free will that could choose something other than saving grace.  This viewpoint is based upon Scripture (c.f. Sirach 15:14-17, “God in the beginning created human beings and made them subject to their own free choice.  If you choose, you can keep the commandments; loyalty is doing the will of God.  Set before you are fire and water; to whatever you choose, stretch out your hand.  Before everyone are life and death, whichever they choose will be given them.”) and leads directly to the Church’s belief that, despite the objective power of the Cross to save all men, not all men will receive it.  A summary view was presented by the Council of Trent:

“But, though He died for all, yet do not all receive the benefit of His death, but those only unto whom the merit of His passion is communicated. For as in truth men, if they were not born propagated of the seed of Adam, would not be born unjust,-seeing that, by that propagation, they contract through him, when they are conceived, injustice as their own,-so, if they were not born again in Christ, they never would be justified; seeing that, in that new birth, there is bestowed upon them, through the merit of His passion, the grace whereby they are made just.” 

Session 6, Ch. III

The Theoretical Possibility of an Empty Hell

This leads naturally to the second proposition, namely that, because the Church has never claimed to know if any humans are in hell, universal salvation remains a theoretical possibility.  The problem is that the Church has consistently believed that there will be at least two human beings in hell.  The first is the Antichrist who is described in Revelation 20:10 as being “tormented day and night forever and ever.”  One could also reasonably assume, given the principle of biblical typology, that all of the Antichrists described by St. John in his first letter as well as those who have been historically considered types of the Antichrist also suffered a similar fate.   

The other example is Judas.  Although the Church is not in the habit of declaring reverse canonizations, the witness of Scripture offers no other interpretation than that Judas ended up in hell.  In Matthew 26:24, Our Lord declares that “would be better for that man[that betrayed Him] if he had never been born.”  In John 6:70 he calls Judas “a devil” and in 17:2 He says that “none of them was lost except the son of destruction.”  None of these could be true if Judas was counted among the Blessed.    

In his FAQs, Bishop Barron says that “The Church has made no authoritative declaration, based on this passage or any other, that any person whatsoever is in hell.”  This statement again is highly misleading.  The Church may never have solemnly declared that Judas is in hell, but solemn declarations are not the only way in which Catholics determine whether something is to be definitively held.  There is a consensus among the Fathers of the Church that Judas is in hell.  In a 5th Century homily, Leo the Great placed the “Son of Perdition” in hell saying,

“The traitor Judas did not attain to this mercy, for the son of perdition (Jn. 17:12), at whose right hand the devil had stood (Ps. 108:6), had before this died in despair; even while Christ was fulfilling the mystery of the general redemption… The godless betrayer, shutting his mind to all these things, turned upon himself, not with a mind to repent, but in the madness of self-destruction: so that this man who had sold the Author of life to the executioners of His death, even in the act of dying sinned unto the increase of his own eternal punishment.” Sermon 62, On the Passion of the Lord

St. Ephrem (4th Century) and St. Augustine (5th Century) say the same thing.  St. Thomas, writing 8 centuries later also sees Judas in hell as well as St. Catherine of Siena.  

As a side note both Balthasar and Barron claim that St. Catherine of Siena share their position.  This is very difficult to reconcile with her Dialogue where the Father tells her that Judas was “punished with the devils, and eternally tortured with them” (Dialogue, 37).  This would call into question the authenticity of her entire Dialogue, something I am not sure they would be willing to do.

Adding to the witness of Scripture and to Tradition is the law of the liturgy, ­lex orandi.  In the liturgy for Good Friday the Church’s Collect traditionally portrayed Judas as receiving eternal punishment.

“O God, from whom Judas received the punishment of his guilt, and the thief the reward of his confession: grant unto us the full fruit of Thy clemency; that even as in His Passion our Lord Jesus Christ gave to each retribution according to his merits, so having cleared away our former guilt, he may bestow on us the grace of His resurrection: Who with Thee liveth and reigneth.” 

Traditional Roman Missal

Why We Must Get this Right

Beliefs, like the ideas underlying them, always have consequences.  Balthasar (and presumably Bishop Barron) was concerned that the traditional view of hell as heavily populated ultimately drove people away from God.  He said that, “One really has to ask oneself how, given an eternally valid bifurcation of mankind like this, simple human love of one’s neighbor, or even love of one’s enemy in Christ’s sense could still be possible.”  This reeks of the false spirit of Vatican II in which a pastoral concern, namely a zeal for souls such that we truly desire that each person we meet be saved, demands a obfuscation of doctrine.  Clarity especially about the Last Things is a vital necessity for true zeal.  The fact that hell remains a real and likely possibility for each and every one of us ought to spur each one of us to work not just for our own salvation but the salvation of everyone we meet.  The Dare We Hope approach destroys zeal for souls by making evangelization seem completely unnecessary.

Augustine and the Culture of Euthanasia

Bioethics, Culture of Life, End of Life, Human Dignity, , ,

Nearly sixteen centuries after its publication, St. Augustine’s City of God remains a seminal text in Christian political philosophy.  With the Fall of Rome as his backdrop, the Doctor of Grace contrasts the forces at work that seek to claim men’s souls.  History, from the Fall of the Angels to the Fall of Rome, has consisted of battle between the City of God and the City of Man.  From the vantage point of over a millennium and a half, one can see how, using the Augustine’s principles, Christendom emerged as the City of God dominated the City of Man.  But we seem to be living in a time where the transition is going in reverse and the weeds of secularism are choking out the wheat of Christendom so that Augustine’s text can serve as a blueprint of sorts for restoring the City of God and rebuilding a Christian society.

Without diving into all of the themes Augustine presents, the focus will be on his opening theme: suffering.  Why, in introducing the two cities, would Augustine choose to focus on suffering?  As he points out, the sack of Rome led to seemingly indiscriminate sufferings; both the good and the bad, the Christian and the Pagan suffered.  Suffering doesn’t seem to distinguish them at all.  But when we look not at the nature of the sufferings, but the response of the sufferer, we find great differences.  He says, “though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different.  Virtue and vice are not the same even if they undergo the same treatment…What matters is the nature of the sufferer not the nature of the sufferings.”  So then suffering becomes like a great identification card enabling us to determine residency in either of the two cities.  

The Two Cities

Why this is so becomes apparent once we grasp that ultimately, the two cities are distinguished by their loves.  The “two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point if contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self…The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God ‘I will love You, my Lord, my strength.”  For Augustine suffering is brought about when men love the world more than God, the City of Man more than the City of God.  The good and bad suffer together because even the good (even if to a much lesser degree) love this world rather than despising it.

Both the Christians and non-Christians were equally affected but the sufferings of the Christians have “tended to their moral improvement because they are viewed through the eyes of faith.”   For the residents of the City of God suffering becomes an opportunity for growth in virtue and holiness.  “Viewed through the eyes of faith,” sufferings become necessary because they are the most expedient (i.e. most gentle and most merciful) way that God naturalizes us as residents in the heavenly city.  They may be free from criminal and godless wickedness they still see that they are not so far removed as to not to deserve to suffer temporal ills for them.

The residents of the City of Man see suffering as the greatest of all evils.  Rather than viewing them as opportunities, they see them as something to be avoided at all costs, even to the point of self-inflicted death.  From within this context Augustine visits the question of noble suicide within Roman culture.  Drawing from two historical examples at key turning points in Roman history, Augustine shows why suicide is always wrong.  His first case study is Lucretia.  After becoming a victim of rape she killed herself and Rome celebrated the nobility in doing so.  Augustine asks why should she, who was innocent, have suffered a worse punishment than the offender?  “One does not take vengeance on oneself for another’s crime.”  To suffer some injustice and then commit another injustice, even against oneself, is like killing the innocent.

His second example is Cato who killed himself as a political act, a steady refusal to live in a Rome led by Caesar.   As the prototypical Stoic, he thought happiness was only to be found in escaping the body and not something that was achieved in the soul through the body.

