The Disconnect Between Catholic Academics and Daily Living

One of my personal complaints against Catholic philosophy and theology for the past 100 years or so has been its increasingly academic, specialized nature and consequently its lack of immediate application to daily Catholic living. Of course, there are many counterexamples to this sentiment, but even in many of those counterexamples, one will find the same specialized, technical handling hindering its consumption by a wider, literate lay audience.

For example, take the notion of the universal call to holiness, promoted officially in Lumen Gentium, ch. 5. Bishop Sheen famously said we have entered the age of the laity. Paul VI and John Paul II promoted the same notion when they advocated repeatedly for evangelization efforts to be taken up by the lay faithful, which is tied up with the universal call to holiness since the soul of the apostolate is sanctity and the end point of evangelization is sanctity. In this ongoing academic discussion, what have we instead witnessed? Decades and decades (if not over a century) of theological disagreements over the exact nature of the development of the spiritual life and its application to apostolic work, all under the heading of spiritual theology. These are necessary debates, to be sure, but what certain, concrete conclusions may be drawn from them and given to the layman for use? Instead, many will find it much easier and more practical to read one of the classic works of spirituality, such as the Introduction to the Devout Life or the Spiritual Combat or a book of meditations by St. Alphonsus. In other words, the theological battles of the 20th century that led to the promotion of this idea that we are in the age of the laity and that the laity have a newfound responsibility to promote the causes of Our Lord through the sanctification of the world have no palpable application for actual laypeople living in the world. They must return to older works by the Saints and Doctors who had no such theological concerns in order to begin to live in a manner that the 20th century theologians have called for. Hence the disconnect between academic, specialized life and concrete lay life. 

Or take another example, the case of aesthetics. Especially in the past few decades, we have heard touted the famous line, "Beauty will save the world." Bishop Barron has been an ardent proponent of this approach to evangelization--we draw people in by beauty. Peter Kreeft has mentioned that he was partly converted by the beauty of older Catholic Churches (never mind that he was also converted by a serious reading of the Church Fathers). Yet when one skims through the academic literature conducted by Catholic philosophers and theologians on aesthetics, one is left scratching his head whether we stand on firm ground by upholding such an approach or what such a pithy phrase even means metaphysically, let alone in its concrete application to a methodology for evangelization. In the conversation between Bp. Barron and the Protestant philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, Craig almost scoffed at the idea that we can merely evangelize through beauty. Craig's experience (and his reference to sociological data to support his experience) is that people leave the faith or question the faith because they perceive it to be intellectually bankrupt. The moral bankruptcy of ecclesiastical figures then "seals the deal" on their leaving the practice of religion. In Craig's estimation (and many of his colleagues who have spent decades in Christian philosophy and evangelization work), people need the assurance and proof that the Christian faith has deep, intellectual anchors, and that these anchors have real application to daily living. While beauty might appeal and draw a person in, that intuitive attraction needs to be fleshed out conceptually if the person is to stay since intuitions, like emotions, are fleeting, but convictions rest on habits of thinking.

Hence in Barron's approach, one can see that a "Catholic" commentary on culture and the arts is interesting and provides much food for thought, it doesn't actually explain why the Catholic faith is true or how the Catholic conception of religious life applies to daily living. A commentary on a movie or a song may serve a springboard for an interesting conversation and may open one's aesthetic appreciations, it is hard to perceive that such an approach would have anything close to the corrective effects that Craig's and other apologists' approach has been, which directly addresses the errors of thinking in modern society and how these errors in turn trickle down into wider culture.

To be fair, the approaches of Barron and Craig are not mutually exclusive, and these two men are approaching their goals based on their very different experiences. It is conceivable that some complementary, third way or tiered method of evangelization that makes use of both approaches may be conceived and developed, but this very need to do so, and the technical precision with which it must be done for philosophical and theological accuracy, affirm my initial contention: the theology of evangelization is fundamentally disconnected from the practice of it.

The Church in fact had encountered this difficulty with Catholic Action. Fervent Catholic men and women leading political causes on behalf of Christ the King ended up being more political than Catholic, and the Church was often pressed into the difficult decision of how to support these movements in the midst of very difficult political maneuvering from the 19th century and on. Reflecting on the role of Catholic Action, perhaps one may say that the multifaceted causes that feed political and social movements are almost impossible to fully analyze especially in the moment, and an apostolic effort to steer or influence those movements, to avoid getting lost in the uncertainty of the present, must remain firmly grounded on the supernatural foundation of prayer, trust in God, and sacrifices. And the fruits of one's efforts may not be seen in one's lifetime since these movements were centuries in the making.

And for a third example, it has often been remarked that Catholic morality has nothing to do with daily life. What this sentiment typically means is something twofold: 1) the Church has nothing to do with how I conduct my private or public life; and 2) the convoluted, casuistic reasoning of theological writings has little application for my daily living since there is no one to translate that reasoning into concrete norms suitable for a lay audience.

