Pope Benedict XVI on Gender Theory

[...] It was noticeable that the Synod repeatedly emphasized the significance, for the transmission of the faith, of the family as the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence. This is something we learn by living it with others and suffering it with others. So it became clear that the question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself – about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human. The challenges involved are manifold. First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for? Man’s refusal to make any commitment – which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering – means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his “I” ultimately for himself, without really rising above it. Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.

The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. [Note: And by extension, marriage is no longer intelligible.] Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

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Source: Benedict XVI, "Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI on the Occasion of Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia" (address presented in the Vatican, December 21, 2012), accessed July 1, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2012/december/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20121221_auguri-curia.html.

Nietzsche on Modern Marriage and Romance

This sounds like bigoted, misogynistic conservatism to modern ears:

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The things that make an institution into an institution are despised, hated, rejected: people think that they are in danger of a new sort of slavery when the word 'authority' is so much as spoken out loud. The value-instincts of our politicians, our political parties, are so decadent that they instinctively prefer things that disintegrate, that accelerate the end ... Witness modern marriage. It is clear that modern marriage is completely irrational: but this is an objection to modernity, not to marriage. The rationality of marriage lay in the fact that the husband has sole juridical responsibility: this gave marriage a centre [sic] of balance, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage lay in its principled indissolubility, which gave it an accent that knew how to be heard above the accidents of feeling, passion, and the distractions of the moment. The rationality also lay in the family's responsibility for choosing the spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the whole basis of marriage has been eliminated, the very thing that made it an institution in the first place. You never, ever base an institution on an idiosyncrasy, and, as I have said, you do not base marriage on 'love',—you base it on the sex drive; on the drive for property (woman and child as property); on the drive to dominate that keeps organizing the family (the smallest unit of domination), that needs children and heirs in order to maintain (even physiologically) the measure of power, influence, and wealth that has been achieved, in order to prepare for long tasks, for a solidarity of instincts between the centuries. Marriage as an institution already affirms the greatest, most enduring form of organization: when society cannot work as a whole to extend an affirmation to the most distant generations, marriage has stopped making sense.—Modern marriage has lost its meaning,—consequently, it is being abolished.

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Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecee Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 215.

Repost: The Trouble with Endless "Discussion"

The trouble with thinking that truth will always win out in open discussion, in my view, is that people in general are not particularly interested in truth. More than that, though, there is no such thing as a universal reason accessible to all human beings. What is rational is so only in a particular time and place and according to criteria that emerge from that context. When modern people fail to be convinced by natural law arguments, this is not because they are irrational or whatever. Rather, it is simply because all of the assumptions that underlie natural law theory make no sense to the modern mind. One might as well argue in favor of some position by referring to the principles of alchemy.

This is part of the reason why the occasional staged argument between Christians and liberals always end with the audience even more firmly on the side of the liberals. Liberals can appeal to the intuitive "common sense" of ordinary people, and they can also appeal to their emotions in ways that Christians cannot. Instead, Christians have to either attempt to justify their positions in liberal terms, which is a pointless endeavor, or waste time describing the alternate paradigm in which their views make sense, but even then, very few Christian apologists are any good at making a case for why this paradigm is superior to the liberal one.

Of course, this is so because, deep down, most Christians don't really believe their own thing anymore. And, even to the extent that they do, most of them still think of their own position in terms completely determined by the modern paradigm. Consider that traditional Catholics now like to pontificate about the naturalness and goodness of homosexuality and the base and disgusting nature of "homophobia." This is a pure transvaluation of values being accepted uncritically by Christianity. However, even Christians who do not go in for this sort of thing are still determined in their beliefs by the modern paradigm, much in the same way that the Romantic revolt against soulless modern technology in the name of pure nature was itself determined completely by modern categories.

So, I do not think open debate will solve much in this situation. As Ernst Juenger says, "A sound opinion finds many advocates, but no martyrs." Or, as Bl. John Henry Newman put it, "Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion." The early Church preached Christ crucified, it did not engage in endless, anemic "discussion." We know what the outcome of that strategy was, and we know what the outcome of ours has been.

