There is a phrase, "If you have a problem, the problem is probably you." Or some variation of that. It captures the problem that a lack of self-awareness can create. Examples are easy—you always seem to get fired, you're always assigned with lazy teammates, things always go wrong around you, everyone treats you badly. Naturally the question arises, "Could it possibly be that everything always goes wrong with me, or is there something about me that attracts and causes problems in my life?" That question can arise only when a person is self-reflective.
But the issue can be a false dichotomy, and those in charge can use that trope to justify their own incompetence. The issue goes both ways. If China is polluting the environment, and the US criticizes China for it, ultimately the criticism is true even if the US is polluting the environment as well. China can't turn to the US and say, "The problem is you." The problem is both: there are people who lack self-awareness and reflectivity, and there are people who run from taking responsibility for their behaviors and blame the character flaws of others in order to do so.
And as Seth Godin says, "The problem you can't talk about... is now two problems" (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/05/the-problem-you-cant-talk-about.html).
In other words, if there's a problem, the better strategy is to take the problem seriously and explore its full extent so that both sides can learn and grow. Certainly there are exceptions where blame is clearly on one side. But wouldn't it help if instead of immediately resorting to cliches, we stopped to take each other seriously and face the possibility that everyone can help each other to grow?
Showing posts with label self-deception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-deception. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Innocent?
Don't let the fact that Kevin Spacey's character is a psychopath distract you from the disturbing truth that he speaks.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
The Backfire Effect and Confirmation Bias
Confirmation biases can be used to explain why some beliefs persist when the initial evidence for them is removed. This belief perseverance effect has been shown by a series of experiments using what is called the "debriefing paradigm": participants read fake evidence for a hypothesis, their attitude change is measured, then the fakery is exposed in detail. Their attitudes are then measured once more to see if their belief returns to its previous level.
A common finding is that at least some of the initial belief remains even after a full debrief. In one experiment, participants had to distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. The feedback was random: some were told they had done well while others were told they had performed badly. Even after being fully debriefed, participants were still influenced by the feedback. They still thought they were better or worse than average at that kind of task, depending on what they had initially been told.
In another study, participants read job performance ratings of two firefighters, along with their responses to a risk aversion test. This fictional data was arranged to show either a negative or positive association: some participants were told that a risk-taking firefighter did better, while others were told they did less well than a risk-averse colleague. Even if these two case studies were true, they would have been scientifically poor evidence for a conclusion about firefighters in general. However, the participants found them subjectively persuasive. When the case studies were shown to be fictional, participants' belief in a link diminished, but around half of the original effect remained. Follow-up interviews established that the participants had understood the debriefing and taken it seriously. Participants seemed to trust the debriefing, but regarded the discredited information as irrelevant to their personal belief.
---
Source: Wikipedia, "Confirmation Bias," Wikipedia website, June 26, 2015, accessed July 1, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias.
---
[323] We find that responses to corrections in mock news articles differ significantly according to subjects’ ideological views. As a result, the corrections fail to reduce misperceptions for the most committed participants. Even worse, they actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups in several cases. [...]
The backfire effects that we found seem to provide further support for the growing literature showing that citizens engage in “motivated reasoning.” While our experiments focused on assessing the effectiveness of corrections, the results show that direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual beliefs – an empirical finding with important theoretical implications. Previous research on motivated reasoning has largely focused on the evaluation and usage of factual evidence in constructing opinions and evaluating arguments (e.g. Taber and Lodge 2006). By contrast, our research – the first to directly measure the effectiveness of corrections in a realistic context – suggests that it would be valuable to directly study the cognitive and affective processes that take place when subjects are confronted with discordant factual information.
---
Source: Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, "When Corrections Fail: The Persistance of Political Misperceptions," Political Behavior 32 (2010): 303–330, http://climate.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Climate_Change_AOSS480_Documents/Nyhan_Belief_Facts_Politics_PoliticalBehavior_2010.pdf.
---
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. [...] If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger. [...]
This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.
A common finding is that at least some of the initial belief remains even after a full debrief. In one experiment, participants had to distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. The feedback was random: some were told they had done well while others were told they had performed badly. Even after being fully debriefed, participants were still influenced by the feedback. They still thought they were better or worse than average at that kind of task, depending on what they had initially been told.
In another study, participants read job performance ratings of two firefighters, along with their responses to a risk aversion test. This fictional data was arranged to show either a negative or positive association: some participants were told that a risk-taking firefighter did better, while others were told they did less well than a risk-averse colleague. Even if these two case studies were true, they would have been scientifically poor evidence for a conclusion about firefighters in general. However, the participants found them subjectively persuasive. When the case studies were shown to be fictional, participants' belief in a link diminished, but around half of the original effect remained. Follow-up interviews established that the participants had understood the debriefing and taken it seriously. Participants seemed to trust the debriefing, but regarded the discredited information as irrelevant to their personal belief.
---
Source: Wikipedia, "Confirmation Bias," Wikipedia website, June 26, 2015, accessed July 1, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias.
---
[323] We find that responses to corrections in mock news articles differ significantly according to subjects’ ideological views. As a result, the corrections fail to reduce misperceptions for the most committed participants. Even worse, they actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups in several cases. [...]
The backfire effects that we found seem to provide further support for the growing literature showing that citizens engage in “motivated reasoning.” While our experiments focused on assessing the effectiveness of corrections, the results show that direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual beliefs – an empirical finding with important theoretical implications. Previous research on motivated reasoning has largely focused on the evaluation and usage of factual evidence in constructing opinions and evaluating arguments (e.g. Taber and Lodge 2006). By contrast, our research – the first to directly measure the effectiveness of corrections in a realistic context – suggests that it would be valuable to directly study the cognitive and affective processes that take place when subjects are confronted with discordant factual information.
---
Source: Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, "When Corrections Fail: The Persistance of Political Misperceptions," Political Behavior 32 (2010): 303–330, http://climate.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Climate_Change_AOSS480_Documents/Nyhan_Belief_Facts_Politics_PoliticalBehavior_2010.pdf.
---
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. [...] If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger. [...]
This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.
---
Source: Joe Keohane, "How Facts Backfire," Boston.com website, July 11, 2010, accessed July 1, 2015, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
The Being of Identity
What is identity? It is not substance. Is it a quality? Is it a relation?
I propose that identity is the accumulation of actions, passions, qualities, and relations by and in which one not only tends to characterize oneself but is characterized by others. The relations that arise from these changes remain accessible in the memory and are re-asserted when relevant.
Hence identity is not identical with a full understanding of my being and its history, an understanding possible only when every transcendental relation arising from the subjective modifications of inherent accidents are taken into account objectively. In fact, identity may go contrary to transcendental relations that arise regarding my subjectivity; e.g. I identify myself as a certain gender or sex when this assertion has no correspondence to the transcendental relation that exists suprasubjectively, i.e. independently of my thoughts, beliefs, or feelings regarding my identity. Thus, identity is further characterized by what I assert or say of myself and what others say of me.
But identity isn't merely what others say of me, which is reputation and perception. Identity is principally self-perception and the expression of that self-perception with an accompanying acceptance from others regarding this self assertion. Secondarily, since how others perceive me and my assertions is not entirely within my control, identity must also encompass something of these uncontrollable variables.
Identity as self-perception and expression of that self-perception carries with it the implicit desire that others accept this self-perception. Hence this desire of acceptance is constitutive of identity. A person who describes herself with a certain label is upset when people deliberately mischaracterize that identity characteristic.
Because identity exists in the order of ens rationis, that is, the objective, cognitive constructions natural to the species-specifically human form of semiosis, identity will for all concrete purposes be inextricably tied up with the influence of cultural symbols. A person's identity is always expressed with language, with labels, words created and agreed upon by a larger society to mean certain things, and hence, even if identity is primarily self-perception, expression of self-perception, and desire for acceptance, its sources are always outside the cognitive activity of the subject forming the identity.
The strange paradox arises, then, that identity is what a person asserts is most personal and yet is formed exclusively of cognitive constructs originating outside of the person and which constructs the person simply determines will be his own identity, his own uniqueness.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, our uniqueness is not and should not simply be a matter of what I say I am. My inherent accidents are unique to me not only in principle (that is, metaphysically) but in concrete; further, the transcendental relations that arise from my intersubjective activities are unique to me, that is to say, no one else in history has or ever will have the same personal history of events and behaviors. It is impossible to reproduce in principle and in concrete even if it can be imagined.
