Secularism Destroys True Individuality

It would be hard to offer a better description of secularism than “religious emotion divorced from religious belief.” Nor are we likely to find a more accurate account of the spiritual vanity characteristic of the contemporary world. There is, perhaps, only one serious difference between Dawson’s day and our own. When he wrote, half a century ago, he complained of a secularism that was essentially collective. Democracy, nationalism and socialism are movements larger than the individual. This is their point. Nowadays, the secular mind fixates on the purely personal, shrinking from the social. Its preoccupations are curiously private: the cult of the body, authenticity, sexual license, the New Age in all its mystic vapidity. Secularism has become the numinosity of the narcissist. Postmodern man elevates a monstrance and sees at its center a mirror.

There is an obvious irony here. This self-worship is ignorant of the sources of the self. It prizes a rootless individualism, undifferentiated from place to place. In the name of local truths—my right, my body, my opinion—it banishes localism, replacing it with compulsory cosmopolitanism, the standard self-absorptions of Everyman. In the name of distinctive identity it produces identical “individuals.” Yet it is in the local and regional where a person is formed and made. Dawson, the most urbane of thinkers, was unsettled by this derogation of the provincial and the parochial. He knew that cosmopolitanism—the same citified culture the world over—produced homogenous [sic] [xx] cities, homogenous citizens. Urban man, deracinated and despiritualized, forgot the sources of his moral vitality: family, region, local clay. As with early civilizations, so with late: the closer to the land the better.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xix–xx.

How Relation Is Crucial

How Relation Is Crucial in Human Knowledge, the Sacraments, Signs, and History

In 1970 Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his book Introduction to Christianity,

Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the “individual.” Let us listen once more to St. Augustine: “In God there are no accidents, only substance and relation.”¹ Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.”²

When I first came across this quotation, I was studying Thomistic philosophy at Gonzaga, and although I wasn’t a traditionalist at the time, my first reaction to this quotation was a kind of unreflective outrage. I just felt within me that Ratzinger was saying something philosophically wrong, that some sort of liberal or modernist tendency of his was polluting pure Thomistic natural philosophy, which obviously placed substance as primary and accidents as secondary. Now, a few years later, I must admit that he was right, and his insight contains a key component of the solution to the modernist crisis.

Let me turn to another thinker, quite different than Ratzinger, the Canadian philosopher John Russon, who is well known for his philosophical and historical work on Hegel. Russon states what has become of the modern man:

One of the ideas with which we are most comfortable in our everyday life is the idea that we are self-enclosed, independent beings. We strongly defend our claim to being self-possessed, insisting that “it’s my view, and I have a right to it”, or “that’s mine”, or “I’ll do what I like”. In each case, we identify ourselves as the “I” who is in charge of its own affairs, which means an “I with a unique point of view, with a unique body, and with a unique will to initiate actions. On this view, it is up to each one of us to determine who we are and what we shall do. If this is what we are really like, then tradition has little intrinsic value: if we are in full self-possession, then traditions do not bind us or direct us or generate us, but are at most amusing objects of observation.³

We see contained in this statement a summary of all modern political philosophy, such as is found in Rousseau, and philosophy of human nature. We see in it the inevitable separation between Church and state. All liberalism and modernism, the nominalism of Ockham, the immanence of Luther and the Reformers, the rationalism of Descartes are contained here. Here is the mentality of the “cafeteria Catholic,” who picks and chooses according to his internal whims. Here is the pseudo-spirituality of the New Age as for example in practitioners of The Secret, who judge the value of any pursuit with whether they feel that they are remaining in a state of “high vibration,” which is simply the subjective sense of an absence of stress and the presence of pleasure. Here is the viral popularity of the idea that one can “love Jesus and hate religion,” a notion which excludes the social, traditionally defined aspects of spirituality for the sake of an individual relationship defined by the arbitrary decisions of the individual. This is what happens when man’s real relation to reality is severed.

I believe that on a fundamental level, all of reality can be understood in terms of substances with their accidents and the various kinds of relations that exist on different levels of reality. The reason for this is that reality is a faint reflection of its Creator, and its Creator is a single Divine substance and a Trinity of relations. Hence in creation, it is substance and relation at its root. This needs fleshing out and careful qualification, all of which cannot be done in a short talk, so for today, I want to consider two main points:

1. Changes in the conceptual understanding of relation has had significant impact on the development of Western civilization.

2. The health of a society may be judged by the relations it maintains in its philosophical worldview, in politics, and in religion.

The earliest systematic discussion of relation begins with Aristotle in chapter 7 of his short work the Categories. In this work, Aristotle is seeking to establish the different ways in which reality exists by itself and can be spoken about intelligibly. He’s looking at the largest “categories” of mind-independent reality, the dimensions that cannot be reduced to others. He arrives at his basic distinction between substances and accidents. Substances are individual, existing things. Accidents are properties or characteristics existing in substances, properties such as quantity (having a certain height or weight), quality (being a certain color), location, time, position (seated or standing), etc. One of those categories is relation.

Aristotle defined relation as being towards something else (pros ti). The Latin phrase is ad aliquid, towards something. Relations are that by which something is related to another thing.

