A More Perfect World?

Atheism, Lent, Passion of Christ, The Life of Jesus, , ,

One of the go-to arguments against the existence of God is the presence of evil in the world.  The atheistic interlocutor looks at the world, sees evil and concludes that there is no God.  Such a conclusion rests upon a primary assumption, namely that he can conceive of a more perfect world, a world without suffering.  Therefore either God is a cold-blooded tyrant or He does not exist.  Given how often such an argument is given, we must be prepared to meet it, but not in the usual way.  Too often theists respond to the conclusions rather than the assumption.  In this essay we will challenge the notion that God could have made a more perfect world.  Can we really conceive of a world in which there is no evil and, if so, then would that world be more perfect than this one? 

To conceive of a world with no evil, at least on the surface seems relatively simple.  But we must be prepared to admit that the world would be vastly different than our own.  Not just in that it lacked evil, but that its physical properties (if it could have any at all) would be vastly different than are own. 

The Argument of the Head

Evil, properly conceived, is a lack of a good that should otherwise be there.  In a physical world of many physical beings the avoidance of at least some physical evils is an impossibility.  This topic is treated more fully in another essay, but the gist of the issue is that material things are by definition limited things and this limitation combined with a desire for self-preservation means that there will always be a lack in some creatures.  There is a single piece of bread and two people.  At least one of them (or possibly both if they split it) will experience the evil of hunger.  It is pointless to argue that the world could have an unlimited amount of bread because that will result in the evil of something else being lacking.  A physical world will always experience some lack and therefore some evil.

In a material world, one being’s good can be another being’s evil.  Not all relationships can be symbiotic.  The man who is hungry will experience the evil of thorn pricks from the bush that grows them in order to protect its berries from being plucked.  The virus that causes the flu will embed itself in a host and replicate for its own good but the host will experience sickness.

Usually the objection to the evil in the world is related to moral evils, that is, the evils we bring upon ourselves and inflict upon others.  The man who overeats will experience the evil of heart disease and the man who, in protecting his family from an intruder, will experience the evil of being stabbed.  These moral evils may results from the free will responses to physical evils (looters who raid stores after a storm for example) or strictly out of malice.  Either way, they are the result of the free will of someone.

A good God may give the power to use free will, which is good.  But the creatures that have the power may come in conflict with each other in how they use it.  God gave the power and is in a certain sense the cause of power in the action, but He is not the cause of the action itself.  A man who sells a gun to another is responsible for the man having the gun, but this does not mean He is responsible for how it is used.

While we cannot imagine a material world with no physical evils, we might imagine one in which there are no moral evils.  But this would result ultimately in the loss of free will.  A world in which all the goods are limited always carries with it the possibility of misapprehending and misusing those goods.  God could intervene each time someone tried to do something evil, but this would make free will conditioned and thus not totally free.

Our interlocutor would now be hard pressed to imagine a physical world that includes beings with free will in it that does not also include the presence of some evil.  Even if he can come up with one, he cannot prove it that it is more perfect than our own because perfect implies some knowledge of purpose.  Just as you cannot speak of a more perfect pair of shoes until you know what shoes are for, so you cannot speak of a world that is more perfect than our own until you know what the world’s purpose is.  In fact when we begin to examine the world’s purpose, we find that it is perfectly fitting that it contains evil

To say that the world has a purpose is really to say that the world is not an end but a means.  A perfect world would be one in which it prepares its inhabitants for the Real World that is to follow.  It must be a world that mirrors the goodness of the Real World just enough to invoke desire in its inhabitants, but not so much that they feel completely at home in it.  The Real World is one of an eternal communion of self-giving love.  This world must be a training ground that makes that self-giving love possible.  The limited nature of the physical world such as it is makes it possible for this self-giving love, but not without a willingness to suffer some lack for the sake of the beloved.   This willingness must mean that there are actual evils present in the world, even if not all love leads to also suffering from those evils.

The Argument of the Heart

What has been offered to this point is an argument of the head.  A mere “theistic” response is not adequate and only a Christian explanation will do.  God desired to make an “argument of the heart” in order to drive this point home.  This “argument of the heart” is the Passion and Death of Our Lord.  To show the path to the Real World, God Himself stepped into ours in order to show us the way.  He experience evil firsthand and used that suffering illuminating a path through this world marked by suffering.  

With the Passion and death of Christ suffering becomes a necessary component of the escape plan into the Real World.  In our suffering, we, in both a metaphorical and real sense, share in Christ’s suffering.  His suffering was entirely voluntary so that when we suffer, even involuntarily, it signals to us the depth of the love He has for us.  Without suffering we would not know what it was like for Him and would never grasp His great love.  Not only that, but He Who is the one in which all times are present, is really suffering with us.  The Passion is not just a past event but a current event for Him so that He (re)lives it in our very suffering.  He is the Lamb in the Real World that still walks about as though slain (c.f. Rev 5:6). 

The only acceptable answer to the problem of Evil for a Christian is Christ.  The impassible and unchanging God in exercising His omnipotence and omnibenevolence came into our world and suffered with and for us.  He spoke not just to our heads but to our hearts telling us the depth of His desire to share His life with His creatures.  This argument of the heart is at the very core of what it means to live Lent intentionally.  It is the time of reflecting on Christ’s Passion and coming to a greater knowledge of the truth of the nature of the Real World.