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Source: Crusading Philologist, October 21, 2014 (6:45 p.m.), comment on Vox Clamantis, "The War's Not Over -- Oh Boy!," Fish Eaters Traditional Catholic Forum, October 20, 2014, http://www.fisheaters.com/forums/index.php?topic=3466336.0.

Repost: Lonergan and the Desire to Know

According to Lonergan, Aristotle expressed something fundamental in the opening lines of the Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” When the animal has its physiological needs met, it sleeps, but when the human has met its needs, we do math or theology or go exploring, for our intelligence is essentially dynamic love; so long as we want to know, so long as we care and direct our intelligence towards knowing, our consciousness continues to operate in a cumulative, self-correcting, and indefinite process of accumulating data and acquiring new insights. This dynamism is for some unknown, and we seek this unknown spontaneously, by some innate tendency, although it “is a conscious tendency . . . we do so intelligently.” Children ask incessant questions, without prompting, according to some inner impetus, although the dull child, the one who does not care to know, can rarely be coaxed or coerced into knowing if he lacks the desire, for knowledge does not just happen because the external data is present but because of the interior condition of inquiry and the interior operations by which we arrive at knowing. The interior condition manifests itself in questions, for we would not ask unless there was an unknown, and we could not ask unless we sought something. Something: what we seek exists as an ideal, but not clearly or explicitly or we would already have what we were seeking.

The transcendental condition of our questions is the dynamic desire to know, and to know what is unknown, an x, and this unknown x functions as a heuristic, as an intended ideal that as yet is not appropriated or known. It is whatever is intended by the question. But what is intended by questions is not empty or abstract. The condition of questioning is transcendental—the “pure question”—but “no one just wonders. We wonder about something.” Of course, we can wonder about many things, in many different ways, and there are different heuristics at different times, in different communities, and so on. The pursuit is intelligent and conscious, but it is not conceptually explicit, and it differs and develops as questions differ and develop, so “how do you proceed methodically . . . to the attainment of something that you do not know, something which, if known, would not have to be pursued?” According to Lonergan, the solution is precisely that metatheory by which we try to catch ourselves in the act of knowing which Budziszewski judged distracting:

The solution . . . to this problem is self-appropriation. . . . The ideal we seek in seeking the unknown, in trying to know, is conceptually implicit. There does not exist naturally, spontaneously, through the whole of history, a set of propositions, conceptions, and definitions that define the ideal of knowledge. But to say that conceptually it is implicit . . . that these statements differ in different places and at different times—they are historically conditioned—is not to say that it is nonexistent. While the conception of the ideal is not by nature, still there is something by nature. The ideal of knowledge is myself as intelligent, as asking questions, as requiring intelligible answers . . . and if we can turn in upon these fundamental tendencies, then we are on the way to getting hold. . . .

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Source: R.J. Snell, "The Meaning(s) of Natural Law," Intercollegiate Review, June 16, 2014, accessed July 1, 2014, http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2014/06/16/the-meanings-of-natural-law/.

Distinction: Right to Live vs. Right to Conceive

Apropos this chilling article on the growth of gestational surrogacy in recent years (http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/gestation-surrogacy-harms-children), I would simply comment that there is a difference between the right to live and the "right" to conceive a child by any means possible. Does such a right exist? I don't think so. Although sexual reproduction and the rearing of children may be inherent to our animal nature, such activity is both unnecessary for each individual's happiness even as human and regulated by natural law. No one would argue that because a person has a "right" to conceive a child therefore another person may be raped in order to satisfy that right.

Dr. Daren Jonescu, the Church's Embrace of Progressivism, and Naturalistic Reduction

For several decades, the presumption of the Catholic hierarchy, from the Vatican on down, has been that since socialism seems, on its face, to have similar goals to Christianity—caring for the less fortunate, charity, devoting oneself to a goal higher than self—it is the natural political affiliation of the Church. There are a variety of major problems with this presumption of a Christian/socialist affinity, of course: Christianity is doctrinally committed to individual salvation, socialism to collective achievement, at the expense of the individual where necessary; Christianity is doctrinally committed to a higher purpose beyond the material world, socialism fundamentally materialistic in its focus on earthly “equality”; Christianity has a doctrinal reverence for the past (including the extremely distant past), while socialism has grown out of materialist historicism’s disdain for the men and ideas of the past; and so on. [...]