The City of God and the Culture of Euthanasia

But he does more than simply prove the immorality of suicide.  He also shows how one might argue against a suicide culture.  In this way he provides us with a blueprint for overcoming a Culture of Euthanasia.  In both of his case studies Augustine chose to focus on “cold-blooded” suicides.  Both Lucretia and Cato were deliberate suicides, not merely acts of impassioned despair.  Augustine thinks there is nothing noble about killing oneself and a culture that elevates it as such is a culture that bestows victimhood on its members.  He wants to empower men and women so that they can be truly noble in facing their sufferings, even the final ones, head-on.

Augustine’s argument and ours as well depends upon strong Christian witness.  If we are to overcome the Culture of Euthanasia we must preach that the only “sweet death” is one that opens wide the door to eternal life.  We cannot “accompany” someone who chooses to kill themselves because it is accompanying a lie that says that God does not use the death He has chosen for us as a means to bring about life.  Instead we should accompany them in their sufferings by encouraging them to dying with true nobility, the nobility of Christ.  Dying with dignity is dying as conformed to Christ.  We will never overcome the emerging Culture of Euthanasia until we suffer like true Christians and encourage others to do the same.  This was Augustine’s way and it needs to be ours too.   

Praying to the Lord of the Harvest

Advent, Church, Church Fathers, Fasting, Holy Orders, Women's Ordination, , , , , ,

On the first Saturday of Advent, the Church chooses as the gospel Matthew’s account of the commissioning of the Apostles.  After taking to heart the lost souls around Him, He demands that His disciples beg God to send more laborers into the fields.  He then empowers the Apostles and commands them to go out into the world to continue His mission of redemption (c.f. Mt 8:35-10:3).  The implications are obvious.  There are many lost souls that can only be saved through the continuing authoritative mission of the Apostles.  But this mission only continues through the prayers of all Christ’s disciples for more Bishops and Priests.

This interpretation is by no means novel.  The Church has always understood what Our Lord was telling us to do.  Nevertheless, in times of vocational crisis, there is a tendency, rather than trusting in God’s way of doing things, to look for human solutions.  Thus, we find ourselves discussing doing away with celibacy or adding women to the ranks of the ordained as human solutions to the problem.  But ultimately the “vocations crisis” is a crisis of faith in that we do not trust in God’s promise to send faithful Bishops and Priests.  We do not have them because we do not ask.

One might immediately object to what I just said.  There are plenty of people who pray for vocations.  While it is true that I have no idea how many people pray for vocations regularly, I do know that the Church has official periods of supplication for Priests that practically go unnoticed.  I am, of course, speaking of Ember Days. Ember Days are the ways in which the Church fulfills Our Lord’s command to pray for more harvesters.

The Ember Days

The Quatuor Tempora or Ember Days, are four periods of prayer and fasting (if you want to know how to fast, read this previous entry) that the Church has set aside for each of the four Ecclesiastical seasons.  Ember Days begin are marked by three days (Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) of penance by which the Church, especially through fasting, consecrates to God each of the Seasons of the Year.  The practice sprung out of the habit of Israel to fast in the fourth, fifth, seventh and tenth month (c.f. Zech 8:18-19).  The practice, at least according to Pope St. Leo the Great, has been a part of the Church’s year since the times of the Apostles.

The Advent Ember Days, like each of the other three, have as their object gratitude and supplication for the harvest.  According to Leo the Great, the Advent Ember Days, falling in the time of the year where all the fruits of the earth had been collected, would mark a time of “joyful fasting” (Zech 9:19) in thanksgiving for the harvest. 

The connection to the earthly harvest also has a further meaning connected to Our Lord’s mention of the great harvest of souls.  The Church through an act of penance would pray the Lord of the harvest to send worthy Ministers who are holy and true Shepherds during the Ember Days.  The faithful would join the Church in her intention by offering their own acts fasting.  In short then the Ember Days are special days in which the Church as a whole fasts and prays together for vocations. 

The fall into disuse of the Ember Days and the current vocation crisis are hardly coincidental.  The prayer of the Church is always far more pleasing and efficacious than individual prayer.  As the Ember Days of Advent come upon us tomorrow, let us join the Church in this act of gratitude for the faithful Shepherds among us and beg the Lord to send us more.  As Dom Prosper Gueranger exhorts us, the Ember Days are a great way to “keep within ourselves the zeal of our forefathers for this holy season of Advent.  We must never forget, that although the interior preparation is what is absolutely essential for our profiting by the Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, yet this preparation could scarcely be real, unless it manifested itself by exterior practices of religion and penance.”  Individually chastened by our fasts, let us then join the Church in these Ember Days and implore the Lord of the Harvest to send out more laborers.     

On the Necessity of Mental Prayer

Prayer, , , ,

In the thirteenth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Our Lord gives us the Parable of the Sower.  He speaks of a farmer who indiscriminately spreads seeds over a variety of soil types.  Despite the farmer’s prodigality, the seed only produces a yield in the rich soil.  The implication is obvious: to produce the great yield of holiness, we must become rich soil.  What is not immediately obvious, however, is how one becomes the rich soil. 

One might be tempted to think that the solution is to be a “good” person.  When you are nice to other people and try not to sin, you become rich soil.  The problem with this viewpoint however is that soil cannot make itself rich.  It must be made rich by having things added to it.  Clearly then, the answer is to receive the Sacraments.  The Sacraments are like a strong fertilizer producing rich, dark soil.  But this interpretation is problematic as well.  While the Sacraments are, at least objectively speaking, like spiritual fertilizer, their effect depends upon the subjective disposition of the soil in which they land.  Even the Sacraments will have no effect upon a hardened heart.  Instead, the Fathers of the Church all thought the key to becoming rich soil was to become men and women of prayer.

But prayer is anything but a simple solution, especially living in the grasp of a ubiquitous technocracy.  Within its grasp, we have grown accustomed to thinking that all of reality can be controlled and manipulated by technique, our spiritual lives not excepted.   The technocratic mindset has led modern men and women to search for human techniques, usually repurposed from Eastern Religions, to solve the problem of prayer.  Rather than solving the problem, these techniques often lead us away from God because they are not in accord with human nature itself.

The Myth of Technique

Let’s suppose that we want to pray, but St. Paul is right when he says that “we do not know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26).  It is normal to then think we must investigate various techniques to find out which one works best for us.  The problem with this mindset is that it is a subtle form of Gnosticism.  The knowledge of how to pray becomes some secret knowledge that we must discover.  The conclusion, one that a lot of people draw, is that a life of true prayer is not open to everyone and is reserved for a select few who somehow figure it out. 

We must hear St. Paul out.  While it is true that “we do not know how to pray as we ought ,” the Apostle reminds us that “the Spirit Himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (Romans 8:26).  Prayer is, first a foremost a gift.  It is a gift, but it is a gift that we are naturally inclined to receive.  As St. Thomas repeatedly says, whatever is given is received according to the mode of the receiver.  There is a natural way then to receive the gift of prayer.

Why it is Necessary

St. Alphonsus Liguori in his treatise on prayer said that “all the saints have become saints by mental prayer.”  The saint is telling us that in order to become rich soil, we must practice mental prayer.  He is not alone in this assessment as all of the saints say something similar.  Understanding why mental prayer is the entry point into a life of holiness will enable us to rely more fully on this method.

Our supernatural destiny is the Beatific Vision by which we will see God face to face.  What this means is that we will know Him directly and this knowledge will lead to an eternity of loving Him.  Prayer ought to in some way mimic this. In this life we can only know Him by way of intermediaries, “in a mirror darkly” if you will.  But this knowledge is still real knowledge even if it is only by way of reflection.  We can know the sun directly by looking at it, but even a man who has only seen the moon still knows the sun.  Mental prayer is the means, in this life, by which we come to knowledge of God through discursive reasoning upon both Revelation and Creation.  But in order to be a true preparation for our eternal destiny, it must not just be intellectual musings, but must consist in acts of the will as well.  In fact true prayer must always find its terminus in movements of love.

St. John of the Cross demonstrates these movements in his Spiritual Canticle. He begins by meditating upon creation:

O woods and thickets, planted by the hand of my Beloved! O green meadow, coated, bright, with flowers, tell me, has he passed by you?”