Facebook Comments Box

The Argument from Conscience

Atheism, Creed, , , ,

In his book, Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, St. John Henry Newman gives account of what might be described as a philosophy of faith.  He thought logical proofs for things like the existence of God, even when sound, were unconvincing for many people because they failed to garner the right kind of belief or assent.  In Newman’s thought, assent to a proposition or a set of propositions can be of two types: notional and real.  Notional assent was a simple assent to a proposition or set of propositions as true.  Real assent takes those same propositions and moves them from the head to the heart so that it becomes concrete and personal.  A man patterns his life around a real belief while a notional belief only remains in the back of his mind.  When it comes to questions of facts, notional assent is often sufficient.  But when it comes to important questions, such as the existence of God, an assent “following upon acts of inference, and other purely intellectual exercises” is never a sufficient impetus to conversion.  Instead Newman thinks that only real assent can act as a means of paving the way for the invasion of grace. 

In Newman’s mind, it is very difficult for all but the most erudite of philosophers to give real assent to the logical, deductive, metaphysical proofs of someone like St. Thomas and his Five Ways.  These proofs are not defective in any way, in fact they are quite the contrary, having stood the test of time by offering certain proof of the existence of God.  Instead Newman thinks real assent can only be given when a person’s experience leads them to a real encounter with God.  For Newman this means turning to inductive proofs that leads one to the probable conclusion that God exists.  Newman thinks he found a universal subjective experience that proves the existence of God in moral obligation.

Conscience as a Universal Experience

Newman’s Argument from Conscience as it has most often been called is one of the most effective arguments for the existence of God.  This is because it builds upon a universal experience.  We all judge our own actions according to whether they are right or wrong.  Once this judgement is made, we experience an obligation to do what is right and avoid what is wrong.  We do not always judge correctly, but we cannot avoid judging.  Likewise, the experience of guilt always accompanies when we don’t choose according to our judgement. 

Stepping outside of ourselves and looking at the universality of this experience we must admit that it is rather strange, especially considering that we appear to be both judge and judged.  We speak of conscience as a voice (or an echo of a voice) that is both imperative and constraining and it is like no other dictate in our experience.  Who, in judging himself, would ever declare guilt unless the voice of conscience somehow connects us to someone beyond ourselves?  When we look in the world, we find no source for this voice (more on this in a moment) and so Newman thinks that “If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.”  Conscience then, according to Newman, is “a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator.”

Freud would tether us to a this-worldly explanation to keep us from leaping from conscience to God.  He explains guilt as “tension between the ego and the superego.”  The superego is something akin to conscience but it contains only faint echoes of human authorities, especially in our formative years.  This mechanistic explanation of guilt however does not explain the absoluteness with which the dictates of conscience are felt.  Rather than seeming like a transgression of a merely human authority, guilt is experienced as a breaking with the Absolute.  We feel guilty because we know we are guilty.

Why the Argument Works

Recalling to mind the context in which Newman presents the argument, we can see why it might be so convincing.  Conscience as the “aboriginal vicar of Christ” presents God not merely as a Voice out there, but One Who is close to me.  To grasp this though we must move from the notion of conscience as a source of guilt to conscience as spurring us on towards what is truly good.  It is not just the voice of Judge, but of a Father, that desires our well-being in everything.  If we but listen to its voice, conscience no longer acts like a referee keeping us from breaking rules but a coach teaching us to excel in the game of life.  As Newman puts it, “the gift of conscience raises a desire for what it does not itself fully supply. It inspires in them the idea of authoritative guidance, of a divine law; and the desire of possessing it in its fulness, not in mere fragmentary portions or indirect suggestion. It creates in them a thirst, an impatience, for the knowledge of that Unseen Lord, and Governor, and Judge, who as yet speaks to them only secretly, who whispers in their hearts, who tells them something, but not nearly so much as they wish and as they need” (Sermons preached on Various Occasions, Dispositions for Faith).

Presented then in this light, Newman’s Argument from Conscience paves the way not just for notional assent, but real assent.  As the person begins to listen more and more to his conscience, even if poorly formed at first, he develops a taste for the good.  That desire for the Good manifests itself in desiring only what is truly good and the soul begins to look for the moral maps that God provides through the Church.  Judging correctly more and more often, especially as they open themselves up to grace as a gift from the God Who has speaks to them louder and louder through an informed conscience.  The Argument from Conscience truly paves the way for conversion.   

Facebook Comments Box

On Inculturation

Anthropology, Church Authority, Culture, Defending the Faith, Devils, Natural Law, Pope Francis, , , , , , , ,

In his new Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis mentioned the process of inculturation as a starting point for the conversion of the region.  The Holy Father most certainly had the Pachamama controversy in mind when he exhorted the Faithful to “not be quick to describe as superstition or paganism certain religious practices that arise spontaneously from the life of peoples. Rather, we ought to know how to distinguish the wheat growing alongside the tares, for ‘popular piety can enable us to see how the faith, once received, becomes embodied in a culture and is constantly passed on.’ It is possible to take up an indigenous symbol in some way, without necessarily considering it as idolatry. A myth charged with spiritual meaning can be used to advantage and not always considered a pagan error. Some religious festivals have a sacred meaning and are occasions for gathering and fraternity, albeit in need of a gradual process of purification or maturation” (QA 78-79).  Setting aside the fact that all false religions are by definition superstitions, the Holy Father’s remarks call for a deeper understanding of what the Church means when she uses the term Inculturation. 