Of course, the first half of the sentiment is completely wrong and predicated on the success of post-Enlightenment liberalism + the way of life made possible by industrial, technical, medical advances (=modernity), but the second half is often reflecting a truth. The moral reasoning that upheld Catholic living increasingly not only disagreed with modern moral sentiments, but it also increasingly had nothing to do with how modern moral frameworks conceived and articulated themselves and hence nothing to do with how people went about their daily moral decision-making once those frameworks trickled down into popular culture. These are points far better articulated and discussed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his works for the past 40 years. 

In other words, the arguments of Humanae Vitae literally have nothing to say to the "modern man" (whatever that means). It is inconceivable to a modern person how metaphysical and theological arguments around the nature of the marital act could have conclusions against acts like contraception since the marital act is not even conceived as reserved to marriage, and certainly not with any outdated metaphysical or theological accoutrements.

Pro-life arguments often take a mostly secular line of reasoning and not even from natural law considerations but arguments from the science/biology of conception, the application of a liberal society's conception of human rights and dignity, etc. One can retroactively or anachronistically apply natural law "tailoring" to those argumentative approaches, but for the pro-life movement to have such widespread support, it must fundamentally appeal to modern sentiments: liberalism, science, dignity, rights, etc. These all make the most sense within a Catholic metaphysics, but they cannot be articulated as such by the widespread; otherwise we would lose the support of the Evangelicals and pro-life secularists, and the movement would most likely fall apart. Hence one even has the paradox that abortion is conceivable as a "right" only within a liberal paradigm and yet one argues against that right using the same paradigm that makes it possible. Within a Catholic milieu, there would be no possible way of thinking that one had a "right" to abortion and hence no need to argue against it using the same conceptual framework.

But regardless, moral arguments from the Catholic tradition are stereotypically caricaturized as debates on "how many angels dance on the head of a pin." To summarize: they are useless, impractical, academic, convoluted, etc.

This all of course being a long-winded preface to my next consideration, the morality surrounding the Covid vaccine. To be continued...

The Definition of Faith & Invoking the Dictionary

There exists a strange tendency to use the dictionary as a source of authority for arguments in many topics. Kory Stamper, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, wrote a penetrating blog article on this strange phenomenon whereby she shows that the dictionary's primary if not only function is and always has been to describe how language actually is used at the present moment as well as to catalogue how language has been used and evolved over time (read the article here: http://korystamper.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/the-voice-of-authority-morality-and-dictionaries/). Accepting that no one has a monopoly over language, Stamper argues that not only for sanity's sake but also for the simple fact that a rigoristic prescriptivism has always stood awkwardly and arbitrarily aloof from the rest of language users we must draw true wisdom from deeper reflection and not a "slot machine" usage of the dictionary.

What are the implications for rational dialogue? Primarily, while we can look to a dictionary to understand how a word is being used by the majority of people, we also know that in specialized fields of study, some words must take on specialized meanings that while being related to their quotidian signification will also differ from them. To take one example that comes up very frequently: faith. Atheists will very often wave the dictionary definition of faith in front of apologetic (in the Greek sense) believers so as to stop any possible conversation dead in its tracks because, after all, atheists have SCIENCE, and believers have

firm belief in something for which there is no proof (definition 2b [1], Merriam-Webster)

Hence from the start the discussion introduces a seemingly-insurmountable dichotomy between science/rationality and faith/irrationality. Of course, the attempt to point out to the atheist pseudo-scientist that the entire enterprise of science presupposes cenoscopic knowledge that transcends the scope of science while simultaneously grounding its very possibility, and that this same semiosic dynamic provides the same very psychological-intellectual framework by which the act of faith is made, leads to the response, "Nya, nya, nya, nya, nya-nya! I have science, and you have blind faith!" The irony as many theists have already noticed is that such behavior, closed to the possibility and openness of any dialogue, is reminiscent of three year olds and is itself a manifestation of the blindness that it denounces.

Unfortunately, with these sorts of people, wherever they exist, after the calm, deliberate attempt to show them their practice of invoking the dictionary as a "voice of authority" has failed, the only remaining option is to let them go on their way and to pray for them in sorrow.

Questioning the Our Father

Our Lord gave us the Our Father, the most beautiful and perfect expression of prayer possible in any human language. It begins by addressing God as "Our Father." Can we believe that this expression was arbitrary or ruled by cultural biases? Isn't such a doubt precisely that—a lack of faith in the divinity and hence the transcendence of Christ, the God-Man who unites all mankind and culture in Himself perfectly, transcending every divide, even the divides of sin and death? Is it possible that the Man who came to give us life to the full should stifle the potential growth of the spiritual life of so many because He chose a culturally-relative term rooted in Patriarchy?

