Tag Archives: City of God

Better Off Dead?

Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, , , ,

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

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

Augustine on Suicide

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

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

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

Challenging on Their Terms

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

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

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

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.   

Standing Firm in History

Church and State, Culture, History, , , , , ,

The attendant clatter of a silent statue falling on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was loud enough to be heard throughout the country.  Loud, not just because of the coverage it received in the main stream media, but also because it was joined in chorus by the death knell of one historical vision and the triumphal melody of its replacement.  Although Confederate statues have been toppling over with great regularity, this one is different.  Different because it occurred on the campus of an institution of higher learning, an institution that prides itself on its department of history whose “primary goal is to foster the creation and communication of historical knowledge.” History as it has been understood up until now is, well, history.

We must first admit that there is no such thing as merely communicating historical knowledge.  The essence of history is not found in facts, but in interpretation of specific historical events.  Good historians always allow the data of facts to drive them, but in the end how they view reality itself is always going to color their communication.  Events never occur within a vacuum so that the context itself also matters.  As the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson once quipped, an alien may witness the Battle of Hastings and have more facts than we do, but this knowledge would not be historical because it lacked both an understanding of reality and a context.

The Two Views of History

What are these two views of history that have been grappling for the Western Mind?  What we might call modern history has won out strictly because it is modern.  It is modern because it feeds off of the two great modern ideologies—communism and liberalism.  In the communist view, all of history is marked by a conflict between oppressor and oppressed.  History for liberalism is only subtly different in that it documents the struggle at various stages pitting those who fought against for freedom against the enemies of freedom.  Either way, a reduction occurs in which history is driven by conflict with the bad things always left in the past.  This inevitability of progress assumes everything in the past was backwards and that those who do not see this are evil, ignorant or both.

In this way history parallels the theory of evolution in that there is always progress towards a time of enlightened peace.  Progress will save us.  And like its intellectual counterpart, the evolutionary view of history also suffers under the weight of materialism (even if there is some lingering Deism).  With conflict as the only thread, there is a sit-com-like disconnect of events from each other.  History is simply one episode after another, with very little reference to the previous episode.  Retaining a historical memory really has no value, because, as the great historical student Henry Ford once said, “all history is bunk.  The only history I care about is the history I am making.”

The toppling of Silent Sam gives us a prime example of this viewpoint of history.  The Civil War was a battle between the white oppressors in the South and the Union proxies of the oppressed slaves.  Even the great Karl Marx saw it that way.  Sure there are other things that happened, but it all really comes down to this one thing.  Freedom, of course, won the day and the United States marched on in its messianic mission as the instrument of liberal progress.  Because the statues harken back to those days of un-freedom, they must be literally dumped in the dust bin of history.  Anyone who sets his hand to the handle of the bulldozer and looks back can have no part in progress.  History, like our favorite sit-com, has nothing to do with here and now so why would we need reminders of it?  If you do not understand that then you are, at best, an ignorant fool, or just as likely, a racist xenophobe who wants to put other people in chains.

This view of history has finally eclipsed its previous contender; what one might call the Christian view of history.  Christianity is by definition of historical religion because its Divine Founder “in the fullness of time pitched His tent and dwelt among us.”  Whether you use BC/AD or BCE/CE, the fact still remains that the Incarnation is the center of history.  It is the center of history because it proves once and for all that history does not merely have a direction, but a Director Who regularly makes cameos in His story. History now becomes the field in which the redemption of Creation plays out.

Knowing this, history must always leave room for the supernatural.  There are no accidents.  Where would the world be if St. Joan of Arc was blown off because she merely “heard voices”?  What if St. Pius V hadn’t pleaded with the Queen of Victory at Lepanto?  Or what if Pius VI when imprisoned by Napoleon in France had not prayed while the Emperor mocked him (Napoleon is purported to have said “does he think the weapons will fall form the hands of my soldiers?” which is exactly what happened in Waterloo)?  What if the steady handed, trained assassin had not encountered the hand of God in the chest of John Paul II?

The exemplar of all Christian historians is the great St. Augustine.  His City of God is a synthesis of human history read through the lens of Christian principles.  History for Augustine, and for us as Christians, is not a record of events but the revelation of a divine plan that embraces all ages and peoples.  He also shows that history, in order to be truly history, must be continuous.  There are no episodes or seasons, but a continuing story.  Memory is a key component of identity.  Both liberal democracy and Communism create regimes for forgetting the past.  Fans of the Jason Bourne series know the dangers of forgetting the past—not that you are doomed to repeat it, but that an amnesic people is defenseless and malleable.

What About the Statues?

Through the lens of the Christian notion of history, what place do Confederate Statues have as tokens of history?  In an age in which the conflict theory of history prevails they are very important.  When we think we have moved on, it is easy to think we should sanitize all versions of the past.  When we see history as the revelation of God’s plan of redemption for mankind however we need statues.  Statues, as the name suggests, are not symbols of honor but signs of someone who stood firm.  They may have stood firm for bad things like slavery.  Or they may have stood firm for good things like the courage to defend your homeland.  Or, as in the case of many of the Confederate statues, it was both.  But as tokens of history they teach us to choose carefully those things we are going to stand firm in.  They also teach us through real life examples that our actions, good and evil, endure.  They will not be erased.  Finally, they remind us that even the greatest of men is still flawed.  We wonder how courageous young men like those depicted in the Silent Sam statue could have such a blind spot and hopefully wonder where our own blind spots are.  Finally, it keeps our hubris in check in thinking we can build some messianic kingdom.

Let the statues stand—if for no other reason that they keep history from falling into the dustbin.