Understanding authentic inculturation begins by grasping what we mean when we use the term culture.  Culture is the soil in which the human person grows.  As the Second Vatican Council put it, “Man comes to a true and full humanity only through culture, that is through the cultivation of the goods and values of nature…. The word ‘culture’ in its general sense indicates everything whereby man develops and perfects his many bodily and spiritual qualities” (GS, 53).

Against Cultural Relativism

When viewed in relation to “goods and values of nature,” it becomes evident that cultures are not ends in themselves, but instead means for human growth.  Likewise because there are objective “goods and values of nature,” we can also evaluate cultures objectively in terms of good and bad.  Good cultures are those that cultivate authentic human flourishing and bad cultures are those that do harm to true human goods.  Authentic culture must always be, according to the International Theological Commission, that which “reveals and strengthens the nature of man.”

In short, there is no such thing as a neutral culture nor can anything like cultural relativism be tolerated.  We must evaluate and judge cultures by the objective criterion of whether true human goods are protected and promoted.  It is the Church’s role to be judgmental towards cultures in three specific ways.  Those values that are true human values, even if expressed in “local” terms are adopted as part of the vernacular of the Church and are the means by which the Gospel takes root.  If they point to true human values, but are deficient in some way then the Church purifies them.  Finally, if they are irreconcilable then the Church condemns them.  This process of promoting, purifying and purging is what the Church calls inculturation.

The point of reference for the Church is not the culture itself, but as in all things, the transmission of the Gospel.  The culture is simply the means by which the message takes root.  This is why it is disingenuous to speak of inculturation as a two-way street.  The Church has the fullness of truth and thus has no new facts to learn from the various cultures.  The culture gives to the Church what is for its own benefit—a language that speaks the truths of salvation.  What she does gain is a fuller manifestation of her catholicity.  It becomes proof positive that the Gospel can be put in terms that are intelligible to men of every age and place and answer the deepest longings of all human hearts.

Because he was the most traveled Pope in the history of the Church, St. John Paul II constantly emphasized the connection between inculturation and evangelization.  In an address to the People of Asia while he was visiting the Philippines he reminded the Church that  “Wherever she is, the Church must sink her roots deeply into the spiritual and cultural soil of the country, assimilate all genuine values, enriching them also with the insights that she has received from Jesus. Given the mission entrusted to it by our Lord, the Church’s priority is always the evangelization of all peoples and therefore of all cultures. Inculturation is a means of evangelization, being at the same time its consequence.”

With all of this laid as a foundation, we can see what role, if any, Pachamama would play in legitimate inculturation.  Those who defended it treated it as something that could simply be taken up (literally) as an authentic human value.  But worship of a false god, however seemingly benign or how “spontaneously” it arises (how do we know if something arises spontaneously or at the prompting of demons?), is not a true human value.  Nor is that something that can be purified but instead must be something that is rejected.  Pachamama may have crossed the Tiber after it was tossed in the Tiber, but it was only because certain churchmen lacked both the faith and charity towards the Amazonian people to give them the saving truth of Jesus Christ.  As St. John Paul II, who was not immune to failures in authentic inculturation, told the people of Cameroon, “the Gospel message does not come simply to consolidate human things, just as they are; it takes on a prophetic and critical role. Everywhere, in Europe as in Africa, it comes to overturn criteria of judgment and modes of life; it is a call to conversion.”  Never once was the call to conversion issued to the worshipper of Pachamama.

The great missionary saints, whether it was St. Paul, St. Patrick, St. Francis Xavier, or St. Isaac Jogues, were all masters of inculturation not because they were clever but because theirs was a call to conversion even if they translated them into colloquialisms.  It was because they were holy men that they were up to the task.  As John Paul II put it, “Only those who truly know Christ, and truly know their own cultural inheritance, can discern how the divine Word may be fittingly presented through the medium of that culture. It follows that there can be no authentic inculturation which does not proceed from contemplating the Word of God and from growing in likeness to him through holiness of life”.

Facebook Comments Box

Darwin and Intellectual Racism

Anthropology, Atheism, Creation, Evolution, Faith and Reason, Science, , , ,

When you are in the habit of setting days and months aside to celebrate everything and everyone, you are bound to have some rather odd coincidences.  Today, February 12th, might be one of them.  In the midst of Black History Month, we take a day to “celebrate” Darwin Day.  Chosen to coincide with the birthday of Charles Darwin, the day is set aside to highlight Darwin’s unique contributions to science and to promote science more generally.  A strange coincidence because Charles Darwin single-handedly gave the world a theory that, at its very core, gives intellectual justification for racism.