Now how are relations related to Sacraments, knowledge, history, etc.? After Aristotle, the idea of relation is covertly imported into theological discussions about the nature of the Sacraments, which are quickly seen to be a kind of symbol or sign. Even in the New Testament, St. Paul speaks of how Baptism and the Eucharist refer not only to the effects they bring about but how they also symbolize certain aspects of Christ’s life. For example, Baptism is a symbol of participating in Christ’s death and resurrection (Rom. 6:3-11). The Eucharist is a symbol of the unity of the Church (1 Cor. 10:17). Marriage is a symbol of the bond between Christ and the Church, His Bride (Eph. 5:22-23).

In other words, the Sacraments are signs. What is the unique nature of a sign? Origen in his commentary on the Letter to the Romans says, “A sign is a visible something that suggests the idea of another invisible thing.”⁴ St. Augustine defines sign in a similar manner in book 2 of De doctrina christiana: “A sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses” (Signum est enim res praeter speciem, quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem uenire).⁵ What we see in this definition of sign is the reality of relation. Without relation, which brings one thing towards another, a sign could never bring us to another thing.

As St. Augustine and many other Church Fathers show, there are multiple relations in a Sacrament: the relation of matter to form, the relation of the sacramental rite to the spiritual effects that it causes, the relation of the sacrament to the church in general. But essential to the notion of Sacrament is that it is a sign of a certain sort. In fact, the importance of defining a Sacrament in terms of the sign led the theologian Pierre Pourrat to state, “[W]henver the definition departed from the idea of sign, it lost something of its precision.”⁶ It is from these theological considerations, along with debates on how God relates to creation and the nature of the Trinity, that the notions of relation and sign were further developed in the medieval era.

I will pass over the various complexities, but suffice it to say, the scholastics quickly realized that Aristotle’s account of relation was inadequate and admitted of numerous exceptions. Aristotle’s definition of relation applied to what the scholastics called “predicamental relation,” a real relation existing between two physical subjects. This tree is similar to that tree. But if the second tree were cut down, the relation would cease because there no longer is a second tree to compare to. However, the scholastics noticed at least two other forms of relations that Aristotle did not account for: relations between two mental entities, such as concepts in the mind, such as in mathematical equations, and relations between one physical entity and a mental entity, such as the knowledge of the value of a coin.

Key insights developed during the 13^th century on the nature of knowledge that form the basis of realism as opposed to future epistemologies based on faulty philosophical views. The immediate object of sensory awareness is the external world. In this process, the human observer enters into multiple relations with his environment. Scholastics realized, however, that the relation between man and his environment in the process of knowledge was one more form of relation that went against Aristotle’s defintion! Nothing on the part of physical reality is modified by our coming to know it, but we change as we come to know reality; hence there is no such thing as the “right side of a column” except relative to someone viewing a column from the right side: the change is in the perceiver, not the column.

14^th century nominalism changes things. Ockham begins a process sometimes called the “progressive ‘mentalization’ of sign.”⁷ Peter of Ailly summarizes this shift by saying that the concept is “the very act itself of knowing the thing.” This move, which flattens the process of human cognition, beginning with pre-conceptual sensation and moving to successive levels of differentiation in perception and then intellection, is precisely what leads to Descartes’ rationalism when the latter claims that “ideas are the only immediate objects of my sensory awareness” (“Sixth Meditation,” n. 6). Ockham rejects the notion that relations exist independently of the mind and without realizing it, thus cuts man off from external reality. On the other hand, Ockham strangely upholds the notion that things can be related to each other independently of the mind, the rejection of which would mean that there could be no such thing as act and potency, causality, or identity:

The intellect does nothing to bring it about that the universe is one, or that a whole is composed [of its parts], or that causes in spatial proximity [to their effects actually] cause [their effects], or that a triangle has three [sides], etc. …any more than [the intellect] brings it about that Socrates is white or that fire is hot or water cold.⁸

It is likely that Ockham’s involvement in the political-religious dispute between John XXII and the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria prevented Ockham from realizing the full implications and almost self-contradictory aspects of his thought. For if relations themselves are merely products of the mind, then man is immediately cut of from reality.

We come now to the second contention of mine, namely, that the health of a society may be judged by the relations that issue from its collective worldview, especially philosophical, political, and religious. The progression from late scholastic nominalism towards the principle of immanence, in which man is the source and measure of all reality, is very straightforward. Due to the severing of man and reality because of the mentalization of the sign and the reduction of relations to mere beings of reason, which are products of the mind, man can no longer be informed by external reality. He now exists on his own. Thus we return to the dawning of modern thought, the core of which is immanentism.

Ratzinger rightly noted the ever increasing emphasis or tyranny of substance in metaphysics. Descartes defined substance as a “thing that exists in such a way that it doesn’t depend on anything else for its existence”⁹ and thus rendered substance as absolutely self-existing, without the need of God. Spinzoa in fact would notice this logical consequence of Descartes’ definition and from it develop his own philosophy of monistic pantheism. Leibniz, describing his own version of substance, called a monad, famously said that they “have no windows,” that is, no relation to external reality. He wrote:

Strictly speaking, one can say that no created substance exerts a metaphysical action or influx on any other thing.¹⁰

And:

There is no way of explaining how a monad can be altered or changed internally by some other creature, since one cannot transpose anything in it, nor can one conceive of any internal motion that can be excited, directed, augmented, or diminished within it, as can be done in composites, where there can be change among the parts. The monads have no windows through which something can enter or leave.¹¹