Rather, if we take seriously that Jesus is God, that His self-consciousness included the divinity in all of its clarity and comprehension, and if we take seriously that God's perfections are the eminent expression of all transcendental qualities in the created order (or rather that the created order shares in and reflects these qualities that find their perfect source and expression in God's nature), then ultimately the implication of calling God our Father is that paternity finds its perfect expression in God the Father, and all fatherhood is a model of God's Fatherhood (à la Platonic philosophy).

Since the Bible uses maternal expressions, pronouns, and descriptors for God, we must also hold that maternity somehow finds its perfect expression in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity, the giver and the receiver, the male and female, the yin and the yang (to be a bit bold). Fr. Norris Clarke, S.J., explored this dimension of being's self-fecundity: all being is in itself, from another, and towards another (esse in, esse ab, esse ad).

We need to examine and understand seriously the implications of calling God our Father and that God Himself has told us to do so: the implications for the Church as a Bride of Christ, creation as a "palace for the Bride" as St. John of the Cross so beautifully put it, for each individual in relation to God, for the life of the Trinity. God bridges the infinite gap between fallen creation and Himself, and therefore He determines its parameters. Isn't it, then, a lack of faith that makes one question the validity of calling God a Father? It betrays an uncritical commitment to a specific modern, Western ideology that comes, actually and shockingly, at the expense of and to the detriment of faith.

The final reflection is that God is the universal cause who reveals Himself in the particulars of history. We are scandalized at the particularity of the Israelites—so-called chosen by God. We are scandalized by the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. We are scandalized by the origins of the Church and that it is headed on earth by a man who resides in Italy. We are scandalized that God would speak to us in our own language, adopting and purifying our own expressions so as to return them to their true referent in Himself. This is the scandal of particularity through which God has willed to reveal Himself. Shouldn't we accept it out of unquestioning faith?

Distinction: Unworthy vs. Incapable

There is a difference between being unworthy of something and incapable of something. Unworthiness refers to being; incapacity refers to doing or activity. And although activity follows being (function follows form), one has to be careful in how this concept is applied.

For example, we are unworthy of salvation before God because we have sinned. Nevertheless, even if we hadn't sinned, as finite creatures we still could not save ourselves without God's grace because salvation transcends the capacity of finite power; it requires the infinite absolutely. Sin, on the other hand, makes us in a certain sense further incapable of salvation because it makes us unworthy by willfully rejecting the only thing which could save us, namely, God's grace.

Sometimes the Church makes this distinction. For example, She tells us that two persons of the same sex are incapable of marrying each other through the Sacrament of Matrimony. She tells us that women are incapable of ordination, and at one point, She decreed that women were incapable of singing in the choir because it is a liturgical function and hence reserved for men. In none of these instances does the Church decree that such people are unworthy so as to shame them. In a certain sense, all are unworthy of the grace of marriage, priesthood, and contributing to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. But most people take the notion of unworthiness as a stimulus for shame rather than humility. 

This stimulus to shame rather than humility is fueled by a lack of healthy self-integration usually caused by childhood experiences in being raised poorly. Shame is fueled by falsehoods, pain, and hatred. Humility is fueled by truth, consolation, and love. Humility can feel painful, but it is a very different kind of pain than the pain that accompanies shame. The pain of humility is the pain of subduing one's pride, of resisting the allure of falsehood. The pain of shame is utterly destructive and usually leads to a form of overcompensation: either a person acts "nicely" and allows himself to be walked over without asserting healthy boundaries so as to avoid further pain; or the person acts like a jerk, stomping over others to give himself a false sense of power. Both reactions are extremes that try to hide from the simple presence of shame.

Hence when a person is told they "can't" do something, usually due to the above circumstances, this denial is used as a way to shame the person, confusing the notions of unworthiness and incapacity. In the past, others may have said, "You can't do that" so as to shame the person; e.g. "You can't watch TV/be with those people/eat this food/do that activity/etc." This "can't" took other forms as well: "Stop crying/don't be a cry baby/grow up/toughen up/don't talk about that/shut up/etc." These commands express one reality: you "can't" talk about your emotional state and what's really going on.

Rather than being a way to state a simple, humbling truth, "can't" becomes a powerful tool to place people into positions of shameful submission. Instead of something obvious, such as, "You can't fly because you don't have wings" or "You can't touch the stove or else you'll burn yourself real badly," can't takes on the form of unhealthy social dynamics that leads to shame. 

Hence when the Church declares something very simple and pure and profound, such as, "You can't deliberately miss Sunday Mass without committing mortal sin," She isn't trying to shame us to go to Mass but reminding us of a very basic reality: the primacy of God in our lives, and the most obvious expression of that primacy is weekly worship as handed down to us from Christ Himself.

All the commandments and dogmas of the Church are interpreted as shaming mechanisms by people who themselves feel ashamed for whatever reason. They cannot be properly seen as humble statements of divine truth when a person is caught up in such a psychological-spiritual state. But in reality, these commandments and dogmas are lampposts to our happiness and freedom because they guide us to humility, and as Scripture tells us, "God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble" (Jas. 4:6).

