On Mixed Marriages (1929)

[214] The widely noticed article "What it Means to Marry a Catholic," by a non-Catholic woman in the June Forum, simply confirms the wisdom of the attitude taken by the Church. As our readers know, the Church regards mixed marriages as an evil and permits them only in exceptional cases, under certain safeguards designed to protect the faith of the Catholic party and to insure the religious training of the children. The discrepancies between the Catholic and the Protestant points of view are irreconcilable, and the case could be made even stronger than it is stated by this non-Catholic woman, who regrets her mistake in marrying a Catholic man who apparently tries to be faithful to his religion by avoiding contraceptive practices, attending to his religious duties, and insisting on having his children trained in Catholic schools—all things which the Protestant wife does not believe in, and for which she has nothing but prejudiced contempt. It is strange that so many Catholics, even at an age when they should know better, fail to see the incompatibility of the Catholic with the Protestant conception of marriage and the impossibility of either a sincere Catholic or a convinced Protestant being truly happy in such a relationship.

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Source: Anonymous editorial, The Catholic Fortnightly Review 36, no. 11 (August 1929): 214.

Michael Crichton on the Religion of Environmentalism

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

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Source: Michael Crichton, "Remarks to the Commonwealth Club" (presentation, San Francisco, CA, September 15, 2003).

Can the Descent of Modern Society Reverse?

To act as though man made history by his own purposes and decisions is a kind of spiritual blindness which bears within it its own downfall.

[xxxix] And it is precisely this spiritual blindness which is characteristic of modern civilization, a kind of hubris which leads to the frustration of social idealism and society’s turning away from those principles it professes to be following, in order to promote their opposite. Has there ever been a society which set a higher store on the ideals of humanitarianism than our own, and has there ever been one which, at the same time, allowed for the killing off of such countless millions of unborn infants? And has there ever been a culture which so repeatedly emphasized its concerns for the rights of man, and at the same time meekly acquiesced in the obliteration of those rights by totalitarian regimes in all parts of the world?

Written thirty-five years ago, in the midst of World War II, the following judgment of Christopher Dawson has a direct relationship to the condition in which the whole of the modern world finds itself today:

But this is just the truth which the modern world has denied. It has put its trust in the “arm of flesh”; it has believed the word of man rather than the Word of God. It has reversed the whole hierarchy of spiritual values so that our civilization has been turned backwards and upside down, with its face toward darkness and nonentity and its back to the sun of truth and the source of being. For a short time—whether we reckon it in decades or centuries is of small importance—it remained precariously skating on the thin ice of rationalism and secular humanism. Now the ice has broken and we are being carried down the flood, though we may delude ourselves that the forces that have been released are of our own creation and serve our will to power. 

Is it possible to reverse this process? No human power can stop this progress to the abyss. It can only come about by a profound movement of change or conversion which brings the human spirit once more into vital relation with the spirit of God. (The Judgment of the Nations [London: Sheed and Ward, 1942], 157)

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Source: John J. Mulloy, “Preface to the 1978 Edition”, in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxxviii–xxxix.

When Society Loses Its Higher Spiritual Ordering

Our own civilization, as Dawson points out, is one which has increasingly ignored the significance of the religious element, whether through prophecy or through the consecration of its social institutions to religious ends. The result is a widespread sense of spiritual dissatisfaction, which leads participants in the culture to look upon it with distrust and hostility. This not only withdraws from society the psychological support which it needs, but also, it leaves society vulnerable to movements of violence against its social structure and the values it embodies. “When the prophets are silent and society no longer possesses any channel of communication with the divine world, the way to the lower depths is still open and man’s frustrated spiritual powers will find their outlet in the unlimited will to power and destruction” (Religion and Culture [London: Sheed & Ward, 1948], 83).

[…] [xxxvii] But while society needs religion for its survival, it cannot return to religious belief simply by an act of the will, as a means of recovering its spiritual roots. This arises from the very nature of religion, from the fact that there is a basic difference between the motivations of religious feeling and those of political purpose. “It is useless to judge a religion from the point of view of the politician or the social reformer. We shall never create a living religion merely as a means to an end, a way out of our practical difficulties. For the religious view of life is opposite of the utilitarian. It regards the world and human life sub specie aeternitatis. It is only by accepting the religious point of view, by regarding religion as an end in itself and not as a means to something else, that we can discuss religious problems profitably” (Christianity and the New Age [London: Sheed & Ward, 1931], 172).

