How to Concretely Spread Traditional Catholicism

 Adapted from Vox Clamantis [Tracy Tucciarone], June 3, 2015 (9:30 p.m.), comment on Michael Levanduski, "Head of Vatican Liturgical Office Says Pope Francis Urged Him to Continue Work o [sic]," Fish Eaters Traditional Catholic Forum, June 3, 2015, http://www.fisheaters.com/forums/index.php?topic=3468202.msg34004505#msg34004505.

1. Establish the Latin Mass at your parish. Consult this very helpful page from Fisheaters.com: "How to Establish the Traditional Mass in your Parish"


2. Speak to friends and family about the importance of traditional Catholicism a much as possible without being creepy or overbearing, of course.

3. Give financial support only to parishes, fraternities, and seminaries that directly support and spread traditional Catholicism.

4. Put advertisements up for the Latin Mass, the Sacraments in the older right, and resources on telephone posts and other public areas, especially in local parishes. Prepare flyers to hand out.

5. Lead RCIA programs and introduce neophytes and catechumens to traditional Catholicism.

6. Bring in orthodox, traditional priests to lead an old-fashioned mission in a parish.

7. Start website and blogs or send friends/family to existing sites.

8. Get academic degrees, write books and articles from the Catholic perspective (or at least incorporating traditional theology or philosophy where relevant), teach, obtain tenure, and introduce traditional Catholicism into academia.

9. Write movie and book reviews from a traditional Catholic perspective.

10. Respond to anti-Catholic bigotry in a winsome manner. Learn how to be an effective apologist by mastering critical thinking abilities, obtaining knowledge, and developing personal character, integrity, and sanctity. For resources on critical thinking and how to interact well, look at these Protestant resources, for example: http://www.str.org/, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/.

11. Write your own movie screenplays, books, and short stories founded in a Catholic worldview. Introduce beautiful art into culture.

12. Make smart, interesting videos for video websites like YouTube or Vimeo. These videos can be excellent vehicles for apologetics not only for traditional Catholicism specifically but the Catholic faith in general, responding to secularists "with class, style, brains, and humor."

13. Pray in public: Rosary, before meals, cross yourself in front of a church, a graveyard, when you hear a siren. Bow your head at Jesus' name.

Memorized Formulas vs. Lived Truth

Blessed are those simple souls, for whom this fundamental truth [of Faith] is not merely a formula committed to memory but a truth of life. Blessed are those who experience true sorrow for their sins.

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Source: Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Love of God and the Cross of Jesus, vol. 2, trans. by Jeanne Marie (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1951), 354.

Internal Semiosis, Resonance, and the Interior Life

Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange compared the interior life to the internal conversation that occurs in a man. If this interior life is natural, the conversation occurs simply with oneself, making oneself the ultimate referent of all experience: "As soon as a man ceases to be outwardly occupied, to talk with his fellow men, as soon as he is alone, even in the noisy streets of a great city, he begins to carry on a conversation with himself [....] If a man is fundamentally egotistical, his intimate conversation with himself is inspired by sensuality or pride." (Three Ages of the Interior Life, trans. M. Timothea Doyle, ch. 2, http://christianperfection.info/tta6.php).

At the moment that a man seeks the good in honesty, the nature of this conversation changes: "He converses with himself, for example, about what is necessary to live becomingly and to support his family. This at times preoccupies him greatly; he feels his weakness and the need of placing his confidence no longer in himself alone, but in God" (ibid.). Even in the state of grace, egoism confuses and mangles this interior conversation, pushing God out as much as possible despite the soul's clearer vision of its inadequacy and dependence on God. In fact, Garrigou-Lagrange suggests that this interior conversation cannot end and implicitly points to man's need for God as well as man's final fulfillment in God, who alone can finally satisfy this interior dialogue: "The soul must converse with someone other than itself. Why? Because it is not its own last end; because its end is the living God, and it cannot rest entirely except in Him" (ibid.).

Modern psychology at its best provides scientific precision to analytical explanations of the interior, psychological processes of the intellect and soul. Often, however, where psychology gets something correct, we find such points already explicated in the writings and experiences of the Saints, at least in nascent or unscientific form. St. Paul famously experienced the interior struggle between what he saw was good and what he hated as evil:

For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do. If then I do that which I will not, I consent to the law, that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do. Now if I do that which I will not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 

I find then a law, that when I have a will to do good, evil is present with me. For I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man: But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members. Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God, by Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with the mind serve the law of God; but with the flesh, the law of sin. (Romans 7:15–25; DR trans.)

And Psalm 19 says, "Who can understand sins? from my secret ones cleanse me, O Lord" (v. 12). These verses posit that there exists a dimension of the broken personality, caught up in sin, in conflict with the conscious striving towards virtue. There is a contrast in Paul between flesh and mind yet almost as if the flesh had a mind and will of its own. Modern psychology would distinguish these dimensions as the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious. The exact nature of these different aspects can lead to serious error in a philosophy of human nature, and it's clear that much of modern psychology has tended towards a mechanistic reductionism of the human psyche, where the unconscious takes on some kind of overwhelming force. Without going to these extremes, it seems reasonable that we often act out of a plurality of motives, some of which we do not discern until we reflect later on our actions with deeper insight. The increase of self-knowledge is not merely quantitative—I know more and more truths about my personality—but also qualitative—I know my personality more deeply than before, its patterns, tendencies, weaknesses, and also very importantly, its strengths, some of which due to my God-given temperament.

Perhaps a semiotic analysis of human psychology would provide some helpful insights for spiritual growth. We know from experience that when a man works on growing in self-knowledge and discernment, the unconscious aspects of his moral actions eventually come to light. We also know from the experience of the Saints that where sinful tendencies reside in these unconscious dimensions, grace and asceticism eventually purify and heal the psyche of these tendencies. Here is a simple refutation of the omnipotence of the unconscious. Transformation in Christ is where the Saint may say truly, "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).

This internal dialogue, often the source of many self-destructive tendencies, especially to despair in various forms, is nothing other than a process of "private semiosis," the internal activity of signs in the human mind as it processes its environment and itself in some unified way. Conversation is speech, and speech consists of signs; human language is nothing other than that form of sign use unique to humans: anthroposemiosis. This semiosis is private insofar as it occurs immanently in the mind, seen in its immediate, raw form only by the individual and God although it may be expressed in a mediated way to others—mediated because only we can experience the fullness of what we experience.

But sign activity, or semiosis, for humans occurs in multiple dimensions since the human alone of all animals can distinguish between signs as such and all other forms of reality, between subject and object, between actual and ideal. Much of the activity that informs our conscious semiosis is subconscious. For example, when we read a novel, we subconsciously take on the role of a reader who understands that we are entering into a fictional world. Did we make the conscious, private semiosic choice to take on this interpretive stance? No (although we could if we so chose). We switch between interpretive modes for all genres of text, and we do something similar when we enter different social settings and engage with different people. Even where there is the conscious awareness of making certain switches, for example, "I must not use vulgarity when I'm around grandma," we might tell ourselves privately, there are other aspects of this switch that we often are not aware of; for example, what is the prior condition that prompts us to tell ourselves that we ought not to use vulgarity around our elders? This prompting is a semiosic process that we might become aware of, just like we might become aware of our breathing at any moment if we so chose to pay attention and knew what to look for, but just like our breathing, these processes often remain on the subconscious level.

Perhaps we can see the distinction between conscious and subconscious precisely in terms of relation, a relation to intentional awareness or the lack thereof. Following a Lacanian line of thinking regarding the unconscious, the unconscious is precisely everything other than the conscious remaining in human experience, encompassing the aspects of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; this residue or overflow occurs because conscious processing of our experience always leaves something to be desired, something missing; language is often insufficient—we find ourselves at a loss for words as the saying goes. Hence analogously, just as God is precisely everything other than created, finite beings (and by extension, the concept of God is precisely a concept consisting of an amalgamation of relations by which we conceive that God is not this, nor that, nor that), so too our unconscious is everything other than consciously filtered experience through our private semiosis.