Intrinsic Dignity vs. Circumstantial Dignity

Experience tells us that circumstances may either dress a man up with nobility or with degradation. When Christ was scourged and crowned with thorns and then shown to the people, such an act was surely not dignifying but degrading. Nevertheless, we know that even in that circumstance, Christ's intrinsic dignity both as God and man perdured. In fact, reflection on such common experiences of public shame and embarrassment show us that it would be absurd to propose that a person's dignity could be annihilated by circumstances.

Intrinsic dignity is that which remains inherent to a person in spite of circumstances, perceptions, and actions. It is why rape is always wrong, even if as some people crudely suggest a victim was somehow "asking" for it or herself guilty for attracting potential rapists. Even if a woman was inviting such a gravely immoral action, the rape is still wrong because it violates the woman's dignity (among other reasons). It is also why many people argue against capital punishment; they say, "What example are we setting by killing a killer?" I'm not here to comment on the rigor of these arguments but am simply pointing out that they imply and appeal to a notion of intrinsic dignity.

Hence, it is clear that to take the life of someone, or for him to take his own life, would be wrong even if all the circumstances of his life were undignified—poverty, lack of hygiene, the absence of loved ones or any support, depression and other suffering, etc. No number of degraded circumstances could destroy the intrinsic dignity of an individual. These circumstances may make a person's life psychologically unbearable to endure, it may be granted, but the dignity remains.

When a person begs to "die with dignity," they usually, but not always, are pointing more properly to the notion of being perceived as dignified. In other cases, such a request points to that individual's self-perception of dignity: "do I see myself as dignified in these circumstances?" In either case, the person ignores intrinsic dignity. Of course, they have the freedom to do so, but they are ignoring it nonetheless.

What is the implication of intrinsic dignity? Does it mean that a person can take his own life? Most cases of euthanasia appeal to circumstantial dignity—the suffering, the dwindling resources, the age, etc. People who commit suicide often do so, if they leave a suicide note, out of circumstances and not an appeal to their intrinsic dignity.

Actually, intrinsic dignity suggests that despite circumstances a person should persevere in the struggle for self-actualization as a human. This would mean, as far as possible, the cultivation of virtue. Intrinsic dignity implies a firm rock amidst a violent ocean to which they ought to cling.

There is, finally, a striking conclusion from the notion of intrinsic dignity. A common and powerful argument for abortion is that a child should be killed before he or she should be made to suffer growing up in terrible circumstances, where a mother may resent the child for being a reminder of when she was raped, where a father is absent, where poverty and frequent abuse is the norm, where an education is practically impossible, etc. This argument presents abortion as an act of mercy to a child. But if we remember intrinsic dignity, then we can see its absurdity. Take a 5 year old who has already been growing up in such circumstances as described in this argument: should the mother/father/society/etc. be allowed to kill the child to prevent that child from suffering further abuse or neglect? What about a 2 year old? What about a 1 year old? What about a baby who has just been delivered? Should it be killed then? Clearly no one would kill a 5 year old because of such reasoning. But why should age be the only differentiating factor, and if it is, when is the child young enough, and why does that age justify the act?

If we would not kill another person because that would be a violation of their intrinsic dignity, which includes in it the right to live and to self-determination, why is the violation acceptable in the case of an infant still in the womb? The infant is biologically an individual despite its physical dependence on the mother, but even such physical dependence doesn't reduce the intrinsic dignity of an individual being; this is again circumstantial dignity which points to the physical dependence. Calling the embryo a "parasite" is again simply an argument referring to circumstantial dignity.

No, the responsible action is, as always, a respect of individuals and of what is properly theirs, which includes dignity and the right to life and self-determination even if an individual is not in the concrete capable of doing so (appeal to circumstantial dignity). The responsible act, then, is to accept the reality of suffering and moral evil AND respect the right of an infant to live despite the fact that it will grow up in the worst of circumstances.

St. Thomas Aquinas: "Everything is as so much straw..."

When towards the end of his life St. Thomas Aquinas was graced with undoubtedly some of the highest experiences of contemplation, a famous episode occurred while the theologian was celebrating a morning Mass on December 6, 1273. We are not entirely sure what the content of that experience was, whether St. Thomas had a vision or locution (extraordinary graces) or an actual moment of contemplative prayer or perhaps some combination, but we know that after this experience, St. Thomas never finished his famous Summa Theologiæ. When pressed by his assistant and companion, Brother Reginald, why the saint had stopped writing, St. Thomas replied, "I can't go on.... Everything seems as so much straw in comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."