To be fair, Charles Darwin himself was vehemently opposed to slavery.  He came from a long line of abolitionists.  The problem is that he also came from a long line of atheists so that his hatred of God was greater than his love of slaves.  His justification of slavery and many other genocidal practices was not merely an unintended consequence of his theory but a result of a willed obstinance.  His co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace warned him that it was insufficient for explaining man and his friends, including Samuel Wilberforce, the son of the great British abolitionist, warned of the brutality his theory justified.  Darwin, in a moment of brutal honesty once wrote, “I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.”  In short, he was willing to accept any collateral damage in his “slow and silent attack on Christianity.”

Even Evolutionary Ideas Have Consequences

If we look closely at the theory of evolution itself, we will see why racism necessarily follows.  The Theory of Evolution is based on the relatively straightforward principle of Natural Selection—“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”  Colloquially known as “Survival of the Fittest”, Darwin’s model is rather intuitive until he posits that it explains everything.  The principle is without limitation and any species, given enough time and interaction with the environment, might evolve into any other species.  It is endless evolution with no room for distinctions between micro- and macro-evolution even though Darwin never uncovered evidence for the latter. 

Had he simply put forward the theory of Natural Selection to explain the origin of non-human species like he did in his first book On the Origin of Species, then it is very likely that the microevolutionary aspects would have been accepted and the macroevolutionary rejected, or at least severely modified.  But Darwin had intrinsically connected his scientific theory to a materialist worldview.  To consummate the wedding, he slipped humans into the theory in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.

After Evolving into a rock, Charles Darwin hangs out with the author at the Museum of Natural History in DC

Despite making numerous connections between the rudimentary forms of morality and intelligence in animals and human beings, Darwin was plagued by what appears to be an uncrossable chasm—the difference between the highest animal and the highest human.  But if he was to apply Natural Selection to the “descent of man” then he could allow for a slow and steady evolution which posits that there is not just a difference between animals and men, but between gradations of men as well.  As he puts it in The Descent of Man “Some of these, for instance the Negro and European, are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true species.”

For Darwin evolution is an ongoing process.  This means that it continues down to our own day and that various species are continually fighting for survival; humans included.  Governed by the first evolutionary principle of Survival of the Fittest, Natural Selection has favored certain races over others.  Race is pitted against race and tribe against tribe so that the only way we know which is the most fit of them is by their continued survival and destruction of other races and tribes.  So then evolution not only scientifically justifies slavery and racism, but also genocide.  As Darwin himself put it in Decent of Man:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [like the gorilla, orangutan, or chimpanzee] . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

An Inherent Contradiction

Modern men are unique in their ability to hold contradictions together in their head, but it is impossible to hold them together in practice.  Either racism, slavery, and genocide are wrong and Evolution is a false explanation for the origin of man or Evolution is true and racism, slavery and genocide are justified.  There can be no intellectual racism without actual racism emerging.  No amount of “sympathy” (to use Darwin’s term) or “woke” condemnation can overcome “scientific fact.”  When science is all you got for truth, then you have to accept the consequences of that.   

We have spoken on any number of occasions previously on why Evolution is both bad philosophy and bad science.  Nevertheless it is accepted as fact because it is the only explanation that eliminates God.  Darwin knew that and his intellectual progeny know it as well.  The problem is that any worldview that eliminates God ultimately ends up justifying the elimination of men.  If Man really came from below, then we might treat him as we see fit.  Might makes right.  But if man came from above then every man is intrinsically valuable regardless of whether he is a savage or civilized.  In fact, as history has borne out, it is Christianity and not some blind process of evolution that raises man from savage to gentleman.  

Facebook Comments Box

God’s Salt

Bible, Church, Creation, Grace, Martyrdom, Scripture, Spiritual Life, The Life of Jesus, ,

In his extended commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, St. Augustine says that Our Lord has laid out for us “the perfect standard of the Christian life.”  Prepared from all eternity, it is the most perfect sermon.  We should be hanging on the Word’s every word.  From beginning to end Our Lord has one goal in mind, to give the blueprint for sainthood.  The outline is made in the Beatitudes and the “how-to” follows.  The first words then of the “how-to” section are vital to understanding what it means to be a Christian and therefore merit our close scrutiny.

After defining Christians as those who find their joy in being persecuted, Our Lord tells His disciples they must be salty; “You are the salt of the earth.  But if salt loses its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?  It is good for nothing anymore but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men” (Mt 5:13).  To modern ears the Saline Commandment might strike us as a bit odd, especially because we only think of salt as a seasoning.  But Our Lord had something deeper in mind making this a most perfect metaphor for the Christian mind, something that we can begin to grasp more clearly if we look at salt itself.

The Master of Metaphor

First, we must admit that Our Lord was a master of metaphor and the reasoning for this is simple.  Our Lord did not need to search for a metaphor to describe the Christian, He simply created the metaphor.  Salt may have plenty of practical uses (all of which could be accomplished another way if Our Lord so decreed), but salt is what it is precisely because Our Lord wanted to use it to reveal the truth to His disciples.  In this case the truth of what it means to be a true disciple.  Catholics used to grasp this intuitively because they had a sacramental vision of reality.  Thanks to an unhealthy scientific excess, we have lost that ability and need to regain it.  That begins by resisting the temptation to simply say salt is “nothing but” Sodium Chloride and to probe deeper into its meaning. 