Hence the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious all converge simultaneously to create the presently processed experience of our environments. Deepening our self-knowledge allows us to identify these different strands and how they are functioning at any given moment. Perhaps this lack of self-knowledge or despair of possibly attaining to it in atheistic psychologies has led to the idea that the unconscious inescapably dominates all our behavior. There is truth to the experience that often we seem to lose control of ourselves, that our emotions seem to be out of our control, our thoughts run on endlessly, often laboriously (even St. Teresa of Avila complained about this on multiple occasions). Much of this lack of control for the average person certainly stems from a lack of self-knowledge and the tools to deal with and integrate the different dimensions of our experience. (We might also postulate that this lack of control may be the result of a sensitive temperament that is more attuned to the multiple effects of one's surrounding and/or the result of a sensitivity that comes from ascetic and mystical purification by which one is keenly aware of the different spirits affecting our behaviors, thoughts, etc.; maybe some combination of the above was the case with St. Teresa, whose almost constant contemplation bombarded her soul with new infusions of grace, overwhelming her and overflowing into the bodily dimension of her being, sometimes painfully.) With self-knowledge and discipline, these different dimension can be identified, organized, and trained even on the natural plane.

But first, we need to understand why the process of the constant bombardment of shifting emotions and internal dialogue occurs. To begin metaphysically, all being contains positive and negative dimensions, positive perfections and negative lacks due to its finite structure and the circumstances that may have vitiated its due development towards its final end. Being is simultaneously communicative and receptive, sharing its proper perfections around it and receiving the perfections of other beings, hopefully in ways complementary to its own teleological needs—e.g. rain is necessary for plant growth, but too much rain may drown the plant. Hence we may say there is complementary communication and non-complementary communication (where complementary is understood in relation to aiding a being's fulfillment of its final end).

Our relation to reality encompasses these perfections in an intentional form, and our semiosis communicates these intentional realities and perfections, which in turn constantly are those elements that bombard us. So much of this communication is occurring all the time that it seems impossible for any individual to process all of it, and we know from neuroscience just how much processing our brain does behind the scenes in order to maintain our practical functionality at any given moment. Within this bombardment is the opportunity for help or hurt. It is a common experience that we find ourselves in pain or ambient anxiety, and it seemingly arises from nowhere. Demonic influence and psychological disorder momentarily set aside for theoretical reasons in this analysis, it may very well be that a steady bombardment of non-complementary being has slowly accumulated within our souls, leading to affective experiences of pain, anxiety, etc. It may also be that this accumulation resonates in a certain way with already present stores of past accumulations of pain, going back even into early childhood or gestation. Psychology has been able to show just how influential these formative years are and how devastating they may be if a child is not given a properly nurturing upbringing.

The old children's rhyme about sticks, stones, and words never hurting us is simply a child's denial of a very painful reality, its attempt to gain control over what feels beyond its control, the overwhelming overflow of communicated being (or perhaps non-being in the sense of moral evil) leading to pain. The rhyme then seeks to contain the pain through the use of words, but this misses the point because the child clearly does not have the experience or psychological maturity or discernment in order to properly face such pain.

As different webs and spirals of semiosis accumulate in the soul by forming qualities in the manner of habits—and here I am being more speculative than before—perhaps it is precisely in this way that the soul informs the body in a secondary manner—the primary manner being that the soul provides the basic constitutive framework of this kind of living animal—, in the manner of how quality is respect to form as quantity is respect to matter. Habits, while being qualities in the soul, clearly have physical effects in the body; neural networks are formed in habits, for example. As the soul is informed by semiosic processes, so too the body responds accordingly. And perhaps the movement is reciprocal: as the body is affected by external forces beyond the soul's control, the soul is affected, or at least its full and proper expression through the body. Hence, physical and mental disabilities that impede the proper development and expression of normative human intellectual activity.

Regardless of how the above process works, the accumulations of semiotic webs within the soul, both conscious and unconscious, then lead to qualities that affect bodily development and render certain patterns of behavior easier, swifter, and accompanied by a certain spiritual and bodily delight. The quality of a soul informed by a habit and its subsequent informing of the body renders a person apt for the actualization of these habits, creating what we might call a "resonance."

Just as in acoustics, room resonance depends on the wall matter, sound, and location all interacting simultaneously to create a booming effect, or just as pitch resonances may create sympathetic vibrations when certain conditions are met, when certain semiosic processes converge in a human informed with this habitual quality, a resonance may occur, rendering the actualization of the habit immediate, facile, and delightful, perhaps even overwhelming in a certain sense.

Thus the pain of a person trapped in vice—the convergence of these semiosic processes is nothing other than what is called a temptation. At the moment of this convergence, the communication of intentional non-complementary being creates a certain resonance, striving to activate the soul, whose vicious quality renders it apt for reacting in this vicious way. Thus the psychological experience of the temptation may feel overwhelming.

Similarly, for a person formed in a virtuous habit, when the proper semiosic conditions converge, the virtue is activated, the morally good action executed with delight, sometimes with a deep relish at having accomplished the good, even simple goods.

And just as conditions may create resonance based on the qualitative predisposition of a soul formed in this habit, so too opposite conditions may resonate very poorly if at all in people with the opposite qualities respectively. Hence what used to be a temptation to a soul now is hardly a blip in its habitual, qualitative orientation towards the good; likewise, a stimulus to good may be experienced for a soul trapped in sin as painful, dissonant, and hardly moving. The semiosic communication is jarring with the quality of the soul; the being that is being communicated is not converging properly with the soul informed or disformed by these qualities. We see analogous clashes in the realm of physical organisms all the time, where external conditions and the subjective constitution of an organism or seed do not converge to lead to the flourishing of the organism.

But lest this process seem to be another form of omnipotence, shifting from the unconscious to these semiosic processes, it must be remembered that conscious semiosis in the human is the discursive reason, guiding and directing the will, creating the conditions for freedom. Clearly the freedom of a soul trapped in sin is encumbered but can never be totally destroyed without destroying discursive reason itself. Hence these semiosic processes are both the condition for freedom as well as the possibility for either its hindrance or development, just as water is a necessary condition for the growth of plant life, but too little, too much, or contaminated water will kill the plant. The will must still choose, and the will can direct the intentionality of these semiosic processes, guiding them in certain limited ways, depending on the various conditions, both external and internal. Qualities are supposed to aid the soul in the proper guidance of these processes, in the proper flourishing of the rational aspect of human nature.

Grace enters. We say that grace perfects nature. Grace is a communication in the divine life, a participation, or in other words, a relation. This is precisely semiosis on the divine level, entering through an analogous, accidental, created, physical mode into the soul. Without grace, the private semiosis of an individual would begin at conception and crash into oblivion at death. Grace thus creates a relation between the soul and God and creates an elevation of those dimensions that exist in the soul, giving them an orientation to the divine or at least the conditions that make possible the development of this orientation. Hence the accumulated semioses remain, but grace now offers and provides a "defrag" program for the soul. There is certainly an extent to which the soul may do this itself—the active purifications and ascetical stages of the spiritual life constitute this extent. But the end for which God has made man goes beyond man's natural, immanent capacities, and besides which, the wounds of sin that remain render the accumulation of harmful semioses sometimes overwhelming, something experienced sometimes as loss of total control, addiction.

The conversation, the private semiosis, may now turn to God. God's semiosis enters into the soul; the Trinity makes its dwelling in the heart. The Logos communicates the fullness of the divinity. The Holy Ghost consumes and transforms. The Father guides the soul lovingly, teaching, listening, aiding, assuring.

We also believe there is a Communion of Saints. Communion involves communication, reception, relation, a sharing, a participation. The semiosis of grace extends not only to the Deity but to those who are linked by grace to God.

These are the helps that the soul needs. Nevertheless, those resonances remain, the resonances of already formed habits. The struggle is arduous, but the soul is assured of divine assistance, a true omnipotence, the omnipotence of God and the shared, participated omnipotence of the Blessed Mother, who obtains for us all that we need. The theological virtues create wellsprings, new qualities in the soul, by which the old resonances may be combatted not only on the natural plane but also the supernatural.

Here it must be remarked one particular difficulty people have in allowing grace to establish a new, supernatural quality. Faith is the virtue by which we attain to God as revealed and revealing Truth. St. John of the Cross interestingly argues that living faith alone is the proximate and proportionate means of union with God. What does this mean semiotically? Simply that the semiosis of faith is experienced psychologically as pure emptiness, darkness, nothing except the will's constant clinging to God despite all other competing strands of semiosis in the psyche.