This episode is in fact recorded for us by Br. Reginald himself, passed on to a certain Bartholomew of Capua, and made its way into the canonization process for St. Thomas. I bring attention to it because many people, especially those who in subtle ways dislike St. Thomas, point to this episode as if somehow to lessen the emphasis that Thomists give to their intellectual and spiritual master. They use this episode as if to say, "Look, you can't know everything about God. You can't dissect the work of God into an exact science [like Thomas—they mean to imply; this is, of course, a strawman of Thomas's work as well as Thomists']. God is a mystery, infinitely beyond our capacity to understand [when a person has said something like this, you know that he has never read St. Thomas in any way beyond a cursory glance, if at all]. Thomas never would have wanted to be read in this way. His work wasn't supposed to be followed so closely. It was more like guidelines [when a person says this, they clearly don't know or are deliberately ignoring papal and official Church documents promoting St. Thomas's philosophical and theological work]. Even at the end of his life, he admitted that his work was just straw, useless, etc." You may have encountered not a few people who say something similar to these words.

And they must be responded to very simply with a little fact that most people don't know: when St. Thomas compared his work to straw (remember, he didn't explicitly call it straw, but said, rather, "Everything seems as so much straw..."), he was alluding to what was in the Middle Ages a common term for Scripture's literal sense. 

Recall that the Church has taught that there are four primary senses for Sacred Scripture: the literal (or historical), and the spiritual senses (allegorical, tropological (meaning related to morals), and anagogical (meaning related to eternal things or eschatological). See Br. André Marie, MICM's very good article on the four senses, basing his explanation primarily off of St. Thomas here: http://brotherandre.stblogs.com/2007/12/11/the-four-senses-of-scripture/.

You will see, then, that for St. Thomas, the literal sense—or "straw"—was quite fundamental and nuanced. St. Thomas has a very profound doctrine of the literal sense and how it is foundational for the spiritual senses derived from it. As Fr. Paul Murray, one of the great historical scholars on spirituality of our times, has noted, "So, although Aquinas was compelled, at the end, to acknowledge the radical limitation of his lifetime's work, he was not simply dismissing it all as so much rubbish" (Fr. Paul Murray, "Aquinas at Prayer," Logos 14, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 58, 65 (fn. 80)).

Aquinas was being humble but not dismissive.

Distinction: Beginning of Life vs. Beginning of Human Life vs. Beginning of Human Person

This interviewer confuses three distinct notions: 1) when does "life" start (whatever that means); 2) when does the life of a distinct biological organism start (in this case, a human); 3) when does a human being become a human person.

The first two questions posed as they are in this context makes them biological/scientific questions rather than philosophical ones as the interviewer intended because both questions can be answered very easily by science:

1) to ask when life starts without any further qualification is similar to asking whether the chicken or the egg came first; the sperm and ovum must both be alive for there to be any conception; when conception occurs, a distinct biological organism forms that is alive (this is the beginning of the life of this distinct human);

2) to ask when this biological organism becomes human is simple: by referring to the genetic makeup of the organism, we can tell what species it is; in this case, human.

The third question might be philosophical depending on whether or how a person distinguishes the notion of human being from human person. A lot of the philosophical aspect of the abortion debate circles around these concepts. The political aspects focus more on the utilitarian and concrete consequences of either supporting or preventing abortion.

Of course, for Catholics and many realists, the human being is always a human person because although the notions may be logically distinguishable, they are not so and cannot be so in the concrete. We exercise such "distinguish-ables" all the time: e.g. "tree" doesn't simply exist on its own but exists in concrete manifestations of trees: elm tree, birch tree, apple trees, etc.; there isn't just a "car" but specific models and makes: Honda Civic 2013, Ford Fiesta 2012, Volkswagen Passat 2014, etc.

Dignity is Not an Appendage

We do not build up dignity by our environments, by how we feel, or by our present or possible physical, emotional, or spiritual conditions. Certainly there's something related to dignity when these are present or absent (for example, we say that it would be undignified for someone of high office to act and dress like anyone else), but our dignity must be intrinsic to our very being as humans, as this kind of concrete manifestation and arrangement of being.

To allow for abortion until the day when a child will be born to a loving mother, a good environment, a hopeful future, etc., is to consign most of humanity to death (on the first condition alone, for many mothers seem to be hardly loving). This utopia will never happen. It reveals the inadequacy of such an argument. The argument implies that the intrinsic worth of a being is determined by the external circumstances in which it shall grow. Our dignity inheres and remains in spite of trials and tribulations. Tribulation is the rich soil for heroism and greatness of soul (magnanimity), which all admit is the shining pinnacle of human dignity. But tribulation is also the potential pit of despair, and this result often occurs because of a lack of heroism among those who are already in tribulation as well as a lack of love, which always requires a certain degree of heroism.

Tolerance is Imposition

There cannot be a "non-imposing" worldview. A person may in fact or in the concrete circumstances of his life not bother anyone else with what they do, but this fact may be due simply because of a lack of opportunity to stand up for anything. To demand tolerance is to make an imposition as vigorous as the Christian demand for repentance and conversion. Of course, repentance and conversion cannot be forced but only urged. Christian dogmas imply an ethical standard that has political effects, touching upon issues within medicine, science, and human relations (e.g. marriage). To tell another person that they cannot force their views on others is itself a forcing of a view, namely, the view that we shouldn't force our ideas on others. Thus the internal logic of tolerance is incoherent and self-destructive.