Now this conception of religion is so opposed to the modern attitude that it is difficult for modern man to accept it or appreciate its force. He is always asking whether religion serves this or that purpose, has this effect or that on the social order or on human behavior, as a way of deciding whether its existence is justified. It is man’s will rather than God’s which is taken as a standard, man’s conception of human welfare, not life seen in the light of eternity, which forms the basis for judgments concerning the significance of religion.

Yet this is discernment only on a superficial level; and even history itself testifies how limited and earthbound such ideas of human welfare and human destiny turn out to be. There is, as Dawson points out, an unpredictable character to events and outcomes in history which goes quite counter to rational calculations and makes the standards of a purely human judgment strikingly inadequate. “The real meaning of history is something entirely different from that which the human actors in the historical drama themselves believe or intend” (Religion and the Modern State [London: Sheed & Ward, 1935], 81). As an example of this, Dawson cites the contrast between the expectations of the Liberals concerning the purposes of the French Revolution and the harsh realities of the Revolution itself.

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Source: John J. Mulloy, “Preface to the 1978 Edition”, in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxxvi.

Prophets and Mystics Revitalize a Culture’s Religion

In every religion the religious aim of a culture is determined by the mission and the inspiration of its prophets and by the vision and spiritual experience of its mystics. Where these vital organs fail, religion becomes secularized and is absorbed in the cultural tradition to a point at which it becomes identified with it, until it finally becomes nothing more than a form of social activity….

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Source; Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture (London: Sheed & Ward, 1948), 81–82.

The Cultural Effects of Contrasting Visions of the World

The experience of Mohammed in the cave of Mount Hira, when he saw human life as transitory as the beat of a gnat’s wing in comparison with the splendor and power of the Divine Unity, has shaped the existence of a great part of the human race ever since. For a people which has heard thrice a day for a thousand years the voice of the muezzin proclaiming the unity of God cannot live the same life or see with the same eyes as the Hindu who worships the life of nature in its countless forms, and sees the external world as the manifestation of the interplay of cosmic sexual forces.

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Source: Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion (London: Sheed & Ward, 1929), 76–77.

The Vitality of a Society is Found in Its Spiritual Roots

The central conviction which has dominated my mind ever since I began to write is the conviction that the society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally. Consequently the problem of social survival is not only a political or economic one; it is above all things religious, since it is in religion that the ultimate spiritual roots both of society and the individual are to be found.

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Source: Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into Religion and Culture (London: Sheed & Ward, 1933), vi.

The Essence of History is Tradition

Hence the essence of history is not to be found in facts but in traditions. The pure fact is not as such historical. It only becomes [286] historical when it can be brought into relation with a social tradition so that it is seen as part of an organic whole. A visitor from another planet who witnessed the Battle of Hastings would possess far greater knowledge of the facts than any modern historian, yet this knowledge would not be historical for lack of any tradition to which it could be related; whereas the child who says “William the Conqueror 1066” has already made his atom of knowledge an historical fact by relating it to a national tradition and placing it in the time-series of Christian culture.

Wherever a social tradition exists, however small and unimportant may be the society which is its vehicle, the possibility of history exists. […] [287]

Yet even the religion that denies the significance of history is itself a part of history and it can only survive in so far as it embodies itself in a social tradition and thus “makes history.”

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Source: Christopher Dawson, “The Kingdom of God and History,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), 285–287. Originally published in The Kingdom of God and History, ed. H. G. Woods et al., vol. 3 of Official Oxford Conference Books (New York: Willett, Clark & Company, 1938).

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The fact does not tell the story; the story, as it were, tells the fact. It is the latter that gives pattern and meaning; it is the former that lacks meaning of its own. Moreover to arrange such disordered material, to give it narrative shape, is not to diminish historical particularity but to acknowledge it. To see meaning beyond the local is to see it in the local. After all, we grasp our truths in the solid, the tactile, the here-and-now. We exercise a faculty of imagination without which historical insight is impossible. […] In the parochial we [xxvi] glimpse the perennial. In time we grasp Time’s end, its very purpose and meaning.

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

Culture Is Incarnational

Rationalists, [Dawson] realized, misunderstood religion precisely because they misunderstood culture as well. Indeed they misunderstood both for the same reason: their thin and etiolated behaviorism denied the possibility of a grander vision of man. Allowing religion no other purpose than the [xxiii] sanctification of social or private compulsions, they closed off an entire realm of man’s being. This represented, of course, the collapse of the very empiricism they claimed to uphold. A conclusion was contrived, then evidence adduced to support it: hardly a triumph of the investigative arts. Yet the circularity should not surprise us. With their functionalist view of culture and religion no other conclusion was available to them.