Here we can see why so many people get lost in secondary matters of faith and, although they intellectually adhere or profess to the matters of faith and their extensions to different aspects of the Church and Christian life, this faith doesn't seem to transform them as it ought. For example, focusing on issues, such as the pro-life movement, personal devotions, political topics, like women priests, sexual morality, marriage, or issues of liturgy, tradition, and doctrine—these are all secondary to faith. Faith primarily attains to God and secondarily applies to all else insofar as it stands in relation to God revealing. Hence faith is meant to unite us perfectly to God and not to these secondary matters. St. John of the Cross insists that a person who places importance on these secondary issues is, despite these issues being related to faith, hindering their union with God through faith. The following quotation focuses only on devotions and the Mass, for example:

These people attribute so much efficacy to methods of carrying out their devotions and prayers [....] They put more trust in these methods than they do in the living prayer [....] For example, they demand that the Mass be said with a certain number of candles, no more nor less; or that it be celebrated at a particular hour, no sooner nor later; or that it be said after a certain day, not before; [...] And regarding other ceremonies in vocal prayers and other devotions, one should not become attached to any ceremonies or modes of prayer other than those Christ taught us." (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 3.43.2, 44.4)

St. John of the Cross says the way to the top of the mountain is: nada, the emptiness of pure faith, a total clinging to God in absolute darkness of intellectual and finite semioses. The divine semiosis of faith stands in absolute difference (but not indifference) to all human semioses, and to inject human semiosis into the divine semiosis of faith is to kill faith. Meditation, as St. John of the Cross teaches, is a heuristic process, temporary, by which the soul is actively weaning itself of previous vicious habits and working towards developing virtuous qualities. Think of St. Teresa of Avila's comparison of meditation to drawing water out of a well with a bucket. Meditation simply frees up the soul to a sufficient degree so that its accumulated semioses may not get in the way of the divine semiosis of faith because it often is the case that our accumulations stifle and mute faith without our even intending it to. Perhaps more precisely we should say our accumulations stifle and mute the expression and development of faith but not faith itself; otherwise, it would be impossible to remain in a state of grace unless we were already perfect! No, God, seeing our weakness, accepts the conscious intention of our will to adhere to the faith, and this is sufficient for faith to remain in the soul. Nevertheless, this state is only the beginning, and it's easy for the individual, so accustomed to created, finite semiosic processes, to confuse the divine semiosis of faith with these other finite processes, which extend to our conceptions of the Mass, of the Pope, of what the Church really should look like, and even what our spiritual life should look like. As long as we cling to human semiosis, we hinder faith.

To repeat: meditation is not a clinging to human semiosis, but an efficient tool to redirect human semiosis to free the soul of its accumulated vicious qualities so that these accumulations don't completely stifle and freeze the flowering of faith in the soul. Meditation should be leading us to become more and more humble and detached from our private conceptions and semiosis and becoming more and more attached to God, conversing with Him, remaining recollected in Him, not ourselves, going out of ourselves as St. John of the Cross would say, forgetting ourselves.

Someday, by God's grace, we shall attain to that state where our private semiosis is directed by the Holy Ghost perfectly, so that although we experience reality with our accumulated past and individuality, it is filtered and subsumed harmoniously and without resistance by the divine semiosis of Christ: "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).

Fr. George Rutler on Shallow Religion

A. Liege on Cafeteria Faith

"If the faith is essentially a union with the Spirit of God Who reveals Himself, the man who exercises private judgment in matters of faith constitutes himself a judge of the truth of salvation on an equal level with the Holy Spirit. If his rejection of any particular point of faith is formal, this is sufficient to taint his entire faith at its very source of light. O man, who are you to judge the secrets that God delivers to thee?"

-A. Liege, O.P.

Paul Ricoeur on the Critique of Religion and the Masters of Suspicion

These masters of suspicion have nurtured the modern context to the point that religion and religious interpretation will [...] have to face the challenge they represent. We are hereafter, as modern religious subjects and believing communities that desire mature faith, required to do business with the iconoclastic panoply of interpretation generated in work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Ricoeur writes:

What we have appropriated to ourselves is first, the critique of religion as a mask, a mask of fear, a mask of domination, a mask of hate. A Marxist critique of ideology, a Nietzschean critique of resentment and a Freudian critique of infantile distress, are hereafter the views through which any kind of mediation of faith must past.

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Source: Paul Ricoeur, "Two Essays by Paul Ricoeur: The Critique of Religion and the Language of Faith," in Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 28, no. 3 (Spring 1973): 209, in Richard R. Topping, Revelation, Scripture and Church: Theological Hermeneutic Thought of James Barr, Paul Ricoeur and Hans Frei (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007), 178.

Repost: Karl Marx on How Human Rights Force Competition

But, if a man, although a Jew, can be emancipated politically and receive civic rights, can he lay claim to the so-called rights of man and receive them? Bauer denies it.

“The question is whether the Jew as such, that is, the Jew who himself admits that he is compelled by his true nature to live permanently in separation from other men, is capable of receiving the universal rights of man and of conceding them to others.” 

“For the Christian world, the idea of the rights of man was only discovered in the last century. It is not innate in men; on the contrary, it is gained only in a struggle against the historical traditions in which hitherto man was brought up. Thus the rights of man are not a gift of nature, not a legacy from past history, but the reward of the struggle against the accident of birth and against the privileges which up to now have been handed down by history from generation to generation. These rights are the result of culture, and only one who has earned and deserved them can possess them.” 

“Can the Jew really take possession of them? As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will separate him from non-Jews. He declares by this separation that the particular nature which makes him a Jew is his true, highest nature, before which human nature has to give way.” 

“Similarly, the Christian as a Christian cannot grant the rights of man.” (p. 19-20)

According to Bauer, man has to sacrifice the “privilege of faith” to be able to receive the universal rights of man. Let us examine, for a moment, the so-called rights of man – to be precise, the rights of man in their authentic form, in the form which they have among those who discovered them, the North Americans and the French. These rights of man are, in part, political rights, rights which can only be exercised in community with others. Their content is participation in the community, and specifically in the political community, in the life of the state. They come within the category of political freedom, the category of civic rights, which, as we have seen, in no way presuppose the incontrovertible and positive abolition of religion – nor, therefore, of Judaism. There remains to be examined the other part of the rights of man – the droits d’homme, insofar as these differ from the droits d’citoyen.

Included among them is freedom of conscience, the right to practice any religion one chooses. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized either as a right of man or as the consequence of a right of man, that of liberty.

Déclaration des droits de l’droits et du citoyen, 1791, Article 10: “No one is to be subjected to annoyance because of his opinions, even religious opinions.” “The freedom of every man to practice the religion of which he is an adherent.” 

Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among the rights of man, Article 7: “The free exercise of religion.” Indeed, in regard to man’s right to express his thoughts and opinions, to hold meetings, and to exercise his religion, it is even stated: “The necessity of proclaiming these rights presupposes either the existence or the recent memory of despotism.” Compare the Constitution of 1795, Section XIV, Article 354. 

Constitution of Pennsylvania, Article 9, § 3: “All men have received from nature the imprescriptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and no one can be legally compelled to follow, establish, or support against his will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can, in any circumstances, intervene in a matter of conscience or control the forces of the soul.” 

Constitution of New Hampshire, Article 5 and 6: “Among these natural rights some are by nature inalienable since nothing can replace them. The rights of conscience are among them.” (Beaumont, op. cit., pp. 213,214)

Incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is to such a degree absent from the concept of the rights of man that, on the contrary, a man’s right to be religious, in any way he chooses, to practise [sic] his own particular religion, is expressly included among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal right of man.

The droits de l’homme, the rights of man, are, as such, distinct from the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen. Who is homme as distinct from citoyen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of civil society called “man,” simply man; why are his rights called the rights of man? How is this fact to be explained? From the relationship between the political state and civil society, from the nature of political emancipation.

Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits de l’homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society – i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community. Let us hear what the most radical Constitution, the Constitution of 1793, has to say:

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.Article 2. “These rights, etc., (the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.”

What constitutes liberty?

Article 6. “Liberty is the power which man has to do everything that does not harm the rights of others,” or, according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791: “Liberty consists in being able to do everything which does not harm others.”

Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why is the Jew, according to Bauer, incapable of acquiring the rights of man?

“As long as he is a Jew, the restricted nature which makes him a Jew is bound to triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with other men, and will separate him from non-Jews.”

But, the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself.

The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to private property.

What constitutes man’s right to private property?

Article 16. (Constitution of 1793): “The right of property is that which every citizen has of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of the fruits of his labor and industry.”

The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion (à son gré), without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it. But, above all, it proclaims the right of man

“of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of his goods and income, of the fruits of his labor and industry.”

There remain the other rights of man: égalité and sûreté.

Equality, used here in its non-political sense, is nothing but the equality of the liberté described above – namely: each man is to the same extent regarded as such a self-sufficient monad. The Constitution of 1795 defines the concept of this equality, in accordance with this significance, as follows:

Article 3 (Constitution of 1795): “Equality consists in the law being the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.”

And security?

Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property.”

Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. It is in this sense that Hegel calls civil society “the state of need and reason.”

The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793) This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community, to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egotistic homme, that the sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not man as citoyen, but man as private individual [bourgeois] who is considered to be the essential and true man.

“The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.” (Declaration of the Rights, etc., of 1791, Article 2) 

“Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights.” (Declaration, etc., of 1793, Article 1)

Hence, even in moments when its enthusiasm still has the freshness of youth and is intensified to an extreme degree by the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be a mere means, whose purpose is the life of civil society. It is true that its revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory. Whereas, for example, security is declared one of the rights of man, violation of the privacy of correspondence is openly declared to be the order of the day. Whereas “unlimited freedom of the press” (Constitution of 1793, Article 122) is guaranteed as a consequence of the right of man to individual liberty, freedom of the press is totally destroyed, because “freedom of the press should not be permitted when it endangers public liberty.” (“Robespierre jeune,” Historie parlementaire de la Révolution française by Buchez and Roux, vol.28, p. 159) That is to say, therefore: The right of man to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only the guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradiction with its aim, with these rights of man. But, practice is merely the exception, theory is the rule. But even if one were to regard revolutionary practice as the correct presentation of the relationship, there would still remain the puzzle of why the relationship is turned upside-down in the minds of the political emancipators and the aim appears as the means, while the means appears as the aim. This optical illusion of their consciousness would still remain a puzzle, although now a psychological, a theoretical puzzle.

The puzzle is easily solved.

Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of the old society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign power, is based. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word – feudalism. The character of the old civil society was directly political – that is to say, the elements of civil life, for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labor, were raised to the level of elements of political life in the form of seigniory, estates, and corporations. In this form, they determined the relation of the individual to the state as a whole – i.e., his political relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from the other components of society. For that organization of national life did not raise property or labor to the level of social elements; on the contrary, it completed their separation from the state as a whole and constituted them as discrete societies within society. Thus, the vital functions and conditions of life of civil society remained, nevertheless, political, although political in the feudal sense – that is to say, they secluded the individual from the state as a whole and they converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as they converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation. As a result of this organization, the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to appear as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people.

The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern, that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community. The political revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life. A person’s distinct activity and distinct situation in life were reduced to a merely individual significance. They no longer constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual, and the political function became the individual’s general function.

But, the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same time the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing off the political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from having even the semblance of a universal content.

Feudal society was resolved into its basic element – man, but man as he really formed its basis – egoistic man.

This man, the member of civil society, is thus the basis, the precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this state in the rights of man.

The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty, however, is rather the recognition of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life.

Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business.

The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals – whose relation with one another on law, just as the relations of men in the system of estates and guilds depended on privilege – is accomplished by one and the same act. Man as a member of civil society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears, however, as the natural man. The “rights of man” appears as “natural rights,” because conscious activity is concentrated on the political act. Egoistic man is the passive result of the dissolved society, a result that is simply found in existence, an object of immediate certainty, therefore a natural object.

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Source: Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," Marxists, 2008/9, accessed October 12, 2014, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/.

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.

Catechetical Pedagogy and Faith

When the Baltimore Catechism is brought up in certain Catholic circles, usually the result is polarizing. There typically is either a nostalgia for supposedly better times (pre-Vatican II) or a knee-jerk rejection of superficial catechetical pedagogy, a style of education also associated with the intense disciplinary practices of American sisters that has left a foul taste in many American Catholics' mouths years later.

If we would try to look at the issue clearly, then we would need to examine and define what we are talking about (this applies, of course, to any topic). We need to look at Faith, the Catechism, and a philosophy of education; finally, how do these associate?

Why has the Church produced catechisms throughout Her history? The catechism serves as a way to understand the Creed, and the Creed's purpose was to solidify and communicate the original experience of Christ that the Apostles had and were commanded to spread. Pure experience must eventually be codified into language, and the gap between language and reality will always leave something wanting. Experience itself does not need explanation although it may stir curiosity. Without guidance solidified through oral and written tradition, the experience will be lost. The Commandments illustrate this point very clearly: without the Commandments, man has no solid lampposts to guide his conscience. Although the Commandments are written on his heart by God even in the natural sphere, the tendency of man wounded by original sin is to silence the conscience. The Commandments then, far from being arbitrary commands, are anchors to help man on the way to genuine happiness.

Similarly, the experience of divine love in the Incarnation must be solidified so that others may anchor themselves onto God through faith. St. Paul tells us that faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10:17). The preacher does not preach pure experience but the codification of this experience through the medium of doctrine. St. Thomas Aquinas explained in theological terms the operation of grace that occurs in the conversion process, which can be summarized as such (Summa Th., 2a2æ.6):

1. The person hears the words of the preacher.
2. The grace of God moves the hearer to accept the words as true.
3. The hearer cooperates with God's grace and accepts the words, making an act of faith.
4. What formerly existed simply as intellectual words signifying an unknown reality that was inaccessible to the hearer now, through the theological virtue of faith, grant the convert direct access to God as supreme Truth. The words thus accepted form channels linking the believer to God.

Faith externalizes in the form of words signifying a reality, which we believe, says Aquinas. That belief, powered by God's grace, is faith internalized.

The words and the reality, however, remain mysterious to us because they touch on God's very nature, which overpowers the grasp of reason. Hence, faith does not give us complete understanding of the realities contained in the Creed but simply access to those realities contained, a sharing in those realities. Faith says, "I believe even if I do not understand, but I believe for the best and most compelling reason: the authority of Truth itself. Perhaps I may begin to understand if God so allows." In fact, at least some understanding must be given in order to preserve the integrity of doctrine. Hence the catechism.

The catechism is an explanation of the Creed, of Sacred Revelation. Because Sacred Revelation transcends the power of reason, reason alone cannot attain to the truths contained therein. Therefore, unlike natural sciences, man cannot come to a true knowledge of the Divine without the aid of the Divine.

How the contents are organized is an editorial decision based on the audience and circumstances. The Catechism of the Council of Trent was written for parish priests in order to help their preaching; hence while being theologically rigorous, it is not overly technical. The Catechism of the Catholic Church was written for bishops; hence while being simple in its depth of coverage, its language is dense and not immediately accessible to regular, lay readers. The Baltimore Catechism was designed for children in school, and in fact we now know that the method of question and answer, call and response was the method used by the earliest Christians in teaching new converts and preparing them for Baptism.

Question and answer in fact form a very important part of human understanding. The Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan drew attention to the point that a question frames and determines the kind of answer one will receive. By changing the question and its frame, one can evoke a different answer even if the question is "essentially" the same in content. Those involved in social science research are showing the truth of Lonergan's point.

Why is question and answer especially important when it comes to doctrine? Because doctrine is a specific answer to a specific question, a question that is innate in the fallen condition of man, and a question that must be guided. No one would ever think to ask, "Who is Jesus Christ?" It presupposes that we know that there is a Jesus Christ to ask about. To ask what the purpose of life is presupposes a notion that there is a purpose at all and that we can know it.

Hence, while a question and answer format is in itself very simple, the frame provokes deep insight into the very nature of Sacred Revelation and reality itself. If we can ask these questions and get these answers, then we know something about God, reality, and ourselves.

What's the problem then? I think the problem is twofold: 1) guilt by association; and 2) the exaggerated separation of externalized and internalized faith.