Pouring out a thousand graces, he passed these groves in haste; and having looked at them, with his image alone, clothed them in beauty.

Ah, who has the power to heal me? now wholly surrender yourself!   Do not send me any more messengers, they cannot tell me what I must hear.

Spiritual Canticle 4-6

Seeing God’s presence in a simple meadow that has been clothed with beauty, He is moved to wonder and then pleads for God to heal him and surrender Himself to John.  His musings have moved from the intellect to the will, from the head to the heart.

Mental prayer is the entry point to deeper level of infused prayer because it is the only truly human way of praying.  Because it is in accord with human nature, it is also the means by which prayer purifies us.  Through the power of abstraction, we can say that the “thing known is in the knower.”  This means that the thing known becomes a part of the knower.  When the thing known, is the One Thing that Needs to Be Known, then He necessarily becomes a part of the knower.  This is why those who truly pray are never heretics.  But it is also why not only our thoughts are purified, but our desires too.

Setting Our Expectations

If God wills all men to be saved and prayer, as we have shown, is absolutely necessary for salvation, then all men are given the grace to pray.  God not only wills our salvation but also provides all that is needed to make that happen.  What this means is that we should expect the grace of prayer because God has promised it.  God desires that we pray and if we remain open to it, He will provide us with all the necessary graces to reach levels of prayer that we thought only possible for great mystics.  This is for everyone.  We need only to beg Him for the grace of perseverance and then show up day after day.

At the outset we said that there are few among us that are immune to the effects of living in a technocracy.  Those few, if St. Alphonsus is to be believed, are the future saints who practice mental prayer.  Rather than trying to manipulate God through technique, they set themselves up to receive the gift of prayer and God delivers by raising up saints so desperately needed in our times.

The New Eve and the Immaculate Conception

Apologetics, Bible, Church Fathers, Grace, Incarnation, Mary, , , , , ,

In a previous post, we mentioned how St. John gives us all we need to make the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady explicit.  But this is not the only dogma that he gives us the foundation for.  He also helps us to ground the other controversial Marian dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

One of the things that makes Christianity unique among all the world religions is that it is grounded in history.  Its central premise is that the eternal and transcendent God took human flesh in a specific time and place and effected our salvation.  The Incarnation is a historic event that, because it occurred in the “fullness of time”, was not some haphazardly chosen moment, but one providentially decreed from the foundation of the world.  The events leading up to the Incarnation were meant to reveal God’s plan and toe prepare the way for it.  This means that these events, especially those detailed in the Old Testament, are charged with prophetic and theological meaning.  From this emerges the principle of typology which reveals the unity of salvation by moving from “type” to fulfillment in the “antitype”.  Because the movement is from prophecy to fulfillment it is always from lesser to greater.

Typology is not a trick biblical scholars apply to the bible but instead is a principle that is applied in the Bible itself.  The New Testament abounds in examples, but one in particular, because of its relationship at hand bears special mention—Christ as the New Adam (c.f. 1 Cor 15:45, Rom 5:12-21).  St. Paul is essentially alluding to the fact that Christ is the new and greater Adam, serving as a counter-image our first father in the flesh.  Although created by the infusion of God’s breath (i.e. the Holy Spirit), the first man failed in his test and brought sin and death into the world.  The Second Adam, who also was made flesh by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit did not fail the test and defeated sin and death. 

The New Eve

In a very real sense this type-antitype relationship is the most fundamental of all because it is the first one used in the Bible.  The first thing that God does after the Fall, is to promise a New Adam, one who would crush the head of the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gn 3:15).  This promise however is not just for a New Adam, but also another “Woman” (Eve’s name given by Adam) who would serve as a New Eve.  The New Adam would be born of this woman’s seed (an allusion to the Virgin Birth since, biblically speaking, the seed always came from the man) and she and the Serpent would have a relationship of enmity.

This New Eve is revealed to us by St. John in his gospel, a theme that he makes rather explicit.  The beginning of John’s gospel would immediately evoke the beginning of Genesis as if what he is about to write about fulfills the Creation account found in Genesis.  Both open with “in the beginning” and both go on to depict days of creation and re-creation.  In John’s account we find the use of “next day” twice and then skips two days and starts again “on the third day”.  If you are counting, that gives us six days—“the beginning” (1), “the next day” (2), “the next day” (3) and “on the third day” (6).  And just like on the sixth day of creation, we are told on the sixth day of re-creation there is a marriage taking place.  We are told nothing about the bride and groom of that wedding, but only that Our Lord and His Mother are there (John 2:1).  We are then told of a conversation between the Mother and her Son in which He addresses her in a rather strange way—as “Woman”.  This address, combined with the parallels to Genesis, would call to mind both Eve and the promise of the New Eve.  This New Eve would, by her words, overturn the damage done by the words of the first Eve and set in motion the work of the New Adam in defeating the Serpent. 

This connection would already be pretty clear, but Our Lord wanted to make sure it was crystal clear when, hanging on the Cross, He once again addresses her as Woman (John 19:42).  This time He makes both the image and the vocation clear.  Just as Eve of old was the mother of all the living according to the flesh, the New Eve was to be the mother of all the living according to the Spirit.

Mary as the New Eve was not something hidden away in the Scriptures or a product of popular piety but something that dates back to the Apostolic age.  We find this as the first title that the Church Fathers gave her.  For example, St. Irenaeus whose favorite theme was re-creation or recapitulation used that title when he made account of the Apostolic preaching saying,

“And just as through a disobedient virgin man was stricken down and fell into death, so through the Virgin who was obedient to the Word of God man was reanimated and received life… For it was necessary that Adam should be recapitulated in Christ, that mortality might be swallowed up and overwhelmed by immortality; and Eve recapitulated in Mary, that a virgin should be a virgin’s intercessor,  and by a virgin’s obedience undo and put away the disobedience of a virgin.” 


Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 33

St. Irenaeus most certainly was qualified to give account of Apostolic preaching for he was a disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of St. John.

Typology and the Immaculate Conception

With the type-antitype relationship firmly established we can make the link to the Immaculate Conception more explicit.  Recall that this relationship implies that the privileges given to Eve must in no way exceed the privileges given to Mary.  Eve was conceived without the stain of Original Sin, that is, she was conceived with the gift of sanctifying grace.  Mary then too must be conceived, at the very least, with the same privilege or else the type-antitype relationship falls apart.  St. John in canonizing Mary as the New Eve also, even if only in an implicit manner, declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Using typology we can even go further when we factor in the revelation that the New Eve will be at enmity with the Serpent.  This term, enmity, means that the hatred will be so deeply seeded that she will never fall into his power.  And just as Eve received grace consonant with her mission to battle the Serpent and make her a “helper suitable” to the first Adam, so too the New Eve would receive a plentitude of grace to make her a suitable helper to the New Adam and His battle against the Serpent by making her immune to his weapon of sin.  The Hebrew term ezer kenegdo that we translate as “helpmate” or “helper suitable to him” implies both a similarity and a complementarity.  And just as God gave to Eve a share in Adam’s humanity, so God gives to the New Eve a share in His divinity, which we call sanctifying grace and a complentarity by which the New Eve gives her seed to His humanity.  She is to be a helpmate suitable to His mission as Redeemer by being like Him in a unique share in His divinity but still subject to His redemptive (or pre-demptive) act.  In short, the New Eve would need to be not only conceived in grace, but also to never have lost it through sin.

We can do no better than to conclude by quoting Saint John Henry Newman’s lucid summary of the connection between Eve and the Immaculate Conception:

“She [Mary] holds, as the Fathers teach us, that office in our restoration which Eve held in our fall:—now, in the first place, what were Eve’s endowments to enable her to enter upon her trial? She could not have stood against the wiles of the devil, though she was innocent and sinless, without the grant of a large grace…Now, taking this for granted, . . . I ask you, have you any intention to deny that Mary was as fully endowed as Eve? …If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had even a greater grace? …And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the first moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference:—well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.”

Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching

Translating the Five Ways

Atheism, Faith and Reason, , , , ,

Having stood the test of time, St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways remain a reliable means by which to prove the existence of God.  The problem, especially in an age steeped in scientistic thinking, is that most people are metaphysically illiterate and unable to really capture the genius behind them and see their great evidentiary power.  This calls for those who can understand the proofs to summarize them in such a manner that even the metaphysical novice can understand.  Better yet, in a sound-bite culture, it is invaluable to provide a single argument that combines all five into one.  Thankfully, there are Thomists in our own age who have done the legwork on this (Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s God His Existence and His Nature and Edward Feser, Five Proofs for God) but their work remains inaccessible to those unschooled in Scholastic Philosophy.  It is in this spirit, that this essay tries to translate St. Thomas’ work into a language that can be readily understood, and more important, presented to unbelievers.

The great 20th Century Thomist, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange summarized the arguments like this:

“All these arguments can be summed up in a more general one, based on the principle of causality, which may be stated as follows: That which does not exist by itself, can exist only by another, which is self-existent. Now, experience shows that there are beings endowed with activity, life, and intelligence, which do not exist of and by themselves, since they are born and die. Therefore, they received their existence from another, who must be existence, life, and intelligence itself. If such were not the case, we should have to say that the greater comes from the less, the higher form of life from the lower, and that the plurality of beings comes from a primary being less perfect than all the others taken together.”

God: His Existence and His Nature Volume I

An Important Distinction

At the heart of each of the Five Ways is the distinction between what a thing is or its essence and that a thing is or its existence.  Once we grasp this distinction, the existence of God logically follows.  Everywhere we look we find things that have not always existed.  No visible being has as part of its nature, existence.  Each being requires that existence be given it by another being.  We call these existence-dependent beings, contingent beings.

One of the common mistakes we make in interpreting these arguments is to look at them as proving a First Cause in time.  But that is not what they do.  They set out to show a First Cause in existence.  Contingent beings, beings who do not have existence by nature, require existence be given them not just when they come into being, but in order to remain in being.  The fact that a thing exists at each moment would not allow for an infinite regress in causes.  But because this is not immediately obvious, we will discuss it briefly.

The chain of causes that we are describing is called an essentially subordinate series.  It is labeled as such because in order for the entire series to hold, the First Cause must continually exercise its causal activity.  Suppose we have a chain ABCD.  C can only cause D because it is being caused by B.  Likewise B causes C.  You could multiply the causes between B and A, but unless you get to a cause, which we are calling A, that is uncaused, then the chain of causation will never occur.  There must be a cause that does not itself require a cause in order for any link of the causal chain to connect.

Recall that this causal chain is not tracing back in time like an ancestral tree where a grandmother ceases to exercise causal power on her grandson, but is horizontal in holding a being in existence here and now.  St. Thomas uses the analogy of a man using his arm to push a stick that moves a rock.  If the man ceases to exercise his free will in moving his arm, then the stick ceases to move and the rock remains stationary. 

Once we eliminate the possibility of an infinite regress, we can see how the proof leads us to God.  If there must be an uncaused cause, a being who does not get existence from another source, then we can say this being’s essence includes existence.  We call this being the necessary being.  More accurately we would say that this Being because his essence is to exist is existence itself.  And we call this Being God or “I AM”.

The Five Ways and the Way

This obviously does not take us all the way to the Christian God as He has revealed Himself.  Reason could never get us there.  But it does, in a certain sense, lead us up to the time of Moses.  God revealed Himself to Moses as Being Itself, “I AM WHO AM” because it was the foundation upon which He was to reveal Himself not just as Being Itself, but Being Who is here for you right now.  Once we grasp that it is God Who doesn’t just create us and leave us to our own devices, but instead holds us in existence at each moment, the Christian message becomes more accessible.  If God is holding us in existence then He must will to do so.  He wills not in some disaffected way, but because He sees our existence as something good.  And not just “our” but mine and yours individually.  He wills it because He loves the good that we are.  We need only open ourselves to the fullness of that love so that we don’t merely exist as creatures but are crowned as sons. 

By adding the Christian conclusions to our philosophical findings, we come to realize why St. Thomas should never be seen as some dry intellectual philosopher.  He saw all of his work as leading us back to God, including his proofs for his existence.  We too may grasp this when we set to succinctly give his reasons for believing, not just to win arguments, but to win souls.  The Five Ways ultimately lead us to the Way Himself. 

The Permanence of Hell

Anthropology, Church Fathers, Communion of Saints, Devils, Heaven, Magisterium, Mercy, Scripture, , , , , , , ,

C.S. Lewis once said that there was no doctrine that, if he had the power, he would more willingly remove from Christianity than hell.  But he also was humble enough to recognize that were he to do so, it would destroy the very reason for Christianity.  The Good News is really only good when we understand the bad.  Unfortunately, there are many in our modern day who, rather than teaching us how to avoid hell, avoid hell itself by explaining it away.  In its place they have offered a universalism in which all men will be saved.  There are different ways in which this universal salvation is brought about, but one of the more popular versions posits that hell is not everlasting and those who had been consigned there will be given the opportunity to repent and join everyone else in heaven.

According to Scripture, Sacred Tradition and human reason, escaping hell after death is an impossibility.  In Hebrews 9:27-28 we are told that just as Christ died once, we too die and receive judgment once.  Likewise, Revelation 20:10 says that the damned “will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”  That “their worm dies not and the fire is not extinguished” (Mk 9:45) is also taught by Sacred Tradition, not only through the unanimity of the Fathers (c.f. St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Irenaeus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Augustine) but also through the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) which declared that the damned “receive a perpetual punishment with the devil”.

The Permanence of Hell and Human Nature

It is when we apply human reason to Revelation about the duration of hell that we begin to understand why it is the way it is.  In our temporal state, our will remains flexible in that it may be changed both before and after a choice is made.  We choose based upon some knowledge and only choose differently based on some new knowledge.  In short, a change in will is dependent upon a change of mind.  Regret only follows upon some new realization.

The ability to change our minds is a uniquely human power, and uniquely temporal at that.  The angels, our spiritual counterparts, are incapable of regret because they can’t change their mind.  Our decisions are plagued by ignorance, their decisions are always fully informed and thus fully consented to.  Their wills remain everlastingly fixed in the decision they have made because they never have a reason to change their mind.  When the soul is separated from the body, we will “become like the angels” in that our wills too will remain fixed in the state they were at separation and we have no reason to change our mind.

As we apply this anthropological truth to the question of the damned, it does not seem obvious at first why they should not desire to change their mind.  Wouldn’t the pains of hell be enough to make them rethink their relationship to God?  The short answer is no and to deny this would begin to tear at the fabric of many Christian beliefs besides the everlasting duration of hell.

A change of mind regarding God in this life requires the action of actual grace.  We are incapable of lifting ourselves out of sin and move towards repentance on our own.  It is actual grace that moves us.  Because it is still my and your repentance however there must be a movement of the will that accompanies the actual grace.  It is possible that the will become so hardened that actual grace no longer penetrates the hardened heart.  Scripture offers us a prime example in Pharaoh.  While Moses pleads with him, his heart remains impenetrable.  The will becomes hardened through its own acts and only a supernatural act of God can undo it.

Why Repentance After Death is Impossible

The soul in hell then is incapable of repentance because there is no actual grace present to move them.  This is not because God withholds it however.  It is so because their will is fixed in a permanent “No!” to God.  There is no actual grace is present because no amount of grace could change their mind.  Why this must be so becomes obvious once we think about it for a second.  This fixity of the will is, in a certain sense, a two-edge sword.  It keeps both the damned in hell and the blessed in heaven.  If a change from evil to good is possible, then it could also be possible that there is a change from good to evil.  In other words, there would be nothing per se that would keep the blessed from crossing over the chasm into hell.  This law of human nature cannot be operative for good only.  As Abbot Vonier puts it, “God has made spiritual natures so perfect that a wrong use of their powers will bring about results as permanent as the right use of them.”

