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Angels and the Sexes

Angels, Anthropology, Apologetics, beauty, , , , , , ,

There is perhaps no topic that St. Thomas Aquinas is more closely associated with than angels.  Dubbed The Angelic Doctor, both because of his angelic purity, and because of his thorough compilation of the Church’s teachings on the angels, he is a reliable teacher on the topic.  We can turn to him and find the necessary principles that will enable us to answer any question we might have, including the question as to why angels always appear as men in Scripture. 

One of the things that St. Thomas does is to help us see beyond on modern prejudices because he appeals to universal principles.  There is a modern tendency, especially in an age of exaggerated gender equality, to attribute it to patriarchal repression.  But there is more to it than that and it begins by turning to Aquinas’ negative definition of an angel as that which is “understood to be incorporeal” (ST, q.51, art.1).  Lacking bodies, are neither male nor female by nature.  Nevertheless, because matter makes the invisible visible, the angels use a body to reveal themselves. 

Where the Body Comes From

To say that they “use” a body leads us to a necessary digression.  The angels do not rob a grave nor perform something like a good possession, but instead draw together the matter necessary to create the physical appearance of a human body.  “Appearance” because it is not truly a human body because its proper form of the human soul.  Although they do not have a body by nature, they do, by nature have the power to move matter in accord with their will (assuming Divine approval of course).  Making a body then would be perfectly within their natural powers.

This “body” serves solely the purpose of revealing the angel and allowing him to communicate with humans on their level.  In this way, the angels are in the image of God, given the power to use the material to make the non-material intelligible to us.  This is why we can never look upon their choice of body as an accident of social convention or a concession to patriarchy.  Instead it is chosen for a purpose, namely to reveal the angel, in both his nature and personality, to men.  This purpose helps set the tone for an explanation as to why the bodies are always male. 

Angels, because they lack materiality, also lack, philosophically speaking, potency.  The angel is pure intellect, always being in act of knowing a loving.  If they cease to think and love, they cease to exist.  Likewise, being immaterial, they “live” outside of visible creation.  This means that angels are always the initiators in their interaction with mankind.  Men cannot beckon them (this is why the angel will not tell Jacob his name) nor conjure them up.  They must always come on their own accord.  In “coming” they enter into the physical world from the outside.  They must come from outside of visible creation and enter into the physical world.  Finally, angels are by their mission, the militant protectors of mankind.  They are warriors assigned to battle the evil spirits in their assault upon mankind.

The Body Reveals the Personality

If the angel, in forming a body, wants to convey both his nature and his personality, then how should he present himself?  To convey personality, he must choose one of the sexes and not just an amorphous blob or non-personal type matter.  To convey his nature, he must choose one or the other.  To see which one, another slight digression is in order.

The sexes, male and female, are meant to reveal masculinity and femininity.  The masculine principle is always the initiator, always the one who comes from the outside.  The feminine principle is always passive and receptive.  The masculine is, viewed philosophically, acts as the efficient cause in reducing the feminine from potency to act.  Likewise, the masculine is always the protector and warrior of the feminine. 

Angels, by choosing to appear with men, are revealing that they have initiated the conversation with men, and that they have come from outside of visible creation.  The Heavenly Host is an army arrayed in battle to protect us.  This militancy is best portrayed by being a man.  It is for these three reasons that angels always appear as men in Scripture and why we always speak of the angels that we don’t see as “he”.

In the book of Zechariah, there is a story of how the prophet was visited by an angel.  In that regard, it is no different than many other cases in Scripture of similar visitation.  It is unique however because at first glance it appears that a female angel (actually two) makes an appearance.  There is reason to think however that these angels are actually demons.

The prophet is visited by an angel who points out to him a basket that contains a woman whom he identifies as “wickedness”.  He closes the basket and then the angel raises Zechariah’s “eyes and saw two women coming forth with wind under their wings—they had wings like the wings of a stork—and they lifted the basket into the air.  I said to the angel who spoke with me, ‘Where are they taking the basket?’  He replied, ‘To build a temple for it in the land of Shinar. When the temple is constructed, they will set it there on its base.’” (Zech 5:9-11).  These “two women”, some posit, are angels.  But the destination, Shinar, which is where the tower of Babel was built (Gen 11), later referred to as Babylon, tells us something different.  Throughout Scripture, Babylon is always presented as the city of the devil and thus they are carrying wickedness back to its biblical home. 

Devotion to the Angels and Angel Statues

All of that being said, why does it matter if they appear as both men and women or only as men?  It matters because angels are not just hypothetical beings but real people who play an active role in the world of mankind.  It becomes then a matter of discernment, giving us a principle by which to distinguish between an angel of light and an angel of darkness.  Given all that we have said, it is not surprising that exorcists and demonologists find that only demons appear as women and that they caution us to avoid a feminine spirit.  This is not to suggest that women are evil, (for the demons also appear as men) only that femininity does not properly convey the nature of the angel.  The demons operate on deception and seduction and thus we should not be surprised that these is one of the means they use. 

It isn’t just discernment that matters, but also devotion.  Devotional art ought to portray the object of devotion as it truly is.  It may abstract away certain pieces (like the excess blood of Christ on the Cross) but it must remain true to the object itself.  In other words, devotional art ought to imitate nature because it helps to foster a deeper devotion.  This is why we should be cautious in accepting the modern tendency to depict angels as female in art.  The angels themselves are artists and they have chosen the male body to portray themselves.  Masculine angel art helps to foster true devotion to the angels because it depicts their true characteristics more than a female art would.  In this way, that is because it has claritas, the masculine angel is always more beautiful than the feminine. 

If it is really true that only demons appear as women, then these aesthetic objects may in fact be idols, fostering devotion to devils instead.  Devotion is always directed from the heart to the object.  In this way it has a power of forming our hearts to love the object of our devotion.  A poor depiction of angels, or even one that is really demonic, can eventually do harm to our spiritual life.  This is why it is always better to foster devotion based on what we do know, namely that angels always take on masculine form, then to speculate, and risk offering devotion to something far more insidious. 

Kindred Spirits?

Defending the Faith, Protestantism, Saints, Scripture, , , , , ,

Summing up why Sacred Scripture matters, St. Jerome once proclaimed that “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”  The famously acerbic Doctor of the Church knew that the Word Made Flesh could be found on every page of the Bible and therefore dedicated his life to studying the Scriptures and producing accurate translations of the books of the Bible.  Living in a time when many of the versions had become corrupt due to poor translation and copyist errors, he learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic just so that he could create the most accurate translation of the ancient books.  So gifted was he in this area that the pope at the time, Pope Damasus, asked him to produce an “official” translation in Latin that became known as the Vulgate.  It is this translation that remains the official translation of the Church to our day.

Like much of what the somewhat contentious Jerome did during his lifetime, his work was not without controversy in his day.  Little did he know that this controversy would be felt a millennium later when a former Augustinian monk stumbled upon some of his early thought and used his arguments to justify his own position.  The bulk of Jerome’s work was done when the Church did not have an official canon—official in the sense that the Church had authoritatively spoken as to which books were part of the Bible and which weren’t.  It was not until 382 that Pope Damasus produced a list of the canon that was later affirmed by the Council of Hippo (393) and the Council of Carthage (397).  Nevertheless, there was still widescale agreement among the Faithful as to which books could be used in the Liturgy (which was the home of Scripture) and which couldn’t.  There was still some question about a few books like the Book of James, Revelation, the Letter of Clement to the Corinthians and the Didache, but most agreed that the former two belonged and the latter did not.  But before officially closing the canon, Pope Damasus sought to produce an accurate translation of the entire canon of Scripture so that the Church could have a single collection of the books to rely on.

It is important to note however that the debated books never included what has become known as the Deuterocanon (or Apocrypha in Protestant circles).  This name, Deuterocanon, was used to distinguish books of the Old Testament that could be used for argumentation and evangelization with Jews from those that couldn’t.  For the Jews, once they realized that their books were being coopted by the Christians, had begun to build a wall around their Scriptures and rejected all those books that were not found in Hebrew.  A list that included the seven books (Baruch, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Sirach, Judith, Wisdom, and Tobit) and parts of two others (Daniel and Esther) of the Catholic canon.  But the Church still viewed both sets of books as inspired and we find those books included among all the early lists of the approved Scriptures by the Church Fathers. 

Jerome’s Line of Reasoning

The agreement in the Early Church regarding the Deuterocanonical books was unanimous except for one man—St. Jerome.  For Jerome made a mistake in his thinking, a mistake of which the aftershocks are still felt today.  As he gathered up the various translations of the books, he found that the copies of the Septuagint, that is, the ancient Greek translation of the books of the Old Testament, were various and not wholly consistent.  Translating them without finding an “official” text proved difficult to say the least.  He also found that the Hebrew texts, what he called the Hebrew Masoretic (HM) texts, had been widely circulated for several centuries and were much cleaner and consistent.  From these two facts, Jerome came to an incorrect conclusion.  He thought that the HM texts were the “correct” ones and not the Septuagint.  He called this the principle of “Hebrew Verity”.  And since the Deuterocanon did not appear in the HM texts he also concluded that they were not inspired.

Flash forward 1100 years and Martin Luther, whose theology, especially on indulgences and praying for the dead, is clearly contradicted by these books, is looking for a reason to throw these books out of the Canon.  He stumbles across Jerome’s reasoning and latches on to it.  The story of how he removed the books has been covered previously, so we won’t rehash that here.  What we will cover however is that Jerome was wrong in his line of thinking and therefore Luther merely resurrected his error and passed on a stunted Canon to his Protestant progeny.

Why Jerome was Wrong

We know that Jerome was wrong for two reasons.  The first is related to the findings in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  This sacred library was discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds and contained the earliest translations of many of the books in the Old Testament.  These translations precede any of the earliest translations we had up to that point by almost 1000 years and precede Jerome’s HM text by almost 500 years in some case.  Why this is significant for the discussion at hand is that among the books that were found were the books of the Deuterocanon.  And not only were they in the library, but there were Hebrew and Aramaic translations.  These translations, as well as the translations of the other books that were found, are closer in substance to the Septuagint and not to the HM texts.  In short, the Dead Sea Scrolls show that Jerome erred in thinking that just because the HM texts were consistent, they were correct.  The problem was that the parts of the Septuagint were actually preserving the original Hebrew better than the currently existing Hebrew and the Dead Sea Scrolls show this.

While Luther might be excused for not knowing this, the second reason should have convinced him.  The reason we know Jerome was wrong is because Jerome said he was wrong.  In a letter Against Rufinus he said,

“What sin have I committed if I followed the judgment of the churches? But he who brings charges against me for relating the objections that the Hebrews are wont to raise against the Story of Susanna, the Song of the Three Children, and the story of Bel and the Dragon, which are not found in the Hebrew volume, proves that he is just a foolish sycophant. For I was not relating my own personal views, but rather the remarks that they [the Jews] are wont to make against us.”

And this ultimately helps us to uncover not just the error Luther made but his motivation.  For he cites St. Jerome as his authority, but then does not do what Jerome did.  For Jerome, even though he had personal reservations against those books being included in the official canon, still translated them, and ultimately deferred to the authority of the Church.  He knew that his personal opinion could err, but the Church could not, especially when it comes to the Canon of Scripture.  He knew that a fallible list of infallible books leads to an absurdity, one that tugs at the seamless garment of the content of faith until it entirely unravels. 

It is not much of a stretch, especially when we read their writings, to see that Jerome and Luther were kindred spirits with one huge exception.  St. Jerome has the humility of a saint and deferred to the authority of the Church.  Luther had the pride of devil and decided to set himself up as his own authority.