First, guilt by association. Question and answer is one educational tool that can be combined with others. Just because it was combined with poor methods of teaching that happened to be in vogue in the early-to-mid twentieth century doesn't mean that question and answer itself is a bad thing. But now the Baltimore Catechism is associated with the Puritanical pedagogy of certain religious. But having examined and distinguished what is properly question and answer, it should be clear that one would have to do more work to say that question and answer itself is somehow bad pedagogy for teaching the Faith.

Second, the separation between "objective" and "subjective" faith. I've introduced two very poorly understood words and used them as replacements for "externalized" and "internalized." I think the latter pair are far better and more useful in a discussion of pedagogy. This is for another discussion however.

Everyone recognizes that faith can be lifeless, empty words on the lips of a person who acts just as a nonbeliever would. Real faith, faith that has been appropriated as one's own, internalized, transforms a person even if not immediately and completely. It is a first step towards sanctification. The Pharisees, for all their obedience to the laws and performance of sacrifice, were not justified in the eyes of God, for God desires mercy not sacrifice. Nevertheless, Christ commands His disciples to exceed the Pharisees in their righteousness. What does that mean then?

It means that we ought not to separate faith externalized and faith internalized. While the difference is a useful conceptual schema in theological discussion, in practical, concrete terms the two must be united. When I confess my belief, it is a belief in Christ, in the Trinity, in the Catholic Church. My belief is directed, concrete; my internal act of faith expresses itself externally in concrete directions because it has a concrete direction. The words signifying realities guide my act of faith. Hence a Catholic cannot be "spiritual but not religious." Faith embraces both in an inseparable unity: the spiritual soul of faith requires the religious body of doctrine; without each other there is only a disaster and vagueness that can be led in any direction, swept away by every wind of doctrine as St. Paul warns (Eph. 4:14). I don't just "believe"; I believe IN Christ. I don't just "adore"; I adore GOD.

Here it would be good to address the objection to the use of question and answer in teaching the faith: "The problem is that the faith remains superficial, just memorized answers to questions that mean nothing to the believer."

This objection is problematic on several levels. Let's examine each:

1. The objection implies a Pelagian view of faith, something that the believer can will and do independently of a gift of God. In fact, no matter what method one picks to hand on doctrine, ultimately the grace of God must intervene to breathe life into those words of the Creed.

2. We must distinguish between memorized answers as such and someone who intellectually adheres to doctrine without the grace of faith.

Memorized answers as such are not bad. In fact, many times they are the necessary foundation stones for further understanding. We ponder a fact over and over, examining it this way and that, until one day a deeper insight takes hold of us, and we see the fact from a higher perspective. Suddenly, we understand the fact, the reason why it is the way it is. If we were asked to demonstrate it, we would be able to without hesitation because we now understand what used to be a "brute datum." Now it is a vivid reality. Now we can ask further questions. Now we can lead others to ask questions.

But then where exists the problem? The only possible problem I can see is that such a method does not guarantee that the faith will be appropriated by the individual believer, will not be internalized and made one's own. Perhaps, even more strongly put, the method of teaching doctrine through question and answer discourages the individual from internalizing the Faith. How could this be?

Perhaps from our perspective, the rote and mechanical pedagogical process implies that doctrine is something sterile, brute data to be accepted in the way we memorize algebraic formulas and polyatomic ions.

But actually, doctrine is always such because it is mysterious. Without grace, which absolutely no pedagogical method on earth can somehow secure, doctrine remains sterile, empty words signifying an inaccessible reality. We cannot merit grace, no matter what method we use to teach doctrine, no matter how much we dress it up or try to encourage a person to "make it his own."

In fact, there is only one way to make faith one's own, and it is the way that faith itself dictates: total surrender to Truth.

Hence the objection betrays a subtle placing of the individual above Sacred Revelation. The individual is more important or most important in this interaction. What this practically amounts to is that the individual must fully understand, must have a so-called "informed opinion." In other words, the individual is to judge for himself what is acceptable and what isn't. This placing of the individual's judgment above Truth is one of the principles of Modern thought, which reduces the mystery of religion to a set of ethics and a moral imperative guided by the individual's conscience without regard for a higher authority, such as the Church.

Faith, however, as well as reason both suggest that we only really appropriate truth when we kneel before it in humility, not when we have grasped it so that we can feel empowered to accept or reject it. In fact, truth overpowers us, not vice versa. It overtakes us, shakes us, wakes us from our preconceptions. All facts are useless until their truth grasps us.

But if we do not know doctrine correctly, what are we adhering to? Better then to know doctrine correctly even if one doesn't accept it than to believe wrongly and not realize that one is placing one's faith in a false god.

Faith has a form, but its life is guaranteed not by the pedagogy that we utilize but by the free, uncontrolled, unmerited grace of God. Its form is both the external guideposts of doctrine and the internal assent of the individual, with or without understanding.

The doctrine points us to the reality, which is mysterious, which is overwhelming, which blinds us because of its brightness.

Cafeteria Catholicism/Christianity is appealing because the individual remains in control. Actual faith means an act of surrender to God and hence a giving up of control. Cafeteria Catholicism appeals because the individual understands the "food" of doctrine being placed on the "plate" of one's assent. Actual faith accepts the fact that the food is a given, given to be eaten for our nourishment whether we understand what it is or why it nourishes us or not.

Yes, it would be a pity if a person were forced to memorize doctrines that he had no desire to accept. It would be a pity if a person memorized doctrines but never really cooperated with the grace of faith. It would be a pity if a person was forced to memorize anything and never given a sense of why such a process was important. It would be a pity if a person was made to do these things and punished for what was, to a child, perfectly innocent behavior and carried resentment for the rest of his life.

That being said, these potential problems apply to any pedagogical method because when it comes to faith, there is no method that guarantees cooperation with grace or even its being given. The best that a pedagogy should do would be to prepare the individual to cooperate well, and only on this ground should pedagogy be adapted. It's not question and answer though; it's the standardization of factory thinking that became so prevalent in post-Industrial culture and infected how the Faith is taught. We know now that individuals must be appreciated for their individuality, and education serves the individual rather than the other way around.

But no matter how good or bad the education is, faith is ultimately God's gift. These two principles must be upheld simultaneously and in tension: 1) good education prepares an individual psychologically to accept and cooperate with God's grace, but 2) this grace is unmerited, which means that no method, no education can secure it better than any other in itself, and even being given a so-called good education is a grace that cannot be merited.

Hilaire Belloc on the Mood of Faith vs. Its Act

People said that [G.K. Chesterton] might come in at any time because he showed such a Catholic point of view and so much affection for the Catholic Church. That always seemed to me quite the wrong end of the stick. Acceptation of the Faith is an act, not a mood. Faith is an act of the will and as it seemed to me the whole of his mind was occupied in expressing his liking for and attraction towards a certain mood, not at all towards the acceptation of a certain Institution as defined and representing full reality in the world. There is all the difference between enjoying military ideas ... and becoming a private soldier in a common regiment.

---

Source: Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2014), 253.

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange on the Efficacy of Prayer

[428] Merit, being a right to a reward, is related to divine justice [1]; prayer, on the other hand, is addressed to divine mercy, which often hears and grants it and lifts up the soul without any merit on its part; thus it raises up souls that have fallen into the state of spiritual death. The most wretched man, from the depths of the abyss into which he has fallen, can utter this cry to mercy, which is prayer. The beggar who possesses nothing but his poverty can pray in the very name of his wretchedness, and, if he puts his whole heart into his petition, mercy inclines toward him [2]; the abyss of wretchedness calls to that of mercy. The soul is raised up, and God is glorified. We should recall the conversion of Magdalen; let us also [429] remember the prayer of Daniel for Israel: "Thou hast executed true judgments in all the things that Thou hast brought upon us... for we have sinned and committed iniquity.... Deliver us not up forever, we beseech Thee, for Thy name's sake" (Dan. 3:28f., 34). The psalms are filled with these petitions: "But I am needy and poor; O God, help me. Thou art my helper and my deliverer: O Lord, make no delay" (Ps. 69:6). "Help us, O God, our Savior; and for the glory of Thy name, O Lord, deliver us: and forgive us our sins for Thy name's sake" (Ps. 78:9). "Thou art my helper and my protector: and in Thy word I have greatly hoped.... Uphold me according to Thy word, and I shall live: and let me not be confounded in my expectation" (Ps. 118:114, 116).