Salt itself is formed by the evaporation of salt water.  The process of evaporation involves two outside elements—sun and air or wind.  Salt cannot escape the sea water without these two things.  Now in sacramental language, the seas water is associated with chaos.  The Sun is Christ and the Wind is the Holy Spirit.  Putting them all together we find that His disciples cannot escape the chaos of the world without Our Lord and the Holy Spirit.  This is to make sure that the “try-hards” recognize that the Beatitudes are absolutely impossible without the infusion of grace.  Salty Christians then are formed.

The Real Saline Solution

We can glean more of Our Lord’s meaning, especially what He means when He calls them “salt of the earth” by examining how salt was commonly used.  Prior to refrigeration, salt was the primary preservative for food.  By reducing the water molecules in the food through osmosis, bacteria had no medium in which to grow.  What little bacteria did land on the food would die because it attacked their DNA.  In short, salt was used to stop decay.

So too it is with the Christian in the world.  Our Lord is saying that once they become salt, the disciples keep the world from decay.  This role of Christians is one that is easily overlooked but one that is worth examining more closely.

When God saw all of the evil that was going on in Sodom and Gomorrah, He told Abraham that He was going to destroy it.  But it wasn’t just as a punishment for the evil that He threatened to destroy it, but because there was no salt to keep it from decaying.  He could find no righteous men to preserve it.  Sodom and Gomorrah were fully decayed and their destruction was inevitable.  Had their been salt, they would have been preserved.

Christians are “salt of the earth” precisely because they preserve it and enhance its flavor.  All around us we see signs of decay, but true Christians can slow that decay by their very presence.  It is saints that change the world, not primarily by their actions, but by their sanctity.  The solution to our cultural crisis is simple—be a saint.  It is saints who have turned every culture around and it is saints that will turn ours around.  Saints are those who are committed to God’s will no matter what and those are the ones that He uses to season the world. 

Because of its dehydrating qualities salt was often used in war as a means of destroying crops.  So too God will use some of His salt to destroy the crops of the Evil One.  As His salt we must, each and every one of us, be prepared to be poured out on the ground.  Martyrdom is never really that far away for the Christian and we must be prepared for it to come.  But even if it doesn’t God’s salt must continue to keep the bacteria from spreading from within their own sphere of influence.  The thing about salt is that we immediately recognize its presence as well as its absence.  We must be salty then.

Before closing, let us take to heart Jesus’ words regarding losing our savor.  For salt cannot actually lose its savor without ceasing to be salt.  Despite the fact that we no longer use this language, it is important for us to do everything we can to stay in a state of grace.  If we lose our savor, it can be restored by becoming salt again, but we are at a great risk for being trampled underfoot.  All the saints prayed for the gift of perseverance so let us join their litany to stay salty.

Facebook Comments Box

Keeping Your Hands Off

Church, Church Authority, Church Fathers, Eucharist, Magisterium, Sacraments, , , , , , ,

It has been alleged that in the early years of his revolution, Martin Luther was in the practice of celebrating “Mass” by omitting the words of consecration while still elevating the bread and chalice.  This was done so that those gathered would not realize that Luther was doing something novel.  His act of deceit reveals not only his own lack of faith in Transubstantiation, but the power of the signs that surround the Sacrament.  He knew that if he were to eliminate the sign completely, he would quickly be branded as a heretic and his revolution would be dead on arrival.  But if he could make small, subtle changes, it would be much easier to eliminate faith in the Eucharist.  Applying this law of anti-Sacramental gradualism the Protestant Revolutionaries also introduced the practice of distributing Communion in the hand as a subtle attack not only against the Real Presence but also the ministerial priesthood.  Wise as serpents, they knew that to attack these foundational beliefs head-on was reformational suicide, but if they changed the practice, toppling belief would be easier.

This lesson in ecclesiastical history is instructive because it relates to one of, if not the biggest, crisis facing the Church today—a diminishment in belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Through a certain Protestantization, namely Communion in the hand, a back door into the Tabernacle has cleared a path for the removal of Christ from the Eucharist.  It is only by reintroducing this practice that we can hope to reverse the rising tide of unbelief.

How We Got Here

For at least a millennium and a half, the Eucharist was always and everywhere received on the tongue.  In 650 we find the Synod of Rouen issuing condemning Communion in the hand as an abuse revealing that at the very least it was common practice at the time to receive It on the tongue.  This remained the norm until just after the Second Vatican Council.  After because the Council Fathers never made mention of altering the practice.  Instead the false “Spirit of Vatican II” that grew out of the yeast of ambiguity and loopholes, found permission in Pope Paul VI’s 1969 instruction Memoriale Domini.  Despite the declaration that “This method[Communion on the tongue] of distributing holy communion must be retained, taking the present situation of the Church in the entire world into account, not merely because it has many centuries of-tradition behind it, but especially because it expresses the faithful’s reverence for the Eucharist”, the Pope left a loophole for those who had “special circumstances” to introduce or continue the practice.  Granting a loophole enabled the principle of anti-Sacramental gradualism to infect the entire Church.