On the Possibility of Miracles

Apologetics, , , , , , , ,

The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, better known as the Jeffersonian Bible, was compiled in 1820 by the founding father of the same name.  Using a literal cut and paste method, Jefferson extracted sections of the New Testament that he thought presented Jesus as a great moral exemplar.  Left behind are only mentions of the miracles He performed, including the Resurrection, and any passages that even have a whiff of his divinity.  The famous tinkerer could find no reasons to believe in the divinity of Christ and the operation of the supernatural so he imposed his naturalism upon the texts of the Bible.  Although he hid it away for fear of reprisal, there are many, even inside confines of the Church, who openly adopt and preach naturalism. 

Naturalism

Simply put, naturalism is the position that all that exists is nature.  It usually goes hand in hand with scientism, that is, the belief that the only field of knowledge is empirical science.  Within this philosophical framework the supernatural is a priori excluded such that there must be a natural explanation for everything.  This would include the divinity of Christ and miracles.  Rather than scientifically investigating the possibility of miracles, they simply conclude that miracles are impossible because they are impossible.  As we shall see, however, the miracles of Jesus are in fact quite possible.

CS Lewis makes a helpful distinction in categorizing the miracles of Jesus into two very broad categories: miracles of the Old Creation and miracles of the New Creation.  The former are those miracles in which, seemingly, the laws of nature are altered.  The latter are those that pertain to the laws of supernature.  As an example of the former we could have the changing of the water into wine and of the latter, the walking on water.  Both however respect nature and are no mere suspension of natural laws.  The super-natural always builds upon and assumes the natural. 

Using the Miracle of Cana as an example, let us examine whether or not such a miracle of the Old Creation is possible.  But before doing so, a disclaimer of sorts must be made.  The goal of this discussion is to show that miracles are possible and if possible then probable.  This is not a definitive proof that any particular miracle, including the changing of water into wine, actually happened.  That must be taken upon faith.  Instead the goal is more modest and that is to show that there is nothing irrational about believing in miracles, and, in fact, it is irrational not to believe in their possibility.

Returning to our example, let us examine what is happening.  A substance, namely water, is being changed into another substance, wine.  Change is a reality within the natural world and occurs everywhere we look so there is nothing per se out of the ordinary here.  All substantial change is governed by the enduring principle of matter.  In each substantial change, the matter takes on a new form; water gets into a grape seed and the matter becomes the grape vine which then bears grapes which undergo another substantial change through the process of fermentation and become wine.  So, we see, using the laws of substantial change, it is quite possible that water becomes wine. 

The Lord of Nature

This is not to explain away the miraculous, but to set it in its proper context.  Properly speaking the miracle is not in the change itself, but in the rapidity of the change.  Christ is revealing that He is the Lord of Nature and so it is fitting that He would respect the laws of nature and yet show His mastery over them.  He is the Sovereign King of Creation and thus He can do all things.  He came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it means not just the religious laws like the ritual washing that made the stone jars necessary, but also the laws of nature as well.  In fact, He uses the miracle as a sign that it is His power over nature that also gives Him the authority over the religious law. This mastery over nature is precisely what lends credibility to His claims of divinity and is the reason why He always uses some form of matter in His miracles rather than just creating it out of nothing.  The fact that He also produced a superabundance of 520 liters of wine shows how His absolute mastery.  A similar thing can be shown with the other miracles such as the multiplication of the loaves. 

What about the miracles of the New Creation, those like the walking on the water and the Resurrection?  How can we reconcile these?  Here again we must admit that we cannot prove them, but we can show how the follow from the possibility of the Miracles of the Old Creation and how they are not a repudiation of the laws of Nature.  If we view the miracles of the Old Creation as signs, motives of credibility if you will, then we can say that these miracles of the New Creation are the fulfillment of those signs.  They are meant to show that the laws of nature are not what is altered but man and his relationship to nature that is altered.  Water is still wet and still permeable, but man is given power over it.  Peter, a mere man in the process of becoming a new man, is able to walk on the water as long as he kept his eyes fixed on Christ.  Death, a natural consequence of man’s material being, no longer can hold him.  In both cases the laws are still in place, but man himself has changed.  Previously governed by the material laws because of his material body, he is governed by the laws of a spiritual body.  Spirit asserts its dominance against matter. 

We see now that we must admit at least of the possibility of miracles of Jesus and any philosophy that eliminates them by definition is necessarily false.  There is nothing contrary to the character of nature that would preclude them.  To eliminate them a priori means that you must in some way deny some of the attributes of nature itself.  To eliminate the possibility of the supernatural in this case means a denial of the natural as well.  The only way they could be excluded is if God did not allow them, a question that the Naturalist is not even willing to consider.

Not surprisingly most naturalists are also atheists (or at least deists).  In other words, they form their philosophy based on their belief, rather than as true scientists who would allow the data to take them wherever it goes.  In other words, they invent a philosophy to fit their belief rather than fitting their belief to a correct philosophy.  One may not know whether Christ was God or not, but to eliminate the possibility of the miraculous ultimately is unreasonable. 

The Fountain of Youth and the Resurrection

Anthropology, Resurrection, , , , , ,

Legend has it that the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León stumbled upon Florida while searching for the Fountain of Youth.  The mythical spring would restore youth to anyone who drank or bathed in its waters.  His personal records make no mention of his search, but nevertheless popular history has attached the fountain to his name, often as evidence of a backward time.  But if we replace magical fountains with technology, then the quest at least, does not seem so doltish.  The fountain may not exist, but the desire to remain forever young remains a part of the human psyche.  Mass vanity?  Perhaps.  But if we dismiss the desire too quickly, then we are in danger of missing a message from our hearts that points towards the One Who is the fulfillment of every desire.

A quick word first about vanity.  Vanity or vainglory is not wrong because it seeks glory.  We were made to receive glory.  Vainglory is wrong because it seeks glory in the wrong things, in the wrong way or from the wrong person.  Glory is meant to be received from God in reward for the good that we do for the right reason.  To seek it in other ways is ultimately empty and unsatisfying and thus leaves us perpetually searching for what ultimately proves to be a mythical satisfaction. 

St. Thomas on Perpetual Youth

Reading St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae can be intimidating, but those who are willing to brave the raging intellectual waters are often struck by his common sense.  Related to the topic at hand, he takes a common sense approach about the state of our bodies after the general resurrection.  Building off the promise in Ephesians 4:13, namely “until we all attain to…mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ”, St. Thomas points out that man will rise again at the most perfect stage of nature (ST III, q.81, art.1).  Because perfection does not come to us all at once, there is a defect in human nature in time.  First there is the defect of childhood in that they lack maturity and bodily strength.  Secondly there is a defect in old age brought about by the diminishment of bodily strength and faculties.  These two defects meet at a single point in which growth terminates and just prior to the movement towards defect begins.  This point, St. Thomas calls a “youthful age” and it is when we are at our strongest bodily.  This is the same youthful age that the Fountain of Youth is attempting to capture.  It is the same age that the bodily resurrection will capture for all eternity.  This desire in our culture to stay forever young is really a twisted-up desire for our bodily resurrection in which we will attain to “the extent of the full stature of Christ.”   

Because Christ Himself rose at the youthful age of 30, and our resurrection is a share in His, we will all arise in our bodies of a similar youthful age.  But, before closing, we would be remiss if we merely glossed over the fact that Christ was struck down at what would be considered the strongest age.  This ought to bring both pause and praise because the age in which He was strongest was also the age at which He could suffer the most.  To cut a man down in His prime requires the greatest effort.  His gift of self to mankind was more complete at 30 than it would have been at any other age and helps explain why it was fitting that He be that age. 

The desire for perpetual youth in this world is vanity, not because it seeks the glory that comes in youth, but because it seeks it in the wrong way.  The desire is a pointer that extends beyond this world to tell us that it is only by dying to self with a youthful vigor that we can actually become younger.  Perpetual youth only comes from the One Who won it for us by giving Himself away during His youth.  Fully untwisted, the Fountain of Youth and all its present day manifestations become a true north for us to fix our desire on its proper object.  Only by sharing in Christ’s passion do we share in His youthful resurrection.

Hope and the Mystery of Evil

Atheism, Last Things, Mercy, Theology, , , , , , , , , , ,

Atheists, at least those who are honest, often cite the problem of suffering as their main obstacle to believing in God.  They reason that if there is a loving God, then there wouldn’t be so much suffering.  A believer may counter with the burden of free will, but that really only accounts for the moral evils in this world.  What about the natural evils, those like we see in the wake of hurricane, where suffering and death seem to be everywhere?  The problem facing the believer is how he can explain a mystery, that is the mystery of evil, to one who does not yet have faith.  And so, the unbeliever goes away with only more reasons for disbelief.  But if we are to give them reasons for belief, then we must be willing to dive into this question a little more deeply.

Evil and suffering are, as we said, a mystery.  The word mystery comes from the Greek word mysterion which literally means closed.  Mysteries, at least in the sense we are using it here, are closed to the rational mind.  The human mind, unaided by revelation, can not even conceive of the mystery.  Once it is revealed, it becomes intelligible, but the light of full understanding cannot be seen.  The mystery of evil is one such revealed truth that, absent the gift of divine faith, is completely incomprehensible.  No amount of reasoning about suffering and evil could ever bring us to the point where we could conclude that “all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Hope and the Desire for Justice

Even if we could intellectually assent to this truth, it remains elusive because it is also the foundation of the theological virtue of hope.  Like faith, hope is a gift and not something we can earn.  It resides in the will and acts like a holy fortitude that enables us to habitually cling to the truth of God’s Word even in the presence of manifold evils.    It is in “hope we are saved” (Romans 8:24).  At every corner, the believer is tempted to despair, that is, to give up on the fact that God always fulfills His promises so we should not be surprised when the unbeliever, who lives without these supernatural gifts, finds no seeds of hope in this world. 

Lacking supernatural faith and hope, it would seem that the unbeliever’s ears remain permanently closed to any possible theological explanation.  It only seems that way however when we ask an important question.  Why is it that the unbeliever expects things to be otherwise?  The answer, once it is uttered, turns the issue on its head.  What makes evil and suffering so bad in the mind of the unbeliever is that it appears to be indiscriminate; favoring, if anything the guilty more than the innocent.  Peeling back a layer of his thoughts he will find that, like all men, he has an innate desire for justice.  This desire, even if it is unacknowledged cannot be stamped out.  He finds within himself a fundamental paradox—”there is no God and yet I expect justice.”

Every true desire that we have has an object.  We experience hunger and there is food, we experience loneliness there are companions, we desire knowledge, there are things to be known.  We could go on and on listing our desires and find that each matches to some object.  Justice however remains mostly elusive.  We certainly believe there is an object, or else all the political machinations in which we try to create a utopic paradise are pointless.  But those objects have proven to be woefully inadequate.  It is reasonable then to expand our horizons. 

This line of reasoning is not unlike CS Lewis’ argument from desire, except that it points towards an event—the Last Judgment.  The Last Judgment, the moment when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead, will be first and foremost an event of justice.  Every injustice will be set right, every wrong righted, everlasting crowns given to those who suffered injustice and everlasting shame to those who doled it out.  The judgment of history will be corrected and “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”  Justice will be served. 

The Final Judgment as a Beacon of Hope

In short, the desire for justice is meant to serve as a signpost pointing towards the truth of eternal life.  Pope Benedict XVI calls this “the most important motive for believing in eternal life” in Spe Salvi, his second encyclical:

There is justice. There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life. The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ’s return and for new life become fully convincing.

Spe Salvi (SS) #43

Following this line of reasoning a little further, we see that the unfulfilled desire for justice in this life becomes a beacon of hope for the next.  It is according to God’s Providential design that justice will be lacking in this world precisely to spur our desire for the next.  Revelation then becomes the venue where desire meets object.  The heart testifies and Revelation answers.

Based on this view, the Pope wants us to correct our view of the Final Judgment and see it in the light of the Good News.  “The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope” (SS, 44).  When we see it as part and parcel of the Good News as a response to man’s universal longing for justice, its evangelical power can be unleashed.