Do we believe in the power of prayer? When temptation threatens to make us fall, when light does not shine in us, when the cross is hard to carry, do we have recourse to prayer, as Christ advised us to? Do we not doubt its efficacy, if not in principle at least in practice? Yet we know Christ's promise: "Ask, and it shall be given you" (Matt. 7:7). We know the common teaching of theologians: that true prayer, by which we ask for ourselves with humility, confidence, and perseverance the graces necessary for our salvation, is infallibly efficacious [3]. We know this doctrine, and yet it seems to us at times that we have truly prayed without being heard.

We believe in, or rather we see, the power of a machine, of an army, of money, and of knowledge; but we do not believe strongly enough in the efficacy of prayer. The power of that intellectual force which is knowledge, we see by its results; there is nothing very mysterious about it, for we know whence this power comes and approximately whither it goes. It is acquired by human means and produces effects that remain within human limits. If, on the [430] contrary, prayer is in question, we believe too weakly in it, because we do not know clearly whence it comes and we forget whither it is going. [...]

The sources of rivers are high up; the waters of the heavens and the fountain of the snows feed their streams. A river is first a torrent which descends from the mountains before irrigating the valley and casting itself into the sea. This is a figure of the loftiness of the source of the efficacy of prayer.

At times we seem to believe that prayer is a force which should have its first principle in ourselves, one by which we would try to bend the will of God by persuasion. Immediately our thought encounters the following difficulty, often formulated by unbelievers, in particular by the deists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: namley, no one can move, no one can bend the will of God. God is indeed Goodness which asks only to give itself, Mercy ever ready to come to the help of him who suffers. But God is also perfectly immutable Being. The divine will is from all eternity as immovable as it is merciful. No one can boast of having enlightened God, of having made Him change His will: "I am the Lord, and I change not" (Mal. 3:6). By the decrees of Providence, the order of things and of events is strongly and gently established from all eternity [4]. Must we conclude from this, with fatalism, that prayer can do nothing, that it is too late, that whether we pray or not, what is to happen will happen?

The words of Holy Scripture remain, and the interior life must ever penetrate them more deeply: "Ask, and it shall be given you: [431] seek, and you shall find: knock, and it shall be opened to you" (Matt. 7:7; Luke 11:9; Mark 11:24).

Prayer is not, in fact, a force having its first principle in us; it is not an effort of the human soul, trying to do violence to God in order to make Him change His providential dispositions. Such a manner of speaking, which is used occasionally, is a metaphorical, human way of expressing oneself. In reality, the will of God is absolutely immutable, but this superior immutability is precisely the source of the infallible efficacy of prayer.

Fundamentally it is very simple in spite of the mystery of grace involved in it. We have here a combination of the clear and the obscure that is most captivating and beautiful. First of all, we shall consider what is clear: true prayer is infallibly efficacious because God, who cannot contradict Himself, has decreed that it should be [5]. This is what the contemplation of the saints examines profoundly.

A God who would not have willed and foreseen from all eternity the prayers that we address to Him, is a conception as puerile as that of a God who would change His plans, bowing before our will.

Not only all that happens has been foreseen and willed (or at least permitted) in advance by a providential decree, but the way things happen, the causes which produce events; all is fixed from all eternity by Providence. For material harvests, God prepared the seed, the rain that must help it to germinate, the sun that will ripen the fruits of the earth. Likewise for spiritual harvests, He has prepared spiritual seeds, the divine graces necessary for sanctification and salvation. In all orders, from the lowest to the highest, in view of certain effects God prepares the causes that must produce them.

Prayer is precisely a cause ordained to produce this effect: the obtaining of the gifts of God. All creatures exist only by the gifts of God, but the intellectual creature alone can realize this. Existence, health, physical strength, the light of the intellect, moral [432] energy, success in our enterprises, all is the gift of God; but especially is this true of grace which leads to salutary good, causes it to be accomplished, and gives strength to persevere. Grace and, even more, the Holy Ghost who has been sent to us and who is the source of living water, is the gift par excellence which Christ spoke of to the Samaritan woman: "If thou didst know the gift of God, and who He is that saith to thee: Give Me to drink; thou perhaps wouldst have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.... Whosever drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but he that shall drink of the water that I will give him shall not thirst forever. But the water that I will give him shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting" (John 4:10, 13 f.).

The intellectual creature alone is able to realize that it can live naturally and supernaturally only by the gift of God. Must we, then, be astonished that divine Providence has willed that man should ask for alms, since he can understand that he lives only on alms?

Here, as elsewhere, God wills first of all the final effect; then He ordains the means or the causes which must produce it. After having decided to give, He decides that we shall pray in order to receive, as a father, who has resolved in advance to bestow a pleasure on his children, purposes to make them ask for it. The gift of God is a result; prayer is the cause ordained to obtain it. St. Gregory the Great says: "Men ought by prayer to dispose themselves to receive what Almighty God from eternity has decided to give them" (Dialogues, Bk. I, chap. 8. This passage is quoted by St. Thomas in IIa IIae, q. 83, a. 2). Thus Christ, wishing to convert the Samaritan woman, led her to pray by saying to her: "If thou didst know the gift of God!" In the same way, He granted Magdalen a strong and gentle actual grace which inclined her to repentance and to prayer. He acted in the same manner toward Zacheus and the good thief. It is, therefore, as necessary to pray in order to obtain the help of God, which we need to do good and to persevere in it, as it is necessary to sow seed in order to have wheat. To those who say that what was to happen would happen, whether they prayed or not, the answer must be made that such a statement is as foolish as to maintain that whether we sowed seed or not, once the summer came, we would have wheat. Providence affects not only the results, but the means to be [433] employed, and in addition it differs form fatalism in that it safeguards human liberty by a grace as gentle as it is efficacious, fortiter et suaviter. Without a doubt, an actual grace is necessary in order to pray; but this grace is offered to all, and only those who refuse it are deprived of it [6].

Therefore prayer is necessary to obtain the help of God, as seed is necessary for the harvest. Even more, though the best seed, for lack of favorable exterior conditions, can produce nothing, though thousands of seed are lost, true, humble, trusting prayer, by which we ask for ourselves what is necessary for salvation, is never lost. It is heard in this sense, that it obtains for us the grace to continue praying.

The efficacy of prayer well made is infallibly assured by Christ: "Ask, and it shall be given you: seek and you shall find: knock, and it shall be opened to you.... And which of you, if he ask his father bread, will he give him a stone? Or a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? ... If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father from heaven give the good Spirit to them that ask Him?" (Luke 11:9–13). To the apostles He also says: "Amen, amen I say to you: if you ask the Father anything in my name, He will give it to you. Hitherto you have not asked anything in My name" (John 16:23 f.). Prayerful souls ought more than all [434] others to live by this doctrine, which is elementary for every Christian; by living it, one discovers its depths.

Let us, therefore, have confidence in the efficacy of prayer. It is not [...] a human force which has its first principle in us; the source of its efficacy is in God and in the infinite merits of Christ. It descends from an eternal decree of love, it reascends to divine mercy. A fountain of water rises only if the water descends form an equal height. Likewise when we pray, it is not a question of persuading God, of inclining Him to change His providential dispositions; rather we have only to lift our will to the height of His in order to will with Him in time what He has decided from all eternity to grant us. Far from tending to bring the Most High down toward us, "prayer is a lifting up of the soul toward God," as the fathers say. When we pray and are heard, it seems to us that the will of God inclines toward us; on the contrary, it is ours which rises; we begin to will in time what God willed for us from all eternity.

Hence, far from being opposed to the divine governance, prayer cooperates in it. We are two who will instead of one. And when, for example, we have prayed much in order to obtain a conversion and have been heard, we can say that it is certainly God who converted this soul, but who deigned to associate us with Him and from all eternity had decided to make us pray that this great grace might be obtained.

Thus we cooperate in our salvation by asking for ourselves the graces necessary to attain it; among these graces, some, such as that of final perseverance, cannot be merited, but are obtained by humble, trusting, and persevering prayer. Likewise, efficacious grace, which preserves us form mortal sin and keeps us in the state of grace, is not merited; otherwise we would merit the very principle of merit (the continued state of grace); but it can be obtained by prayer. Moreover, the actual and efficacious grace of loving contemplation, although, properly speaking, not merited de condigno, is obtained by prayer: "Wherefore I wished, and understanding was given me: and I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came upon me" (Wis. 7:7).