What We Can Do About It

Unlike the great need to change the orientation of the Priest during Mass through the re-introduction of ad Orientem masses, the laity can do something about this directly by receiving only on the tongue.  By receiving on the tongue, rather than in the hand, the faithful witness directly to the Real Presence of Christ.  How this is so we will discuss presently.

When a family sits down for a meal, platters are set out and each person is served food on their plate.  From their plate they then feed themselves.  A similar thing happens in Mass when the “minister” serves the Host to each person and they then feed themselves.  This is all fine and good if the Host were simple food.  But if the Host is not ordinary food, then how we eat Him ought to reveal this.  By receiving the Host in a manner that is wholly unique to anything else that is eaten, namely on the tongue, the believer is testifying to the truth that it is no ordinary food, but instead Jesus Christ Himself.  In fact we would be killing two birds with one stone by also obscuring the “family meal” interpretation of the Eucharist that has persisted over the last half century.

The use of scare quotes around the word minister above anticipates another important aspect of the practice.  Just as the Protestant Reformers used Communion in the hand to diminish belief in the ministerial priesthood, a similar fascination with the priesthood of all believers has allowed this practice to thrive.  By receiving the Host directly from the hands of a Priest, the same Priest whose hands were consecrated so that he could touch the Eucharist, testimony is given to the sacredness of the Host.  Just as Mary Magdalene was chastised for touching the Body of Christ after His Resurrection, while the Ordained Apostle Thomas was not, the laity should avoid touching the Eucharist.  This, again, would not only have the positive effect of reducing the number of (Extra?)Ordinary Ministers of the Eucharist, but will also help to avoid even the smalles particle of the Eucharist (of which Jesus is truly present) from being dropped or desecrated.  One way to insure that doesn’t happen is to limit the number of touches.

Older is Better?

It is worth dealing with what amounts to the most common objection, namely that it was the ancient practice of the Church to receive Communion in the hand. 

There are a number of theologians which have addressed this question and it is not entirely clear that there was a universality in the reception of Communion.  To dive into this question historically however misses the point.  Because the Church is a historical reality governed by the Holy Spirit, we should have no desire to “go back” because doctrine, being living and active, develops.  As the understanding of the Deposit of Faith deepens, practice, especially liturgical practice, adapts to reflect that.  For example, the understanding of Confession, especially its power to remove sin, was not something that the Early Church had a firm grasp on.  That it forgave sins was never in question, but how and when was not understood.  Could this be done only once or many times?  If only once then you would want to save it, or even better save Baptism until there was an emergency or until you were about to die.  If many times, then how could you prevent its abuse?  From within this setting, Public Confession was widely practiced. 

The point is that as doctrine developed public Confession went away.  To have any desire to go back to public Confession would be to try to erase all of that development.  So unless the “older is better” crowd are willing to go back to that practice, then they should not desire to do something similar with the Eucharist. All that we now know about the Real Presence of the Eucharist can’t be put back in the storehouse of the Deposit of Faith.  The practice reflects this understanding as we have shown above.  Orthopraxy goes hand in hand, or perhaps hand to tongue, with orthodoxy. 

In short, antiquarianism is really innovation and ultimately degradation.  This is a point that St. John Henry Newman made in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.  Using a false analogy, the antiquarians reason that just as a spring is clearest at its font, so too divine Revelation.  But Newman gone to great lengths to show that development admits of growth in clarity as it moves from the source.  As Pope Pius XII cautioned, we should not favor something just because it has “the flavor of antiquity. More recent liturgical rites are also worthy of reverence and respect, because they too have been introduced under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, who is with the Church in all ages even to the consummation of the world . . .the desire to restore everything indiscriminately to its ancient condition is neither wise nor praiseworthy.”((Pius XII Mediator Dei).  Communion in the hand ultimately then is a corruption and needs to be stopped immediately.

Facebook Comments Box

On the Necessity of Government

American Founding, Angels, Anthropology, Church and State, Culture, Moralilty, Natural Law, , , , ,

Our country was founded upon a rather strange amalgamation of principles.  A perusal of the writings of the Founders will uncover both references to Catholic Natural Law and principles of the Enlightenments. One can imagine that there are some pretty stark contradictions.  One such contradiction is found in the question of why we need government at all.  In the midst of defending the need for a government that includes checks and balances in  Federalist Paper no. 51, James Madison makes what seems like at first to be a very Catholic statement saying that government is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature.”  Rather than remaining on that train of thought, Madison diverts to another track claiming that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  Understanding both of his statements will help us go a long way in understanding why our country seems to be plagued by moral decay.

If Men Were Angels…

Obviously one of the important questions that the Founders sought to address was how authority was to be exercised by the State.  Trying to emerge from the shadow of Divine Right Theory, the Founders thought authority came from the individual.  Men would form a society like the State by bartering freedom for security.  The individuals would bestow authority upon a Governor in order to ensure that his rights would be secured against encroachments from other men who had all entered the society via a social contract.

When Madison says that government is the “greatest reflection upon human nature”, he has this view of human nature in mind—man as the individual who enters society via the social contract.  This principle of the Enlightenment treats government then as a necessary evil that must be tolerated because man is fallen.  In his own words, “anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.”  If men were not fallen, like the angels, then government would not be necessary.  So commonplace is this idea today, that hardly anyone questions whether Madison has greatly misunderstood human nature.