Healing Our Speech Impediment

Moralilty, Redemption, ,

If our sole criterion for judging the seriousness of particular sins is the number of times it is mentioned in Sacred Scripture, then most certainly sins of the tongue are among the most dangerous.  St. James describes the danger in rather stark terms: “The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna” (James 3:6).  Of course, he is reiterating what God gave to Moses in the Eighth Commandment which calls out our post-edenic speech impediment. But in our own age, because of a marked preference for verbosity over veracity, we ought to re-examine his warning lest the gravity of the tongue drag us into Gehenna.

Man has always struggled with simply following rules—not in the sense that he doesn’t follow them, but that he chooses how he is going to follow them.  This is both the gift and burden of freedom.  We can use these rules as boundaries or we can use them runways for freedom.  We can find out how to stay within the strict letter of the law or we can learn how to use them to truly thrive.  The choice is up to us, but the Church always leans towards the side of freedom.  She gives us not just rules, but also reasons.  She teaches ethics so that we can develop ethos. 

On Telling the Truth

This is especially true when it comes to truth telling.  Moralists have argued for centuries as to what constitutes a lie.  Even the Catechism has had to change its definition since it was first released in 1992.  The point is not that rules are unnecessary—there can be no gray without black and white—but that unless you understand why telling the truth is so important, you will always be trapped in a casuistic web.  Truth telling matters because the truth matters.  The truth matters because it is God Who through His Provident care has set reality as it really is.  It is He Who has willed, directly or permissively, things to be the way they are.  To distort that is to usurp God as God and to alter reality such that it is the way I want it to be.  There is no color coding of lies, white or otherwise, because lying is first and foremost an offense against God’s Fatherhood.

Most people know a lie when they tell one, but sins of the tongue encompass so much more than just lying.  It is the gray areas that often and unwittingly cause the most problems.  There is gossiping, excuse making, calumny, slander, flattery, and detraction; all of which are just as, if not more, common than just straight up lying.  This is because there seems to be no clear rules governing them.  But once we look at the telos, or purpose, of our capacity for speech, we find a set of guiding principles emerging.

Among all the visible creatures, speech is the most distinctively human powers.  Other animals may speak, but none can truly communicate.  Our speech allows us to make visible what is otherwise invisible.  Speech allows us to communicate not just facts or theories but our interior.  It gives us the power to tell others exactly is going on inside of us.  So important is this fact, that Our Lord also mentions it in a discussion with the Pharisees.  “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts…” (Mk 7:21).

Truth and Communion

But speech is not just for us to download our thoughts, but it is given to us for communion.  Made in the image of God, the Triune God that is in perfect communion through the Word, our speech is meant to be a power in which we give what is most intimate, our thoughts.  But falsehood cannot bear the weight of communion, so that true communion can only happen when there is communication in truth.  It is this last statement that animates the two guiding principles for the use of our tongue: truth and communion.

Truth is paramount for the reasons already mentioned, but not every situation calls for truth telling.  Some situations call for truth withholding.  Truth withholding is really about truth protecting, that is, protecting the truth from those who do not need to know it (detraction) or those who will exploit it for evil.  Even in those cases it is never permissible to lie, even if you must exercise a mental reservation or suffer for remaining silent.   But we often struggle with deciding whether someone needs to know and for this we can rely on the principle of communion.  Will what I am about to tell lead to a communion of persons or destroy it?  If I were to tell my neighbor that their babysitter is a drunk then that would be protective of the common good.  If I were to tell the babysitter that my neighbor wears a pink tutu then it would not.

Before closing there is one further point that need to be made related to speech and rash judgment.  Earlier I compared speech to downloading our thoughts.  Speech can also be a means by which we govern our thoughts.  When we speak it has the effect of solidifying our thoughts because there is now someone else who knows what I know.  But when we keep the thoughts to ourselves, it has the effect of causing us to examine them more carefully and gives us time to offer a corrective.  Speaking our thoughts sets them in stone.  Silence leads to true thoughts. 

Herein lies the promise of freedom when we learn to not just avoid lying, but use our speech well.  It leads us out of the captivity of our minds and into the glorious freedom of seeing and loving the truth.

Jumpstarting Reform

Devils, Eucharist, Fasting, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, , , , , , ,

In the opening chapter of his short book, Letter to a Suffering Church, Bishop Robert Barron calls the scandal within the Church “a diabolical masterpiece”.  The Bishop’s point is that everything that has happened within the Church over the last half century has been clearly and methodically planned out such that the sulfuric stench cannot be overlooked.  Bishop Barron only mentions this insight in passing as he attempts to instill hope in those who have suffered greatly as a result of the latest scandal. It is befitting, however, if we are to fully come up with a plan of reform, that we linger just a while longer on this fact.

First, we must admit that as ghastly as the abuse crisis has been, from within the satanic strategy, it is but a means to the devil’s overall plan to destroy the Church.  What this means is that if we focus only on the abuse crisis then we will be putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.  This is not to say that we do nothing about it or that we do not address it directly—band aids are necessary treating wounds, but only after the source of the wound is treated.  And the source of this wound in the Church is exacerbated by the fact that we deny that someone is actively working to destroy the Church.  It is the steady refusal over the last half century to admit of the Church’s militancy.  The Church is not a field hospital, but an army.  It may have field hospitals, but it is not the Red Cross.  It is an army because it is at war and its battleground is dominion of human souls.

Breeding Soft Soldiers

This repeated refusal to admit of the Church’s militancy has not changed the fact that she is Militia Christi, but it has made the soldiers soft.  The Church may be feminine, but she is not effeminate.  There is no more visible sign of effeminacy than sexual vice, especially of the kind that many clerics are accused.  But this softness affects not just the clergy but the laity as well.  We are the “soft generation” that is doomed to be the “lost generation” if we do not tighten up formation.

Notice that I did not say the softest generation, for there are far too many generations in the Church who have fallen prey to softness.  Church historian Roberto De Mattei describes the story of the Sack of Rome in 1527 as a “merciful chastisement” because reform in the Church had stalled and it served to jumpstart it. “The pleasure-seeking Rome of the Renaissance turned into the austere and penitent Rome of the Counter-Reformation.”  His point, although only implicitly made, is that chastening, either divinely or self-inflicted, is always a necessary pre-cursor to reform.  Softness must be rooted out one way or the other.

Like any army, once the enemy is clearly identified, a battle plan must be drawn up.  Since this is first and foremost a spiritual battle, we must use spiritual weapons.  Every renewal in the Church has come on the heels of a small remnant that committed to using these weapons and specifically aiming them at the enemies of the Church.  When the Church becomes soft, it is these three weapons, prayer, penance and mortification that are eschewed.  So, if we are to re-enter the fray, we must grasp the hilt of these three swords and wield them against our enemies.

Prayer

The mention of prayer is not meant to insinuate that people are not praying.  It is to direct our prayers towards a very specific intention—to strengthen and protect the Church from her enemies.  This intention is best fulfilled by praying with the Church in her two “official” prayers—the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours.

I have written many other times about the necessity of regularly, that is daily and not just weekly, participating in Mass so I won’t belabor the point yet again but lead with a simple question: what sacrifice in your life do you need to make so that you can become a part of Christ’s saving mission begun at Calvary and continuing at the altar of your local parish?  The Eucharist is an infinite source of grace that Christ is just waiting to pour out upon those who offer it with Him.

The second form of prayer is one that I have not discussed much in the past and that is the Divine Office.  Commonly called the Liturgy of the Hours, it is the prayer of the Church that is offered seven times a day.  Seven is no arbitrary number, but the Church’s answer to the fact that “though the just man falls seven times a day, he will get up” (Proverbs 24:16).  This getting up and returning whole-heartedly to God by singing to Him His songs of praise in the Psalms and Canticles and recalling His saving acts throughout history.  The Liturgy of the Hours are by their very nature penitential and thus perfectly suited to our times.

Those in the clerical state are required to pray the Liturgy of the Hours under the pain of sin.  Many unfaithful priests do not.  The laity can pick up the standard voluntarily and run with it, keeping those unfaithful priests, many of whom are directly responsible for the sad state of the Church, in their intentions.  And because it is a free gift and not required it is most pleasing to God, even if due to our state in life it requires a great sacrifice to pray seven times.  Desperate times call for heroic sacrifice.  If it seems daunting find someone who can pray it with you or teach you, or read one of the recent books written to draw the laity into the Divine Office.

Penance and Mortification

These two terms, penance and mortification, are often used interchangeably.  Grasping the distinction is important only insofar as it relates to our intention.  Penance is reparation for sins committed, mortification is like pre-pentence in that it is aimed at rooting out the weaknesses that cause us to sin and have to do penance.  In practice they should go hand in hand.

Sins of the flesh and the demons who specialize in them are specifically targeted by fleshly penance and mortification.  “These can come out only with prayer and fasting”.  Fasting is the “fleshly” penance par excellence because it trains the Christian soldier to control all of his fleshly appetites.  It is the antidote to the softness that has hamstrung the Church.  It is no wonder that we no longer hear about it from the pulpit or that the Church does not require it more often than twice a year.  We need to be giving more and offer it in reparation for the Church’s soft sins.  The upcoming battle will require tremendous sacrifice and only those who have trained themselves to forego what is necessary in favor of the “one thing that is necessary” that will persevere.

There are many ways to fast and all are good.  The point is to start by making sacrifices at each meal and add from there.  You will find a method that fits with your state in life.  The method that St. Thomas recommends amounts to skipping one meal a day and that principle seems to work well although the combinations are endless.  One that works very well for the laity because it is the least disruptive to family life is from dinner to dinner.  You eat dinner on day 1 and then eat only two tiny meals during the day and then have a full meal at dinner the next evening.  The point is not to kill yourself but to offer something to Jesus.  When this intention is kept in mind, you will find that your desire to be generous with Jesus quells any hunger pains.   

There are other bodily mortifications and penances that are helpful, especially when we think about those practices that make us soft—cold showers, sitting upright in a chair with both feet on the floor, setting AC/heat at a level where you are slightly uncomfortable, rocks in shoes.  The point is to directly attack our need for comfort in a spirit of penance.

St. Paul was perhaps the greatest cultural reformer and a pillar of the Church.  One could argue that his success was attributed to the fact that he had a clear understanding of who he was fighting against and armed himself spiritually for the battle.  “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against…the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12).  If we want to jumpstart the reform of the Church, then we should likewise enter into the spiritual battle.

 

The Un-Person

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It what is becoming a recurring theme. Fr. Arturo Sosa, SJ, the Superior General of the Jesuit Order recently told an Italian magazine that the “devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality…The devil exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because [he] is not a person, [but] is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life.” This statement comes on the heels of a similar statement two years ago in which told another magazine that “we have formed symbolic figures such as the Devil to express evil.”  This, of course, contradicts the unbroken Tradition of the Church, rooted in Sacred Scripture, that the devil is in fact a person and with his minions in tow, he actively works to destroy humanity out of envy.  Fr. Sosa is not alone in his belief however and therefore his position merits a thorough examination. 

One might be tempted initially to dismiss the whole discussion.  The reality of evil in the world, it seems, is a human problem and therefore the nature of its source is not really important.  If you want to believe in an actual devil or a symbol, then what difference does it make?    As we shall see, and without danger of hyperbole, it makes all the difference in the world.

Let us first call to mind what we mean when we speak of the devil as a person.  At root, a person is a being that has intelligence and the capacity to choose.  Lucifer along with the rest of the fallen angels were endowed with these inherent capabilities by God at their creation.  Rebelling against God, their intelligence and perverse will remain fixed on the destruction of His human creatures.  Endowed with a power over nature, the demons work with extreme intelligence to set in motions plans for this destruction.  These diabolical plans are carried out both directly and through human cooperation.  Any notion that evil does not have a personal power behind it then would not fit with the reality of what the Church knows to be true.  Fr. Sosa, on the other hand, would have us believe that the devil “exists as the personification of evil in different structures” (emphasis added).  Removing the personal element, we now find evil as presented to us in “different structures”.    