Dawson’s recognition of culture as a bearer of truth was the insight of an anthropologist but also, in a more profound way, that of a Christian. His understanding of man in society was, in the deepest sense, incarnational. […] Man grasps the divine in diverse, sometimes prosaic, ways. His spiritual insights come mediated through the materiality of the everyday. He understands the blessedness of the ordinary: the common meal, the shared sorrow, the unburdened heart. Slowly, too, he begins to understand the truth beyond these smaller moments: that the God who enters human history reveals Himself in living cultures, authentic communities. His face shines in material and sacramental ways, evident to those with eyes to see. This is not to say that culture itself is religion. Nor is it to say that one culture is much the same as another. Least of all is it to propose that human culture contains the entirety of the divine revelation. It is, however, to acknowledge that culture matters more profoundly than even cultural historians realize.

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

A Definition of Real Religion

Real religion, Dawson argued, must “embody itself in concrete forms appropriate to the national character and the cultural tradition” (Dynamics of World History, 88) of a people. […] A religion is real precisely to the extent that it integrates, and is integral to, the spiritual and physical lives of its adherents.

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

The Religion of Enlightenment Utopianism

Late-eighteenth [xxi] and nineteenth-century utopianism was more absurd than most. But wherein lay the absurdity? Not so much in the ignorance of human history as in its faux religiosity. The great abstractions—Liberity, Equality, Fraternity; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—always came in threes. They were secular trinities amply supplied with creeds, priests, keepers of orthodoxy, heresy-hunters, the fervent faithful. All they lacked was self-knowledge, awareness of themselves as profane theologies. Indeed, nowhere was this more apparent than in their understanding of religion itself. Philosophes fashioned a “purely rational philosophy of religion based on the abstract generalities . . . common to all forms of religion. For deism is nothing but the ghost of religion which haunts the grave of dead faith and lost hope” (Dynamics of World History, 88). It never occurred to the builders of the new society hat the religion they concocted—of society itself—was not enough. Such things cannot be concocted anyway, put together as from some recipe book of socially useful devotion. Real religion, Dawson argued, must “embody itself in concrete forms appropriate to the national character and the cultural tradition” (88) of a people. The late-eighteenth-century version was manifestly ersatz.

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

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.

Commentary on "What Is Identitarian Religion?"

My commentary below on an interesting essay: http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2014/3/27/what-is-identitarian-religion

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The article begins by recounting that an internet friend of the author, a self-identified "Trad Catholic," has left the Church because of the liberalism of his parish priest. Whatever the true details of this story, the very act of apostasy reveals that "Trad Catholicism" was merely a political label or at best a self-imposed identity, rooted only in the lightest sense in supernatural Faith, for there are few sins greater than deliberate apostasy.

The article notes the modern evolution of Christianity in its two main forms, one outside the West (especially in Africa and South America) and one within the West, which is dominated by "Cultural Marxism." These observations are astute and as far as I can tell accurate.

The author cites the well-known biologist E.O. Wilson's comment that religion is adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint, providing multiple benefits to the social cohesion of a group. Modern Western Christianity is "maladaptive" because of its complete assimilation and equation with Marxism through the philosophical impetus of the Hegelian dialectic and the principle of immanence, by which man judges all values himself.

The conclusion: the author sounds a return to "ethno-religion," the combination of an acceptance of the hard reality of "race" in defining social groups as well as religion. The historical support is that the vast majority of humans have fallen within this group. I am not sure of the legitimacy of this "fact," but let's assume it is true for the moment.

The author continues with this line of reasoning: "But the question here is whether competing forms of Western identitarian religion can get along. Within the larger framework of Western identitarian religion, can, for example, Identitarian Christians and Pagans coexist. I don’t see why not."

And even further: "And what of identitarian atheists and agnostics? Can they co-exist with identitarian religion? Since identitarian religion is not at odds with nature, and thus not at odds with evolutionary science, it does not threaten secular knowledge but offers itself as an additional societal glue." (Source)

Something has gone terribly wrong from the perspective of objective truth. The core of Christianity is faith in a supernatural reality, independent of any construction of the mind or for the purposes of any social cohesion or evolutionary fitness. God exists as a Trinity, and this Trinity has revealed itself specifically in Jesus Christ, God and man. If this is true, paganism is false. If this is true, atheism and agnosticism are false. These facts have political and social consequences, particularly in human relations and the ordering of society.