Every worldview implies an ethical standard because every worldview says something about what it means to be a human living on earth. Not every worldview, therefore, is congruent with or complementary to every other worldview. Some are diametrically opposed.

Some may attempt to solve the antithesis between two worldviews through a higher synthesis, but such a synthesis implies the particularity of each worldview, i.e. that each worldview that has been synthesized contained enough elements of particulars and not enough metaphysical principles that gave intellectual coherence to the particulars.

If someone tells you not to shove your ideas on others, you can simply ask and point out, "By telling me not to shove my ideas on others, what are you doing to me now? Shoving your idea on me that others shouldn't shove their ideas on others."

Original Sin: Affected but Not Guilty?

I remember when I was a freshman in college, my roommate asked me why we should all be held guilty for the original sin that Adam and Eve committed. I couldn't give him a good answer because I didn't know. All I could say was that we are affected by that sin but not guilty for it, but I couldn't explain how that works. It seemed (and seems) like we are being punished by God for something we didn't do. The Church holds that newly-born humans are born into Original Sin; hence the necessity of infant Baptism, which removes the stain of that sin and allows the child, if it were to die, to enter heaven.

But when the Church says that we are born into Original Sin, people tend to think this somehow means we are born into a state where we're just like Adam and Eve—having taken the forbidden fruit ourselves. But this isn't exactly what is meant. There are two aspects to the Original Sin: 1) the original, physical, historical act of the will by which Adam and Eve in pride disobeyed God's command not to eat of the forbidden fruit; and 2) the RESULT of that act. We are born into the RESULT of that first act. The Church has also dogmatically taught that Original Sin is transmitted through generation (i.e. biological conception and succession). This suggests that if Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, their children would be born in a state of grace.

But if we didn't commit the original act, why are we punished for it? After thinking about it for a long time, an analogy has helped me to understand it better. It begins by asking, "Have you ever done something that affected other people negatively?" And the answer is of course. All of us have done actions that had either intentional or unintended consequences on others. A classmate's brother died along with about 7 other people because they died in a vehicle accident while someone was driving drunk. Were all 7 people guilty of drunk driving? No, but they suffered the consequences of it.

Were the victims of 9/11 guilty of the terrorists' acts of destruction? No, but they suffered the consequences of those acts.

Does a child who is born with genetic and physical deformities because of his mother's drinking and smoking while the child was forming in the womb bear the responsibility of his mother's addiction? No, but he suffers the consequences of it.

Did the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during World War II declare war on the Americans and agree with the bombings at Pearl Harbor? No, but they suffered the consequences of America's paranoia.

The examples can be multiplied.

Adam and Eve committed an act that has repercussions on the entire human race. The primary effects of that act are: 1) the stain of that Original Sin on our souls; 2) the spiritual darkness of ignorance and disordered desire.

Adam and Eve declared on behalf of the human race by their irresponsibility that Man shall be cut off from God. God has offered us a way to come back to Him that respects our freedom and individuality: either through following our conscience with good will; or 2) through Baptism and appropriating faith ourselves as individuals (1 and 2 are not necessarily at odds with each other, but they are distinct ways of coming to God that the Church has upheld).

Hence even though we are not responsible for the original act committed by Adam and Eve, we are responsible for what we choose to do now that we suffer the consequences.

This is like a victim who either remains in a state of victimization or chooses to overcome that pain by facing it and taking responsibility for his life. God gives us grace to take responsibility for our lives and our pain even if we as individuals didn't cause it to be there in the first place.

Joe Heschmeyer on Mary's Sinlessness during the Presentation

Great, concise apologetic article on how the purification of Mary at the Presentation does not disprove her sinlessness as Protestants attempt to show but rather demonstrates even more strikingly how she participated uniquely in the redemption wrought by Christ.

Shameless Popery: The Feast of the Presentation: a Smoking Gun for Mary's Sinlessness

"Do Atheists Exist?"

An excellent article by Nicholas Frankovich on the "religion" of atheism, the fundamental religious consciousness of man, and the Western philosophical tradition related to God's nature and existence.

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[...] The Sunday Assembly, a “godless congregation” founded in East London last January by standup comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, now boasts affiliates in Brighton, Bristol, Oxford, Canberra, Melbourne, New York, and Portland, Ore. On September 21, it announced a “global missionary tour”: This past fall, interested individuals in 22 cities across the Anglosphere held Sunday Assembly meet-ups. [...]