Not only man, but every substance in reality becomes increasingly isolated and cut off from each other. Every man for himself. The traditional Catholic writer Roger Buck points out that this all leads to what he calls Enlightenment Despair. He cites the poem “Aubade” (pronounced: oh-bawd) by Philip Larkin:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. […]

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

As Buck strikingly puts it, “Here is the work of a man in hell—suffering acutely from the deathly vacuum [that] materialism has generated. May God have mercy on his soul and the souls of all those afflicted by the same terrible dread, ennui and meaninglessness.”¹²

The late Neothomistic philosopher W. Norris Clarke, SJ, said that being naturally enters into relations with other beings because it is the means by which a being shares its “ontological richness” with another, a process necessary for the sustaining of all substances.¹³ Clarke along with a few other philosophers developed the insight based on St. Thomas’s metaphysics that every being in its respective manner simultaneously contains self-perfective and self-communicative dynamics.¹⁴ If it is intrinsically self-communicative, then that being is intrinsically relational; thus esse in is simultaneously and always esse ad aliud, being towards or for another, and being towards implies being from (esse ab alio). Communicativity implies the capacity for receptivity (esse ab) as a complement even if the former is not always actually attained between subjects. Receptivity, then, is a necessary condition, for without it a being could not advance towards its full development. Thus there is a micro-trinity within substance: esse in, which is the substance itself, but also esse ad and esse ab, for every finite substance comes from something else and will be the agent of different causal chains, or at least potentially can be. And the whole arrangement and relation of each substance to each is necessary for the flourishing of all finite being, at least when all is properly ordered according to their natures. Of course, given the fallen state of creation, this doesn’t always attain, but its potential remains rooted in the natures of things, which are both existing in themselves as a unity and existing towards others as a relation.

The recovery of the universality and import of relations not only in abstract metaphysics but in day-to-day relations, in religion, in politics is an essential task for Catholics. We say that man is a microcosm of the universe, but we must also see how man is a microcosm of the Trinity, and when in a state of grace, he actually contains the Trinity and stands in a supernatural relation with the Trinity, a relation that all men are called to by the mercy of God. Virtue, prayer, and the proper formation of the intellect all orient man back into reality and establish him more and more firmly in relation to his end, which perfects him. If civilization is the fruit of the habitual orientation of a society in right relations with God, each other, and each man to himself, then it is the re-establishment of these right relations that will restore civilization.

This leads us to the importance of tradition. Tradition is the means by which each generation is related to the past, to the intellectual and cultural riches of the past, and from this relation to properly orient ourselves to the future. And here also is the importance of Sacred Tradition. We defend Sacred Tradition because it is the only sure means to come into a proper relationship towards God, and by means of which save our souls as St. Ignatius put it at the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises. Maintaining right relations in the present depends on following the sound wisdom and accumulated knowledge of the past, which forms the intellect and guides it to maintain a proper perspective of reality as it enters the future.

Footnotes:

1 St. Augustine, De Trinitate, 5.5.6.

2 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (New York, NY: Herder & Herder, 1970), 132, 137.

3 John Russon, “Hegel and Tradition,” in Hegel and Tradition: Essays in Honour of H. S. Harris, ed. by Michael Baur and John Russon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 3, quoted in John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 658.

4 Origen, In epist. ad Rom., 4.2.

5 St. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 2.1.1.5-7.

6 Pierre Pourrat, Theology of the Sacraments: A Study in Positive Theology (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1910), 36.

7 Stephan Meier-Oeser, “Medieval Semiotics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 28 Jan. 2017.

8 William of Ockham, Ordinatio I, d. 30, q. 1 in Opera Theologica iv, 316-317.

9 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, ed. Jonathan Bennett, http://www.ahshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/descprin.pdf, I.51.

10 Leibniz, Primary Truths (1689), A 6.4:1647/AG 33.

11 Leibniz, Monadology, n. 7, G VI 607: AG 213-214.

12 Roger Buck, Cor Jesu Sacratissimum (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2016), 36.

13 Cf. Norris Clarke, “Person, Being, and St. Thomas,” Communio 19 (Winter 1992), 605.

14 Cf. W. Norris Clarke, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).

Repost: St. Gregory on Envy and the Communicability of the Divine Good

Reposted from: https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/gregory-on-the-envy-and-the-communicability-of-the-divine-good/

But why do we say so much about envy if we do not also suggest how to get rid of it? It is indeed hard for people not to envy someone who has what they want to acquire. Concerning any material good that is acquired, the more it is divided among many owners, the less of it does any single person have. And that is why the mind of the one who wants it suffers so much from spite: one person who has what that one wants has either bought up the whole supply or has made it scarcer. The one, therefore, who wishes to be rid of the plague of spite for good must fall in love with that inheritance that is not used up by the number of coheirs. It is one for all and all for each one. The more abundant it is, the greater the multitude of those who receive it. (Moralia 5.XLVI.86)

Repost: Jonathan Franzen on Techno-Consumerism

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting). [...]

Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors. [...]

My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life. [...]

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie. [...]

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking. [...]

When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer. [...]

Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?

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Source: Jonathan Franzen, "Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts," The New York Times, May 28, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html.