Why the Difference Matters

The difference is no mere subtlety but amounts to a vastly different Christianity.  If evil exists and is aided and abetted by the devil, then the battle is primarily a spiritual battle.  Knowing who our true enemy is, we engage in the appropriate battle.  The devil who is pure spirit is only susceptible to spiritual combat.  Aided by grace and the Communion of Saints, we engage first and foremost on a spiritual front—“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12).  Using an image from St. Thomas Aquinas, men are like horses and the demons are like riders.  When we dislodge the riders, the horses run free.  Souls are saved in the midst of this combat.

Compare this to evil in “different structures”.  If there is no person behind the evil then the battle is no longer spiritual but political.  This sounds very similar to the ideas of Rousseau, Marx, Nietzche, Stalin, and Mao.  They all sought to create political solutions to remove the structures of evil, even at the edge of a sword.  They became demons themselves.  But even if they were to find some utopic solution, it would still mean demonizing any men and women that opposed them.  In short, if you deny the existence of demons, then you will most certainly create them.  And because the proper home of demons is hell, souls will most certainly be lost.

The Devil as the Un-Person

The substitution of the political for the spiritual solution is precisely why Fr. Sosa’s ideas are not just stupid, but dangerous.  They open up a Pandora’s Box of sorts that ultimately tears at the roots of true Christianity.  His very ideas are diabolical because it creates “structures” that are turned away from God and de-personalize man.  When then Cardinal Ratzinger was asked the question in 1973 about whether there was a personal devil he said, “If one asks whether the devil is a person, then one must in an altogether correct answer that he is an Un-Person, the disintegration and corruption of what it means to be a person” (Ratzinger Reader, p.44).” 

What the future Pope was saying is that the diabolical disorientation that Fr. Sosa is proposing ultimately leads to more “Un-Persons” and not some cute theological trick.  It is clear based on past evidence that he truly believes this to be true and thus should be corrected as the International Association of Exorcists did last week.  For our part, we too need to realize that there is a powerful person who hates each one of us more than we can possibly imagine and our only refuge is in the Blood of Christ, the only Person Who can save us.

On Transubstantiation

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In tracing the history of the Church, we find that whenever the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was challenged, the Church has turned to the dogma of Transubstantiation as a bulwark.  Our present age, in which a crisis of unbelief has arisen, also needs to be reminded of the powerful explanatory power attached to this doctrine.  For it offers an explanation of how Our Lord comes to be present on the altar that accords with reason all while showing the impossibility of positions contrary to the true doctrine.  In our very practical age, this explanation has fallen into disuse and even mockery and so it is important for Catholics to be able to put forth a reasonable explanation.

The Church has long preferred this explanation because it so simply accords with experience.  It was first introduced in 1215, was reaffirmed during the Council of Trent and defended as dogma by Pope Pius VI (1786) when the Synod of Pistoja wished to dismiss it as a “purely scholastic question.”  In short, Transubstantiation is no mere speculation, but instead belongs to the deposit of faith.  It is the belief that a Sacramental miracle occurs on the altar when the substances of the bread and wine is turned into the substances of Christ’s Body and Blood.

Philosophical Foundation

Lacking the philosophical language of our predecessors, this requires some explanation.  First, we define a substance as a distinct individual thing that exists independently of other things.  Each substance carries with it non-essential properties that we call accidents.  These include things like texture, taste, and color.  These accidents depend upon the substance themselves for existence.  A piece of bread is an individual substance that has the nature of bread and does not depend on anything other individual thing for existence.  Taste does not exist independently of the thing it is the taste of so that the taste of the bread depends on the piece of bread for its existence.  Likewise, two pieces of bread may taste differently, but still be bread.

Given all that exists does so either as substance or accident, then we can say there are two types of change—substantial and accidental.  A substantial change is one in which a thing is transformed into another things.  The most obvious example of a substantial change is nutrition.  A piece of bread is eaten and become a muscle cell (for example) in the body of the animal that eats it.  Bread and muscle cells are of completely different kinds and thus a substantial change has occurred.   An accidental change is one in which only the accidents attached to a particular substance change.  The leaves of an oak tree may turn green to yellow, but in so doing the oak tree remains the specific oak tree that it was prior to the change.  The substance did not change, but the accidents did.

We should notice one last thing before returning to the Eucharist and that is that any change always requires some subject that is changed.  Put another way, in order to speak properly of change we must have something that remains constant throughout the change.  Change may be the transformation from one being to another, but it is never a change from being to non-being back to being.  That would not be change, but annihilation coupled with creation.  For accidental change, the subject is obviously the substance itself.  The leaves of the oak tree change from green to yellow, but the oak tree remains.  Even a substantial change, in which one thing becomes another, has a principle of continuity which we call primary matter.  This principle is a little complicated to briefly explain, but we can view is as the matter that undergoes the change from one type to another when it is taken up by a new form.  Take for example the fact that the matter of the bread is taken up by the body and becomes the matter of the muscle cell. 

The Doctrine Itself

With this foundation in place, we can now set our sights on the altar and ask what this can tell us what happens to the bread and wine.  We are left with three alternatives—an accidental change, a substantial change or no change at all (i.e. a symbol).  We will examine each one in light of all that we have said.

First there is an accidental change.  An accidental chance would mean that the substance of the bread of wine would not change, but only their accidents.  Christ’s Body and Blood would be attached to the bread and wine.  This would mean that they would leave His heavenly abode and come to the altar.  The problem with this view is that He would be limited in His presence to one place at a time.  It would imply an accidental change not just in the bread and wine, but in Christ Himself as He moves from place to place.  Those familiar with Luther’s view will recognize this as consubstantiation and it proves why it is necessarily false.

With the elimination of an accidental change we can turn to a substantial change which would mean that the substances of the bread and wine are transformed into the substance of Christ’s Body and Blood.  This initially has appeal because it does not require any accidental change in Christ Himself and thus allows for the ubiquity of His presence on the many altars simultaneously.  This is possible because unlike a natural substantial change the bread and wine are changed not into some new forms, but already existing ones of Christ’s Body and Blood.  Thus there is no change in Christ’s members but in the bread and wine. 

It is not an annihilation and then creation, but a true change.  The subject of change are, miraculously, the accidents of bread and wine.  They remain on both sides of the change.  As St. Thomas puts it, “whereas in natural transmutation the matter of the one receives the form of the other, the previous form being laid aside. Secondly, they have this in common, that on both sides something remains the same; whereas this does not happen in creation: yet differently; for the same matter or subject remains in natural transmutation; whereas in this sacrament the same accidents remain.” (ST q.75, art. 8).  It is this miraculous change that we call Transubstantiation.

This suspension of the accidents, leads to no evidence of change that is discernible to the senses.  Any attempt to empirically prove that the change has occurred would ultimately fall flat because they can only measure the accidents.  This is why some confuse it for symbol.  This is also why ultimately the recently conducted Pew survey that found that 70% of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence represents first and foremost a crisis in faith.  It is only the ears, attuned to the words of Christ, that can discern this change.  Reason can eliminate the possibility of consubstantiation but only faith can prove that it is really Christ present.

The Divine Composer

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If we were to encapsulate the teachings of the self-help gurus, then they would boil down to “never leave anything to chance.”  After all, at the heart of the self-help movement is, well, helping yourself, by taking control of your life and seizing the day.  The saints too would exhort us to never leave anything to chance.  But they would express this for a very different reason.  For the saints there is no such thing as chance.  Instead they would urge us to leave everything to Providence.  And it is this attitude that make them saints.  If we too want to join them in the Church Triumphant then it behooves us to study how the most practical of Christian doctrines, Providence, “works”.

Notice how any discussion of Providence will always have the idea of chance in its orbit.  To say that “there is no such thing as chance” might seem provocative at first, but once we unpack it then we will see that it must be profoundly true.  If any discussion of Providence cannot proceed without bumping into the notion of chance, then we must begin there. 

Toppling the Objections to Providence

On the one hand we know that pure chance, the notion that things “just happen” violates the principle of causality.  Everything that happens must have a cause.  Usually what we mean by chance then is when we cannot observe the causality or so many causes seemed to converge that the event was so unlikely that it had to be chance.  Labeling an event as chance really is a way in for us to admit that we cannot fully explain how an event happened.  But this leaves us with only two alternatives—either the causality was governed by some random force that we call chance or it is governed by God through His Providence.  Even if it is a tough pill for us to swallow in our empirical age, we must side with the saints in their choosing of the latter and their insistence that there is no such thing as chance.

This raises a second objection in that, by removing chance, it seems to also remove free will.  If everything is meticulously planned out, then how can there be freedom to choose?  But this is to confuse chance with contingency.  God’s Providence has left some things to necessity (like the Incarnation) and some things to contingency (like Mary’s cooperation).  But it is by His omnipotence that He governs the bringing about of the necessary things through contingent things (c.f ST I, q.22, a.4).  This bears some further explanation because it enables us to marvel more fully at God’s Providence.

Because God is the Creator of all things and, because He knows His own omnipotence, He can know all things that could happen or do happen because He is their ultimate cause.  So, despite leaving some things up to free will decisions, He can alter the events surrounding those decisions to suit His purpose.  This is not to suggest that He is constantly executing “Plan B”, but an admission that He foresaw all that was to happen.  Therefore, His eternal law is simply one plan.  Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange gives a useful example to demonstrate how this might work. 

Over time, the great composer Beethoven grew deaf but, despite not actually be able to hear them, was still able to compose beautiful pieces of music.  This was because he knew music not just in hearing it, but through its laws.  He could compose without audible experimentation because he knew how the notes would fit together and create harmony.  This higher way of knowing his music through the laws governing it made it unnecessary that he try all possible combinations of notes.  In knowing the law he, in a very real sense knew all possible combinations enabling him to say “these fit, these don’t” to every set of notes that entered his mind.   So too with God.  He knows the laws by which the universe is governed, even the “law” of free will by which our actions are presented to Him and thus can Providentially compose the world.

There is one final aspect that bears mention as well and that is the role of petitionary prayer.  Prayer is a gift from God meaning that true prayer is always inspired by God in order to conform our desires to the plans of Providence.  That is why the holiest of men and women, that is those who are most like God, willing what He wills, will always be the most effective of pray-ers.  In asking for what God intends to give, they are free instruments in the implementation of His plans.  Prayer then is one of the instrumental causes of Providence, perhaps the most powerful of all them.

The Laws of Divine Providence

The laws of God’s divine composition, which we call Providence, are essentially threefold.  First, nothing that happens is contrary to His purpose of Creation, namely, as a manifestation of His Goodness and the rational creature’s share in the revealed Glory of Christ.  Second, nothing that happens was not foreseen by God and willed either actively or permissively.  Finally, God sees to it that all things work to the spiritual benefit those who are called to be saints and persevere in His love (Romans 8:28).

At this point it is good to be reminded that the doctrine of Providence is practical.  Hidden within the word Providence is provide.  This means that although we make theological distinctions between God’s active and permissive will, in our daily living we should not make any such distinction.  We should see each and everything that happens as coming directly from the hand of God with the intent of providing for the spiritual needs of those who love Him.  And everything, means everything including our own sins.  God only allows us to fall if, in the end, it leads us towards being more fully invaded by grace. 

An example drawn from real life might help us bring all of this into relief.  Forgiveness, something most of us struggle with, is only possible with a firm belief in Providence.  Recall the story of Joseph the Patriarch.  When his brothers sought forgiveness he did not trivialize what they did nor did he forget it.  In fact, he remembered it and told them as such.  But he remembered it as it truly was, an instrument of Providence.  Joseph is the perfect model for the stance towards those that slight us.  When we submit to the plans of Divine Providence, we see those who harm us actually doing us a favor.  They become instruments in God’s Providential plan.  The “logic” is simple if we believe the laws of Providence elucidated above.  This does not mean we won’t suffer, but we are guaranteed to draw the fruit that God intended for us to receive when we submit to His will in it.  Our Lord was silent in the face of His oppressors precisely to win the grace for us to do the same.  Nor does it make what the person has done right.  It simply gives us a means by which we can move towards truly forgiving the other person.  Providence makes forgiveness possible and even easy.