[According to Thomas Aquinas, l]aws do not prohibit all vice, because that would be to restrict unduly the free will of the majority of men, who are imperfect. In other words, virtue in general is a private, which is to say non-legal, matter. The purpose of human law is to restrict the kind of vicious behavior (“murder, theft and such like”) which directly harms other people, thereby, if left unchecked, causing the breakdown of human society. That is, the law ought to restrict only those behaviors which the majority of men, though imperfect, can and will abstain from of their own free will. Stated differently, the law ought not to touch the actions of the majority of men. Laws ought to be of a limited and “negative” character. [...]

This is much more than a matter of Catholic doctrine. It has the deepest implications for all religions, and for moral philosophy in general. Leftist progressivism seeks to impose specific behaviors on all citizens, in order to bring about “desirable” social outcomes, of a material nature. But what is the goal of religious and moral teaching? Is it to achieve materialistic social outcomes, or individual moral outcomes?

By limiting human law to the restriction of those violations against others “without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained,” St. Thomas reinforces the proper Christian theological focus on the salvation of individual souls, which is only possible (short of divine intervention) when men are able to exercise free will in the practice of the virtues which perfect the soul.

In short, there is no virtue in doing that which one is compelled to do. Charity, for example, is only charity (i.e. a Christian virtue) if it is a freely chosen course of action. Government-imposed “charity,” in addition to violating constitutional rights, also short-circuits the moral growth of individual citizens.

Source: Daren Jonescu, "Santorum and St. Thomas Versus the Catholic Bishops," Canada Free Press Website, February 6, 2012, accessed December 5, 2013, http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/44416.

The Catholic Church's recent history of sympathizing with, and even supporting, Marxist progressivism is clear, sad, and indicative of a deeply irrational and anti-individual streak within the modern Church hierarchy. Catholics who care about the Church, its history, and its future -- and also about humanity, reason and freedom -- must stop making excuses for their current spiritual leadership's collectivist authoritarian impulses. [...] 

For generations, the global Catholic Church, at leadership levels, has been deeply invested in progressive collectivism. This has been an awkward relationship, in as much as hardcore Marxism seeks to abolish religion in favor of the deification of the State, and doctrinaire collectivism runs counter to any notion of the value of individual souls. As a result, the Church has, at times, spoken with some force against both communism and socialism. These moments of reasonableness have allowed thoughtful Catholics to defend the Church's political position as basically non-leftist: "See," they repeatedly tell themselves, "the Church is fighting the good fight against Marxism." 

In so far as Marxism includes atheism, the Church could hardly do otherwise. Soviet-style Marxists openly declared religion their enemy, and persecuted believers. Obviously the Church defended itself against this direct assault. But while abhorring atheistic dialectical materialism, practical elements of Marxist theory -- "social justice," economic redistribution, the condemnation of wealth -- struck a sympathetic chord within the Church, which gradually adopted such Marxist language as its own. This baptism of the Marxist vocabulary in the waters of Christian faith has allowed generations of good men and women to deny the disturbing truth before their very eyes, and to persuade themselves that this language, when used by the clergy, is somehow legitimate Catholic moralism. [...] 

Notice that he is specifically calling on political leaders and "financial experts" (57) to undertake a "vigorous change" -- fundamental transformation, anyone? -- in the direction of "balance" and a "more humane social order" which "favours human beings." In other words, [Pope Francis] is not advocating Christian charity, which is, and must be, a private moral decision, since it is through the correct application of his God-given free will that man is to find his path to God. Rather, to state the obvious -- let us finally apply the famous "razor" of a truly great Catholic philosopher here, and dispense with sophisticated explanations of the indefensible -- Francis is advocating socialism: a political system which obviates the morality of free will, and thus violates the foundations of the Catholic faith on the most profound level. [...]