Repost: Thomas Storck on "Sex and the Cartesian Body"

[...] American culture during the 1950s was dominated by a Cartesianism that tended to regard a human being as only a mind and hence to look upon the body as just so much inert matter. As far as sex was concerned, there was a kind of pretense that there was no such thing. TV shows portrayed married couples sleeping in separate beds, for example.

[...] If we can speak of “a woman trapped in a man’s body” or “a man trapped in a woman’s body,” are we not assigning the same value to the flesh that, fifty years ago, we derided as anti-natural and anti-sexual? Some have even been willing to physically or chemically mutilate their bodies if their minds demanded it. This is a return to Descartes with a vengeance!

If we can and should celebrate the fact that God made us bodily creatures, then I do not understand how we can think that a body can be simply a biological mistake, merely because our mental attitudes and desires say it is. Certainly instances exist where a body does not neatly fit into one or the other of the two sexes and no one will want to belittle the anguish that persons can undergo because of what they feel is a mismatch between their bodies and their minds.

Moral theology has long recognized these cases and made provision for them. But it did so by assigning priority to the bodily structure in determining whether someone was a male or a female. To do otherwise is to revert to that Cartesian disvaluing of the body which is one of the perennial temptations of modern American culture.

If the body and the mind seem not to agree, why must we reflexively give preference to what the mind seems to want? A human being is more than his mind or his soul, and God created the human body and its actions as good. [...]

The annals of human behavior contain many examples of psychic abnormalities whose genesis can be impossible to discover and which can manifest themselves in some pretty bizarre desires and actions.

It is simplistic to view a desire expressed by the mind as a fundamental expression of the human personality, merely because one feels it strongly. In light of what we know, as well as what we don’t know, about the workings of the mind we should hesitate to make any absolute pronouncements that result in treating our bodies as so much matter to be manipulated at will. To focus solely on what we think we want and ignore the obvious reality of our bodies is to return to that Cartesian trivializing of the body that the counterculture of the 1960s did well to reject.

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Source: Thomas Storck, "Sex and the Cartesian Body," Ethika Politika website, June 24, 2015, accessed July 1, 2015, https://ethikapolitika.org/2015/06/24/sex-and-the-cartesian-body/.

Modest Dress and "Evil" Beauty

Some liberally minded people object to modest dress because they say modest dress enforces a notion that women's bodies are evil, that the beauty of a woman cannot be anything but temptation, and therefore modesty is degrading to the dignity of women.

And it may be admitted that modest dress may enforce such a notion among some people. But is this possibility a sufficient reason to reject modest dress? No, because the connection is not a necessary one. There is no logical connection between modest dress and the idea that women's bodies are evil. In fact, quite the contrary.

As semiotic beings, we organize and interpret sensation into coherent experience through signs and sign processes proper to our biology. Due to this primacy of sign usage, every subjectivity with which we come into contact is experienced as an object. An object is already an interpretation of a subject. As semiotic beings, we may then differentiate the objective and subjective dimensions of any being presented in experience, understanding that what I experience has its own subjective constitution. In this case, a woman with her dignity.

But a man, as with any animal, experiences the woman firstly as an object to be sorted into three possible categories of fundamental interpretation: 1) an object to be desired; 2) to be avoided; or 3) ignored. Such a categorization isn't evil; this is fundamental to animal experience. To reduce the totality of a woman's subjectivity to my preliminary, animal objectification of her would be evil, but the act by which we categorize any object of experience into 1, 2, or 3 is natural and necessary.

Men who struggle with lust obviously categorize women into the first: an object to be desired. Why? They interpret this object of their experience as possessing desirable features and characteristics, and the object then presents itself with future possibilities of fulfillment in multiple ways: animal, physical, emotional, familial, spiritual, etc. But desirable objects must possess positive goods that are recognized as such in order to be categorized as desirable. Hence, a man who struggles with lust is precisely someone who is stuck on one feature of a woman's positive goodness in relation to himself, namely, his own pleasure-seeking. As we noted above, the reduction of a woman's subjectivity to this simple objectification is precisely the objection to modest dress, but notice that our analysis up until now has had nothing to do with modest dress. The objectification occurs all within a man's psyche.

Where does modest dress enter in? It enters precisely in two ways: 1) women seek to help men overcome this objectification; 2) men seek to admit their weakness.

1) modest dress ought to be a means by which a woman says, "I recognize that you have trouble controlling your desires, that you struggle with objectification. I want to help in the way that I can." We are not responsible for each other's actions; hence a woman cannot be required to help a man work through his own psychological mechanisms. But she can help remotely by not encouraging the man's habits by presenting herself in an overtly sexual manner. In so doing, modest dress represents that a woman recognizes the power of her physical beauty to attract the gaze and attention of another, and, wishing to help the other remain both attracted but not enslaved to solely that dimension of her subjectivity, she wears modest dress as a reminder that she is more than her physical beauty. Her mystique is more than the physical although the physical is certainly part of it.

2) men must be willing to admit their weakness. There is a trend in our culture to object to modest dress on the basis that men should be able to control themselves, and having women wear modest dress implies that men can't control themselves. And yes, that is precisely the problem. Women are not responsible for men's lack of self-control; that is not what is claimed by proposing modest dress as a help. We must stop fooling ourselves into believing that we have self-control; look around and be honest. Most do not exercise self-control. This is a problem, and it leads to problems. But modest dress may help take first steps by not encouraging the man to be stuck at the physical level from the very first moment. If a man doesn't notice and become fixated on the physical beauty of a woman from the first instant, an environment is encouraged in which the man may expand his conception of women beyond the pleasure he derives from physicality.