The Heresy of Scientism

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Modern science has brought us many wonderful things, but we would be naïve to think that it has made us wonder-full.  In fact, our obsession with the empirical has left us wonder-less because we mistakenly believe that everything can be explained.  We can, of course, explain how a lot of things in nature work.  The problem comes in when we accept these merely mechanistic explanations as the only explanation.  Our forefathers may have lacked the empirical skills that we have, but they most certainly were wiser because they were able to order all things.  Like ourselves, these wise men and women were obsessed with answering the question why, but unlike us they were unsatisfied with just knowing how nature worked.  They wanted to know why it worked the way it did more than how it worked.  For all their supposed backwardness they knew that nature could have worked differently, but it worked the way it did for a reason.  They sought to discover the reason first.  To use Aristotelian language, they wanted to understand formal and final causes and not just material and formal causes.

Scientism

The overemphasis on the how without any concern for the why has led to the heresy of scientism.  Notice that I called it a heresy and not just a philosophy.  It is a heresy because it rejects the truth that there is a universe.  It looks only at objects, but never objects as they fit into the whole.  He loves the trees but knows nothing of the forest.  To borrow from Chesterton, the scientistic heretic is “moved to discuss details in art, politics, literature…He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe…Everything matters—except everything.”  It is a heresy because it ignores the religious implications of Nature.  Religious because God is its Creator and He has written into it His-story.  Implications because it is just Creation and never meant to be worshipped.  It is a sign, a sacrament if you will, that reveals to man His Creator.  In fact, creation exists for man so that He might come to know the Creator.  That is its purpose and so we must read it that way.  Just as in the Book of Scripture God has revealed Himself, so too in the Book of Creation.

Like any heresy, there is always a temptation to overcorrect and reject scientistic explanations whole cloth.  But when we do this we are creating a false opposition between the scientistic and sacramental standards.  Both creation and Scripture have the same Author telling the Truth in different forms.  Just as it is foolish to remove Scripture and only “find God in Nature”, it is likewise imprudent to diminish the story that God is telling through Creation.  Aristotle thought all four causes were necessary to come to a more complete understanding of things.  The medievalists may have been wiser because they were able to focus on the formal and final causes, but they were limited in their understanding of the material and efficient causes and therefore were not as wise as they could have been.  We, on the other hand, have at our disposal a great power to more fully plum the depths of the material and efficient causes.  In short we have an opportunity to be wiser than our predecessors, but only if we avoid the heretical pitfalls we are speaking about here.

Our Lady, the Morning Star

An example will help to illustrate what this might look like.  The Litany of Loreto describes Our Lady as the “Morning Star”.  This moniker came about because of the wedding of the book of Scripture with the book of Creation.  The Church has long interpreted a verse from the Song of Songs (6:9) as descriptive of her: “Who is She that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun?”.  Turning towards creation we find that there is, in fact, a  “star” that is found in the sky just prior to the rising of the sun.  This “star” reflects the light of the sun and suggest the rising of the sun.  Our Lady, as the truest reflection of the brightness of her Son, always points to His coming (c.f. Jn 2:5). 

Some might accuse Catholics of over-spiritualizing things by doing this until we actually look at this empirically.  The planet Venus, which is named for a Roman goddess of fertility (could there be anything more fertile than a Virgin Mother?), has its orbit inside of the Earth’s orbit.  This means it is always relatively close to the sun in the sky.  When it is on one side of the sun it appears to follow the sun and brightens in our sky just after the sun sets.  When it is on the other side of the sun it precedes the sun in our sky so that it brightens the sky just before sun rise.  One can readily see how this one aspect of the book of nature perfectly describes Our Lady.  Apropos of our impending Solemnity, Our Lady is a Heavenly Body.  Nevertheless, even if she is closer to the sun, she still remains inside our orbit as one of us.  She always reflects the “Light of the World”, but especially in times of darkness.   

We could go on, but you get the point.  In fact, the more we wonder about this one particular aspect of creation, the deeper we could make of the connections.  Clinging to the complentarity of nature and Scripture enables us to see this in its fullest meaning.  If nature is nothing but the random collision of atoms, then you won’t care about why Venus is the way it is.  If you think nature something completely doomed for destruction, then you won’t care what it has to say.  But if you take the authentically Catholic both/and approach then you will be led deeper into the awareness of how close God is to us.

The Divine Quadrilemma

Bible, Defending the Faith, Faith and Reason, History, Paganism, Passion of Christ, The Life of Jesus, , , , ,

The greatest heresy in the history of the Church was the Arian heresy.  At one point during the Fifth Century, nearly 3/4 of the world’s bishops were Arian.  Arius posited that Jesus was not truly God but instead the greatest of God’s creatures.  The popularity of this heresy was due to the fact that it would enable Christianity to be palatable to both Pagans and Gnostics alike.  By denying the equality of the Father and the Son, Christianity would take a decidedly Pagan turn.  This is what made this particular heresy such a threat—it made Christianity more palatable to Pagans and could be a source of unity throughout the recently Christianized Roman Empire.  This blending of Christianity was, of course, rejected by the Council of Nicaea with St. Athanasius leading the charge.  It took a long time for the Nicene effect to be felt throughout the Church, but eventually the Arian Heresy was squashed.  Unfortunately, heresies never wholly die, but are reincarnated in different forms such that we have seen a revival of the errors of Arius in our own day.  This time it comes in the form of a religious eclecticism that attempts to blend all religions together.

In our day there are any number of people who say, “there are many paths up the mountain, but the view is the same at the top of the mountain.”  They present the metaphor usually as a defense of blending religions or choosing a religion that best suits them (as opposed to one that is true).  This religious indifferentism is really a substitution of spirituality for religion.  Spirituality is about self-fulfillment whereas religion is about a relationship with God.  But it is problematic for a more fundamental reason, one that is easily uncovered once we drop the metaphor and actually compare religions. 

To insist that they lead up the same mountain while simultaneously contradicting each other makes this hard to believe.  One says Jesus is God, another that He was a prophet, another that He is the brother of Lucifer, another that we are all gods, and another that says everything is God.  While it may be convenient to use the “same mountain” metaphor, the truth is that there is no way that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Pantheism can be reconciled.  Depending on which you believe you will end up with vastly different conclusions.  They are not different paths on the same mountain, but different mountains all together.  

It may be possible to blend some religions together, but Christianity does not lend itself to any blending whatsoever.  This is because Jesus, in His infinite wisdom, has forced us all to take a stand.  Unlike any other religion, He made the claim to be God Incarnate.  That means that you must either accept that claim as true and relate to Him as absolute Lord or you must treat Him as a crazy, lying cult leader and dismiss everything He said.  If it is the latter, then to say that you like His teachings, that is to label Him as merely a human teacher, is not really an option.

The Quadrilemma

Those familiar with CS Lewis’ Christological trilemma will recognize this as a version of it.  Lewis said that you must treat Jesus as either lunatic, liar or Lord.  Those are the only three options.  You cannot treat Him as a merely human teacher however.  You either submit wholly to Him or you run as far away from His teachings as possible, even if some of them are actually helpful.  Lewis’ trilemma however is not impenetrable because, thanks to “biblical scholars” in our own time, there is now a fourth option that many people are choosing.  They claim that Jesus never actually said He was God.  And in this way, we see how the Arian heresy is coming back into play.

When we focus on whether Jesus actually said He was God (as opposed to whether or not that is true) we move from the realm of faith to that of history.  In other words, this is an attack on the historical reliability of the Gospels.  As an internal witness, the Bible is quite clear that Jesus made Divine claims.  But in order to grasp this, we must first take a necessary tangent in order to examine how He might say it.

The Internal Evidence

If the Incarnation were to have happened in our day and age you might expect Him to say (in English) “I am God.”  But if we look at the translations of the gospels we have today, we do not find such a direct statement, nor should we expect to.  We should expect that Jesus would say it the way a first Century Jew might.  Our Lord’s moments of self-revelation always invoke the Old Testament name for God, the same name He gave Moses and that the Jews treated as unutterable (YHWH).

In Greek, the language of the gospels, the Name is translated as egō eimi or “I am”.  This phrase is used in a number of places, but any time it is used in an absolute sense without any predicate, it refers to the Divine name.   The most obvious examples occur within John’s Gospel where we find he uttering things like: “unless you come to believe that I AM, you will surely die in your sins” (Jn 8:24).  Likewise, when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus in the Garden and announce it is Jesus they are seeking, He answers egō eimi.   In the ordinary sense it simply means “I am he” letting them know they have found who they were looking for.  However, those who hear this response fall to the ground suggesting that they are party to a theophany.

John’s Gospel, written later in the first Century, has a distinctive emphasis on the divinity of Christ because it was, according to Irenaeus, meant to counter some of the early Christological heresies that had arisen (Against Heresies, Book 3, Ch11).  But he is most certainly not the only one who uses this Jewish formulation for identifying Jesus as divine.  These references are found throughout the Synoptic Gospels as well.  First, there is the fact that only one reason is given for His crucifixion—blasphemy.  When on trial before the Sanhedrin, the High Priest asked Him:

“Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?”  Then Jesus answered, “I AM”; and “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”  At that the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further need have we of witnesses?  You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as deserving to die.”

(Mk 14:55-64, c.f. Mt 26:59-66, Lk 22:66-71)

Notice that Jesus invokes the Divine Name and equates Himself with God by prophesying that He will sit at God’s right hand.  Likewise, He is also accused of blasphemy for setting Himself equal to God when He forgives sins (c.f. Mk 2:6-7, Mt 9:3).

Perhaps His clearest revelation comes in the form of a question to the Pharisees about whose son the Messiah will be.  They tell Him David, which He does not deny but He shakes their limited understanding by quoting from Psalm 110: “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet’? If David calls him ‘lord,’ how can he be his son?” (Mt 22:44-45, c.f. Mk 12:35–37; Lk 20:41–44)    By referring to the Messiah as both pre-existing David and David’s LORD, He is admitting to being God Incarnate.

The External Evidence

Those who challenge that Jesus said that He was God often overlook the fact that we have external evidence as well.  They try to attack the timing and historical accuracy of the Bible but forget that we have writings of the Apostolic Fathers that confirm what has been said has been received as such.  These writings show that Christ’s divinity was not something added later on but was understood to be true directly out of the hands of the Apostles.  There are numerous quotations that could be shared, but a few should suffice to show that the gospels are historically reliable.  First there is Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of John who was likely ordained by Peter who said, “For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary in accord with God’s plan: of the seed of David, it is true, but also of the Holy Spirit” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 18:2).  There is also the aforementioned St. Irenaeus, the disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of John who said “…He indicates in clear terms that He is God, and that His advent was in Bethlehem…” (AH, Book 3, Chapter 20). Finally we have Pliny the Younger, a Roman Governor, describing Christians as “singing hymns to Christ as to a god” in a letter to the Emperor Trajan.

Given both the internal and external evidence, we must conclude that Jesus did make the claim that He was God.  This, of course, doesn’t prove that He was, but it does render our potential quadrilemma as a trilemma.  Christianity cannot be mixed with other religions because of the unique demands Jesus makes upon His followers.  He is either Lord or Liar, but you must choose one or the other.