Half ironically, the founders allow that the Assembly is a church, dedicated to benevolent acts and the search for transcendence. Though they draw the line at “religion,” insisting that it and atheism are mutually exclusive, the openness with which they borrow ecclesial atmospherics and nomenclature suggests that they see their atheist outfit as not entirely secular either. You might call it a third way, an alternative to religion and secularity both, much as the Church of England was historically a “via media” between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Speaking the language of the many who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” the Assembly draws on an increasingly widespread understanding of religion as something like what “the letter” of the law was for Saint Paul — “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). If “religion” remains the inevitable word for a certain moral and philosophical seriousness, however, atheism is, or should be, counted as religious after all. [...]

And so the Sunday Assembly, its rejection of the label “religion” notwithstanding, joins a distinguished parade of institutions demonstrating that religious practice persists as an anthropological fact even where belief in God is muted or absent.

We live in a post-secular age, having run up against the limitations of procedural liberalism, which, while regulating the market on which God and the Devil compete for souls, remains scrupulously disinterested in the outcome. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, an atheist, created a stir twelve years ago when he began to argue that the secular state has an interest in the distinctive contributions that Judaism and Christianity make to the political order. The Italian philosopher Marcello Pera, also an atheist, goes further, proposing a Christian civil religion to replenish the Judeo-Christian matrix from which the West derives the moral values on which liberal democracy depends. [...]

The third part of the Assembly’s motto, “Live better, help often, wonder more,” reflects a value attractive to souls seeking relief from the cool, or chill, as they experience it, of the secular climate in which they live. “Our modern culture is restless at the barriers of the human sphere,” Charles Taylor writes in A Secular Age. “The sense that there is something more presses in.”

Wonder more: No one disputes that atheism is compatible with wonder at the physical universe and how it works. Wonder at how it came to be just so, however, soon leads to wonder at how it came to be at all, a question that atheists typically sidestep. [...]

[T]he atheist seeking to communicate an accurate answer to the question “Why is there not nothing?” will find himself borrowing theologically inflected terminology. Inescapably, he affirms the most fundamental of theological precepts. He agrees with it implicitly. He asserts that he doesn’t. His disagreement is first of all with himself.

A dramatic declaration of atheism is usually an assertion of disbelief in a god no one else believes in either. Judging the shadowy masculine presence at the center of the Hebrew Bible to be a tyrannical father figure and a lie — Richard Dawkins calls him “the most unpleasant character in all fiction” — atheists who cross over into militant antitheism make quite the show of manfully defying the Lord’s authority to command them. They plant their flag in the ground. There they stand, they can do no other.

They lose their footing when they recoil as they do, reflexively, from classical theism as well. They don’t trust it. If it’s related to Him, they’re not interested; they won’t be seduced. They plug their ears to keep from hearing too distinctly the siren song of sweet reason, which they dodge, rather than confront. Either they see plainly or they intuit that God in his aspect as God of the philosophers is ground on which reason offers no apparent means of escape or resistance. We might as well try to refute the multiplication tables. They are what they are.

“I Am That I Am” is the conventional translation of the enigmatic Hebrew expression by which God in the burning bush identifies himself to Moses (Exodus 3:14). In the Greek of the Septuagint, “I am” is egō eimi. Jesus scandalizes his critics when, shifting to the present tense in a context in which you would expect the past tense, he answers them, “Before Abraham ever was, I am” — egō eimi (John 8:58). In first-century Jerusalem, that statement is either blasphemous or a theophany. [...]

The discernment of God as what Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century would term “ipsum esse subsistens” — the “Ground of Being,” in the parlance of Christian mysticism and theology — developed organically over the course of more than a millennium, with no clear moment of birth, although it was mature certainly by the High Middle Ages. Where the approach to God had been anthropological, it was now also philosophical — ontological, to be more precise. [...]

Many people who would never think to participate in the rancor of public antitheism are nonetheless susceptible to the zeitgeist in which atheism flourishes. It’s what they know. Doesn’t it speak well enough for them too? They start from the proposition that God is a person and rule it out as implausible. The argument that God can only be personal because he can’t be less than we are may be cogent in itself, but it needs a lot of unpacking. It has as its premise the God of the philosophers. To begin to make theism intelligible to a modern atheist, you have to bracket the God of the patriarchs and start from the premise.

Atheism is religion for people in a hurry. They’re quick to assume they understand someone who, engrossed in the question of why there isn’t nothing, says a few words to indicate what he sees the question pointing to. They mistake his verbal gesture for an answer that’s intended to close the question or do it justice. To see what he’s trying to get at, they would have to enter into the wonder that the question elicits in him and dwell there for a moment. The closest thing the question has to an answer is the wonder itself. [...]

For their rejection of all “gods” in the familiar sense of the term, Christians in ancient Rome were sometimes accused of being atheists. Now the misunderstanding is turned on its head: Atheists hold the Christian, and indeed any modern theist, to be most glaringly wrong in his understanding that God is a person, like a god of pagan antiquity. Training their sights on the notion of an anthropomorphic god, they excite and distract themselves. God as Being itself barely registers with them. [...]