Finally, identity must be appropriated in the Christian life. St. Paul states it simply: "Now I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). Through grace and progressive union with God, we come to identify ourselves as Christ and an extension of His mystical body. But this isn't simply self-determination; it is above all cooperation, perfect cooperation through perfect docility to the interior promptings of the Holy Ghost. The transformation that occurs in our psyche must be so thorough that everything is through God, with God, and in God, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. As Aquinas so profoundly put it, grace is the beginning of eternal life.
What can we learn from this paradox of identity then, namely, that that which is most personal to me is inevitably external to me? And further, what can we learn from the fact that our ultimate identity in Christ must be founded in the self-determination, through grace, to cooperate with God's grace in progressive transforming union? We can learn that self-determination is inevitably linked with cooperation, and these two dynamics of independence and interdependence must co-exist for the proper flourishing of any living organism. This balance must be a corrective to the overemphasis in today's society on atomistic independence, the mutual apathy that follows naturally from mindless consumerism, especially of relentless social media. It is also a corrective to a lack of proper boundaries insofar as interdependence does not mean a dissolving of individuals into an incongruous whole but rather their optimal coordination with each other for their mutual and collective benefit.
The Trinity is the perfect model of this balance between independence and interdependence, where substance and relation coincide perfectly and infinitely, where self-determination and cooperation achieve a total co-incidence.
I propose that identity is the accumulation of actions, passions, qualities, and relations by and in which one not only tends to characterize oneself but is characterized by others. The relations that arise from these changes remain accessible in the memory and are re-asserted when relevant.
Hence identity is not identical with a full understanding of my being and its history, an understanding possible only when every transcendental relation arising from the subjective modifications of inherent accidents are taken into account objectively. In fact, identity may go contrary to transcendental relations that arise regarding my subjectivity; e.g. I identify myself as a certain gender or sex when this assertion has no correspondence to the transcendental relation that exists suprasubjectively, i.e. independently of my thoughts, beliefs, or feelings regarding my identity. Thus, identity is further characterized by what I assert or say of myself and what others say of me.
But identity isn't merely what others say of me, which is reputation and perception. Identity is principally self-perception and the expression of that self-perception with an accompanying acceptance from others regarding this self assertion. Secondarily, since how others perceive me and my assertions is not entirely within my control, identity must also encompass something of these uncontrollable variables.
Identity as self-perception and expression of that self-perception carries with it the implicit desire that others accept this self-perception. Hence this desire of acceptance is constitutive of identity. A person who describes herself with a certain label is upset when people deliberately mischaracterize that identity characteristic.
Because identity exists in the order of ens rationis, that is, the objective, cognitive constructions natural to the species-specifically human form of semiosis, identity will for all concrete purposes be inextricably tied up with the influence of cultural symbols. A person's identity is always expressed with language, with labels, words created and agreed upon by a larger society to mean certain things, and hence, even if identity is primarily self-perception, expression of self-perception, and desire for acceptance, its sources are always outside the cognitive activity of the subject forming the identity.
The strange paradox arises, then, that identity is what a person asserts is most personal and yet is formed exclusively of cognitive constructs originating outside of the person and which constructs the person simply determines will be his own identity, his own uniqueness.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, our uniqueness is not and should not simply be a matter of what I say I am. My inherent accidents are unique to me not only in principle (that is, metaphysically) but in concrete; further, the transcendental relations that arise from my intersubjective activities are unique to me, that is to say, no one else in history has or ever will have the same personal history of events and behaviors. It is impossible to reproduce in principle and in concrete even if it can be imagined.
Finally, identity must be appropriated in the Christian life. St. Paul states it simply: "Now I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). Through grace and progressive union with God, we come to identify ourselves as Christ and an extension of His mystical body. But this isn't simply self-determination; it is above all cooperation, perfect cooperation through perfect docility to the interior promptings of the Holy Ghost. The transformation that occurs in our psyche must be so thorough that everything is through God, with God, and in God, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. As Aquinas so profoundly put it, grace is the beginning of eternal life.
What can we learn from this paradox of identity then, namely, that that which is most personal to me is inevitably external to me? And further, what can we learn from the fact that our ultimate identity in Christ must be founded in the self-determination, through grace, to cooperate with God's grace in progressive transforming union? We can learn that self-determination is inevitably linked with cooperation, and these two dynamics of independence and interdependence must co-exist for the proper flourishing of any living organism. This balance must be a corrective to the overemphasis in today's society on atomistic independence, the mutual apathy that follows naturally from mindless consumerism, especially of relentless social media. It is also a corrective to a lack of proper boundaries insofar as interdependence does not mean a dissolving of individuals into an incongruous whole but rather their optimal coordination with each other for their mutual and collective benefit.
The Trinity is the perfect model of this balance between independence and interdependence, where substance and relation coincide perfectly and infinitely, where self-determination and cooperation achieve a total co-incidence.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Repost: "Judge Not"
A good, short article on the misrepresentation of Christ's admonition to "judge not."
---
I envision a lost man standing before Jesus Christ at the final judgment, having a strong sense of the fate that awaits. He cries out, ‘Judge not Jesus! You said it yourself! I read it in red!’
I then imagine that Jesus goes on to explain to the man that he has misinterpreted Jesus’ words: ‘Did you not also read that you are to remove the log from your own eye so that you can see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s? I have no log in my eye. My eye is clear, and I see you as you are. I judge accordingly, and my judgment is true and right.’
In my imagination, Jesus continues, ‘Did you not read that I told my disciples not to cast pearls before the swine? Did I not mean that they had to be able to judge a swine when they saw one? Clearly you do not understand my words.’
To which the man replies: ‘Judge not Jesus! You said it yourself! I read it in red, you hypocrite!’
And he goes to hell, continuing to justify himself for eternity, still thinking that Jesus is the judgmental one.
---
Source: Heath, "Judge Not," Tides and Turning (blog), June 21, 2013, accessed February 24, 2015, https://tidesandturning.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/judge-not/.
---
I envision a lost man standing before Jesus Christ at the final judgment, having a strong sense of the fate that awaits. He cries out, ‘Judge not Jesus! You said it yourself! I read it in red!’
I then imagine that Jesus goes on to explain to the man that he has misinterpreted Jesus’ words: ‘Did you not also read that you are to remove the log from your own eye so that you can see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s? I have no log in my eye. My eye is clear, and I see you as you are. I judge accordingly, and my judgment is true and right.’
In my imagination, Jesus continues, ‘Did you not read that I told my disciples not to cast pearls before the swine? Did I not mean that they had to be able to judge a swine when they saw one? Clearly you do not understand my words.’
To which the man replies: ‘Judge not Jesus! You said it yourself! I read it in red, you hypocrite!’
And he goes to hell, continuing to justify himself for eternity, still thinking that Jesus is the judgmental one.
---
Source: Heath, "Judge Not," Tides and Turning (blog), June 21, 2013, accessed February 24, 2015, https://tidesandturning.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/judge-not/.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Fr. Cooper on Discernment and Discouragement
"All conditional propositions that disturb your soul come from the devil" (4m26s).
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Internal Semiosis, Resonance, and the Interior Life
Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange compared the interior life to the internal conversation that occurs in a man. If this interior life is natural, the conversation occurs simply with oneself, making oneself the ultimate referent of all experience: "As soon as a man ceases to be outwardly occupied, to talk with his fellow men, as soon as he is alone, even in the noisy streets of a great city, he begins to carry on a conversation with himself [....] If a man is fundamentally egotistical, his intimate conversation with himself is inspired by sensuality or pride." (Three Ages of the Interior Life, trans. M. Timothea Doyle, ch. 2, http://christianperfection.info/tta6.php).
At the moment that a man seeks the good in honesty, the nature of this conversation changes: "He converses with himself, for example, about what is necessary to live becomingly and to support his family. This at times preoccupies him greatly; he feels his weakness and the need of placing his confidence no longer in himself alone, but in God" (ibid.). Even in the state of grace, egoism confuses and mangles this interior conversation, pushing God out as much as possible despite the soul's clearer vision of its inadequacy and dependence on God. In fact, Garrigou-Lagrange suggests that this interior conversation cannot end and implicitly points to man's need for God as well as man's final fulfillment in God, who alone can finally satisfy this interior dialogue: "The soul must converse with someone other than itself. Why? Because it is not its own last end; because its end is the living God, and it cannot rest entirely except in Him" (ibid.).
Modern psychology at its best provides scientific precision to analytical explanations of the interior, psychological processes of the intellect and soul. Often, however, where psychology gets something correct, we find such points already explicated in the writings and experiences of the Saints, at least in nascent or unscientific form. St. Paul famously experienced the interior struggle between what he saw was good and what he hated as evil:
Perhaps a semiotic analysis of human psychology would provide some helpful insights for spiritual growth. We know from experience that when a man works on growing in self-knowledge and discernment, the unconscious aspects of his moral actions eventually come to light. We also know from the experience of the Saints that where sinful tendencies reside in these unconscious dimensions, grace and asceticism eventually purify and heal the psyche of these tendencies. Here is a simple refutation of the omnipotence of the unconscious. Transformation in Christ is where the Saint may say truly, "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).