Bigmouths and Gender Ideology

Bioethics, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Sexual Ethics, , , , , ,

When Our Lord issued the Great Commission to the Apostles, He was telling them, and by extension us, to be bigmouths.  The Lord of all knew that the Enemy of man would never cease telling lies and that the only way to confront those lies is by never ceasing to tell the truth.  The Church has been, throughout her history, the Great Truth Teller.  Until recently that is.  No longer does she breathe truth upon the ideological lies that the World tells but plays the part of the mute.  As proof of this, let’s compare the number of Papal Encyclicals dealing directly with the Socialist/Communist Revolution.  Nearly every Pope from Leo XIII to John Paul II addressed this ideological lie directly, never growing weary of repeating themselves.  Now compare that with the number of Papal Encyclicals against Sexual Revolution—one.  That one, Humanae Vitae, landed with a great thud and has been unceremoniously dismissed.  Whatever work John Paul II did in this area has been caught up in the whirlwind of ambiguity that is the current pontificate (i.e. Amoris Laetitia).  The point is that the Church attacked Socialism and all its incarnations directly while they have left gender ideology unscathed despite John Paul II calling it  the “new ideology of evil”.  As the silence mounts, more and more Catholics fall in line with the ideological spirit, especially during the latest manifestation, Transgenderism.   This should not be read as a complaint or a rebuke of clergy, but an undeniable statement of fact.  Ideologies have a way of silencing dissenters, so I am more interested in mobilizing and arming those willing to speak truth against the lies, than to blame anyone for not speaking out. 

Because of the relative silence on this issue, there are no authoritative statements regarding Transgenderism.  Clarity is not a habit normally associated with this lie, but for the sake of clarity we will distinguish between gender dysphoria as the internal struggle that one has with their sexual identity and Transgenderism as the act of attempting to alter one’s sexual identity.  The former is a psychological condition and the latter is a physical action that is said to solve the conflict.  It is relatively easy to show via Catholic moral principles why Transgenderism is wrong.  It can never be a real solution to the problem and ultimately does great harm to the person.  Nevertheless, because it is cloaked in a medical solution it is important that we understand the principles.

The moral principles involve the recently discussed Principle of Totality.  To summarize and review, this bioethical principle says that “except to save life itself, the fundamental functional capacities which constitute the human person should not be destroyed, but preserved, developed, and used for the good of the whole person and of the community.”  Whether it is a surgical intervention or hormonal replacement, the “treatment” modalities involved always seek to destroy the biological sex characteristics and replace them with simulated versions of the opposite sex.  The use of the term “simulated” is deliberate because “sex reassignment surgery” simply is not possible.  The person may resemble the opposite sex, but they can never actually be the opposite sex.  No matter how much plastic surgery you perform, you cannot artificially manufacture a sex organ.  It will always fail in its primary purpose.

The Harm Done

These principles are masked because the harm that is done to these people is often hidden.  It is a pernicious lie that, rather than solving the problem, puts the person into a sexual void.  They will have mutilated the bodily capacity that identifies one’s true sex and they will never be their “new” sex.  To solve the problem of confusion by causing them to truly identify as neither sex is, self-evidentally, not a real solution.  But anyone who questions this, including doctors and psychiatrists are ostracized and vilified, although never refuted.   

Rather than acknowledge this they cover it with an ambiguous term gender.  It is labeled as a “social construct” because of the inherent failure to construct sex themselves.  This is probably why many gender dysphoric people choose not to have surgery.  It is also why one of the few (semi-)reputable studies done found that those who had surgery were 19 times more likely to commit suicide (and this was a study done in “tolerant” Sweden).

Hormone intervention likewise have lasting effects and often constitute a chemical mutilation of sort because they render the person sterile.  Included in this are so called “puberty blockers” which permanently stunt the growth and development of children.   When a child presents with gender dysphoria, this is the standard treatment modality.  We do not let children under 16 vote, drink, smoke or choose not to go to school because of their intellectual and physical immaturity.  We will however allow them to decide what gender they will be and to begin permanent steps in making that a reality.  There is a built-in mechanism to clear up confusion related to sexual identity called puberty.  That is why the reputable studies of gender dysphoria all show that between 80-95% of children who express discordant gender identity come to identify with their biological sex over time (a statistic cited in Ryan Anderson’s excellent book When Harry Became Sally).  Those two sets of numbers, the 80-95% and the 19 times more likely to commit suicide would suggest that any medical intervention should be delayed until the person has reached full maturity.  The fact that these are never mentioned is because the best interest of the person is trumped by ideology.

The Intersex Exception

There is another aspect of this that is important to grasp.  Abortion supporters often argue from “the rape and incest and mother’s life in jeopardy exception” in favor of abortion on demand.  Transgender ideologues do something similar with their Intersex exception.  The argument goes something like “because intersex are biologically neither sex, therefore there are more than two sexes.”  Even if this was true, it is an example of the exception proving the rule.  Intersex individuals have a genetic defect, that is, they have a deviation from the normal condition.  Transgender ideologues, like the abortion advocates, would have us think the exception should be the rule and therefore a person should be able to decide on his own what sex he will be.

Second, the intersex condition is based upon direct observation. Transgenderism is based upon a subjective belief not rooted in any external condition.  The intersex individual is not changing their sex characteristics but attempting to repair them.  Quite frankly, it is surprising that the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) is so ambiguous in their language and allow the Transgender idealogues to co-opt what is a true medical, as opposed to psychological condition.  The ISNA says that persons with disorders in sexual development are not a third gender, but male or female.  Those are the only two options, even if may not always be easy to decipher.

In order not to appear to be “obsessed” with all of the issues of the Sexual Revolution, the Church has chosen to be silent.  It isn’t the Church that is obsessed but the culture.  In order to break that obsession the Church cannot be silent.  Millions of people are becoming ideological and there won’t be a culture to save unless we speak out.  We must arm ourselves with the truth and a willingness to engage.  We must be the bigmouths that Our Lord calls us to be.

The Art of Apologizing

Defending the Faith, Faith and Reason, Paganism, , , , , ,

The Early Church was well practiced in the art of apologizing, not because they were sorry for their beliefs, but because they were sorry that everyone else had not come to accept the truth.  The most famous of apologies came from the pen of St. Justin Martyr, a philosopher saint, who wrote two famous defenses of the Catholic faith to the Roman Emperors.  Ever since then, the field of apologetics has proven invaluable to the spreading of the Faith.  With the re-emergence of Paganism and the stark division within Christianity between Catholics and Protestants, the need is especially acute in our time.   But in order for it to be effective, there is a need to properly understand how it should be applied.

The battle between the Sexual Revolution and the Church has dealt a blow that, if not for Divine protection, would have been fatal for the Church.  The attack came from both without and within, but was successful mainly because the Church lost the battle of public opinion.  In other words, it was a failure of apologetics.  This failure came about not because of silence, at least initially, but because she was speaking another language. 

Using the Arms of the Adversary

As an example, take the battle over gay marriage.  The best public defense that many Christians could offer was based on the Bible.  It failed miserably, not because it wasn’t true, but because it wasn’t believable.  Even the Church says things like “the Church teaches…” rather than “it is true because …”  These arguments from authority, even if they are true, are the weakest of all arguments.  That is because they only work when the two parties accept the same authority.  Contrast this approach with that of St. Justin Martyr.  In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, he limited his discussion only to non-disputed books of what would become the Old Testament.  Most Jews did not accept certain books that the Christians did and, so, St. Justin did not use those books in his argument. 

The awareness that successful apologetics rests upon shared authority prompted St. Thomas in the first question of the Summa Theologiae to formulate a rule of discourse:

Hence Sacred Scripture, since it has no science above itself, can dispute with one who denies its principles only if the opponent admits some at least of the truths obtained through divine revelation; thus we can argue with heretics from texts in Holy Writ, and against those who deny one article of faith, we can argue from another. If our opponent believes nothing of divine revelation, there is no longer any means of proving the articles of faith by reasoning, but only of answering his objections — if he has any — against faith. Since faith rests upon infallible truth, and since the contrary of a truth can never be demonstrated, it is clear that the arguments brought against faith cannot be demonstrations, but are difficulties that can be answered.

(ST I, q.1 art.8)

For non-Catholic Christians, we can use Sacred Scripture, but only the books they accept.  Likewise, because of the unity of the Faith, we can argue from one accepted article of faith to another.  But for those who do not accept divine revelation, we cannot simply use the Bible as many are apt to do.  Instead we must limit ourselves to using either reason alone to either answer their arguments or to prove those truths which, although revealed, are also discoverable through human reason (like God’s existence and attributes and most of the moral law). 

From Common Authority

It is important to also emphasize that just because we limit ourselves to the arms of the adversary does not mean that the Bible is not true nor that we don’t believe it.  Instead it is an admission that the person we are dialoguing with does not accept the same authority structure that we do.  To obstinately cling to using that authority is to fail in the goal of leading the person to the truth.  In fact, by arguing from their accepted authority you can often lend credibility to the truth of Divine revelation by showing how it leads to the same conclusion.  Truth cannot contradict truth and so we should not be surprised that when we argue from true premises we often come to the same conclusion.

What also cannot be forgotten, although it often is, is the fact that faith in divine revelation is a gift that cannot be obtained via argument or discussion.  The best that can be hoped for is to lend motives of credibility for the truth, that is, to remove the impediments that keep them from receiving that gift. 

If reason cannot demonstrate faith and truth cannot contradict truth then there is a flip side as well.  Any proof that claims to disprove the Faith is a mere sophistry.  There is at least one error in the logic of the argument.  We may not be able to prove the truth of the Faith, but because the truth cannot be divided, we can answer every objection using reason alone.  This principle is what motivated St. Thomas to write the Summa Contra Gentiles.

This principle is well-known by the spirit of the world.  That is why Nietzsche said that one should not attack Christianity based on its truth, but based on it livability.  A moment’s reflection leads one to see that this is the way in which the Faith is most often attacked today.  This is why we must be prepared to demonstrate its livability by our actions as well as through our words.  In a culture obsessed with license masquerading as freedom, we must be prepared to show what true freedom looks like.  True apologetics, then, will include both argument and demonstration, appealing to both intellect and will. 

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An Invitation to Awe

Eucharist, Heaven, Holy Orders, Sacraments, , , , ,

One of the aspects of the Liturgy that is often overlooked is its inherent power to spark wonder and marvel and therefore leading to praise.  At least, it ought to do this.  Being no mere work of man, but an Opus Dei, a work of God, the Liturgy is meant to draw us into the “Sacred Mysteries”.  A liturgy that doesn’t elicit this response probably has too much man and not enough God in it.  Whether or not our current liturgy is awe-full or not, this need to be awe-filled remains key to the highly sought after “active participation” so cherished by the Fathers of Vatican II.  Rather than entering into  a debate over the merits and de-merits of the Novus Ordo  Mass, I want to offer a reflection on how to stir up the necessary awe that allows for a fuller participation in the Sacred Liturgy.

One of the more controversial changes to the Mass was the movement of the words “mystérium fídei” (Mystery of Faith) from the formula of consecration of the wine to right after the consecration.  Again, we will forego any critique of it and simply admit that the Liturgy is the way it is right now and we should make the best of it.  The words “Mystery of Faith” seem now to be awkwardly out of place, until we go back to the goal of causing us to marvel at what God has done and is doing.  The words Mystery of Faith, spoken by the Priest, are meant to be an expression of awe at what has just occurred before our very eyes.

All too often, rather than an invitation to awe, it is treated as a rubrical instruction for the congregation to say something.  But if we hover on the exclamation itself, then, rather than simply being a canned response, it can be an exclamation of faith in what has just occurred.  In order to grasp this however we must linger a while on the meaning of the words.

The Mystery of Faith

When the Son of God “took flesh and dwelt among us”, there was nothing remarkable about His appearance as a man.  But this same man, a man Whom they heard, saw with their eyes and touched with their hands was revealed to them to be the Son of God (c.f. 1Jn 1:1-3).  Their senses all supported the gift of divine faith they were given.  Never to leave His Church orphaned, this same Son of God extended the Incarnation throughout time and space through the Eucharist.  Now we are only in the presence of His words and no longer bound to the experience of our senses.  In the Eucharist our senses fail, but once we accept the words spoken by Our Lord we “recognize Him in the breaking of the bread.”