[435] Even when we are trying to obtain the grace of conversion for another, who perhaps resists it, the greater the number of persons who pray and the more each one perseveres in prayer, the more hope there is of obtaining this grace of conversion. Prayer thus greatly cooperates in the divine governance.

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Footnotes:

1. Merit de condigno is based on justice; merit de congruo, on the rights of friendship.

2. N.B. The context clearly shows that Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange doesn't mean material poverty but rather spiritual poverty; hence he also uses the word "wretchedness." He further repeats the common theological teaching that prayer well made infallibly obtains, not material wealth, but the grace necessary for salvation.

3. Cf. St. Thomas, IIa IIae, q. 83, a. 15 ad 2um: "Four conditions are laid down: namely, to ask (1) for ourselves (2) things necessary for salvation (3) piously, (4) perseveringly; when all these four concur, we always obtain what we ask for." And likewise of the sinner's prayer, he says (ibid., a. 16): "God hears the sinner's prayer if it proceeds from a good natural desire, not out of justice, because the sinner does not merit to be heard, but out of pure mercy, provided, however, he fulfills the four conditions given above, namely, that he beseech for himself things necessary for salvation, piously, and perseveringly."

4. This divine immutability is often affirmed, and in a beautiful manner, in Holy Scripture: "God is not a man...that He should be changed" (Num. 23:19). "The heavens are the works of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou remainest: and all of them shall grow old like a garment, and as a vesture Thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed. But Thou art always the selfsame, and Thy years shall not fail" (Ps. 101:26–28). "Every best gift, and every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration" (Jas. 1:17).

5. Cf. St. Thomas, IIa IIae, q. 83, a. 2: "Divine providence disposes not only what effects shall take place, but also from what causes and in what order these effects shall proceed. Now, among other causes, human acts are the causes of certain effects. Wherefore it must be that men do certain actions, not that thereby they may change the divine disposition, but that by those actions they may achieve certain effects according to the order of the divine disposition: and the same is to be said of natural causes. And so it is with regard to prayer. For we pray, not that we may change the divine disposition, but that we may impetrate that which God has disposed to be fulfilled by our prayers."

6. To every adult, though he may be a great sinner, is offered the efficacious grace to pray. How? Every man receives from time to time the actual grace which renders prayer really possible for him. In this sufficient grace is offered efficacious help, as fruit in the flower. But if a man resists this grace, called sufficient grace, he merits to be deprived of efficacious grace, which would make him pray effectively. [...]

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Source: Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life, trans. by M. Timothea Doyle (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1989), 428–435.

Memo: Implications of Post-Industrial Age on Catholic Faith Formation

The following are reflections to be pursued perhaps at another time.

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How has/does the industrial and post-industrial age influence the formation of the Catholic faith?

If school education is primarily based on mass-production, industrial flattening, enforcing obedience through fear, and diminishing initiative and experimentation, let's substitute the following:

1. School = Church
2. Principal = Pope
3. Teachers = Bishops/priests
4. Good grades = Following precepts
5. Tests = Judgment
6. Failure = Excommunication & hell
7. Lessons = Dogma/doctrine
8. Classes = Sunday Mass

Consider, then, viewing dissidence less as a sign of disobedience and more as the natural fruit of resistance to a religion filtered by a culture that no longer applies. My meaning must be very clear here:

It is not religion in itself but as it has been inculcated in an industrial/post-industrial culture.

Questioning the purpose of the multiple-choice test and its fruitfulness for today's economy and culture is analogous to questioning the receptivity of the average man to Church teaching in relation to common living.

The A+ student is the student who can memorize answers the best, not the one who experiments and finds out why the answer is the way it is. But there is a cognitive dissonance in today's cultural mindset: uniformity contrasted with individual initiative.

Even the cultural revolution of the '60s didn't change how schooling was done, how the economy was run. Clearly it affected how parishes were run, how the liturgy was celebrated. Is it possible that Catholicism today is unconsciously viewed with the same lens through which the rest of the post-industrial economy is viewed? Is it possible that reluctance to submit to authority may be partially fueled by the perception of a religious culture that inculcates fear and squashes curiosity?

Finally, what are the implications for the formation of the faith in such circumstances? What are the implications for an educational institution to call itself "Catholic"?

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This question touches upon the nature of the relation between faith and reason itself. Faith accepts God's revelation as a gift, a given; one cannot "experiment" one's way to it. The very nature of reason is dialectical and experimental; reason likes to dig into the mud of reality to discover its nature.

But people forget that reason is the interaction of the mind with being itself, which gives itself. Reason experiments with givens, the fundamental given being being itself. Being is given to reason to examine. Revelation is given to faith to accept, but reason can take revelation and examine it and draw proper conclusions.

Here it is absolutely necessary for a proper guide and custodian of revelation to keep reason from erring. St. Thomas Aquinas noted at the beginning of his Summa Theologiæ that revelation was necessary to make the truth known to man, who otherwise could have come to a knowledge of it only slowly, through much argumentation, and with the admixture of many errors.

Revelation and faith pick up where reason leaves off and make accessible that Being that transcends the created being that is within the normal purview of reason. This transcendence of faith causes darkness in reason, an obscurity because of the object accepted, God Himself.

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Our culture, then, seems stuck in a schizophrenia between: 1) scientific reductionism and industrial reasoning; 2) independent initiative and experimentation that often violates the very nature of the industrial mindset. Yet both poles feed each other—experimentation is tainted by the reductionistic worldview and limits the scope of results and their interpretation. Experimentation is ultimately not free to follow reason where reason ought to lead anyway.

Givenness also requires an attitude of receptivity, and receptivity to givens leads most directly to gratitude. These are attitudes that are often lacking in an industrial/post-industrial/reductionistic society as well as a society that elevates the individual.

The "connection economy" or emphasis on the relative and on what connects us to each other may be a possible aid in relating faith organically to basic social living and learning: liberal learning through a dedication to being or what is. A dedication to being leads inevitably to truth, which is liberating, and all being relates to all being; relation is fundamental to being itself.

Faith formation and Catholic schools, then—those that uphold cura personalis—must embrace the twofold task of 1) fostering the independent and strong use of reason and 2) relating reason within a coherent understanding of reason's place in created being and hence revelation and faith's role in reasonable and free living. But relating reason back to this coherent understanding must be guided by an authority, which is the Magisterium.

Prayer Is Always Efficacious

That God loves us is certain; that we have contact with Him by faith is a certain truth; but supernatural penetration in God can be effected without leaving us any light, any feeling, any experience whatever of the riches that we have drawn from it.

Nevertheless, the commerce of friendship with God by faith enriches us surely. God is Love, communicating Himself eternally. Just as one cannot plunge his bare hands into water without getting them wet, or into a fire without burning them, likewise one cannot have contact with God by faith without receiving from His infinite riches. The poor sick woman who tried to reach Jesus through the dense crowd, in the streets of Capharnaum, said within herself, "If I can touch but the hem of His garment, I shall be cured." She finally succeeds and, with a touch that thrills her Master, she draws from Him the healing cure (Mark 5:25-34). Every contact with God by faith is likewise efficacious. Independently of the particular graces that it might ask and obtain, it takes from God an increase of supernatural life, a deepening of charity. Love seeks in mental prayer a sustenance, a development, and the perfect union that will satisfy all its desires.

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Source: Fr. Marie-Eugène, I Want to See God, trans. by M. Verda Clare (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1953), 59-60.

Notes on Fr. Thomas Joseph White's "Sociology as Theology"

Original article: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/06/sociology-as-theology

Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age seeks to explore the evolutionary roots of human religious behavior. It examines particularly Israel, Greece, China, and India. It ends with the "Axial Age" (~ 200 years before Christ), the moment "in history when human thought attained a genuinely universal character and a profound ethical maturity."

Two tendencies in modern times: Enlightenment thought and liberal Protestantism (a response to the Enlightenment; hereafter LP). LP sought to explain religion with a "bottom-up" approach, a sociological perspective that grounded religion in human nature itself, instilling ethical attitudes. This is a form of Christian humanism. In modernity, two other deeply-rooted worldviews have emerged: evolutionary atheism and postmodern pluralism.