This internal dialogue, often the source of many self-destructive tendencies, especially to despair in various forms, is nothing other than a process of "private semiosis," the internal activity of signs in the human mind as it processes its environment and itself in some unified way. Conversation is speech, and speech consists of signs; human language is nothing other than that form of sign use unique to humans: anthroposemiosis. This semiosis is private insofar as it occurs immanently in the mind, seen in its immediate, raw form only by the individual and God although it may be expressed in a mediated way to others—mediated because only we can experience the fullness of what we experience.
But sign activity, or semiosis, for humans occurs in multiple dimensions since the human alone of all animals can distinguish between signs as such and all other forms of reality, between subject and object, between actual and ideal. Much of the activity that informs our conscious semiosis is subconscious. For example, when we read a novel, we subconsciously take on the role of a reader who understands that we are entering into a fictional world. Did we make the conscious, private semiosic choice to take on this interpretive stance? No (although we could if we so chose). We switch between interpretive modes for all genres of text, and we do something similar when we enter different social settings and engage with different people. Even where there is the conscious awareness of making certain switches, for example, "I must not use vulgarity when I'm around grandma," we might tell ourselves privately, there are other aspects of this switch that we often are not aware of; for example, what is the prior condition that prompts us to tell ourselves that we ought not to use vulgarity around our elders? This prompting is a semiosic process that we might become aware of, just like we might become aware of our breathing at any moment if we so chose to pay attention and knew what to look for, but just like our breathing, these processes often remain on the subconscious level.
Perhaps we can see the distinction between conscious and subconscious precisely in terms of relation, a relation to intentional awareness or the lack thereof. Following a Lacanian line of thinking regarding the unconscious, the unconscious is precisely everything other than the conscious remaining in human experience, encompassing the aspects of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; this residue or overflow occurs because conscious processing of our experience always leaves something to be desired, something missing; language is often insufficient—we find ourselves at a loss for words as the saying goes. Hence analogously, just as God is precisely everything other than created, finite beings (and by extension, the concept of God is precisely a concept consisting of an amalgamation of relations by which we conceive that God is not this, nor that, nor that), so too our unconscious is everything other than consciously filtered experience through our private semiosis.
Hence the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious all converge simultaneously to create the presently processed experience of our environments. Deepening our self-knowledge allows us to identify these different strands and how they are functioning at any given moment. Perhaps this lack of self-knowledge or despair of possibly attaining to it in atheistic psychologies has led to the idea that the unconscious inescapably dominates all our behavior. There is truth to the experience that often we seem to lose control of ourselves, that our emotions seem to be out of our control, our thoughts run on endlessly, often laboriously (even St. Teresa of Avila complained about this on multiple occasions). Much of this lack of control for the average person certainly stems from a lack of self-knowledge and the tools to deal with and integrate the different dimensions of our experience. (We might also postulate that this lack of control may be the result of a sensitive temperament that is more attuned to the multiple effects of one's surrounding and/or the result of a sensitivity that comes from ascetic and mystical purification by which one is keenly aware of the different spirits affecting our behaviors, thoughts, etc.; maybe some combination of the above was the case with St. Teresa, whose almost constant contemplation bombarded her soul with new infusions of grace, overwhelming her and overflowing into the bodily dimension of her being, sometimes painfully.) With self-knowledge and discipline, these different dimension can be identified, organized, and trained even on the natural plane.
But first, we need to understand why the process of the constant bombardment of shifting emotions and internal dialogue occurs. To begin metaphysically, all being contains positive and negative dimensions, positive perfections and negative lacks due to its finite structure and the circumstances that may have vitiated its due development towards its final end. Being is simultaneously communicative and receptive, sharing its proper perfections around it and receiving the perfections of other beings, hopefully in ways complementary to its own teleological needs—e.g. rain is necessary for plant growth, but too much rain may drown the plant. Hence we may say there is complementary communication and non-complementary communication (where complementary is understood in relation to aiding a being's fulfillment of its final end).
Our relation to reality encompasses these perfections in an intentional form, and our semiosis communicates these intentional realities and perfections, which in turn constantly are those elements that bombard us. So much of this communication is occurring all the time that it seems impossible for any individual to process all of it, and we know from neuroscience just how much processing our brain does behind the scenes in order to maintain our practical functionality at any given moment. Within this bombardment is the opportunity for help or hurt. It is a common experience that we find ourselves in pain or ambient anxiety, and it seemingly arises from nowhere. Demonic influence and psychological disorder momentarily set aside for theoretical reasons in this analysis, it may very well be that a steady bombardment of non-complementary being has slowly accumulated within our souls, leading to affective experiences of pain, anxiety, etc. It may also be that this accumulation resonates in a certain way with already present stores of past accumulations of pain, going back even into early childhood or gestation. Psychology has been able to show just how influential these formative years are and how devastating they may be if a child is not given a properly nurturing upbringing.
The old children's rhyme about sticks, stones, and words never hurting us is simply a child's denial of a very painful reality, its attempt to gain control over what feels beyond its control, the overwhelming overflow of communicated being (or perhaps non-being in the sense of moral evil) leading to pain. The rhyme then seeks to contain the pain through the use of words, but this misses the point because the child clearly does not have the experience or psychological maturity or discernment in order to properly face such pain.
As different webs and spirals of semiosis accumulate in the soul by forming qualities in the manner of habits—and here I am being more speculative than before—perhaps it is precisely in this way that the soul informs the body in a secondary manner—the primary manner being that the soul provides the basic constitutive framework of this kind of living animal—, in the manner of how quality is respect to form as quantity is respect to matter. Habits, while being qualities in the soul, clearly have physical effects in the body; neural networks are formed in habits, for example. As the soul is informed by semiosic processes, so too the body responds accordingly. And perhaps the movement is reciprocal: as the body is affected by external forces beyond the soul's control, the soul is affected, or at least its full and proper expression through the body. Hence, physical and mental disabilities that impede the proper development and expression of normative human intellectual activity.
Regardless of how the above process works, the accumulations of semiotic webs within the soul, both conscious and unconscious, then lead to qualities that affect bodily development and render certain patterns of behavior easier, swifter, and accompanied by a certain spiritual and bodily delight. The quality of a soul informed by a habit and its subsequent informing of the body renders a person apt for the actualization of these habits, creating what we might call a "resonance."
Just as in acoustics, room resonance depends on the wall matter, sound, and location all interacting simultaneously to create a booming effect, or just as pitch resonances may create sympathetic vibrations when certain conditions are met, when certain semiosic processes converge in a human informed with this habitual quality, a resonance may occur, rendering the actualization of the habit immediate, facile, and delightful, perhaps even overwhelming in a certain sense.
Thus the pain of a person trapped in vice—the convergence of these semiosic processes is nothing other than what is called a temptation. At the moment of this convergence, the communication of intentional non-complementary being creates a certain resonance, striving to activate the soul, whose vicious quality renders it apt for reacting in this vicious way. Thus the psychological experience of the temptation may feel overwhelming.
Similarly, for a person formed in a virtuous habit, when the proper semiosic conditions converge, the virtue is activated, the morally good action executed with delight, sometimes with a deep relish at having accomplished the good, even simple goods.
And just as conditions may create resonance based on the qualitative predisposition of a soul formed in this habit, so too opposite conditions may resonate very poorly if at all in people with the opposite qualities respectively. Hence what used to be a temptation to a soul now is hardly a blip in its habitual, qualitative orientation towards the good; likewise, a stimulus to good may be experienced for a soul trapped in sin as painful, dissonant, and hardly moving. The semiosic communication is jarring with the quality of the soul; the being that is being communicated is not converging properly with the soul informed or disformed by these qualities. We see analogous clashes in the realm of physical organisms all the time, where external conditions and the subjective constitution of an organism or seed do not converge to lead to the flourishing of the organism.
But lest this process seem to be another form of omnipotence, shifting from the unconscious to these semiosic processes, it must be remembered that conscious semiosis in the human is the discursive reason, guiding and directing the will, creating the conditions for freedom. Clearly the freedom of a soul trapped in sin is encumbered but can never be totally destroyed without destroying discursive reason itself. Hence these semiosic processes are both the condition for freedom as well as the possibility for either its hindrance or development, just as water is a necessary condition for the growth of plant life, but too little, too much, or contaminated water will kill the plant. The will must still choose, and the will can direct the intentionality of these semiosic processes, guiding them in certain limited ways, depending on the various conditions, both external and internal. Qualities are supposed to aid the soul in the proper guidance of these processes, in the proper flourishing of the rational aspect of human nature.