This, by the way, is at the heart of the error that those who believe in “once saved, always saved” commit.  They confuse our temporal state with our permanent state.  The soul is not fixed until death, but they insist that it is fixed once a single choice for Christ is made.

All of this helps us to see damnation as caused strictly by the damned themselves and not as a result of God’s judgment.  It all depends upon the condition of a person’s soul upon death.  Our souls at baptism are reformed into the shape of a cup enabling them to hold sanctifying grace.  This grace, as a participation in the divine nature, is what enables us, upon death, to see God face to face.  It is what makes our souls flame resistant enabling us to stand within the flames of the Consuming Fire.  But our wills, through mortal sin, can also bend our souls so that they are no longer able to hold sanctifying grace.  If our souls are never repaired and we die with them in that shape, then we become permanently incapable of standing before God.  It is the shape of our souls then that determines are everlasting state.

Catholics have grown very fearful of hell, not in the sense that they try to avoid it, but that they avoid speaking of it.  The risk for seeming harsh or intolerant is overwhelming.  The problem is that silence on the bad news makes preaching the Good News very difficult.  Catholics need to rethink their approach if they are to trample down the Gates of Hell and save many people who would otherwise end up there.  This begins by seeing hell for the hell it is and understanding why it must be so.

The Philosophy of Evolution

Science, , , ,

Tomorrow will mark the 160th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.  Considered to be a formational tome in the field of evolutionary biology, it has in the last century plus become a foundation of the model world.  We find evolution, not just among plants, but races of men.  Survival of the fittest becomes political eugenicism.  We find it in not just animals, but among societies of men who reject the ideas of the past as extinct that needed to evolve to suit the changes in enlightened mankind.  The modern world is, in truth, all in on evolution.  And this might help to explain why it has devolved.  The theory of evolution is bad science and even worse philosophy.

Evolution as Bad Science?

Science, in Aristotelian tradition is thought of in more general terms than we do today. The most general meaning of the term is an organized body of knowledge, resting on first principles, purposed to investigate causes.  This broad definition includes all fields of knowledge from metaphysics to the empirical sciences such as evolutionary biology.  This spectrum of sciences has a natural hierarchy in the sense that it studies not just individual beings (empirical science), but being itself (metaphysics).  Each science must accept certain first principles, givens if you will, upon which the investigation of the causes of things can proceed.  With no foundational truths to build upon, the scientific house is destined to crumble.  The hierarchy allows the lower sciences to draw from the higher to procure their first principles.  For example, physics, one of the lower sciences, depends on mathematics, a higher one, for its first principles.  A physicist in acting to quantify some aspect of reality, could not proceed if he doubted the laws of mathematics.  If he were question the laws of math rather than his own hypothetical law, then he would most certainly be wrong.  He is ignoring the first principles so that the truth can adapt to his theory.

Portrait of Aristoteles. Copy of the Imperial era (1st or 2nd century) of a lost bronze sculpture made by Lysippos

A science then can be bad not just in its method, but in its observance of first principles.  In this way evolution is bad science.  Evolutionary biology depends on the philosophy of nature for its first principles.  The philosophy of nature is concerned with principles of unity in the face of change.  Evolutionary biology, too, is concerned with change, but specific changes in individual species.  Any theory that explains the change in individual species must respect the higher science in order to maintain its connection to truth.  If the evolutionary biologist ignores these principles then he is no different than the physicist who ignores the laws of mathematics.

 The First Principles

What are the first principles that evolutionary biology borrows from the Philosophy of Nature?  There are a number of them, but three will suffice to show why evolution is bad science. 

All that exists is either substance or accident.  A substance is an individual existing thing, while an accident depends upon a substance to exist.  A tree is a substance, the green of the leaves is an accident.  Trees exist on their own, greenness does not exist except in the trees (and other green substances).  You could take away the green from the leaves and the tree would remain a tree.

Since evolution deals with change, we must also look at some of the first principles related to change.  Change consists in reducing potency to act; some specific potential that is dictated by a thing’s nature is brought into existence through some agent cause.  This agent cause must already have the power to cause the change.  That is, it must be in act.  Suppose a room is cold which means it is potentially warm.  Only something that is actually warm like a burning log can heat up the room.  A log that is only potentially hot could never heat up the room.  This is the principle of sufficient reason.  This principle, in all its variations, deals with cause and effect.  An effect must in some form be in the cause.  In layman’s terms, you cannot give what you do not have.  For an effect to come about, the cause must have the power to cause the effect. 

Third, there is the principle of hylemorphism.  This principle says that all material beings are composed of form and matter.  Form, which is ontologically prior to matter, determines what a thing is.  Matter is the individuating principle, it is what makes the thing “this thing” rather than “this other thing”.

There is also another principle related to the upward movement of evolution.  Material creation proceeds from simple to complex, from the lowest to the highest.  In philosophical terms, there is a hierarchy of being in which the higher beings exhibit perfections not found in the lower.  Stones are not alive the way that plants are.  Plants cannot move and sense the way animals can, even if they have the same vegetative powers.  Animals cannot abstract and communicate the way that man can, even if they can gain sense knowledge of individual things.  As one of the philosophical dictionaries puts it, “in material and living bodies we find an ascending order of perfection in which the higher beings have their own perfections as well as those of the lower level of being. In the unity of the higher being, the multiplicity of the lower beings is virtually present.”  What this means is that although the lower is contained within the higher, the higher is not contained in the lower. 

The First Principles Applied to Evolution

If we frame evolution first as a philosophical problem, then it becomes clear how the first principles apply.  Specifically, it deals with changes not in individual substances, but in the generation of offspring.  The law of generation allows for accidental differences between parent and offspring.  These accidental differences can be based upon both the mixing of genes of the parents and on mutations in the genetic information.  These differences result in an offspring with the same essential form, but accidental differences.  Some of these differences may be biologically advantageous such that the incidence in the population increases.  Still we are dealing with like substances.  Evolutionary biology has a term for such changes and it calls it microevolution.  Microevolution is on solid philosophical groundwork such that if the biological data supports it then we can conclude that it is at least highly probable.

Macroevolution, on the other hand, posits a different sort of change.  Based on random a series of random mutations the matter is changed to the point that a new form is brought about.  This hypothesis comes in conflict with our first principles stated above.  First, the direction of evolution is always upward towards greater perfections.  But this would violate the principle of sufficient reason.  An effect cannot exceed its cause.  If the cause does not include the effect, then it must be brought about by some other way.  A blind animal can give birth to an offspring with sight because she has sight in potency, but no amount of lightning and “primordial soup” can effect sight in the offspring of a being who does not have eyes.  You cannot give what you don’t have. 

This principle is also violated quite frequently when the fossil record is combed for the elusive “common ancestor” and “missing link” that the lower somehow caused the higher.  There is little actual biological evidence for this causal link such that it is much more plausible that are closely situated on the ladder of being.  If nature is a continuous hierarchy then we would expect to see beings that are closely related to each other.   

Secondly, and more fatal for the philosophical backing of macroevolution, is that it posits that matter is the cause of a new form.  It is saying that given enough changes in the matter, a new kind of form can come into existence.  But form always precedes matter.  Matter cannot exist without a form, even if a form can exist without matter.  Once the new form exists, the matter which is in potency to the form, can be reduced to act.  If the new form cannot come into existence without some immaterial Cause, then the only way that macroevolution could possibly be true is if this Cause intervenes at each evolutionary stage to create new forms.  This Cause, because He was capable of creating all forms, would have to be omnipotent and omniscient.  Most would call such a Cause God. 

We can readily see why microevolution often is used in an ideological sleight of hand to cover up what is going on with macroevolution.  If matter cannot bring about a new form, then in order for macroevolution to proceed, God must create new forms.  In other words, Macroevolution, if it is true, then offers proof for the existence of God.  Because it does not conform to the ideological agenda that most who support evolution have, this fact is kept quiet and only material explanations are allowed. 

Good science always requires good philosophy.  Darwin may not have realized the implications of his new theory, but once we apply the Philosophy of Nature to his theory, we quickly find that macroevolution needs not only Aristotle, but God.