To ask what [the atheist] means by “nothing” will provoke some eyeball-rolling at first, but the longer you think about it, the more you realize just how stubbornly inscrutable a concept “nothing” is, like “time,” which gave Saint Augustine so much trouble: “I know what time is until you ask me for a definition of it.” [...]

By “nothing,” it turns out, Krauss [an atheist physicist who sought to disprove the ontological argument in his book A Universe from Nothing] meant only the vacuum state, which in quantum theory is a field characterized by the occurrence of fleeting electromagnetic waves. In a withering review, David Albert, a theoretical physicist and philosophy professor at Columbia, dismissed A Universe from Nothing as a fraud and excoriated Krauss for failing to deliver the goods advertised in its title: “Vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields!” [...]

Notice how “nothing” can function for the atheist as “God” does for the theist. Are the two only using different linguistic tokens in parallel efforts to express the same ineffable thought? Their fear and trembling at the prospect of the “eternal nada,” Jones and Evans explain, moves them to cultivate their appreciation for the physical world (Christians call it “Creation”) that tickles our sense organs in the here and now: “Transcendence can be found in a breath of wind on your face or in a mouthful of custard tart,” they write. They pronounce nature “awesome,” a word whose recently acquired colloquial sense still shades into its older, literal sense. Open the door to just that much transcendence, however, and all of it comes rushing in, like a strong wind. Atheists instinctively try to resist it, while those of us who have been blown away by it recommend the experience.

“Wonder more,” the Sunday Assembly urges, and adherents of monotheistic religions echo the advice back to them. No, following wonder to its logical conclusion does not by itself make an atheist suddenly Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. It only means he’s not an atheist. Someone should tell him.

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Source: Nicholas Frankovich, "Do Atheists Exist?," National Review Online, December 28, 2013, accessed December 29, 2013, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367136/do-atheists-exist-nicholas-frankovich/.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Christ's Fitting Example Through Suffering

The sin of man consists in cleaving to bodily things and neglecting spiritual goods. Therefore the Son of God in his human nature fittingly showed by what he did and suffered that men should consider temporal goods or evils as nothing, lest a disordered love for them impede them from being dedicated to spiritual things. Thus Christ chose poor parents, although perfect in virtue, lest anyone glory in mere nobility of flesh and in the wealth of his parents. He led a poor life to teach us to despise riches. He lived without titles or office so as to withdraw men from a disordered desire for these things. He underwent labour, thirst, hunger and bodily afflictions so that men would not be fixed on pleasure and delights and be drawn away from the good of virtue because of the hardships of this life. In the end he underwent death, so that no one would desert the truth because of fear of death. And lest anyone fear a shameful death for the sake of the truth, he chose the most horrible kind of death, that of the cross. Thus it was fitting that the Son of God made man should suffer and by his example provoke men to virtue, so as to verify what Peter said (1 Pet 2:21): "Christ suffered for you, and left an example for you to follow in his steps."

Then, because not only good conduct and avoiding sins is necessary for salvation, but also the knowledge of truth so as to avoid error, it was necessary for the restoration of the human race that the only-begotten Word of God who assumed a human nature should ground people in truth by a sure knowledge of it. Truth taught by men is not so firmly believed, because man can deceive. Only by God can knowledge of the truth be confirmed without any doubt.

So the Son of God made man had to propose the teaching of divine truth to men, showing them that it came from God and not from man. He did this by many miracles. Since he did things that only God can do, such as raising the dead, giving sight to the blind etc., people had to believe that he spoke with God's authority.

Those who were present could see his miracles, but later generations might say they were made up. Therefore Divine Wisdom provided a remedy against this in Christ's state of weakness. For if he were rich, powerful and established in high dignity, it could be thought that his teaching and his miracles were received on account of his favour and human power. So to make the work of divine power apparent, he chose everything that was rejected and low in the world, a poor mother and a poor life, illiterate disciples and messengers, and allowed himself to be rebuked and condemned even to death by the magnates of this world. This made it apparent that his miracles and teaching were not received because of human power, but should be attributed to divine power. Thus in what he did or suffered, human weakness and divine power were joined together at the same time. Thus at his nativity he was wrapped in cloth and put in a manger, but praised by the angels and adored by the Magi led by a star. He was tempted by the devil, but ministered to by angels. He lived without money as a beggar, but raised the dead and gave sight to the blind. He died fixed to the cross and numbered among thieves, but at his death the sun darkened, the earth trembled, stones split, graves opened and the bodies of the dead were raised.

Therefore if anyone considers the great fruit of such beginnings, namely, the conversion of peoples over [nearly the whole] world to Christ, and wants further signs in order to believe, he must be considered harder than a stone, since at Christ's death even stones were shattered. Thus the Apostle says (1 Cor 1:18): "The message of the cross is folly for those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God."

Source: St. Thomas Aquinas, De Rationibus Fidei, trans. by Joseph Kenny, DHS Priory Website, accessed October 30, 2013, http://www.dhspriory.org/thomas/Rationes.htm, chapter 7.