Grace enters. We say that grace perfects nature. Grace is a communication in the divine life, a participation, or in other words, a relation. This is precisely semiosis on the divine level, entering through an analogous, accidental, created, physical mode into the soul. Without grace, the private semiosis of an individual would begin at conception and crash into oblivion at death. Grace thus creates a relation between the soul and God and creates an elevation of those dimensions that exist in the soul, giving them an orientation to the divine or at least the conditions that make possible the development of this orientation. Hence the accumulated semioses remain, but grace now offers and provides a "defrag" program for the soul. There is certainly an extent to which the soul may do this itself—the active purifications and ascetical stages of the spiritual life constitute this extent. But the end for which God has made man goes beyond man's natural, immanent capacities, and besides which, the wounds of sin that remain render the accumulation of harmful semioses sometimes overwhelming, something experienced sometimes as loss of total control, addiction.
The conversation, the private semiosis, may now turn to God. God's semiosis enters into the soul; the Trinity makes its dwelling in the heart. The Logos communicates the fullness of the divinity. The Holy Ghost consumes and transforms. The Father guides the soul lovingly, teaching, listening, aiding, assuring.
We also believe there is a Communion of Saints. Communion involves communication, reception, relation, a sharing, a participation. The semiosis of grace extends not only to the Deity but to those who are linked by grace to God.
These are the helps that the soul needs. Nevertheless, those resonances remain, the resonances of already formed habits. The struggle is arduous, but the soul is assured of divine assistance, a true omnipotence, the omnipotence of God and the shared, participated omnipotence of the Blessed Mother, who obtains for us all that we need. The theological virtues create wellsprings, new qualities in the soul, by which the old resonances may be combatted not only on the natural plane but also the supernatural.
Here it must be remarked one particular difficulty people have in allowing grace to establish a new, supernatural quality. Faith is the virtue by which we attain to God as revealed and revealing Truth. St. John of the Cross interestingly argues that living faith alone is the proximate and proportionate means of union with God. What does this mean semiotically? Simply that the semiosis of faith is experienced psychologically as pure emptiness, darkness, nothing except the will's constant clinging to God despite all other competing strands of semiosis in the psyche.
Here we can see why so many people get lost in secondary matters of faith and, although they intellectually adhere or profess to the matters of faith and their extensions to different aspects of the Church and Christian life, this faith doesn't seem to transform them as it ought. For example, focusing on issues, such as the pro-life movement, personal devotions, political topics, like women priests, sexual morality, marriage, or issues of liturgy, tradition, and doctrine—these are all secondary to faith. Faith primarily attains to God and secondarily applies to all else insofar as it stands in relation to God revealing. Hence faith is meant to unite us perfectly to God and not to these secondary matters. St. John of the Cross insists that a person who places importance on these secondary issues is, despite these issues being related to faith, hindering their union with God through faith. The following quotation focuses only on devotions and the Mass, for example:
To repeat: meditation is not a clinging to human semiosis, but an efficient tool to redirect human semiosis to free the soul of its accumulated vicious qualities so that these accumulations don't completely stifle and freeze the flowering of faith in the soul. Meditation should be leading us to become more and more humble and detached from our private conceptions and semiosis and becoming more and more attached to God, conversing with Him, remaining recollected in Him, not ourselves, going out of ourselves as St. John of the Cross would say, forgetting ourselves.
Someday, by God's grace, we shall attain to that state where our private semiosis is directed by the Holy Ghost perfectly, so that although we experience reality with our accumulated past and individuality, it is filtered and subsumed harmoniously and without resistance by the divine semiosis of Christ: "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).
At the moment that a man seeks the good in honesty, the nature of this conversation changes: "He converses with himself, for example, about what is necessary to live becomingly and to support his family. This at times preoccupies him greatly; he feels his weakness and the need of placing his confidence no longer in himself alone, but in God" (ibid.). Even in the state of grace, egoism confuses and mangles this interior conversation, pushing God out as much as possible despite the soul's clearer vision of its inadequacy and dependence on God. In fact, Garrigou-Lagrange suggests that this interior conversation cannot end and implicitly points to man's need for God as well as man's final fulfillment in God, who alone can finally satisfy this interior dialogue: "The soul must converse with someone other than itself. Why? Because it is not its own last end; because its end is the living God, and it cannot rest entirely except in Him" (ibid.).
Modern psychology at its best provides scientific precision to analytical explanations of the interior, psychological processes of the intellect and soul. Often, however, where psychology gets something correct, we find such points already explicated in the writings and experiences of the Saints, at least in nascent or unscientific form. St. Paul famously experienced the interior struggle between what he saw was good and what he hated as evil:
For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do. If then I do that which I will not, I consent to the law, that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do. Now if I do that which I will not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
I find then a law, that when I have a will to do good, evil is present with me. For I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man: But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members. Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God, by Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with the mind serve the law of God; but with the flesh, the law of sin. (Romans 7:15–25; DR trans.)And Psalm 19 says, "Who can understand sins? from my secret ones cleanse me, O Lord" (v. 12). These verses posit that there exists a dimension of the broken personality, caught up in sin, in conflict with the conscious striving towards virtue. There is a contrast in Paul between flesh and mind yet almost as if the flesh had a mind and will of its own. Modern psychology would distinguish these dimensions as the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious. The exact nature of these different aspects can lead to serious error in a philosophy of human nature, and it's clear that much of modern psychology has tended towards a mechanistic reductionism of the human psyche, where the unconscious takes on some kind of overwhelming force. Without going to these extremes, it seems reasonable that we often act out of a plurality of motives, some of which we do not discern until we reflect later on our actions with deeper insight. The increase of self-knowledge is not merely quantitative—I know more and more truths about my personality—but also qualitative—I know my personality more deeply than before, its patterns, tendencies, weaknesses, and also very importantly, its strengths, some of which due to my God-given temperament.
Perhaps a semiotic analysis of human psychology would provide some helpful insights for spiritual growth. We know from experience that when a man works on growing in self-knowledge and discernment, the unconscious aspects of his moral actions eventually come to light. We also know from the experience of the Saints that where sinful tendencies reside in these unconscious dimensions, grace and asceticism eventually purify and heal the psyche of these tendencies. Here is a simple refutation of the omnipotence of the unconscious. Transformation in Christ is where the Saint may say truly, "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).
This internal dialogue, often the source of many self-destructive tendencies, especially to despair in various forms, is nothing other than a process of "private semiosis," the internal activity of signs in the human mind as it processes its environment and itself in some unified way. Conversation is speech, and speech consists of signs; human language is nothing other than that form of sign use unique to humans: anthroposemiosis. This semiosis is private insofar as it occurs immanently in the mind, seen in its immediate, raw form only by the individual and God although it may be expressed in a mediated way to others—mediated because only we can experience the fullness of what we experience.
But sign activity, or semiosis, for humans occurs in multiple dimensions since the human alone of all animals can distinguish between signs as such and all other forms of reality, between subject and object, between actual and ideal. Much of the activity that informs our conscious semiosis is subconscious. For example, when we read a novel, we subconsciously take on the role of a reader who understands that we are entering into a fictional world. Did we make the conscious, private semiosic choice to take on this interpretive stance? No (although we could if we so chose). We switch between interpretive modes for all genres of text, and we do something similar when we enter different social settings and engage with different people. Even where there is the conscious awareness of making certain switches, for example, "I must not use vulgarity when I'm around grandma," we might tell ourselves privately, there are other aspects of this switch that we often are not aware of; for example, what is the prior condition that prompts us to tell ourselves that we ought not to use vulgarity around our elders? This prompting is a semiosic process that we might become aware of, just like we might become aware of our breathing at any moment if we so chose to pay attention and knew what to look for, but just like our breathing, these processes often remain on the subconscious level.
Perhaps we can see the distinction between conscious and subconscious precisely in terms of relation, a relation to intentional awareness or the lack thereof. Following a Lacanian line of thinking regarding the unconscious, the unconscious is precisely everything other than the conscious remaining in human experience, encompassing the aspects of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; this residue or overflow occurs because conscious processing of our experience always leaves something to be desired, something missing; language is often insufficient—we find ourselves at a loss for words as the saying goes. Hence analogously, just as God is precisely everything other than created, finite beings (and by extension, the concept of God is precisely a concept consisting of an amalgamation of relations by which we conceive that God is not this, nor that, nor that), so too our unconscious is everything other than consciously filtered experience through our private semiosis.