Modest dress ultimately is objected to because it hampers pure individuality, which is the core of the indifference we exhibit towards each other in the spheres of our lives. Because of this indifference, cooperation is characterized cynically as mutually accepted manipulation. Real cooperation, however, means that we cannot exist as self-sufficient beings, but we must exist always in relation to each other, helping and complementing each other, seeking support from each other. We can do this without having to be responsible for the personal choices we each make as individuals; on the other hand, we don't have to go to the other extreme and leave each other alone in our struggles to achieve moral freedom.

Self-Identified Cafeteria Catholic

There are certain phrases used among Catholics that are very subtly equivocal. Let me identify two for example.

Some Catholics reject the use of Latin because it is a "dead language." Calling a language dead, strictly speaking, refers to the fact that a language is no longer natively learned. Is there anything in such a description that leads to the conclusion that Latin should not be used anywhere, least of all in liturgy? Of course not. But when people call Latin a dead language, they do so not to point out that no one natively learns Latin but that Latin is a useless language, a backward language, an outdated language, and even a harmful language. They rely on the connotations of dead language and assert these connotations as denotation; hence the calling of Latin as a dead language is an ideological move per se. But liturgy should not be determined or changed by ideology but only by consideration of what is truly beneficial to the Church and in light of the Church's living tradition. Therefore, an ideological proposition has no place in rejecting the use of Latin (or even the vernacular), and thus Latin cannot be rejected solely because it is a "dead language."

A second example. Lukewarm Catholics, modern Catholics use the phrase "practicing Catholic," but this phrase is problematic precisely because it is descriptive in an equivocal way. It describes the alleged fact that a certain Catholic does certain practices, and the performance of these practices form a sufficient condition for the identity of "practicing Catholic," the implication being that the individual is an active Catholic and not a lapsed Catholic. But there is a significant problem: being Catholic means more than doing certain practices. Catholic is an identity that one cannot simply give to oneself as one sees fit, but it is an identity conferred by the Church. In other words, Catholic is a juridical identity firstly, an identity that of course presupposes ontological and behavioral bases but nevertheless is juridical. This point could be drawn out by the distinction that some in a state of grace are not Catholic, and not all Catholics are in a state of grace; in other words, to be Catholic requires more than being a child of God renewed by valid Baptism. To be Catholic is not even determined by whether one is confirmed in the Catholic Church or not. The Code of Canon Law shows what is required to be a Catholic:

Those baptized are fully in the communion of the Catholic Church on this earth who are joined with Christ in its visible structure by the bonds of the profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical governance. (Canon 205)

The three conditions are: the profession of the same faith as the Catholic Church; the participation in the Church's sacraments; submission to her governance. Notice that "practice" falls only under the second condition. Going to Church on Sundays is necessary but not sufficient.

If a Catholic self identifies as a so-called "cafeteria Catholic," then that Catholic is not a Catholic according to the Church's standards for two reasons: 1) the acceptance of Church doctrine, practice, and submission to governance is to be wholly accepted by the will, not vitiated by distinct choices of this or that practice or doctrine; 2) there are only two possible variants on the Catholic identity: those in full communion and those not in full communion

Judgment Is the Only Sin

I have heard some people claim that their philosophy is that "judgment is the only sin." They proceed to act as they please and allow others to do likewise so long as the twain shall ne'er harm each other or get in each others' way against their wills.

But what is judgment? The person may reply, "It is to condemn another for their beliefs and their way of life." In other words, it is to say that something that a person is doing or the way a person is—that is wrong. It is to declare something wrong. A judgment in its most simple form is an assertion that something is or ought to be this way. But then to say "judgment is the only sin" is itself a judgment against judgment. Furthermore, to say, "People can do as they please" is also a judgment, a judgment of freedom; it is an apparently positive judgment but still a judgment. To qualify a statement that one can do as one pleases so long as it harms no one else is a restriction imposed by judgment: behavior is good insofar as it isn't harmful. And what is harm? It is up to the judgment of the individual (and practically speaking, the law).

Why is judgment the only judgment prohibited? These same people will then also assert, when pressed, that obviously things such as rape, genocide, pedophilia, etc., are wrong. But who are they to pass judgment? Why can a person do anything they please except those things that harm others? And who determines what it means to harm others? The individual?

This is a morality of solipsism, of individualism. It allows the individual to get away with anything he wants without responsibility for consequences and without regard for others.

Remember, Christ never forbade judgments in Matthew 7; He forbade hypocritical judgments. Christ Himself made many condemnations and was fully justified in doing so.

Judgment is fundamental to human action. Every action presupposes a judgment. Even animals make judgments. This morality of solipsism is simply a justification for sin, and it seeks to alleviate guilt by removing the possibility of judgment, of condemnation for bad behavior. That is why judgment is the only sin: because the presence of judgment means the possibility that I have to own up to my sins, that I can't simply do as I please without regard for consequences, that I am not an isolated individual who schizophrenically has no regard for others and regard for others only when I desire, when I determine.