Madison’s anthropological error comes into relief if we challenge his theological assertion that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  Angels do, in fact, live within a hierarchy, a hierarchical structure that includes authority.  Scripture provides us with an example in Chapter 10 of the Book of Daniel.  Daniel calls upon the help of Gabriel, but the angel does not immediately respond because the Guardian Angel of the Kingdom of Persia would not allow him to act.  After Michael intervenes, the lower angel is allowed to help Daniel (Dn 10:11-21).  What this reveals is that angels, even unfallen ones, do have a government, one that is based upon a clear authoritative structure.

The Greatest of All Reflections on Human Nature

So, if men were angels then government might be necessary rather than being a necessary evil.  Contra Locke, Rousseau and their intellectual progeny, including the Founders, man is not a solitary being, but is naturally a social creature.  In order to fulfill his nature, man has need of other men.  This is not just a matter of convenience but part of his natural instinct.  There are two natural societies in which man’s needs are supplied, the Family and the State.

Because men naturally form these two societies, they must have an authoritative structure.  As Pope Leo XIII put it, “no society can hold together unless some one be over all, directing all to strive earnestly for the common good, every body politic must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its Author. Hence, it follows that all public power must proceed from God. For God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception, must be subject to Him, and must serve him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely, God, the sovereign Ruler of all. ‘There is no power but from God.’” (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 3).

St. Thomas says that the act of authority would be applied in four ways.  First, the ruler must direct the members of society towards what they should do to contribute to and achieve the common good.  Second, the ruler should supply for difficulties such as protection against an enemy.  Third, the ruler should correct morals via punishment and (four) he should coerce the members to virtuous acts.

Now it becomes obvious that the first two would apply whether or not men were fallen or not.  Virtuous men might agree about some common good, but because it is possible to achieve a good in multiple ways, they disagree as to means.  Without a ruler, that is one without authority, there would be no one to make the final decision.  Because men, even in a state of innocence would not be equal with respect to virtue, it is the most virtuous who would govern.

St. Thomas describes this virtuous ruler in the Summa:

“But a man is the master of a free subject, by directing him either towards his proper welfare, or to the common good. Such a kind of mastership would have existed in the state of innocence between man and man, for two reasons.  First, because man is naturally a social being, and so in the state of innocence he would have led a social life. Now a social life cannot exist among a number of people unless under the presidency of one to look after the common good; for many, as such, seek many things, whereas one attends only to one…Secondly, if one man surpassed another in knowledge and virtue, this would not have been fitting unless these gifts conduced to the benefit of others…Wherefore Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xix, 14): ‘Just men command not by the love of domineering, but by the service of counsel”: and (De Civ. Dei xix, 15): ‘The natural order of things requires this; and thus did God make man.’”

(ST I q.96, a.4)

Madison, because he thinks government a necessary evil, would have us tolerate evil in our rulers.  But when we see the State as something natural, we begin to identify its purpose of making men better.  It is necessary for men to fulfill their nature by becoming more virtuous.  The virtuous ruler will create virtuous subjects.  St. Thomas thinks we can, and must, do better.  The transition may be rocky, but if our society is to turn around and become morally sound, we must not settle for moral degenerates in our leaders.  With Primary Season upon us, especially with a total lack of emphasis on the character of our leaders, this is an important message. 

Facebook Comments Box

Reason, Faith and the Angelic Doctor

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

In his anti-theistic tome, The God Delusion, the champion of the New Atheists Richard Dawkins sets out to expose St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways as “vacuous”.  Unable to grasp any of the subtlety or even the gist of what St. Thomas was trying to argue, He instead reveals that he is out of his element.  What is particularly noteworthy however is that he launches his attack only after admitting his own hesitance to attack such an “eminent” thinker of St. Thomas.  This is one example among many atheists who stop to recognize the towering intellect of the Dumb Ox and are wont to point out that he is one of the greatest thinkers to have ever lived.  He is the pre-eminent Christian philosopher whose unique philosophy makes the Faith intelligible to Christians and non-Christians alike.  The Church has long recognized the value of his thought, even if the members have been guilty of forgetting it at times.  It was, according to Pope Leo XIII, “the chief and special glory of Thomas, one which he has shared with none of the Catholic Doctors, is that the Fathers of Trent [1545-1563] made it part of the order of conclave to lay upon the altar, together with sacred Scripture and the decrees of the supreme Pontiffs, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, whence to seek counsel, reason, and inspiration (Aeterni Patris, 22).  As the Church marks his feast day, it is a good time to revisit why it is important for us to study not just St. Thomas’ theology, but his philosophy as well.

We must first admit that the project of the Enlightenment, judging solely by its fruits, is a complete failure.  It is, at its core, a rejection of St. Thomas and his systematic integration of faith and reason, the foundation upon which medieval society was built.  Enlightenment thought is varied but at its core it takes what is ultimately an exaggerated view of human reason in which reason alone is the source of truth.  This viewpoint, dubbed as rationalism, exalts human reason to the point of setting faith aside. Faith no longer is a source of knowledge and science becomes the only means of certitude.  Errors always come in pairs.  The rejection of a whole field of knowledge in divine revelation leads to an error in over-correction called fideism.  This viewpoint denigrates human reason to the extent that divine revelation becomes the only source of knowledge.  