In his Encyclical on the Eucharist, Mirae Cartitatis, Pope Leo XIII reminded the faith that the Eucharist “is the chief means whereby men are engrafted on the divine nature, men also find the most efficacious help towards progress in every kind of virtue.”  But it is faith pre-eminently, that is exercised and strengthened—“nothing can be better adapted to promote a renewal of the strength and fervor of faith in the human mind than the mystery of the Eucharist, the ‘mystery of faith’…”  When we respond to the Priest’s awe-full utterance with a fervent act of faith, faith grows.  It is not merely a declaration on our part, but an exclamation that the entire history of salvation is bound up and made present in what we just witnessed.  But it is the Mystery of Faith because the mystery cannot be seen with human eyes but only through faith.

The Mystery of Faith

It is not only an act of faith, but participation in a mystery.  We are not just bystanders, but actual participants.  Our senses tell us we are in a pew in a church somewhere while faith tells us we are at the foot of the Cross speaking directly to Christ and offering Him up to the Father.  It is a mystery then first of all because it is real contact with the foundational mystery of the Cross.  And in this one mystery, Pope Leo XIII says, “the entire supernatural order is summed up and contained.”  Because in truth it is not just His Passion and death that is re-presented but His Resurrection as well.  It is, as St. John Paul II says, truly His Passover in which we journey with Him.  Each of the Memorial Acclamations contains the same content; the Passion, Death, Resurrection and “the eschatological footprint of Christ in His return”. 

We can see better what Our Lord meant when he told Thomas that those who did not see Him were blessed.  It is for our benefit that He presents Himself in a veiled manner.  By veiling Himself, His presence grows clearer and clearer in proportion to one’s charity.  Knowledge (faith) always leads to love so that His hidden presence in the Eucharist causes charity to grow in our soul. 

If this does not excite in us both reverence and awe, then we are merely going through the motions.  This Mystery of Faith is the content of eternity because it sums of all the mysteries of our Faith.  We will be contemplating this Mystery of Faith when faith gives way to vision.  In this way the Mass truly is training for life everlasting and we should treat it as such.

If Harry Met Paul

beauty, Culture, Devils, Moralilty, Spiritual Warfare, , , , , ,

The former Chief Exorcist of Rome, of pious memory, Fr. Gabriele Amorth is well known in Catholic circles for his books on the demonic.  He is well known outside of Catholic circles for his repeated criticism of the Harry Potter series.  Speaking mainly from the experience of casting out thousands of demons, he once said, “behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil.”  This was met by mockery outside the Church and deaf ears within.  Many Catholics, clergy included, see “nothing wrong with Harry Potter” and thus allow and encourage children to read the series, see the movies, visit amusement parks and play video games.  Fr. Amorth is not the only exorcist who has warned against the series and even Pope Benedict cautioned against it during his time as Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith.  Deaf ears can often lead to blind eyes and thus it is imperative that we have a coherent explanation and not merely scare tactics of why Harry Potter is dangerous.

To begin, we must concede that for a parent to offer an “it is harmless” defense of anything is not good parenting.  Even if there is such thing as a “harmless” story (as opposed to helpful or harmful), it is questionable parenting to use that as a criteria for what you expose your children to.  Junk food for the body might be permitted, junk food for the mind ought not to be.  But in truth it is an attempt to feign neutrality when in fact there is really no such thing as a neutral story.  Inundated by television and movies, which condition us to accept views of the world uncritically, we can easily forget how powerful a story is to convey a world view.  We tend to equate entertainment and goodness.   

Why Stories Matter

Stories are, to borrow a phrase from JRR Tolkien, a sub-creation.  The author creates a world of his own imagining and then animates that world.  But it is not a creation ex-nihilio, but a sub-creation.  To be intelligible it must rest upon reality as it really is. A good story should also be entertaining, but to be good it must wrap a narrative around a particular aspect of reality so as to let the light of truth shine upon it.   A bad story may also be entertaining, especially if we are uncritical of what we are reading or seeing.  In fact, it often is in order to mask the ugliness of the story.  Ultimately what makes it a bad story is that it distorts reality.  It puts forth a false idea of truth and goodness, redefining them in subtle ways.

Stories have such a powerful effect on children because of their unbridled capacity for wonder.  Wonder gives them a much more expansive view of reality which makes them particularly apt to see the message attached to the narrative.  They don’t just read a book or watch a movie, they insert themselves into the world created by the author and move about.  This is why a whole generation of now adults grew up playing Star Wars and why another generation is growing up playing Harry Potter.  If you don’t want your children pretending to be magicians, using magic for good or ill, then you would not want them to read these books.  Children will play in the stories they hear and read.

There is also a bit of a mixed message that is being sent.  Magic, sorcery and divination are all presented as intrinsically evil by the Church (c.f. CCC 2117) but presented as something that can be used for good by the Harry Potter books.  Since “intrinsically evil” implies one can never use it for good, this sends a rather mixed message.  In short, on the one hand we have a story where the hero uses it and on the other we have stories in Scripture where it is strongly condemned regardless of how it is used.   Deuteronomy 18:9-12 describes magic as an abomination before God and tells how a believer should respond in the face of it.  One need not wonder what would happen if Harry met St. Paul given the latter’s interaction with the magician in Acts 13:6-12.  The point though is that a child will not naturally allow a contradiction to exist and thus will reject one story and accept the other.  One can hardly imagine that, without proper guidance and formation, the child will almost always choose the more entertaining story.

What is Magic, anyway?

A fuller understanding of magic itself will help us better grasp the inherent danger; a danger that is growing daily as our culture is re-paganized.  There are about 20,000 books on Amazon that describe different Wiccan spells so we are talking about more than just mere sleight of hand or some fringe movement if we merely follow the market. Magic is not a sub-creation created in the mind of the author, but something that exists in the real world. Magic is about harnessing superhuman power and using it to overcome our natural limitations.  So, when we speak about magic what we are really talking about is angelic power.  Angels by their nature can act upon material creation simply by willing it.  They can manipulate pre-existing matter in any matter that they wish.  This is exactly what those schooled in magic and the occult are trying to do.

The problem is that evil angels, demons that is, are willing to share this power with human beings.  Not in order to help them but to entrap them.  They give them superhuman powers through spells and the like in exchange for control of them.  By grasping at a power beyond them, they submit their own human strength to the demons.  The demons are only too happy to comply because it makes them “like God” because it is a cheap imitation of God’s power of miracles.  Ultimately it is an attack on God and the humans are simply pawns who end up bearing the brunt of it.

The Harry Potter books never say where the magic comes from, but it comes from the place that all magic comes from hell.  It can seemingly be repurposed for good, or else it would lack appeal, but ultimately this good is a mere smokescreen for the evil that lurks behind its power.  This repurposing of magic for the good is the theme behind another fantasy story, one that acts like the magic elephant in the room anytime Harry Potter is discussed–The Lord of the Rings.

Magic is a key element in the Lord of the Rings as well, and yet, most would say these would be categorized as good stories.  To grasp how it is different from Harry Potter we must return to what was said earlier about the source of magic.  If magic, at its core is angelic power, then there is nothing wrong with angels using it.  It is their natural power.  Those who naturally use magic in the story, namely the Elves and Gandalf, are not human.  Gandalf is not a man but an angelic being called a Maiar who had taken human form.  He and the Elves are, in Tolkien’s sub-creation, angels.  It is natural for them to use “magic” and thus they are not seizing something that does not belong to them, but applying their given powers in pursuit of the good.  The story makes clear that all those lesser creatures who ultimately try to harness that power, even if for good use, ultimately come to ruin.  It is a story ultimately against magic and not for it.  And in that way it is vastly different than Harry Potter which celebrates its use by men and women.

Why Are There Seven Sacraments?

Apologetics, Church, Defending the Faith, Faith and Reason, Sacraments, , , , , ,

Within a generation or two of the first Protestant revolutionaries, the Sacraments became one of the shovels that were used to widen the chasm between Christians.  The debate began mostly over the number of Sacraments with Luther, Calvin and friends reducing the number to two or three.  Eventually, the Protestant Sacraments became unrecognizable, more because of a flawed philosophy than flawed theology.  They became mere signs, given power by the faith of the believer, rather than signs empowered by Christ to bring about the thing signified.  Because the reduction of the number of Sacraments was at the heart of their error, it is worth examining why there must be seven Sacraments so that, by removing one, you necessarily set yourself down a path of rejecting all.

To grasp the reasoning for seven Sacraments, it is first necessary to take a theological diversion into the use of analogy.  Analogy, in the theological sense, takes what would otherwise remain a mystery in the spiritual life and examines it “in the mirror of sensible realities”.  God is the author of both the natural and supernatural and He made them both for the same reason; to reveal Himself to mankind.  If they share the same purpose, then we can take the principles behind the things we can see and apply them to the things we can’t see.  This follows directly from a principle articulated by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans that “His invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things He has made” (Romans 1:20).   

How Analogy Fits into Theology

This parallelism comes with a caveat however.  Creation could never exhaust all that God has to say about Himself, falling short in fully revealing Him.  To supplement the “Book of Nature” God gave man Divine Revelation.  There are things that we can discover about God on our own, but if we are to know Him, rather than just about Him, He must reveal Himself to us.  This means that while we can use the principles in nature and extrapolate them to Supernature, we cannot do so indiscriminately or univocally.  There is a similarity, but there is also a difference at the same time. The analogical concept of existence is powerful in theology because it allows us to say things about God we would not otherwise be able to say.

Knowledge of this principle is important because when God reveals Himself as say Father, neophyte will tend to equate the visible fatherhood with the invisible Fatherhood.  “If God is Father then how could a father watch one of his children die without doing anything?”  But God as Father is an analogical concept.  God is like an earthly father, but also unlike an earthly father.  In fact He is the only true Father, while all fatherhood on earth is a mere reflection (c.f. Familiaris Consortio, 32). 

Analogy then become a necessary tool to understand Revelation.  God reveals Himself as a Tri-unity of Persons.  Human reason is hardwired to never be satisfied with mere facts, even of Revelation, but instead seeks understanding.  Now we could never reason to the Trinity, but the analogy of marriage that undergirds St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body helps us to better understand it.  Likewise, we could never use reason to prove our supernatural destiny, but by examining our natural life, we can better understand it because both have the same purpose.

St. Thomas Aquinas and the Use of Analogy

St. Thomas Aquinas took advantage of the power of analogy better than any theologian in the history of the Church.  He includes these types of arguments throughout the Summa, our topic at hand being one such example.  He articulates the principle saying  that the “spiritual life has a certain conformity with the life of the body: just as other corporeal things have a certain likeness to things spiritual ” (ST III, q.65, art. 1).  Drawing on this analogy, he then goes on to explain why there are seven Sacraments.  Keep in mind that this is not proof that there are seven Sacraments, but explains why there are seven, and how ultimately, to remove one leaves the Christian wayfarer at a loss.

Always profound in his common sense, St. Thomas says that there are two ways in which a person reaches perfection in his bodily life; personally and as a social animal, as part of a community.  Personally, the man reaches perfection in the life of the body directly by being generated (i.e. birth), through growth and through nourishment.  But because he also encounters hindrances and is prone to disease he needs both medicine and those things that will strengthen him against the diseases.

The corporal needs are signs of spiritual needs.  A man is generated bodily by birth and spiritually by Baptism.  He grows to perfect size and strength which corresponds to Confirmation where the indelible mark of Christian growth is given.  This bodily life and strength is preserved through regular nourishment just as in the spiritual life there is the Eucharist.  Finally, to restore health to the spirit after sin, Confession becomes the medicine of the soul.  To strengthen the soul against the wages of sin, Anointing of the Sick is performed, “which removes the remainder of sin, and prepares man for final glory. Wherefore it is written (James 5:15): ‘And if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him.’” (ibid).

Man is a social animal and so he is perfected in relation to others.  “First, by receiving power to rule the community and to exercise public acts: and corresponding to this in the spiritual life there is the sacrament of order, according to the saying of Hebrews 7:27, that priests offer sacrifices not for themselves only, but also for the people. Secondly in regard to natural propagation. This is accomplished by Matrimony both in the corporal and in the spiritual life: since it is not only a sacrament but also a function of nature.” (ST III, q.65, art.1).