Hence the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious all converge simultaneously to create the presently processed experience of our environments. Deepening our self-knowledge allows us to identify these different strands and how they are functioning at any given moment. Perhaps this lack of self-knowledge or despair of possibly attaining to it in atheistic psychologies has led to the idea that the unconscious inescapably dominates all our behavior. There is truth to the experience that often we seem to lose control of ourselves, that our emotions seem to be out of our control, our thoughts run on endlessly, often laboriously (even St. Teresa of Avila complained about this on multiple occasions). Much of this lack of control for the average person certainly stems from a lack of self-knowledge and the tools to deal with and integrate the different dimensions of our experience. (We might also postulate that this lack of control may be the result of a sensitive temperament that is more attuned to the multiple effects of one's surrounding and/or the result of a sensitivity that comes from ascetic and mystical purification by which one is keenly aware of the different spirits affecting our behaviors, thoughts, etc.; maybe some combination of the above was the case with St. Teresa, whose almost constant contemplation bombarded her soul with new infusions of grace, overwhelming her and overflowing into the bodily dimension of her being, sometimes painfully.) With self-knowledge and discipline, these different dimension can be identified, organized, and trained even on the natural plane.
But first, we need to understand why the process of the constant bombardment of shifting emotions and internal dialogue occurs. To begin metaphysically, all being contains positive and negative dimensions, positive perfections and negative lacks due to its finite structure and the circumstances that may have vitiated its due development towards its final end. Being is simultaneously communicative and receptive, sharing its proper perfections around it and receiving the perfections of other beings, hopefully in ways complementary to its own teleological needs—e.g. rain is necessary for plant growth, but too much rain may drown the plant. Hence we may say there is complementary communication and non-complementary communication (where complementary is understood in relation to aiding a being's fulfillment of its final end).
Our relation to reality encompasses these perfections in an intentional form, and our semiosis communicates these intentional realities and perfections, which in turn constantly are those elements that bombard us. So much of this communication is occurring all the time that it seems impossible for any individual to process all of it, and we know from neuroscience just how much processing our brain does behind the scenes in order to maintain our practical functionality at any given moment. Within this bombardment is the opportunity for help or hurt. It is a common experience that we find ourselves in pain or ambient anxiety, and it seemingly arises from nowhere. Demonic influence and psychological disorder momentarily set aside for theoretical reasons in this analysis, it may very well be that a steady bombardment of non-complementary being has slowly accumulated within our souls, leading to affective experiences of pain, anxiety, etc. It may also be that this accumulation resonates in a certain way with already present stores of past accumulations of pain, going back even into early childhood or gestation. Psychology has been able to show just how influential these formative years are and how devastating they may be if a child is not given a properly nurturing upbringing.
The old children's rhyme about sticks, stones, and words never hurting us is simply a child's denial of a very painful reality, its attempt to gain control over what feels beyond its control, the overwhelming overflow of communicated being (or perhaps non-being in the sense of moral evil) leading to pain. The rhyme then seeks to contain the pain through the use of words, but this misses the point because the child clearly does not have the experience or psychological maturity or discernment in order to properly face such pain.
As different webs and spirals of semiosis accumulate in the soul by forming qualities in the manner of habits—and here I am being more speculative than before—perhaps it is precisely in this way that the soul informs the body in a secondary manner—the primary manner being that the soul provides the basic constitutive framework of this kind of living animal—, in the manner of how quality is respect to form as quantity is respect to matter. Habits, while being qualities in the soul, clearly have physical effects in the body; neural networks are formed in habits, for example. As the soul is informed by semiosic processes, so too the body responds accordingly. And perhaps the movement is reciprocal: as the body is affected by external forces beyond the soul's control, the soul is affected, or at least its full and proper expression through the body. Hence, physical and mental disabilities that impede the proper development and expression of normative human intellectual activity.
Regardless of how the above process works, the accumulations of semiotic webs within the soul, both conscious and unconscious, then lead to qualities that affect bodily development and render certain patterns of behavior easier, swifter, and accompanied by a certain spiritual and bodily delight. The quality of a soul informed by a habit and its subsequent informing of the body renders a person apt for the actualization of these habits, creating what we might call a "resonance."
Just as in acoustics, room resonance depends on the wall matter, sound, and location all interacting simultaneously to create a booming effect, or just as pitch resonances may create sympathetic vibrations when certain conditions are met, when certain semiosic processes converge in a human informed with this habitual quality, a resonance may occur, rendering the actualization of the habit immediate, facile, and delightful, perhaps even overwhelming in a certain sense.
Thus the pain of a person trapped in vice—the convergence of these semiosic processes is nothing other than what is called a temptation. At the moment of this convergence, the communication of intentional non-complementary being creates a certain resonance, striving to activate the soul, whose vicious quality renders it apt for reacting in this vicious way. Thus the psychological experience of the temptation may feel overwhelming.
Similarly, for a person formed in a virtuous habit, when the proper semiosic conditions converge, the virtue is activated, the morally good action executed with delight, sometimes with a deep relish at having accomplished the good, even simple goods.
And just as conditions may create resonance based on the qualitative predisposition of a soul formed in this habit, so too opposite conditions may resonate very poorly if at all in people with the opposite qualities respectively. Hence what used to be a temptation to a soul now is hardly a blip in its habitual, qualitative orientation towards the good; likewise, a stimulus to good may be experienced for a soul trapped in sin as painful, dissonant, and hardly moving. The semiosic communication is jarring with the quality of the soul; the being that is being communicated is not converging properly with the soul informed or disformed by these qualities. We see analogous clashes in the realm of physical organisms all the time, where external conditions and the subjective constitution of an organism or seed do not converge to lead to the flourishing of the organism.
But lest this process seem to be another form of omnipotence, shifting from the unconscious to these semiosic processes, it must be remembered that conscious semiosis in the human is the discursive reason, guiding and directing the will, creating the conditions for freedom. Clearly the freedom of a soul trapped in sin is encumbered but can never be totally destroyed without destroying discursive reason itself. Hence these semiosic processes are both the condition for freedom as well as the possibility for either its hindrance or development, just as water is a necessary condition for the growth of plant life, but too little, too much, or contaminated water will kill the plant. The will must still choose, and the will can direct the intentionality of these semiosic processes, guiding them in certain limited ways, depending on the various conditions, both external and internal. Qualities are supposed to aid the soul in the proper guidance of these processes, in the proper flourishing of the rational aspect of human nature.
Grace enters. We say that grace perfects nature. Grace is a communication in the divine life, a participation, or in other words, a relation. This is precisely semiosis on the divine level, entering through an analogous, accidental, created, physical mode into the soul. Without grace, the private semiosis of an individual would begin at conception and crash into oblivion at death. Grace thus creates a relation between the soul and God and creates an elevation of those dimensions that exist in the soul, giving them an orientation to the divine or at least the conditions that make possible the development of this orientation. Hence the accumulated semioses remain, but grace now offers and provides a "defrag" program for the soul. There is certainly an extent to which the soul may do this itself—the active purifications and ascetical stages of the spiritual life constitute this extent. But the end for which God has made man goes beyond man's natural, immanent capacities, and besides which, the wounds of sin that remain render the accumulation of harmful semioses sometimes overwhelming, something experienced sometimes as loss of total control, addiction.
The conversation, the private semiosis, may now turn to God. God's semiosis enters into the soul; the Trinity makes its dwelling in the heart. The Logos communicates the fullness of the divinity. The Holy Ghost consumes and transforms. The Father guides the soul lovingly, teaching, listening, aiding, assuring.
We also believe there is a Communion of Saints. Communion involves communication, reception, relation, a sharing, a participation. The semiosis of grace extends not only to the Deity but to those who are linked by grace to God.
These are the helps that the soul needs. Nevertheless, those resonances remain, the resonances of already formed habits. The struggle is arduous, but the soul is assured of divine assistance, a true omnipotence, the omnipotence of God and the shared, participated omnipotence of the Blessed Mother, who obtains for us all that we need. The theological virtues create wellsprings, new qualities in the soul, by which the old resonances may be combatted not only on the natural plane but also the supernatural.
Here it must be remarked one particular difficulty people have in allowing grace to establish a new, supernatural quality. Faith is the virtue by which we attain to God as revealed and revealing Truth. St. John of the Cross interestingly argues that living faith alone is the proximate and proportionate means of union with God. What does this mean semiotically? Simply that the semiosis of faith is experienced psychologically as pure emptiness, darkness, nothing except the will's constant clinging to God despite all other competing strands of semiosis in the psyche.