"When you interrupt a girl's school day to force her" Meme Analysis

Regarding http://viralwomen.com/post/make_this_go_viral_pass_it_on:

Sexism isn't the issue here. The real issue is the "Law": even in the hypothetical world of unlimited liberty, "Law" would still dominate because the hypothetical world is not real, hence symbolic, and hence dictated and circumscribed by the dynamics of language, of limit. Limit means the condition for desire, but it simultaneously is the barring of desire. I can't have it—so I desire it—but I can't have it, so I am not free.

But, after knowing this dynamic of the Law and liberty, one has only two choices remaining: to submit or to defy. To submit would mean accepting our condition and moving forward. To defy would mean deliberately remaining in a fantasy world in which unlimited liberty is attempted.

To bring this matter into concrete terms: in life, we must submit to rules, even if these rules are without reason, because if we don't, there will be consequences. Sometimes who happens to actually get punished is not as justice dictates—sometimes a woman gets punished more than a man or vice versa. But regardless, the rules exist, and to move forward in normal society, one must submit to the rules. There is nothing wrong with this, nor does it suggest that rules cannot be questioned or changed, but rules must exist in one form or another, and they ought to exist to preserve some sort of freedom.

Either school is about education or it is not. If it is about education, then the rules ought to protect this value, no matter how people feel or think about the specific content of the rules themselves; the specific content is immaterial, but the form or actual structure provided by the rules is essential. The true, passionate pursuit of education, then, means that one will go to any lengths to obtain education, and submission to the rules becomes a nothing rather than the over-exaggerated focus of an impossible fantasy function seeking unlimited freedom. It doesn't matter if boys can or cannot control themselves. If the boy really wants to be educated, put a naked woman in the class—it won't matter to him because he is not there for the woman but for the education. But if the boy doesn't really desire education, then you could put a nun in the class, and he will still indulge in sexual fantasies even regarding the nun. Likewise, if a woman is pursuing education, then what she wears is immaterial. She will submit to the Law, just as the boy submits. Both submit.

This meme is about freedom, not the freedom to chose, but the freedom to pursue education, and the freedom to pursue education limits pure individuality, or the ego, which seeks infinity. It desires infinity, but the pursuit of the object of desire necessarily is a finite and defining project.

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But what about the meme's internal construction? For one thing, it actually is a very manifestation of the sexism that it attacks, for it seeks to place the onus on men for limiting the freedom to choose to dress as a woman pleases. It implicates men as weak, selfish creatures for being unable to control their impulses. Finally, it locates the strength that upholds rules in men. (Some might also argue that the meme is a manifestation of so-called "heterosexism" because its dichotomy is between women and men who desire women—and even if the men didn't desire women, the meme is still man vs. woman). Women are complete, helpless victims; men are always scot-free. These are all sexist assumptions and disrespectful to the data. Actually treating men and women as equal means an equal submission to the law and equal punishment for its violation. Equality here is therefore defined with respect to submission and commitment to the law (and by implication, consequences for following or violating the law).

If someone wants to create a meme about how men and women are in fact punished unequally, then by all means, but that is a significantly different content than what we have here.

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Further thoughts:

The psychological analysis avoids discussing whether the rules are in any way useful or "fair" ("fair" being such a vague concept that its discussion is relatively useless). The reason being that whereas the actual value of this or that rule regarding dress code is always up for scrutiny, the fundamental psychological-social dynamics that create the rules are simply unavoidable. Hence discussion of the rules themselves (concrete manifestations of the underlying psychological-social dynamic) may lead to a never-ending debate on dress code while always missing the fundamental point that the pursuit of anything, that is, the focusing of freedom on the pursuit of any finite object, necessarily limits freedom.

Why do the two pursuits mutually exclude each other? In that hypothetical world, they do not—one could go to school naked if one wished and still get an education. But we do not live in a hypothetical world; we live in a world of Law and conflicting desire. In the world of Law and conflicting desire, one cannot do as one pleases and must submit to the Other. Therefore if one actually cares about one's education, one will accept the limit of a dress code in order to unburden oneself of the hindrance of punishment and the subsequent deprival of education. If one cares about dressing as one pleases, one does so at the expense of education.

Besides, this meme comes from the perspective of one who has never inhabited any seriously professional world (of which school is supposed to also be, but American students in high school and up like to think that school means childhood and not adulthood).

Repost: John Deely, "Solipsism"

The following article on solipsism by Dr. John Deely is so fantastic and straightforward. It explains all the hesitations and frustrations I experienced while studying modern and contemporary philosophy (aside from the frustrations of actually trying to understand what was being said by the convoluted style so infamous and probably genetically passed on among philosophers). Not only does Deely provide a solution to epistemology, but he also provides a powerful framework for cultural criticism and assimilation.

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[1439] From the Latin solus ipse, “the self alone,” solipsism is the view that knowledge does not extend beyond our own subjective existence. Sometimes used to describe a pathological medical condition of a person who has lost capacity to communicate, the term is also used philosophically to name the view that all we directly know and experience reduces to a state of our own consciousness or “mind,” beyond which we have no direct access to anything at all.

The term is often associated with René DESCARTES' formula “I think therefore I am” and with Gottfried Wilhelm von LEIBNIZ's formula “Monads have no windows.” Our consciousness is a kind of bubble: We have no direct awareness of anything that is not itself a product of our own mind.