The Social Construct Myth

Anthropology, Church and State, Church Authority, marriage, , , , , ,

Marriage, according to conventional wisdom, is a social construct.  Governed by cultural norms and expectations, the institution of marriage is completely malleable.  This view of marriage was front and center in the debate over same-sex marriage, but the battle against traditional marriage was won long before that when divorce, especially in its no-fault variety, became an acceptable norm.  Divorce, or at least its cultural acceptance, is what changed marriage making it a social construct.  To say divorce made marriage a social construct is to suggest that things once were otherwise so that if we are to grasp how we got here, we might simultaneously find a remedy. 

Anthropological Roots of Divorce

Deeply imbedded within the Western mind is the notion of man as a rugged individual.  Naturally solitary and free, man forms a social contract either to escape the anarchy of the state of nature (Hobbes) or its noble savagery (Rousseau).  All social institutions become “social constructs” in which men and women freely enter and freely leave according to their own will.  From within this paradigm of liberalism, marriage like all other social institutions are “social constructs” in which men and women freely associate and equally as freely disassociate.  Only the State remains a permanent fixture so as to protect the individual from other individuals infringing upon their rights, even if it too is ultimately a social construct.

Civil divorce grew out of the soil of 18th Century liberalism because it, like all other private contracts, was completely voluntary and always in danger of one of the contracting parties dissolving the contract.  In order to protect this freedom, the State adopts the stance of arbiter and enforcer and is empowered to dissolve what was previously thought indissoluble.  Given the power to dissolve, the State must also then have the power to define and decide what marriage is and who should be married.

There is a certain irony surrounding the fact that marriage was not always thought to be a social construct.  The “social construct” viewpoint replaced the natural view of marriage.  For millennia, marriage was considered to be a natural institution that formed the foundation of the family which was the building block of society as a whole.  It is the natural view of marriage that would preclude either divorce or gay marriage.  By combining them into a single issue it avoids reducing the argument to mere biology.

It is not any mere external circumstances that draws man into society, but his nature.  Man is by nature a social animal.  In order to fulfill his nature, he must have a society of other men to do that.  Because they are absolutely vital for fulfillment, the family and the State are natural societies.

In order to grasp this truth, we must also see that men and women fulfill their nature by becoming virtuous.  Virtue is what perfects all our natural powers.  Marriage is the bedrock of virtue.  Only within the framework of the family are both the spouses and children perfected in their gift of self and unity.  It is where the children are educated in the cardinal virtues as they prepare to give themselves in service to society as a whole.  It is where siblings learn how to live as a community of equals.  It is where parents learn to shed ego.   As statistics repeatedly show, those who divorce or are victims of divorce severely handicap their chances at fulfilling their nature.

It is the Author of human nature, and not the State, that is the Author of marriage.  Marriage, because it is a complete union of persons in all their dimensions—bodily, spiritual and temporal—and thus naturally indissoluble.  The State does not make marriage but only provides an occasion for consent and works to protect and promote it.    The State in its role as guardian of the common good, may act to protect and promote marriage, even by dissolving legal bonds between spouses, but is powerless to dissolve the marriage itself.  In truth a civil divorce is worth no more than the paper upon which it is printed.

Marriage, because of its indispensable and irreplaceable role in fulfilling human nature, is a natural institution and not a social construct.  Understanding the roots of the errors that led to its demise helps us to go back and correct them. 

Cardinal Cupich’s Two-Way Street

Church, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Devils, Ecumenism, , , , , ,

In a commentary in Chicago Catholic posted last week, Cardinal Cupich weighed in on the Pachamama controversy.  The Cardinal decried the removal and disposal of the statues into the Tiber River of calling it an act of “vandalism”.  He defended the inclusion of the “artwork from the Amazon region depicted a pregnant woman, a symbol of motherhood and the sacredness of life” during the Amazonian Synod as an example of the necessary “two way street of inculturation” in which “both the cultures and the church are enhanced in coming to know God.”  In truth however, the Cardinal is defending idolatrous syncretism, a position that is indefensible for a Catholic.

Artwork or Idol?

In an act of sophistry that would make even Protagoras blush, the Cardinal depicted the statues as “artwork”.  One has to wonder why Aaron didn’t think of that when Moses confronted him over the Golden Calf.  His description defies logic and is a great distortion of the truth.  Pachamama is no mere symbol of motherhood and the sacredness of life, but a benevolent goddess of motherhood and fertility that is still worshipped among the indigenous peoples of the Andes.  The peoples, as evidenced by the opening ceremony in the Vatican Garden, still offer worship to the goddess through the statue. 

Each August, the people of the Peru dedicate the month to making offerings and sacrifices to Pachamama.  It is believed that it is necessary to satisfy her hunger and thirst with food offerings.  These offerings are burnt, carrying the prayers of the people in the smoke.  The Pachamama is no mere symbol, but instead a goddess.  The Cardinal is either lying or a fool or both.

Even Pope Francis admits that it was an idol, although not directly of course.  In his apology for the theft and submersion of the statues, he said that the statues were displayed “without any idolatrous intentions”.  No one would question the idolatrous intentions of someone unless the items in question were, in fact, idols.  The Pope’s comment, rather than exonerating him however actually makes what happened even worse.  Worse, that is, if you believe St. Thomas Aquinas.

As an offense against the First Commandment, he thought that idolatry, next to heresy is the gravest sin.  It is an offense directly against God Himself.  Aquinas thought that not all idolatry was equal.  He said that the worst kind of idolatry is, using the Pope’s words, idolatry “without any idolatrous intentions.”  The Angelic Doctor said “since outward worship is a sign of the inward worship, just as it is a wicked lie to affirm the contrary of what one holds inwardly of the true faith so too is it a wicked falsehood to pay outward worship to anything counter to the sentiments of one’s heart” (ST II-II q.94, a.2).  To set up idols without any idolatrous intentions is not only to commit idolatry but to lie as well.  Citing St. Augustine’s condemnation of Seneca for setting up idols that he did not believe in, Aquinas condemned the Pope’s position.

St. Thomas makes another interesting connection in his treatment of idolatry.  Citing St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he mentions how God turns men over to sins against nature as punishment for idolatry. He says that it is a fitting punishment of the sin of idolatry which abuses the order of divine honor that man would sin against nature as a way of suffering from the confusion from abuse of his own nature.  Might it be that the refusal of the Church to stand against all of the idolatrous elements of New Age spirituality has been met by gross sins of nature, especially among the clergy?  In other words, perhaps the homosexuality that plagues the Church is an effect of idolatry that won’t be rooted out until its cause is also rooted out.

Inculturation?

The Cardinal mentions that this event is simply an attempt at inculturation.  He errs however is describing inculturation as a two-way street.  The Church needs no outside help as She has been given the fullness of truth.  Instead she brings the truth to those who have yet to accept it and explains the truth on terms that are readily understood by her audience.  When evangelizing new cultures she may find elements that can be baptized such that they will make the Gospel intelligible.  She brings nothing back to the Church except the souls she is saving.  Our Lady’s approach (detailed here) to St. Juan Diego and the people of Mexico is a prime example of this.  She borrowed elements that were familiar to them, modified them, and used them to point to the true God in her womb.  The Church learned nothing from the Aztecs.

A two-way street approach to inculturation is just another word for syncretism.  Often masquerading as “ecumenism”, this practice ultimately is about finding creative ways to blend the Church’s doctrines with those of other religions.  It thrives on ambiguity and teeters on heresy.  The problem is that you end up far away from the truth in a way similar to what Chesterton described when he described syncretism as analogous to a man who says that the world is a rhomboid because some people believe that the world is flat and others round. 

It signals a loss of faith, thinking we must compromise to get people to come over to our side.  But the truth has a power all its own such that when it is spoken, especially with charity, it is immediately compelling.  It is also a loss in faith in anything supernatural.  The fact that idols have demons behind them is totally foreign to those of Cardinal Cupich’s ilk.