Here we can see why so many people get lost in secondary matters of faith and, although they intellectually adhere or profess to the matters of faith and their extensions to different aspects of the Church and Christian life, this faith doesn't seem to transform them as it ought. For example, focusing on issues, such as the pro-life movement, personal devotions, political topics, like women priests, sexual morality, marriage, or issues of liturgy, tradition, and doctrine—these are all secondary to faith. Faith primarily attains to God and secondarily applies to all else insofar as it stands in relation to God revealing. Hence faith is meant to unite us perfectly to God and not to these secondary matters. St. John of the Cross insists that a person who places importance on these secondary issues is, despite these issues being related to faith, hindering their union with God through faith. The following quotation focuses only on devotions and the Mass, for example:
These people attribute so much efficacy to methods of carrying out their devotions and prayers [....] They put more trust in these methods than they do in the living prayer [....] For example, they demand that the Mass be said with a certain number of candles, no more nor less; or that it be celebrated at a particular hour, no sooner nor later; or that it be said after a certain day, not before; [...] And regarding other ceremonies in vocal prayers and other devotions, one should not become attached to any ceremonies or modes of prayer other than those Christ taught us." (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 3.43.2, 44.4)St. John of the Cross says the way to the top of the mountain is: nada, the emptiness of pure faith, a total clinging to God in absolute darkness of intellectual and finite semioses. The divine semiosis of faith stands in absolute difference (but not indifference) to all human semioses, and to inject human semiosis into the divine semiosis of faith is to kill faith. Meditation, as St. John of the Cross teaches, is a heuristic process, temporary, by which the soul is actively weaning itself of previous vicious habits and working towards developing virtuous qualities. Think of St. Teresa of Avila's comparison of meditation to drawing water out of a well with a bucket. Meditation simply frees up the soul to a sufficient degree so that its accumulated semioses may not get in the way of the divine semiosis of faith because it often is the case that our accumulations stifle and mute faith without our even intending it to. Perhaps more precisely we should say our accumulations stifle and mute the expression and development of faith but not faith itself; otherwise, it would be impossible to remain in a state of grace unless we were already perfect! No, God, seeing our weakness, accepts the conscious intention of our will to adhere to the faith, and this is sufficient for faith to remain in the soul. Nevertheless, this state is only the beginning, and it's easy for the individual, so accustomed to created, finite semiosic processes, to confuse the divine semiosis of faith with these other finite processes, which extend to our conceptions of the Mass, of the Pope, of what the Church really should look like, and even what our spiritual life should look like. As long as we cling to human semiosis, we hinder faith.
To repeat: meditation is not a clinging to human semiosis, but an efficient tool to redirect human semiosis to free the soul of its accumulated vicious qualities so that these accumulations don't completely stifle and freeze the flowering of faith in the soul. Meditation should be leading us to become more and more humble and detached from our private conceptions and semiosis and becoming more and more attached to God, conversing with Him, remaining recollected in Him, not ourselves, going out of ourselves as St. John of the Cross would say, forgetting ourselves.
Someday, by God's grace, we shall attain to that state where our private semiosis is directed by the Holy Ghost perfectly, so that although we experience reality with our accumulated past and individuality, it is filtered and subsumed harmoniously and without resistance by the divine semiosis of Christ: "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Why Self-Knowledge Is Difficult
Notes from Fr. Jules J. Toner, S.J., A Commentary on Saint Ignatius' Rules for the Discernment of Spirits: A Guide to the Principles and Practice (St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1982), 41–44.
---
Aside from the distorting effects of our fallen nature, there are two fundamental reasons for the difficulty of attaining self-knowledge: 1) "the natural bent of our attention"; 2) "the complexity and mobility of our psychic experience" (41).
1. Our attention wanders seemingly aimlessly, drawn by present sensibles, current feelings and their relations to their causes (beliefs, worries, anticipations, regrets, etc.). The flux of consciousness is so fast and fluid that it's hard to identify single factors and motions, unless they are especially pronounced or prolonged. Sometimes we dismiss what is important, thinking it is unimportant, and sometimes we exaggerate what is less important or an aftereffect.
2. The inner motions of our experience are so interrelated and numerous that often it is hard to begin somewhere, and once we have begun, it is hard to isolate one motion. Hence motions that God may introduce into us for spiritual purposes may end up being passed over as said above; they are "never brought to the scrutiny of faith-enlightened intelligence and integrated into our Christian life of free choice and love" (42). And on the other hand, due to ignorance and lack of self awareness, evil motions can hold a sway over us.
It must be remembered that awareness is difficult but possible, even necessary, to advance in the spiritual life. Repeated effort will increase the capacity for self-reflection and understanding.
Those who think that they are an open book to themselves should be warned. "They are probably reading their hearts very superficially, finding what they want to find or what they have been led to expect to find. Their easy confidence may be a barrier to real self-knowledge, which is not easily achieved" (43).
There is a great need for prayer, especially to the Holy Spirit, a prayer of trust and openness. The Holy Spirit can give us a superabundance of helps to come to understand ourselves and develop self-reflection. He alone can protect us from deceptions.
Finally, we need help from others, help from, say, St. Ignatius' rules and experienced guides. These are the human helps, or natural guides, through which Providence works and perfects in order to bring us to supernatural guidance.
Ignatius notes in his rules that these are "some rules," implying that they are neither exhaustive nor univocal. Their application must be adapted to circumstances, guided by an experienced, learned, and holy director. This application falls under the realm of prudence and discretion (44)
---
Aside from the distorting effects of our fallen nature, there are two fundamental reasons for the difficulty of attaining self-knowledge: 1) "the natural bent of our attention"; 2) "the complexity and mobility of our psychic experience" (41).
1. Our attention wanders seemingly aimlessly, drawn by present sensibles, current feelings and their relations to their causes (beliefs, worries, anticipations, regrets, etc.). The flux of consciousness is so fast and fluid that it's hard to identify single factors and motions, unless they are especially pronounced or prolonged. Sometimes we dismiss what is important, thinking it is unimportant, and sometimes we exaggerate what is less important or an aftereffect.
2. The inner motions of our experience are so interrelated and numerous that often it is hard to begin somewhere, and once we have begun, it is hard to isolate one motion. Hence motions that God may introduce into us for spiritual purposes may end up being passed over as said above; they are "never brought to the scrutiny of faith-enlightened intelligence and integrated into our Christian life of free choice and love" (42). And on the other hand, due to ignorance and lack of self awareness, evil motions can hold a sway over us.
It must be remembered that awareness is difficult but possible, even necessary, to advance in the spiritual life. Repeated effort will increase the capacity for self-reflection and understanding.
Those who think that they are an open book to themselves should be warned. "They are probably reading their hearts very superficially, finding what they want to find or what they have been led to expect to find. Their easy confidence may be a barrier to real self-knowledge, which is not easily achieved" (43).
There is a great need for prayer, especially to the Holy Spirit, a prayer of trust and openness. The Holy Spirit can give us a superabundance of helps to come to understand ourselves and develop self-reflection. He alone can protect us from deceptions.
Finally, we need help from others, help from, say, St. Ignatius' rules and experienced guides. These are the human helps, or natural guides, through which Providence works and perfects in order to bring us to supernatural guidance.
Ignatius notes in his rules that these are "some rules," implying that they are neither exhaustive nor univocal. Their application must be adapted to circumstances, guided by an experienced, learned, and holy director. This application falls under the realm of prudence and discretion (44)
Monday, December 15, 2014
St. Alphonsus Liguori on False Appearances of Holiness
[I thought this was funny:]
---
Source: St. Alphonsus Liguori, "Advice to Parents," http://www.olrl.org/snt_docs/advice.shtml.
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Supernatural Joy and the Folk Music Mass
There are two extremes regarding joy in the spiritual life: one is a forced depression, which St. Teresa of Avila famously warned against. Contrition, while deeply sorrowful, is not overwhelming to the point of despair but rather strengthens the soul to trust more firmly in God, to hope for assistance to rise from sin, and to rejoice in God's love.
The other extreme is an undifferentiated joy, one that lacks discernment. Not every joy is holy, and not every joy is of Christ. A person may smile during Holy Mass for many reasons, and not every reason may be a good one. There are many who are temperamentally excited and happy-go-lucky, and some of these people happen to be Christians. Does that mean that they radiate Christ because they are so constantly joyful? Hardly.
St. John of the Cross distinguishes six kinds of joy: temporal, natural, sensory, moral, supernatural, and spiritual (Ascent of Mount Carmel 3.17.2; trans. K. Kavanaugh).
Temporal joy originates over riches, worldly honor, status, prestige (ibid., 3.18.1).
Natural joy is caused by "beauty, grace, elegance, bodily constitution [i.e. physical looks], and all other corporeal endowments; also, in the soul, good intelligence, discretion, and other talents [....]" (3.21.1). God grants these latter gifts only so that He may be better known and loved (ibid.). This second joy is the source of lust (cf. 3.22.2).