In the U.S., the Catholic bishops firmly and enthusiastically supported ObamaCare, the penultimate step towards completely socialized medicine, until they "discovered" -- or, I suspect, until the Catholic laity discovered -- that abortion and birth control were part of the deal. Like their leaders in Rome and their brothers throughout the Catholic world, the U.S. bishops support progressivism in principle -- the Church has declared healthcare a universal human right, an expressly socialist ploy -- but will criticize particular progressive parties or factions when matters of doctrinal import are directly in dispute. In effect, the Church's war against collectivist tyranny extends only so far as that tyranny encompasses atheism or some other specific affront to Catholic practice. [...]

In its socioeconomic position, a large proportion of today's Catholic hierarchy is unofficially progressive, socialist, even Marxist.

Source: Daren Jonescu, "Catholics and Communists," American Thinker Website, December 3, 2013, accessed December 5, 2013, http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/catholics_and_communists.html. 

But on the other hand, many people, such as Rush Limbaugh and his league of listeners, may very easily fall into the trap of a reduction of the supernatural to purely natural principles.

The point is this—this is impor­tant to under­stand: The pope’s words about the “idol­a­try of money” can­not be under­stood within an ide­o­log­i­cal or dual­is­tic pol­i­tics of Cap­i­tal­ism vs.Marx­ism. Instead, they must be under­stood within the frame­work of the teach­ing of the Church about ethics and our respon­si­bil­ity to the poor. [...] 

The pope attacks both Marx­ism and trickle-down. [...] 

Any defense of the pope, and any crit­i­cism, is wrong if it is meant in the con­text of liberal-vs.-conservative. Catholi­cism tran­scends such cat­e­gories; its teachings—which the pope is con­sis­tent with—are premised on eth­i­cal cat­e­gories, not polit­i­cal ones.

Source: Scott Eric Alt, "A Counterblast to Rush Limbaugh on Evangelii Gaudium 54," Logos and Muse Blog, December 3, 2013, accessed December 5, 2013, http://www.logosandmuse.com/a-counterblast-to-rush-limbaugh/.

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What the last quotation is getting at is the distinction between looking at the world either with supernatural faith enlightening reason or without supernatural faith enlightening reason. Without faith it is sensible to analyze the Holy Father's words through a political or economic hermeneutic. But here I quote Dr. Scruton as I've posted elsewhere on reductionism:

Here we encounter a peculiar use of the phrase 'nothing but' [...] justice is 'nothing but' the power requirements of the ruling class [....] Reductionism of this kind does not merely involve a host of philosophical confusions. It is essentially anti-philosophical, based in the desire to simplify the world in favour of some foregone conclusion, whose appeal lies in its ability to disenchant and so demean us. The reductionist 'opens our eyes' on to the truth of our condition. But of course, it is not the truth at all, and is believed to be true only because it is shocking.

Source: Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (New York, NY: Penguin Books USA, 1996), 28.

That being said, Dr. Jonescu provides many disturbing facts about the actions and either de facto or explicit positions of many Catholic hierarchy (and laity, I might add), especially regarding relativism, progressivism, and other ways of viewing the world that have been enhanced and crystalized in the post-Enlightenment West. (Here I find it unfortunate that Dr. Jonescu on the one hand praises the development of natural law thought into modern political theory that allows for a capitalist economy or a democratic nation like the US but on the other hand neglects to mention—although he is most likely aware of it—the fact that these post-Enlightenment errors could occur only in such an intellectual milieu as has developed in the modern era. And regardless, despite his Catholic upbringing, he seems more deeply influenced by his political-philosophical views than any faith that can cut through peripheral and symptomatic issues to the core of the problem before us regarding what the Pope may or may not have said about modern economic systems, namely, whether growing in the love of God is our top priority or not.) 

But as Dr. Jonescu rightly pointed out, the pursuit of virtue can be pursued only freely, individually, and with the assistance of laws to protect the majority from the grievously-vicious minority. Charity, whether of the non-profit or supernatural variety, cannot be forced but only desired with all of one's heart. Until then, we will have quite a fuss about how to sort out the obvious fact that we are imperfect.