This is why they find it so incomprehensible that someone would go to the lengths the “vandal” did in attempting to destroy the idol.  It is an act of zeal; zeal for God and hatred of demons.  As St. John Henry Newman puts it, “zeal consists in a strict attention to His commands—a scrupulousness, vigilance, heartiness, and punctuality, which bears with no reasoning or questioning about them—an intense thirst for the advancement of His glory—a shrinking from the pollution of sin and sinners—an indignation, nay impatience, at witnessing His honor insulted—a quickness of feeling when His name is mentioned, and a jealousy how it is mentioned—a fulness of purpose, an heroic determination to yield Him service at whatever sacrifice of personal feeling—an energetic resolve to push through all difficulties, were they as mountains, when His eye or hand but gives the sign—a carelessness of obloquy, or reproach, or persecution, a forgetfulness of friend and relative, nay, a hatred (so to say) of all that is naturally dear to us, when He says, ‘Follow me.’”  It is zeal that destroys idols without destroying the idolaters.  It is zeal that seeks to set the idolaters free.

Confronting the Problem of Evil

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The Greek philosopher Epicurus may have been the first to articulate it, but he was most definitely not the last.  For the past 2400 years, believers have been haunted by his trilemma: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.  Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”  Epicurus is putting forth the “Problem of Evil” which remains the most repeated argument against the existence of God.  Dressed in various forms, the conditions are always the same—the incompatibility of omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and the existence of evil.  Because of its longstanding quality, believers of every age, our own included, must be prepared to answer this challenge.

Navigating the gauntlet begins by defining our terms, the first of which is evil.  In our time there is a tendency to see evil as some positive force in the universe locked in a cosmic battle with good.  Viewed as something, it seems to have a power all its own.  But evil is no more of a thing than blindness is a thing.  It is not a something but a nothing.  Just as blindness is a lack of sight, evil is a lack of a good that should otherwise be there.  Both exist, but neither has any being of its own.  Instead it exists in the form of a deprivation.  In fact, blindness in the philosophical sense of the term is an evil; a lack of sight in a being that should otherwise see.  Evil only exists as a parasite to some good and has no existence of its own.

Whence cometh Evil?

This philosophical hair splitting is necessary because it addresses Epicurus’ question “whence cometh evil?” and demonstrates how God can be all good and there still be evil.  God, as Creator, gives being to all things.  He is, in an absolute sense, the cause of being.  God cannot create non-being, not because He isn’t omnipotent, but because “create non-being” is nonsense.  To create is to give being and to create something with no being is a contradiction.  God’s omnipotence does not suddenly make the intrinsically impossible, possible.  God could no more create evil than He can make a square with three sides, omnipotent or not.

If we are to take the world as it is, that is a material world with a multitude of creatures, we could see why a certain amount of evil might be logically necessary.  We call these evils physical evils or evils suffered.  These types of evils are not privations per se, even though they can be causes of privations.  They are simply incidences where two goods collide.  When the good of the lion’s preservation meets the good of the lamb’s, the lamb tends to get the short end of the stick.  Physical evils are always connected to a good directly.  The lion’s self-preservation is a good thing, even if the lamb’s demise is not. For God to remove such evils is not simply to make our world better, but to make an entirely different kind of world.  Whether that world would be better or not can be debated, but the presence of physical evil is no argument against God’s omnipotence or omnibenevolence because one could readily imagine that same God guiding all interactions such that they work out for the good of the whole.

Moral evils, that is, evils done by rational creatures, are by far the more difficult to explain.  There are no goods in conflict, only a failure to do what is good.  The moral agent deliberately introduces disorder into what should otherwise be good.  Exonerating God from responsibility for these evils is a bit more challenging. 

God is not just the Creator, but the sustainer of creation.  That means nothing happens without His somehow being a cause.  He is not only the cause of a man, but a cause of His free will activity.  Related to the topic at hand, God is not the cause of the man’s choice, only his power of choosing.  The man cannot choose without God, but what he chooses is up to him. 

Recall that God, through His omnipotence, can do anything that does not imply a logical contradiction.  God could have made a world in which a man might choose freely but always choose good because there is no contradiction.  But He did not.  Instead the world we inhabit allows for free choice that can include evil.  This is allowed because God’s will in creating is to create a world such that His goodness is most fully made manifest through the goods of His creatures.  One can readily see that there are a multitude of goods that would never be made known were it not for the ability to choose what is evil: courage, forgiveness, mercy, justice to name just a few.  If through the designs of divine Providence God wanted to make His creatures participate in these real goods, there must be some evil present; not just physical evil, but moral as well.  Eliminate all evil, and you drag goods with it.

Why the Argument Fails?

This is why the argument ultimately fails.  One may readily admit that there are a multitude of evils present in the world, but not without admitting that there are many cases in which goods that would not otherwise be created are made present.  So, the good trailing on evil is proof not of God’s non-existence or His weakness, but of His goodness and power.  As Aquinas puts it, “‘Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.’ This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good” (ST I, q.2, a.2, ad.2). 

Once we define evil for what it is metaphysically, that is a “no-thing”, we realize that it is only God Who is All-Good and All-Powerful that can create good ex nihilio.  The fact that good does come from evil shows that to be the work of God Himself.  So, the Problem of Evil, rather than leading us away from God, actually leads towards Him.   

Taking Down the Firewall

Apologetics, Church Authority, Communion of Saints, End Times, Last Things, Protestantism, Purgatory, Scripture, , , ,

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral, the Augustinian priest ignited a firewall that continues to separate Catholics and Protestants down to this day.  At the heart of his question was the abuse of indulgences, but he ultimately attacked the firewall upon which the doctrine was built—Purgatory—in order to make his point.  Unfortunately, the debate still rages today, not necessarily because of Purgatory itself but because of all of the ancillary issues attached to it: Atonement, Penance, Tradition, Development of Doctrine, and Authority.  In an age of exaggerated ecumenism, we tend to ignore those doctrines like Purgatory that ultimately lead to division.  Ignoring the truth is never a good idea, especially when the truth is a practical one.  Purgatory is perhaps the most practical of doctrines; many of those who don’t believe in it now will experience it first-hand in the not too distant future.  But it also is important to have a ready explanation for it because it is also a “head-pin” doctrine; knock it down and many of the aforementioned obstacles will fall with it.

The most common argument against it is that it is not Scriptural.  We have spoken any number of times in the past about the rule of faith being implicit within Sacred Scripture and the need for Tradition to make it explicit.  In other words, doctrines like Purgatory need not be explicit in Scripture only implicit.  We will not traverse that well-worn path yet again.  It is mentioned because we need not necessarily have this discussion regarding Purgatory.  If we dig a little deeper into Scripture then we will find that Purgatory is a common theme, so much so that we can offer a strictly Scriptural defense of it.

St. Thomas said that, when arguing with an opponent, we should always argue using terms and sources of authority that they agree with.  For example, when discussing some aspect of morality with a non-Christian, we should not cite the Bible but instead Natural Law.  We can certainly show how the Bible agree with that source of authority, but to obstinately stick to the Bible when they think it mythical is foolish.  A similar thing happens with Catholics and the doctrine of Purgatory.  Second Maccabees (2 Maccabees 12:39-46) clearly points to a belief in Purgatory.  The problem is that Protestants don’t accept that book as inspired.  By referencing them it seems to only prove their point that Purgatory is a Catholic fabrication, yet it still remains the go-to texts from the Old Testament.

St. Francis de Sales and the Argument from Scripture

Throughout post-Reformation history, there is perhaps no one better than St. Francis de Sales at converting Protestants.  Some estimate that he was responsible for over 70,000 conversions in his lifetime.  It is therefore instructive to look at how he presented this divisive doctrine.  He did not argue from Tradition or even mention 2Maccabees, but instead gave a strict Biblical defense using Protestant accepted texts.  Given his success rate and the fact that most of these texts are rarely cited, it is educative to review what he said (Catholic Controversy, Appendix II).