Sensory joy refers to things of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch as well as images in the imagination (3.24.1). The distinction here between natural and sensory goods is subtle and metaphysical since St. John was trained as a philosopher and theologian. Nevertheless, his point is the same.
Moral goods refer to virtues and the practice of mercy and good works (3.27.1). St. John tells us that "though Christians ought to rejoice in the moral goods and works they perform [...] they ought to rejoice [...] that insofar as they perform these works for the love of God, these works procure eternal life for them" (ibid., §4). Thus we ought not stop to look at our good works and congratulate ourselves, but to look to God and thank Him for the grace to serve Him.
Supernatural goods refer to the"gifts and graces of God" (3.30.1) as well as extraordinary graces, such as healing, miracle working, visions, etc.
Finally, spiritual joy derives from all those things "that are an aid and motivating force in turning the soul to divine things and communion with God" (3.33.2). This can occur in several ways: through goods that motivate us, through goods that provoke or persuade us, through those that direct us, and those that perfect us directly. Holy images are an example of motivating goods (3.35.1), and preaching is an example of a provocative good (3.45.1). St. John gives this advice: "On seeing the image [the faithful] should not allow their senses to become absorbed in it [....] They should pay no attention to these accidents; they should not dwell on the image but immediately raise the mind to what is represented. They should prayerfully and devoutly center the satisfaction and joy of their will in God, or the saint being invoked [....]" (3.37.2).
St. John of the Cross warns against turning even the Church's ceremonies into vain objects that prevent our union with God, such as even Holy Mass:
In other words, St. John's point repeatedly is that our joy must be in God alone; any attachment to joy in anything other than God will hinder our union with God. His great guiding principle is the following:
The other extreme is an undifferentiated joy, one that lacks discernment. Not every joy is holy, and not every joy is of Christ. A person may smile during Holy Mass for many reasons, and not every reason may be a good one. There are many who are temperamentally excited and happy-go-lucky, and some of these people happen to be Christians. Does that mean that they radiate Christ because they are so constantly joyful? Hardly.
St. John of the Cross distinguishes six kinds of joy: temporal, natural, sensory, moral, supernatural, and spiritual (Ascent of Mount Carmel 3.17.2; trans. K. Kavanaugh).
Temporal joy originates over riches, worldly honor, status, prestige (ibid., 3.18.1).
Natural joy is caused by "beauty, grace, elegance, bodily constitution [i.e. physical looks], and all other corporeal endowments; also, in the soul, good intelligence, discretion, and other talents [....]" (3.21.1). God grants these latter gifts only so that He may be better known and loved (ibid.). This second joy is the source of lust (cf. 3.22.2).
Sensory joy refers to things of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch as well as images in the imagination (3.24.1). The distinction here between natural and sensory goods is subtle and metaphysical since St. John was trained as a philosopher and theologian. Nevertheless, his point is the same.
Moral goods refer to virtues and the practice of mercy and good works (3.27.1). St. John tells us that "though Christians ought to rejoice in the moral goods and works they perform [...] they ought to rejoice [...] that insofar as they perform these works for the love of God, these works procure eternal life for them" (ibid., §4). Thus we ought not stop to look at our good works and congratulate ourselves, but to look to God and thank Him for the grace to serve Him.
Supernatural goods refer to the"gifts and graces of God" (3.30.1) as well as extraordinary graces, such as healing, miracle working, visions, etc.
Finally, spiritual joy derives from all those things "that are an aid and motivating force in turning the soul to divine things and communion with God" (3.33.2). This can occur in several ways: through goods that motivate us, through goods that provoke or persuade us, through those that direct us, and those that perfect us directly. Holy images are an example of motivating goods (3.35.1), and preaching is an example of a provocative good (3.45.1). St. John gives this advice: "On seeing the image [the faithful] should not allow their senses to become absorbed in it [....] They should pay no attention to these accidents; they should not dwell on the image but immediately raise the mind to what is represented. They should prayerfully and devoutly center the satisfaction and joy of their will in God, or the saint being invoked [....]" (3.37.2).
St. John of the Cross warns against turning even the Church's ceremonies into vain objects that prevent our union with God, such as even Holy Mass:
These people attribute so much efficacy to methods of carrying out their devotions and prayers [....] They put more trust in these methods than they do in the living prayer [....] For example, they demand that the Mass be said with a certain number of candles, no more nor less; or that it be celebrated at a particular hour, no sooner nor later; or that it be said after a certain day, not before; [...] and that the person performing the ceremonies have certain endowments and characteristics. (3.43.2)He says further on, "The manner of saying Mass should be left to the priest who represents the Church at the altar, for he has received directions from her as to how Mass should be said. [...] And regarding other ceremonies in vocal prayers and other devotions, one should not become attached to any ceremonies or modes of prayer other than those Christ taught us" (3.44.3-4).
In other words, St. John's point repeatedly is that our joy must be in God alone; any attachment to joy in anything other than God will hinder our union with God. His great guiding principle is the following:
I should like to offer a norm for discerning when this gratification of the senses is beneficial and when not. Whenever spiritual persons, on hearing music or other things, seeing agreeable objects, smelling sweet fragrance, or feeling the delight of certain tastes and delicate touches, immediately at the first movement direct their thought and the affection of their will to God, receiving more satisfaction in the thought of God than in the sensible object that caused it, and find no delight in the senses save for this motive, it is a sign that they are profiting by the senses and the sensory part is a help to the spirit. [...]
Thus they are not solicitous about these sensible goods; and when, as I say, these good are offered to them, the will immediately leaves them aside, passing on to God. [...]
Yet anyone who does not feel this freedom of spirit in these objects and sensible delights, but finds that the will pauses in and feeds on them, suffers harm from them and ought to turn from their use. Though according to reason one may want help from them in order to go to God, nonetheless they assuredly prove more a hindrance than a help. [...]
Every joy unaccompanied by this negation and annihilation of all other joys—even when these concern something apparently very elevated—is vain, without profit, and a hindrance to union of the will with God. (3.24.5-7)That being said, what kind of joy does the following tend to provoke? For empirical evidence, check the comments. Most of them focus on the song, on the joyful singers, on the performance, on how fun the song is, on how much the singers are enjoying singing. Even at the end, one girl can be seen shaking her arm in sync with the tambourine. Prima facie, such a movement doesn't indicate joy in God but joy in the tambourine. Hardly any comment goes to the point that the song makes the listener want to love and serve God more deeply. What is said is just as important as what is not said.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
"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.
---
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.
---
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).
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.
---
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.
---
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).
Friday, September 5, 2014
Distinction: "Lifelong Catholic" vs. Living Catholic
There is really only one use for describing oneself as a "lifelong Catholic": a statement of chronological fact regarding one's self conception. In other words, it describes a fact of time—that the lifelong Catholic was baptized soon after birth, confirmed, received First Communion, etc., continued attending Mass throughout life, receiving sacraments, perhaps praying.
But what good is a label in itself? I can call attention to any other "chronological fact" regarding myself—I'm a lifelong brown-haired male. Or I can state a fact regarding how I view myself (self-conception), a view that may change with time; e.g. in high school I believed I was ugly because I had acne.
The label and the self-conception are morally neutral, psychological qualities. These qualities may be harmful or beneficial to our flourishing and striving for happiness. There is, however, no intrinsic point in any of these labels. The labels are spoken so as to be used, to set oneself in relation to something else. Hence labels, while neutral qualities in themselves, are always concretely employed in relation to something else; hence enters their political dimension.
However, I want to draw attention to how a person will call himself a "lifelong Catholic." Usually this label is spoken in order to give moral or political weight and authority to what is said; it serves as a sometimes-very-subtle power play, a badge of honor or pride, saying, "Look at me. I've lived this all my life. My opinion therefore is worth something."
But the problem is that being a "lifelong" anything doesn't guarantee mastery. One could be a lifelong entrepreneur, manager, woodworker, painter, etc. Length of experience certainly exposes one to more possibilities, but it in itself does not guarantee mastery. Mastery requires deliberation and intentionality, usually growing through a slow, heuristic process; sometimes, however, such deliberation draws out an intrinsic genius and leads to spontaneous leaps (punctuated growth rather than gradual).