The term itself seems first to occur in Alexander Campbell Fraser's 1874 edition of Selections from Berkeley: “Berkeley's reasoning implies that we can know only our own notions… thus leading, by a reductio ad absurdum, to Egoism or Solipsism” (47). EGOISM has generally come to designate self-interest, whereas solipsism has come into general use primarily in the context of modern theory of knowledge or “epistemology.” “In this respect,” [1440] Bertrand RUSSELL, in his book My Philosophical Development, summarized: “I agree with Berkeley. The starry heaven that we know in visual perception is inside us. The external starry heaven that we believe in is inferred” ([1959] 1997, 20).

There is good reason why solipsism is connected with EPISTEMOLOGY. Both terms arise from modern philosophy 's preoccupation with the theory of knowledge. Epistemology dates to James Frederick Ferrier 's 1854 Institutes of Metaphysic: “This section of the science [of Metaphysic] is properly termed the Epistemology—the doctrine or theory of knowing, just as ontology is the doctrine or theory of being” (46). Of course, knowing being depends upon what knowing is. And what knowing is, according to modern epistemology, is precisely the intervention from within the mind of mental representations that stand between ourselves as knowing and whatever there may be around us. Bishop Berkeley, in A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge ([1710] 1948, Part I, Section 10, p. 45), advised simply that all sensible qualities are “in the mind and nowhere else.” David Hume put it this way: “No man, who reflects, ever doubted, that the existences, which we consider, when we say ‘this house’ and ‘that tree,’ are nothing but perceptions in the mind.” (Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding [1748] 1975, Sect. XII, Part I, last par. in marginal section 118).

The isolation of the knowing self within itself, generally traced to Descartes, is more properly traceable to William of Ockham's view on relation. As Julius R. Weinberg (1965) noted, all the moderns (Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant) adopted Ockham's view that relations have no being in the order of what exists independently of our awareness. Against this background of NOMINALISM Descartes made as his first step toward a “new beginning” in philosophy the bare certainty of our own existence as thinking things. The first unmistakable version of the problema pontis, the “problem of the bridge,” resulted: How can we cross from the cognitive states of our own subjectivity to the world of things existing independently?

John LOCKE agreed with Descartes that the immediate objects of awareness are our own ideas, “mental representations.” But Locke disagreed that our first idea was the rational idea of God. Locke argued instead that ideas of sense are first. Followers of Descartes came to be called rationalists; followers of Locke, empiricists. But both lines agreed that objects as directly apprehended or known are one with our subjective cognitive states. Immanuel KANT, “Master of the Moderns” by virtue of his synthesis of RATIONALISM and EMPIRICISM, introduced a distinction between objects and ideas. But the relations between ideas and objects he attributed wholly to the working of the mind itself (the a priori forms of reason introduced into the phenomenal appearances of sense to give us the necessities of science). Thus Kant concluded that there is no possibility of a bridge passing from consciousness to “things in themselves.”

As a term designating the study of knowledge, epistemology seems straightforward. But when we consider the context of the term's introduction, in particular the assumption that is common (albeit in varying ways) to Descartes, Locke, and Kant, that the direct object of apprehension in every respect of every case involves “ideas” or (after Kant) the “phenomenal veil,” the usage carries the implication that the realm of being as existing independently is “unknowable,” that is, closed to us in principle. Study of “knowledge” reveals a closed circuit wherein the access to “being,” and hence the prospect of ONTOLOGY, is foreclosed.

John Poinsot (1589–1644), a contemporary of Descartes who received no consideration in the context out of which mainstream modern philosophy formed, presciently warned in 1632 (Treatise on Signs, Book III, Q. 2) that any assumption of the view that all awareness terminates directly in mental representations would create an insoluble “problema pontis.” Poinsot's argument (drawn from St. THOMAS AQUINAS) is that sense perception is founded on relations directly consequent on physical interactions between our bodies and surrounding bodies. The resulting awareness does not involve mental representations, but provides rather, within perception, the basis upon which only secondarily as interpretations of direct experience mental representations are introduced. “On this principle, as in a root,” Poinsot states, is founded the knowability of being as having within our awareness a directly awareness-independent dimension concomitant with the objective interpretations that we introduce through mental representations. Otherwise, Poinsot warned, there is no way out of our mind if mental representations are the whole basis of perception within experience.

Leibniz (1704) called the modern development of epistemology “the way of ideas” precisely because of the modern denial that awareness directly involves any relations that are awareness-independent. Leibniz saw at once that, given the assumption that defines this modern path, solipsism is a logically inescapable cul-de-sac—“Monads have no windows”; hence, being is unknowable.

The proposition that the “external world” is in itself unknowable, as Percy Bridgman remarked (1959), “is usually felt to be so absurd as to constitute its own refutation.” From the time of Kant to the present day, however, many have avoided facing up to this consequent, but no one has been able to explain how, starting with the thesis that what we are first aware of is a mental representation, we can get beyond solipsism. Bertrand Russell summarized the modern “epistemological dilemma” concisely. Despite the fact that, given the [1441] assumption of modern philosophy common to Descartes on the Rationalist side, Locke on the Empiricist side, and Kant in his synthesis of Rationalism and Empiricism, “we cannot witness or observe anything else at all” except “what goes on in our heads,” yet “those—and I fear they are the majority—in whom the human affections are stronger than the desire for logical economy, will, no doubt, not share my desire to render solipsism scientifically satisfactory” (My Philosophical Development, 1959).