St. Thomas and the Pursuit of Wisdom

Although not the only Christian philosopher in the history of the Church, St. Thomas was the most successful precisely because of his love for wisdom.  In this way he was the true philosophe.  Wisdom consists of the right ordering of things in relation to man’s end and St. Thomas knew that the path to wisdom comes from both above and below.  Philosophy starts with what is visible and ascends to what is invisible.  Theology, or “faith seeking understanding” starts from above by using divine revelation and puts ordering to all things according to the divinely revealed End, God Himself.  Even if faith is the higher and more certain of the two, resting as it does on the authority of God Who can neither deceive nor be deceived, faith and reason end up in the same place.  One ascends and the other descends, but there can never be any conflict between the two.

What St. Thomas offers us is the most complete school of thought that enables this meeting of the minds to occur.  This school, from which we draw the term Scholasticism, successfully “unites the forces of revelation and reason” and remains “the invincible bulwark of the faith” prompting Pope Leo XIII to command that “carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others” (AP, 29, 31). 

The reason why this connection between Scholasticism and Catholicism must remain intact becomes readily apparent when we examine the role that philosophy plays in theology.  A quick survey of the Church’s battles against the great heresies reveals that there is always a philosophical error attached to each of them.  The Arian heresy was defeated using a metaphysical and anthropological solution that distinguished between nature and person.  The Protestant heresy’s disdain for Scholasticism led to its ready adoption of nominalism and the ultimate rejection of the Sacraments, Sanctifying Grace and the gift of Faith.  What this shows is that while philosophy cannot prove revelation, it can defend it.  But not just philosophy in general, but Scholasticism in particular.  Scholasticism may not be the only means of doing so, but it is the most thorough explanation of the reasonableness of the Church’s teaching.  As St. John Paul II put it, “[A]lthough he made much of the supernatural character of faith, the Angelic Doctor did not overlook the importance of its reasonableness; indeed he was able to plumb the depths and explain the meaning of this reasonableness” (Fides et Ratio, 43).

Nothing but Straw?

Before closing, there is one further point that St. Thomas teaches us.  By all accounts, near the end of his life, St. Thomas had a mystical encounter with Christ that left him completely unmotivated to continue his prolific writing.  When asked by one of his fellow Dominicans why he was no longer writing, he told him “all that I have written is straw.”  Some interpret this to mean that he thought all of his theological and philosophical writings were useless.  But this should not be interpreted as a judgment upon his work, but upon the science of theology as a whole.  Neither philosophy nor theology can ever bring us to the direct vision of God, they are but straw compared to that.  But that doesn’t make them useless, but invaluable when we see “dimly, as in a mirror” (1 Cor 13:12).  Think of a man who lives only in the darkness of night and sees only by the moon.  The moon is but a reflection of the sun, telling the man of the sun, but once day appears the moon is but straw compared to the luminosity of the sun itself.  So too the work of St. Thomas is a bright enough light that draws us to the Sun of Justice.

In closing we must make one last point.  Right thinking always leads to right action.  It was the clarity of thought that made St. Thomas Aquinas act like a saint.  He knew the Truth and it set him free.  Please God, that through his intercession and a thorough study of his teachings, we might likewise follow.

Facebook Comments Box

Aquinas’ Fifth Way and Science

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

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

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

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

The Argument

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

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

  ST I, q.2 a.3

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

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

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

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

Why There Must be a Final Cause

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

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

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

Facebook Comments Box

Relativism, the Supreme Court and Descartes

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

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

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

The Three Words

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

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

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

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

Connecting the Dots

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

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

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

Facebook Comments Box

Praying with Christ

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

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

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

The Person/Nature Distinction

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

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

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

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

Two Dominical Examples

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook Comments Box

On Spiritual Communion

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

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

The Occidental Accident

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

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

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

Communion of Desire

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook Comments Box

Limbo and the Fate of Unbaptized Infants

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

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

Original Sin and Hell

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Means of Salvation and Perfection

“A Possible Theological Opinion”

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

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

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

Facebook Comments Box

Why We Shouldn’t Dare to Hope

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

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

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

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

Hope or Optimism?

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

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

Dare We Hope, p.178

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

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

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

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

Session 6, Ch. III

The Theoretical Possibility of an Empty Hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traditional Roman Missal

Why We Must Get this Right

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

Facebook Comments Box

Augustine and the Culture of Euthanasia

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

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

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

The Two Cities

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

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

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

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

The City of God and the Culture of Euthanasia

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

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

Facebook Comments Box

Praying to the Lord of the Harvest

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

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

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

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

The Ember Days

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

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

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

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

Facebook Comments Box

On the Necessity of Mental Prayer

Prayer, , , ,

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

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

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

The Myth of Technique

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

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

Why it is Necessary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spiritual Canticle 4-6

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

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

Setting Our Expectations

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

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

Facebook Comments Box

The New Eve and the Immaculate Conception

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

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

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

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

The New Eve

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

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

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

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

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


Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 33

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

Typology and the Immaculate Conception

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

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

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

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

Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching
Facebook Comments Box