It without saying that Catholics and Protestants both agree that Christ’s Blood is the true purgatory.  But the question still remains how and when that purgation is applied.    For the saintly Bishop of Geneva and the thousands he converted there was a simple reasoning process: if there are passages which speak of purgation after death then there must be a place (call it Purgatory since the name is never given us) where this purgation occurs for purgation can happen neither in hell (where “the worm does not die” Mk 9:48) or in heaven (where “nothing unclean may enter it” Rev 21:27). 

St. Francis begins where many of the Fathers of the Church, those who spoke the great Amen to God’s Revelation, began, in Psalm 66.  There the Psalmist speaks of being led out into the spacious place by passing through fire (Ps 66:12).  Likewise, Isaiah 4:4 speaks of being cleansed by a spirit of burning. 

St. Francis also refers to Christ’s teaching on the Sermon of the Mount where he cautions about the punishments attached to anger (Mt 5:22-26).  Our Lord suggests different levels of punishment, with only the latter meriting hell.  For the other two, Jesus speaks of a prison of sorts that one can leave saying, “truly, I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny” (5:26).  Building on this theme, St. Paul refers to a man who is saved “as through fire”  (1 Cor 3:11-15).

Praying for the Dead

All of this points to a time and place of purgation, but, absent a connection to Tradition, one could argue that this purgation occurs in this life.  The problem with that interpretation however is the abundance of Scriptural examples of people praying for the dead.  St. Francis begins by referring to David’s prayer and fasting for Saul and Jonathan after their deaths—”And they mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and for Jonathan his son and for the people of the LORD and for the house of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword” (2 Sam 1:12).  Likewise, we find St. Paul praying for his departed friend Onesiphorous (1 Tim 1:16-18).

He also explains two other often problematic texts by referring to Purgatory.  The Mormons often justify their habit of literally vicariously baptizing the dead by referring to Paul’s text in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians (1 Cor 15:29).  St. Francis says that when Paul speaks of being baptized for the dead he does not mean it in the literal sense, but as an exhortation to offer sufferings for the dead.  He says that St. Paul is using Baptism in the same manner as Christ did when He speaks of His baptism of afflictions and penances undertaken in Luke 12:49-50—I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!  There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!”.  Notice how Our Lord references to a fire in this rather clear passage.

Perhaps his most convincing passage prooftext is the last one he refers to: Philippians 2:10.  St. Paul says that that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth”.   In particular, St. Francis is concerned with a proper interpretation of those “under the earth”.  To assume that refers to those in hell would contradict Scripture— ”For there is no one in death, that is mindful of thee: and who shall confess to thee in hell?” (Ps 6:5, c.f. Isaiah 38:18).  Instead those “under the earth” refers to “holy souls in Purgatory”, that is the Church Suffering.  St. Paul’s hymn is making reference to the Church in all her members in heaven, on the earth and in Purgatory.  Ultimately then, there is no firewall between the Church’s members nor should there be between Catholics and Protestants.

Arguing for God’s Existence Through the Degrees of Being

Atheism, Evolution, Faith and Reason, , , , , , ,

According to the First Vatican Council, it is an article of Faith that the existence of God can be proven using reason alone.  This declaration shows just how much faith the Church has in reason and philosophy.  It is an endorsement for the metaphysical endowment that God has given to man in the form of his own intellect.  The timing of the Vatican Council’s declaration is not accidental; reading the signs of the times almost 150 years ago, the Council Fathers saw that faith in reason was in decline and so the Holy Spirit thought it necessary to remind us of our metaphysical prowess.  Their message remains a clarion call for us today.

Among the many proofs for the existence of God, the Church has given a special pride of place to the Five Ways of St. Thomas.  These proofs ably combine metaphysical thinking with common experience to lead us to back to God under five different attributes: the Unmoved Mover, the Uncaused Cause, the Necessary Being, the Most Perfect Being and the Orderly Governor of Creation.  This does not, mind you, replace what God has revealed, but instead acts like a preamble to faith or a preliminary motive of credibility that paves the way for the invasion of grace and true Faith.  These proofs have proven to be irrefutable.  Those who have tried have only shown themselves unable to understand them.  It is therefore vital that we be able to present these proofs in an intelligible manner.  In the past we have explained the First Way so that in this essay we will present what is the most metaphysical of the Five Ways, the Fourth Way, often called the Argument from Degrees of Being.

Before getting to the actual proof, it will be helpful to review the metaphysical principles that St. Thomas employs because the modern mind habitually assumes that all value judgments are subjective.  But objective reality is otherwise.  But in order to grasp this, we need to introduce the medieval concept of the Chain of Being.

The Chain of Being

In an egalitarian age that is unable to decipher between the value of man and beast, the Chain of Being might strike us as odd.  It posits that the world is not just a blob of different stuff or a random collection of atoms, but instead an ordered hierarchy of beings.  The ordering is not based upon subjective preferences, but upon objective standards.  A man’s best friend really does have more value than Man’s Best Friend; John is objectively more valuable than Fido. 

Merely saying so does not make it so however.  Instead we must look at why John is more valuable than Fido.  We say that one creature is greater than another when it has more perfections, that is more being.  A geranium has life and can grow and thus has more perfections than a Plymouth Rock.  Fido has life and the capacity to grow, but also the power of locomotion and sense knowledge.  John too has vegetative powers and sensitive powers of Fido, but also the power to reason.  John is more valuable than Fido because he has more perfections.  And because he has more perfections, he has more being and occupies a higher place in the Chain of Being.  We can say that John is objectively more valuable than Fido accusations of speciesism not withstanding.

It is better to be than not to be.  Put another way, a thing must exist before it can be good so that whatever has goodness must have being.  The reverse is also true: everything that has being also has some goodness.  This is the case because being and goodness are convertible meaning that we can examine being under the aspect of goodness. To be is good and to be more is to better.  Good is related to the perfection of being.

Being is not within a category, but instead transcends all categories because it contains all categories.  The same applies to goodness in that it transcends all categories because it applies to all of them.  This is why we refer to goodness, along with truth and beauty as transcendentals.  Truth is a transcendental because all being is in a sense knowable.  The more being a thing has, the more knowable it is (and the hard it is to truly know).  In that sense we can also say that a plant is more true than a rock.  Likewise with beauty which, in a certain sense, combines goodness and truth so that the objectively beautiful exhibits integrity, harmony and clarity.  To avoid repeating what has been said before, I point the reader to this link on beauty.

Aquinas’ Fourth Way

With our feet planted on this metaphysical foundation, we can now evaluate St. Thomas’ argument.

The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

ST I, q.2, art. 3

St. Thomas begins by referring to the aforementioned Chain of Being.  What he then goes on to do is say that if we predicate a transcendental property to any being, then there must be “something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being.”  This might not be intuitive based on our foundation so we will spell it out more explicitly. 

Although creatures have various degrees of being, none of them are the cause of their own being.  Each creature is limited in their being by their nature or their essence and thus they must receive their existence from another (this is the First Way).  This cause of being cannot itself require a cause but instead must have maximal being, that is, it must be of their essence to exist.  This Being, we call God Who calls Himself “I AM”.

Meeting an Objection

It is worth looking at an objection because it helps to clarify the argument and illuminate St. Thomas’s genius.  It would be a misreading of the argument to assume that St. Thomas is saying that all things that exist in degrees must have a maximum.  He is partly to blame for this because of the example he used with respect to fire and heat.  Heat need not have an absolute maximum.  Treating it as simply an example of a closed system in which a fire is the source of all heat, makes the example more intelligible.  Many people, including theists, make this mistake.  But none make it with as much flair as Richard Dawkins did in his book The God Delusion when he said that “You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness.  Therefore, there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker.”

Dawkins’ cleverness stops at his example.  Unable to see anything without his scientistic glasses, he can only see the flaw in St. Thomas’ example and is unable to grasp the underlying logic.  A bad example does not invalidate the principle.  Dawkins and his kind do not grasp that the argument is not about beings in particular, but being itself.  St. Thomas is focused only on the transcendentals—” so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being”—and not on particular created things.  Those things that share or participate in a limited way of being, goodness, truth and beauty must be caused by a Being that is essentially and maximally good, true and beautiful.