It becomes obvious then why a rejection of one Sacrament ultimately leads to the rejection of all.  They are a complete package meant to meet all of our spiritual needs.  A deficiency in one area always leads to a poverty in another.  That is why Jesus left the Sacraments to the Church in order to provide for all the spiritual needs of the members of His Mystical Body.  At each stage of life, Christ bestows supernatural aid to facilitate the growth of each person into a saint.  To remove one of them means that a need is left unmet and spiritual growth is stunted.  The Sacraments protect Christianity from becoming a “works-based” religion because they reflect our radical need upon God to save us, not just once, but throughout our earthly pilgrimage.  There are seven because God made us to need them.

Protestantism and the Motives of Credibility

Apologetics, Church, Church Authority, Defending the Faith, Ecumenism, Scripture, , , ,

In investigating how we come to Faith, we discussed how the key step in the journey from natural faith to supernatural faith is to have “reasons to believe” that God has authentically spoken.    These external proofs of Revelation, when combined with the internal light of the Holy Spirit, help to formulate the content of faith.  The Church calls these reasons to believe motives of credibility (CCC 56) and enumerates three of them: prophecy, miracles and growth.  Only the Catholic Church bears all three of these stamps of authenticity, proving that she is the voice of God.  But these motives of credibility can also be applied in the opposite direction; not only are they signs of authenticity, but their lack is a sign that a given religion is false.

St. Francis de Sales, in his book The Catholic Controversy puts these motives of credibility to the test in refuting the authenticity of the Protestant Reformers.  He points out that throughout Salvation History, every ambassador for God carried with him a “letter of recommendation”.  This letter of recommendation comes in two forms, mediate and immediate. 

The mediate minister is the one who is commissioned by an already established authority and sent by one of God’s authentic ministers.  Scripture is replete with examples, but one will suffice to demonstrate the point.  When Elijah, who was God’s anointed, appointed Elisha as his successor, the latter became the authentic prophet and the voice of God among men through the imposition of his mantle (c.f. 1 Kings 19:16-21).  Likewise, Acts of the Apostles shows numerous cases in which the Apostles (or those who have been given authority by them) sending ministers out to speak in the name of the Church, the voice of God among men.

Someone who is sent immediately is one who received direct divine commission.  Again, we find numerous Scriptural examples including the aforementioned Elijah and the Apostles themselves.  In contrast to the mediate ministers, these immediate ministers must always carry with them two marks: prophecy and miracles.  They must be both prophesied and prophecy themselves.  The Apostles once again are the example par excellence through both being prophesied and prophesying themselves.  They also performed miracles making their message believable.  The interior movement of the Holy Spirit was met with external signs directing them to the true voice of God.

Applying the Principle to the Protestant Reformation

Once this principle is established, St. Francis de Sales applies it to the Protestant Reformers to see if they are truly God’s ambassadors.  It is readily apparent that the Reformers were not mediately appointed.  They rejected the authority of the Church and therefore to argue that they were sent by the Church would be nonsensical.  But what is often argued is that the Protestant Revolt was one from below and that it was the rank and file laity that sent them.  This viewpoint is historically debatable given that it was mostly imposed by princes, but even if we concede that it is true, then it is most certainly not Scriptural.

Hebrews 7:7, “unquestionably, a lesser person is blessed by a greater” carries with it a corollary and that is that a lesser person cannot bless a greater person.  What this means practically is that the laity cannot ordain an ambassador for God.  Even if some of them were priests, sharing only in Apostolic Succession through their Bishop, they lacked the proper authority to act directly against those Bishops.  To say that Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were anointed by the people would contradict a fundamental tenet that the Reformers all had in common: sola scriptura.  Therefore, we cannot say that these same Reformers were mediately appointed.

This leaves us with the immediate option, namely, that they were appointed by God directly. These reformers were obviously not the first in the history of the Church to make claims against the Church.  Heretics almost continuous made similar claims and were all rejected in part because they lacked these two signs of credibility.   So then, if the Protestant Reformers were truly on a mission from God, then we should expect both prophecy and miracles.  Unfortunately, we find neither as Luther and company never performed any miracles nor were they either subjects or objects of prophecy.

This certainly deals a blow to their credibility and should have been enough for many people to reject them out of hand.  But they countered that they were not changing anything , but restoring it.  Anyone who has studied the history of the Church knows that this is a rather dubious claim at best.  But what is indubitable is that they did change one thing: the Priesthood.

Changing the Priesthood

We find two Scriptural examples of a change in the Priestly Office.  First, we have the Levitical Priesthood.  Moses instituted the Levitical priesthood through his brother Aaron (c.f. Ex 28) as a replacement for the original priesthood of the firstborn son of every family.  This changing of the Priesthood was accompanied by a changing of the law given on Sinai. The members of the tribe of Levi were set aside to offer sacrifices for the people, despite the fact that the entire people of God was a “kingdom of priests” (Ex 19:6).

Jesus, the new High Priest, instituted a new priesthood.  It was prophesied that there would be a new priesthood.  This new priesthood would cease to be a hereditary Levitical priesthood but would be of the order of Melchizedek.  This priesthood will never be replaced (c.f. Ps. 110).  To make the point clear, the Book of Hebrews explicitly lays out how Jesus’ priesthood was of the order of Melchizedek and was the replacement for the Levitical priesthood (c.f. Hebrews 7:11-28).  Its sacrifice (a priest by definition must have a sacrifice) is bread and wine (c.f. Gn 14:18-20).  Jesus anointed the Apostles as priests and commanded them to continue this sacrifice perpetually at the Last Supper.

Looked at in this light, we can clearly see then that the Protestant Revolutionaries instituted a new priesthood.  Gone was the Melchizedekian priesthood to be replaced by “the priesthood of all believers.”  Yet, unlike Moses and Jesus, they did not carry the divine letters of credit with them.  The Melchizedekian priesthood was to last forever so these “reformers” were not prophesied anywhere within the divine deposit of faith.  Nor did they perform any miracles.  Thus, we must conclude that they were operating under, at best, their own inspiration.   

Lacking the first two motives of credibility would be incriminating enough, but they also lack the third as well.  The reformers sowed disunity rather than unity, leading to over 200 different “churches” or denominations (the number 33,000 has been greatly exaggerated ).  Unity is evidence of God-protected and inspired institution while disunity is evidence of a man-made institution.  That is why the unity or “one-ness” of the Church remains a mark distinguishing it from all other ecclesial communities.

St. Francis de Sales spent much of his life battling the Protestant reformers, even being exiled from his See of Geneva.  But because of his grasp of Scripture, a love for the Church and a love for those who left the Church, he convinced many Protestants that he had the truth on his side.  We could all learn a valuable lesson from him.

On Prenatal Testing

Autism, Bioethics, Conscience, Contraception, Family, Moralilty, , , ,

Thanks to a noninvasive prenatal testing procedure called NIPD, a test which can predict Down Syndrome with 99% accuracy, the number of children born with Down Syndrome worldwide has greatly been reduced.  This is not because they can repair the defective condition, but because it fashions the DNA into a bullseye, systematically marking them for death.  Between 2/3 and 4/5 of children with Down Syndrome are aborted, reducing the overall rate by 30%.  In other countries such as Denmark and Sweden nearly 100% of the children are aborted.  This, of course, is an example in which pre-natal testing has been used under nefarious circumstances, but not all of them are bad.  In fact, as more and more data pours in from the work on the Human Genome Project we should expect the ability to make more accurate pre-natal diagnoses on any number of conditions to increase.  With knowledge always comes power, but this power can be seductive unless we are guided by solid moral principles.

What makes navigating the moral waters upon which pre-natal testing floats particularly perilous is the fact that most of the tests themselves do not carry any moral weight.  There are some, like amniocentesis, which present significant dangers for both mother and child.  These tests should be avoided unless there are serious medical reasons for doing so.  But tests like NIPD and ultrasounds are practically harmless to both mother and child and become part and parcel of the standard of care.  The moral issue comes in with the intention of the parents of the unborn child.  In other words, what are they going to do with the information?

Why You Want to Know Matters

If they desire to know so that they can abort the child then it becomes morally problematic, even if they don’t actually follow through with it.  Knowing that this might be a real temptation, then they shouldn’t have the test.  On the flip side, a couple may want to perform the test so that they are better prepared medically and emotionally for parenting a child with serious medical needs then the test can be safely (morally speaking) performed.  There continue to be many advances made to in utero diagnosis and surgical interventions that these tests can often be life-saving.  Just this week the Cleveland Clinic announced that they had performed successful in utero surgery to repair Spina Bifida.  This obviously was made possible through pre-natal testing. 

Summarizing, The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (1994) presents these principles succinctly:  “Prenatal diagnosis is permitted when the procedure does not threaten the life or physical integrity of the unborn child or the mother, and does not subject them to disproportionate risks; when the diagnosis can provide information to guide preventive care for the mother or pre- or postnatal care for the child; and when the parents, or at least the mother, give free and informed consent.  Prenatal diagnosis is not permitted when undertaken with the intention of aborting an unborn child with a serious defect” (50).

With abortion off the table, what are the guidelines we can use if the unthinkable happens and a child is diagnosed with a medical problem.  The Church speaks of avoiding “disproportionate risks”.  This assumes a sort of calculus on the part of the parents by which they weigh the seriousness of the disease against the risk of surgery.  This might include experimental procedures.  Provided that there is an acceptable amount of risk involved and the surgery is done for therapeutic, rather than experimental reasons, then it would be morally permissible to do so.  As the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin, Donum Vitae, puts it,  “[N]o objective, even though noble in itself, such as a foreseeable advantage to science, to other human beings or to society, can in any way justify experimentation on living human embryos or fetuses, whether viable or not, either inside or outside the mother’s womb” (DV I, 4). 

Not only is abortion not an option, but also those procedures which are not inherently therapeutic. Procedures designed to influence the genetic inheritance of a child, which are not therapeutic, are morally wrong.  “Certain attempts to influence chromosomic or genetic inheritance are not therapeutic but are aimed at producing human beings selected according to sex or other predetermined qualities. These manipulations are contrary to the personal dignity of the human being and his or her integrity and identity. Therefore in no way can they be justified on the grounds of possible beneficial consequences for future humanity. Every person must be respected for himself: in this consists the dignity and right of every human being from his or her beginning” (DV, I, 6).

Genetic Counseling

Genetic counseling before a couple actually conceives is growing in use and popularity.   The man and the woman each submit to genetic screening that gives a genetic profile enabling them to predict how likely it is that they have a child with a serious genetic defect.  Like the pre-natal testing discussed previously there is nothing inherently wrong with doing it.  What matters is what you are going to do with the information that is gleaned from it.  For example, suppose a couple finds one or both of them are carriers for some genetic condition such as cystic fibrosis or Tay Sachs, both of which pose serious risks to viability and lifespan of the child.  They may come to learn that there is a 50% chance that their child develops the condition.  Is this a good enough reason to forego having children and adopt instead?

This is one of those cases where the Church does not say one way or the other, although we can certainly apply Catholic principles to come up with a set of guidelines.  First, we must never forget that the goal of parenting is to raise children for heaven.  The most severely mentally handicapped child will only be so temporarily if they are baptized.  I say this not to over-spiritualize the issue, but to put it in perspective.  As a father of a special needs child this thought has brought me much comfort and has stifled my fears.  Having a child with something wrong with them is among the worst things a parent can deal with, but it is not the worst.  Having your child go to hell would be the worst.  Knowing that you raised your child and got them to heaven means that you have done all God asked of you.  “Well done my good and faithful servant.”  

This may not be a reason then to avoid having any children, but it might be counted as a so-called “serious” reason to postpone, even indefinitely, having more children.  If a couple has a child with many medical needs and knowing that they are at an increased likelihood to have another like them, they may legitimately decide to not have any more children, provided the means they use to avoid pregnancy are morally licit.