Animals have adapted to allow better ways to survive. Language -> leisure -> culture -> philosophy, ritual, art, etc. Within culture, we tell stories, narratives of the history of the cosmos.

A problem with Bellah's work is that he doesn't address the deep metaphysical questions that have arisen in human consciousness that demand an answer. His evolutionary hypothesis, while given much food for thought, doesn't explain how we have spiritual qualities and concepts, such as justice.

Fr. White moves over to the topic of pluralism in Bellah's thought—what are we to make of many religions? Bellah rejects the idea that there is "one true religion." But he also rejects the Enlightenment's attempt to color history as the history of progress, from early myth to modern "reason." Rather, Bellah insists that the Axial Age gave rise to "a diversity of cultures in different, nonreducible ways." Religion and ritual have enduring importance and are not simply to be replaced by scientific thought.

Bellah, in this way, embraces what certain postmodern thinkers have begun to recognize: religions are different, and they must be treated as such and respected and studied for what each is and is not. From these religions, a framework emerged that allowed for the development of critical analysis. Each religion and tradition has its own narrative and norms that are irreducible to a single essence. So contrary to modern attempts to point out that all religions are basically the same, Bellah shows through rigorous history and cultural studies that "the universality of the Axial Age cannot be separated from the particularity of its religious embodiments." Bellah is "weary of a cheap religious syncretism that ignores the real differences of belief and practice among the ancient religions." Each religion partially converges but is also partially incompatible with the others in their proffered visions of reality.

But, Fr. White presses, does man seek the absolute? And why should LP ignore metaphysics? But the problem of religion without revelation is that "it's not rational."

But the plurality of religious traditions suggests that "by our own powers we cannot finally resolve all the questions." So can we ask: "What if God has revealed himself to humanity?" The revelation isn't the enemy of reason but its intelligent light and answer, the unity that we have always sought.

Our religiosity then is a "sign of our latent desire for the truth about God, but it is also a sign of our confusion and fallenness." Religion without grace is obscure and dangerous. The life of grace is distinct from fallen humanity's religiosity, even at its best.

True religion is neither bottom-up nor top-down entirely: it's (here it comes...) BOTH-AND. The balance was perfected and performed in Christ, the God-man. Christ heals, purifies, and elevates all attempts at religiosity by grace. Christ, the Alpha and Omega, "fulfills and perfects our native religiosity."

Distinction: Ethnic Cultures & Faith

The Faith always grows and spreads in a culture and with a culture. One danger is that what properly belongs to the Faith and what properly belongs to the culture may become confused. For example, now it's simply a joke that only the Catholic faith can bring together German, Polish, Italian, Irish, (etc.) people under the same roof. But all these different ethnic groups, despite their apparent Catholicity, have always been famous for their ethnic jingoism. This is also especially apparent in Eastern Europe.

People caught up in the midst of these ethnic rivalries and grudges may not realize just how St. Paul strikingly speaks against them: "There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Christ, when His relatives came asking to see Him and given a space because they were His blood kin, replied, "My mother and my brethren are they who hear the word of God, and do it" (Lk 8:21). A woman among the crowd cried out, "Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the paps that gave thee suck." And Christ responded in a way quite puzzling to those who place blood relations above everything else: "Yea rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it" (Lk 11:28). To His Mother, this was not a rebuke but the highest compliment, for Mary heard and kept the Word of God above all others. It indicated the closest and most permanent relationship: the relationship of grace.

But when Faith develops alongside ethnic culture, these simple admonition may lose their clarity. Then actions against other ethnicities may be taken in the name of the Faith.

It isn't clear what steps must occur for there to be a collective realization that the Faith and the ethnic culture in which the Faith develops are separate principles. In America, perhaps the pluralism and secularism have allowed for this realization to occur at least among those who pay attention to such matters. Perhaps it requires a culture in which multiple ethnicities are accorded equal dignity or at least the attempt is made to do such.

Nevertheless, it remains that in Christ, the only relation that matters is that of grace. There are those in Christ and those who aren't. Hence Christ also warned:

Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And as a man's enemies shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. (Mt 10:34-37)

St. John of the Cross on Loving What You Don't Know

It should be known that the teaching of some about the will's inability to love what the intellect does not first know ought to be understood naturally. Naturally, it is impossible to love without first understanding what is loved, but, supernaturally, God can easily infuse and increase love without the infusion or increase of particular knowledge.

This is the experience of many spiritual persons; they frequently feel they are burning in love of God, with no more particular knowledge than before. They understand little but love a great deal, or understand a great deal but love little. As a matter of fact those spiritual persons whose understanding of God is not very advanced usually make progress according to their wills, while infused faith suffices for their knowledge. By means of this faith God infuses charity in them and augments this charity and its act, which means greater love, although, as we said, their knowledge is not increased. Thus the will can drink love without the intellect again drinking knowledge [....]

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Source: St. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. by Kieran Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), 26.8, 576-577.

Hypocrisy and the Grounds for Belief

Many (you can find examples all over the place if you're paying attention) remark that they will not come back to the Church, that they will leave the Church, etc., if the Church doesn't change its position on this or that issue. This attitude measures the grounds of faith against a political agenda, reducing faith to the natural from the supernatural. It is very similar to attributing to the demonic the works of the Holy Ghost (something Christ called an "unforgivable sin" (Mt 12:31-32; Mk 3:28-29)) because God Himself proposes to us faith as the means of salvation, and we must believe Him on His authority. Hence to reduce faith to anything else is to reject Him and His authority, at least implicitly (i.e. without full awareness of what one is rejecting or doing).

This basic reason of rejecting the faith also is used in relation to the sex-abuse scandal of the Church. It is claimed that because the (priests/bishops of the) Church has committed grievous evils not only in the abuse itself but also in its systematic cover-up, therefore faith is rendered impossible. This twist is interesting because it often mixes psychological reasons under an intellectual-political guise. Usually it is unclear what is impossible to accept—the object of faith, namely, God and all that He has revealed; or faith's corollaries, such as the dogmatic, teaching authority of the Church (usually this one especially and all that it applies to). Either way, faith is measured by man's standards, and not even man as man but man as fallen.

There is a certain incongruity in most peoples' minds between the claim to hold the fullness of God's self-revelation, the "fullness of truth" however it may apply but especially in the area of morality, and the fact that most in the Church do not live in accordance with that revealed fullness. But this was Plato's error, namely, that the cause of moral evil is ignorance and that once we know what is right and how to do it, we will do the right thing.

But what is there left to the intuition that people who claim to have the fullness of moral truth should at least live in a noticeably more morally-upright manner than those around them? I think that the intuition should point us not to the falsity of revelation but to the deep extent of sin's influence on the human condition, an influence far deeper than anyone usually suspects. It is why we are hardly ever really scandalized by the Crucifixion—sin has numbed and hardened our hearts to the point where what should be the most heart-wrenching sight possible in human experience is simply placed as decoration between women's breasts ("crucifix cleavage" is a sacrilege).

And this blindness to the depths of sin is to be expected, especially in first-world living, where daily comfort very conveniently hides the ugliness of the rest of the world and even the evil in our midst—in sports, politics, entertainment, academics, science, religion, etc.

Instead of thinking that this intuition proves the falsity of revelation or the falsity of the Church's claim to the fullness of truth or the nonexistence of moral absolutes or the impossibility of our being able to discover and know those moral principles, this intuition should rather remind us more and more clearly of the ease with which we deceive ourselves on a daily basis from the truth that is right in front of our faces most of the time.

Debate and contradiction on what is moral does not in itself prove that there are no moral absolutes nor that we cannot know them (to prove such should require much more philosophical argumentation than what can be condensed into a slogan supporting relativism). It simply proves that it's difficult for humans to adjudicate the false from the true when left to ourselves. St. Thomas Aquinas made this same point: divine revelation was necessary because without it, a few alone could come to a knowledge of the truth but only through great argument, over a long span of time, and with the admixture of many errors (cf. Summa Theologiæ 1.1.1).

Hypocrisy doesn't prove the falsity of (the object of) belief; it merely proves the falsity of adherence to that belief.