Solipsism, in sum, is a term that precisely summarizes in the context of modern epistemology the logical consequent of the antecedent mainstream assumption that the human mind has a direct awareness only of its self-constructed mental representations.

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Source: Deely, John. "Solipsism." New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2012-2013: Ethics and Philosophy. Ed. Robert L. Fastiggi. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 2013. 1439-441. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 11 Oct. 2014. <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|CX2762500669&v=2.1&u=gonzagaufoley&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=5eb7130d8b53c771f1c1dd6321615811>.

Individualism, Social Justice, and Boundaries

Is there an intrinsic tension between upholding concern for others through social justice causes and the insistent maintenance of an individualistic mindset, especially one manifested through the assertion of personal identity that is apathetic to the reaction of the other?

Can one insist that people should care about a certain cause while simultaneously insisting that one can do what one wants, when one wants, how one wants?

Or perhaps concern for others ultimately comes at a price to pure individuality, to the notion that we are atoms randomly bouncing into each other. Perhaps concern for others ultimately means that boundaries, while necessary, are not "dogmas" and that a boundary must serve a person and not vice versa.

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.

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.

Repost: 15 Minutes Alone - A Study

Source: Mark Prigg, "Need Some Alone Time? Researchers Find Men Would Rather Administer Electric Shocks to Themselves than Spend Time Alone with Nothing to Do but Think," Mail Online, July 3, 2014, accessed July 22, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2679950/Need-time-Researchers-men-administer-electric-shocks-spent-time-do.html.

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We've all complained that we would love some time alone - but few people actually enjoy it, researchers have found.

Most volunteers who were asked to spend no more than 15 minutes alone in a room doing nothing but sitting and thinking found the task onerous.

In fact, some of the volunteers, men in particular, preferred to administer mild electrical shocks to themselves rather than sit and do nothing.

'Many people find it difficult to use their own minds to entertain themselves, at least when asked to do it on the spot,' said University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Wilson, who led the study appearing in the journal Science.

'In this modern age, with all the gadgets we have, people seem to fill up every moment with some external activity.'

Nearly 800 people took part in the study.

Some experiments involved only college students.

The researchers then broadened the study to include adults who live in the same area.

They went to a church and farmer's market to recruit people from a variety of backgrounds and ages up to 77.

And they got the same results: most participants regardless of age or gender did not like to be idle and alone with their thoughts.

In some experiments, college volunteers were asked to sit alone in a bare laboratory room and spend six to 15 minutes doing nothing but thinking or daydreaming.

They were not allowed to have a cellphone, music player, reading material or writing implements and were asked to remain in their seats and stay awake.

Most reported they did not enjoy the task and found it hard to concentrate.

Researchers then had adult and college student volunteers do the same thing in their homes, and got the same results.

In addition, a third of volunteers cheated by doing things like using a cellphone or listening to music.

The researchers did an experiment to see if the student volunteers would even do an unpleasant task rather than just sit and think.

They gave them a mild shock of the intensity of static electricity.

Volunteers were asked whether, if given $5, they would spend some of it to avoid getting shocked again.

The ones who said they would be willing to pay to avoid another shock were asked to sit alone and think for 15 minutes but were given the option of giving themselves that same shock by simply pushing a button.

Many did not, especially men: Two-thirds (12 of 18) administered at least one shock.

One did it 190 times. A quarter of the women (six of 24) gave themselves at least one shock.

'I think they just wanted to shock themselves out of the boredom,' Wilson said.

'Sometimes negative stimulation is preferable to no stimulation.'

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Pascal was right: diversion is both modern man's greatest misery and greatest consolation from misery. We don't know how to sit quietly in our rooms. 

It would be very easy for some of us to see this study and scoff and claim, "They didn't test me. I could have done it easy." In a study of 800 people, surely at least a few of them had a similar idea. But if we were to be totally honest with ourselves and face the stark truth: could we find pleasure in being alone with ourselves, our thoughts, our being? Not distracting ourselves, not reading, not thinking, not fiddling; just being. 

Here's why most can't: 1) a habit of diversion from modern living; 2) a deep aversion to any circumstance that brings us face to face with the truth of ourselves; silence and darkness are two powerful ways of doing this. Prayer is another. Traumatic events are also another. Beauty and child-like simplicity can also do it; see, for example, how Mr. Rogers totally disarms Joan Rivers in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Kp5YeqrlE.

For most of us, the truth of ourselves is quite simple: it is the horrifying pain that we have endured for so long that we will do anything to forget about it. It is the shame and fear that has been instilled in us by our parents, peers, society, and even ourselves. It is our deepest secret and what we always are hiding from. We shun silence as boring; the darkness as full of monsters (fear of the dark, the boogeyman, which is simply a representation of our inner, psychological turmoil that we fear); prayer as going unheard or useless; simplicity as naivety; beauty as trivial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw); trauma as the universe's sadism; and death as the ultimate evil for an individual (YOLO).

The truth is we don't know what to do with ourselves, so we just, in the words of the Joker, "do... things...."