But the point of the article is not a return to true religion, but it merely adapts religion under the broader category of pragmatic truth, the truth that works, according to the pragmatists. This conception of truth follows immediately from the philosophical acceptance of evolution and Hegelianism. Religion is seen as useful and perfectly compatible with atheists/agnostics/neo-pagans in a libertarian commune and hence is stripped of the absolutely core question: is it true? Regardless of its social usefulness, is it true beyond the feelings, beliefs, and perceptions of finite minds?

Hence we return to the so-called "Trad Catholic." This person did not sufficiently consider the fundamental question: is it true? And therefore, he did not beg God for the grace of perseverance because to him, whatever the details of his belief may have been, we can at least say they were not sufficiently rooted in reality, supernatural reality.

This brings us, at last, to the irony of this article. In condemning cultural Marxism, the article itself adopts the very philosophical foundations that make Marxism possible: philosophical evolution, Hegelianism, immanentism, and all the trappings of Enlightenment epistemology. How, then, can "ethno-religion" be a true solution to the problem of the decline of religion in the modern West?

The answer: it cannot.

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Source: Alfred W. Clark, "What Is Identitarian Religion?," Radix blog, March 24, 2014, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2014/3/27/what-is-identitarian-religion.

How to Concretely Spread Traditional Catholicism

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memo: Modernist Influences Among Conservative Catholic Communities

Memo to think of and develop sociological surveys to measure modernist influences among conservative and so-called Traditionalist Catholic communities.

Specific dimensions would include the values that underlie liberalism in its various manifestations: political, economic, philosophical. Aesthetics (beauty), morality/ethics, metaphysics (especially hierarchical nature), epistemology (can we know/prove objective morality, God's existence and attributes, human nature, etc.). Social values: independence, human dignity and rights, education, career path, identity formation, subculture, delinquency (drug use, abuse, drop out rates, crime patterns). Religious values (modesty).

Science vs. religion; faith vs. reason; the relation of business, money, and work with faith and small communities (e.g. are there any such Catholics who occupy the so-called "super rich" upper class?).

Is religion and faith seen principally through a modern liberal lens? Etc.

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

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

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

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

St. Thomas Aquinas on Rationalizing Sexual Hedonsim

For know you this and understand: that no fornicator or unclean or covetous person, which is a serving of idols, hath inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no man deceive you with vain words. For because of these things cometh the anger of God upon the children of despair. Be ye not therefore partakers with them. (Eph. 5:5–7)

The Apostle above forbade carnal sins (5:3); here he threatens them with the penalty of damnation that is inflicted on sinners. [...]

He states For know you this and understand, that is, be actually certain of it and not just habitually. “These things I write to you that you may know that you have eternal life; you who believe in the name of the Son of God” (1 Jn. 5:13). And what does he write? That no fornicator or unclean or covetous person, which is a serving of idols, hath inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

Notice that he calls covetousness idolatry, for idolatry happens when the honor due God alone is given to creatures. Now there is a twofold honor due God; we must establish him as the goal of our life and we must put our trust of reaching the goal in him. Hence, whoever places these ‘in creatures is guilty of idolatry. A covetous person commits this when he fixes his end in a created reality as well as putting all his trust in it. “Of their silver and their gold they have made idols to themselves, that they might perish” (Os. 8:4). This happens since, as Proverbs 11 (28) affirms: “He that trusteth in his riches shall fall.” [...]

Notice that only in reference to carnal vices does he teach them to avoid being deceived. For from the beginning men have rationalized to find reasons why fornication and other venereal sins were not really sins so that they might indulge their cupidity without restraint. Hence he states vain words since words that claim these are not sins and do not exclude one from the kingdom of God and of Christ are irrational. “Beware lest any man cheat you by prophecy and vain deceit” (Col. 2:8).”

He demonstrates that such men are deceivers and their words fallacious since, if carnal sins were not sins, they would not be punished by God; God is just and does not impose a penalty where there is no offense. But such acts are punished by God and therefore are sins. He proves the minor when he says For because of these things comes the anger of God, namely, on account of carnal sins, upon the children of despair. This is evident in the flood (Gen. 7), in what happened to the Sodomites (Gen. 19); and again, almost the whole tribe of Benjamin was destroyed on account of this (Jg. 19 & 20).

He says the children of despair because those who sin in this way despair of eternal life. If they acted this way and still hoped for eternal life, it would rather be presumption than hope, which is the certain expectation of obtaining future beatitude meritoriously.

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Source: St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, trans. by Matthew L. Lamb (Albany, NY: Magis Books, 1966), Dominican House of Studies website, accessed Sept. 23, 2014, http://dhspriory.org/thomas/Eph5.htm#3, 5.3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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