Hence, the label "lifelong x" is an expression of unconscious pride. The label of the Saint is "I am a sinner; don't listen to me but to Christ, to the doctors, to the Church" (paradoxically in so doing, the Saints then become listened to themselves precisely because they submit their experience and knowledge to the greater tradition and judgment of the Church). The self-styled expert, or "lifelong Catholic," reveals himself to be a novice. If the "lifelong Catholic" would only realize that salvation and sanctification can be lost in a single moment, a single moral act, that salvation is not guaranteed, that the grace of perseverance must always be begged for, that the mystical life, just as with any art and virtue, must be advanced upon by calm and persevering deliberation that is oblivious to time and the growth of which is not set in proportion to the length of time that has passed, then perhaps that lifelong Catholic may actually become a living Catholic, which is the only kind of Catholic that is worth anything for glorifying God, working for the salvation of souls, and being saved.
But what good is a label in itself? I can call attention to any other "chronological fact" regarding myself—I'm a lifelong brown-haired male. Or I can state a fact regarding how I view myself (self-conception), a view that may change with time; e.g. in high school I believed I was ugly because I had acne.
The label and the self-conception are morally neutral, psychological qualities. These qualities may be harmful or beneficial to our flourishing and striving for happiness. There is, however, no intrinsic point in any of these labels. The labels are spoken so as to be used, to set oneself in relation to something else. Hence labels, while neutral qualities in themselves, are always concretely employed in relation to something else; hence enters their political dimension.
However, I want to draw attention to how a person will call himself a "lifelong Catholic." Usually this label is spoken in order to give moral or political weight and authority to what is said; it serves as a sometimes-very-subtle power play, a badge of honor or pride, saying, "Look at me. I've lived this all my life. My opinion therefore is worth something."
But the problem is that being a "lifelong" anything doesn't guarantee mastery. One could be a lifelong entrepreneur, manager, woodworker, painter, etc. Length of experience certainly exposes one to more possibilities, but it in itself does not guarantee mastery. Mastery requires deliberation and intentionality, usually growing through a slow, heuristic process; sometimes, however, such deliberation draws out an intrinsic genius and leads to spontaneous leaps (punctuated growth rather than gradual).
Hence, the label "lifelong x" is an expression of unconscious pride. The label of the Saint is "I am a sinner; don't listen to me but to Christ, to the doctors, to the Church" (paradoxically in so doing, the Saints then become listened to themselves precisely because they submit their experience and knowledge to the greater tradition and judgment of the Church). The self-styled expert, or "lifelong Catholic," reveals himself to be a novice. If the "lifelong Catholic" would only realize that salvation and sanctification can be lost in a single moment, a single moral act, that salvation is not guaranteed, that the grace of perseverance must always be begged for, that the mystical life, just as with any art and virtue, must be advanced upon by calm and persevering deliberation that is oblivious to time and the growth of which is not set in proportion to the length of time that has passed, then perhaps that lifelong Catholic may actually become a living Catholic, which is the only kind of Catholic that is worth anything for glorifying God, working for the salvation of souls, and being saved.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
We Must Surrender Our Plans for Ourselves
[372] Handsome constructions whose irremediable vice is to have been made by the hand of man and outside the divine plan! To consecrate one's energies to such realizations is usually to depart from the will of God.
Meanwhile, God's real designs in our regard declare themselves, upsetting our own preconceived ones. The result, at least momentarily, is discouragement and disillusionment, unless we begin to reconstruct at once in our own fashion. And perhaps God will permit us to work things out as we foresaw, and to enjoy a success which might even appear brilliant, but which is always only mediocre because superficial and human under a supernatural veneer. Our generosity was spent for ourself and our own projects; it missed the plan of God because it did not make an undetermined gift.
It is truly in the dark that one must look for the design of God; for His thoughts are above human thoughts as heaven, earth. Our God dwells in darkness; the transcendent light of [373] His Wisdom blinds our poor eyes. What is our part, what is our place in His divine plan? He alone knows. The part that we must do, the place that we are to fill, in these is our perfection. The gift of self—which is meant to be made in view of the part and place reserved to us in the divine work and edifice—must seek them in mystery and surrender to that mystery which hides and guards them jealously, awaiting the hour for realization. Thus the gift of self must be indeterminate in order not to go astray in purely human projects, but to be at one with the divine reality and truth. [...]
The holy indifference which is its fruit frees the soul from those bitter disappointments that paralyze it for a moment and sometimes break one's spirit definitely.
---
Source: Fr. Marie-Eugène, I Want to See God, trans. by M. Verda Clare (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1953), 372–373.
Meanwhile, God's real designs in our regard declare themselves, upsetting our own preconceived ones. The result, at least momentarily, is discouragement and disillusionment, unless we begin to reconstruct at once in our own fashion. And perhaps God will permit us to work things out as we foresaw, and to enjoy a success which might even appear brilliant, but which is always only mediocre because superficial and human under a supernatural veneer. Our generosity was spent for ourself and our own projects; it missed the plan of God because it did not make an undetermined gift.
It is truly in the dark that one must look for the design of God; for His thoughts are above human thoughts as heaven, earth. Our God dwells in darkness; the transcendent light of [373] His Wisdom blinds our poor eyes. What is our part, what is our place in His divine plan? He alone knows. The part that we must do, the place that we are to fill, in these is our perfection. The gift of self—which is meant to be made in view of the part and place reserved to us in the divine work and edifice—must seek them in mystery and surrender to that mystery which hides and guards them jealously, awaiting the hour for realization. Thus the gift of self must be indeterminate in order not to go astray in purely human projects, but to be at one with the divine reality and truth. [...]
The holy indifference which is its fruit frees the soul from those bitter disappointments that paralyze it for a moment and sometimes break one's spirit definitely.
---
Source: Fr. Marie-Eugène, I Want to See God, trans. by M. Verda Clare (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1953), 372–373.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
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.
---
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.'
---
---
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.'
---
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...."
Friday, July 18, 2014
The Psychological Importance of Rubrics
Whenever we perform a liturgical action, our virtue is not in the details of the action itself but in our willing to be good servants who do only what they are supposed to do (cf. Luke 17:7-10). Hence the importance of each action is founded on the higher principle of conformity to God's will as expressed through the Church. Following the rubrics with precision is an act of loving service to God; to ignore the rubrics, or, even worse, to disobey them, is an act of pride by which we serve our own will, not God’s will. It doesn’t matter what we think about the rubrics; all that matters is that we surrender ourselves to carrying them out with loving precision. Carelessness walks the same path as disobedience, a path that takes one right into the service of the devil and his motto: "Do what thou wilt."
Each liturgical action is simultaneously a small action and a great action. It is a small action in itself, and our Lord has said regarding small things, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much” (Lk. 16:10). The action is great because, as St. John of Damascus wrote, “A small thing is not small when it leads to something great; and it is no small matter to forsake the ancient tradition of the Church which was upheld by all those who were called before us, whose conduct we should observe, and whose faith we should imitate" (On Divine Images, § 1). That is, each action is great because it is sacramental and an expression of God’s grace at work in the liturgy.
Rubrics provide a necessary foundational form for the expression of praise. All expression requires some form of “repression”; that is, without boundaries, rules, and limits, anything goes. But the Church teaches us that love is not formless. Charity is oriented toward the Good; thus it must follow the will of God.
The Church prescribes rubrics to demonstrate how vital and important Her liturgy is to Her; it is so important that everything within it must be carefully directed. See the strong language that She uses:
Each liturgical action is simultaneously a small action and a great action. It is a small action in itself, and our Lord has said regarding small things, “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much” (Lk. 16:10). The action is great because, as St. John of Damascus wrote, “A small thing is not small when it leads to something great; and it is no small matter to forsake the ancient tradition of the Church which was upheld by all those who were called before us, whose conduct we should observe, and whose faith we should imitate" (On Divine Images, § 1). That is, each action is great because it is sacramental and an expression of God’s grace at work in the liturgy.
Rubrics provide a necessary foundational form for the expression of praise. All expression requires some form of “repression”; that is, without boundaries, rules, and limits, anything goes. But the Church teaches us that love is not formless. Charity is oriented toward the Good; thus it must follow the will of God.
The Church prescribes rubrics to demonstrate how vital and important Her liturgy is to Her; it is so important that everything within it must be carefully directed. See the strong language that She uses:
Regulation of the sacred liturgy depends solely on the authority of the Church, that is, on the Apostolic See and, as laws may determine, on the bishop;When the rubrics are thoroughly learned and understood, then one no longer has to consciously think about them. One is then free to pray, to enter deeply into the Sacred Mysteries of the liturgy. This interior prayer, combined with the external form of the rubrics, is true liturgy.
Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.
Thick Skin is a Defense for Self-Loathing
I think the advice to have "thick skin" is terrible advice in the pursuit of human virtue. Every time that I have heard it given, it came from people who were clearly themselves both unhappy and not virtuous, or it was given in circumstances where honesty could easily have led to a much better solution to conflict.
American culture is actually very unique in the world for being one of the only places that has turned insults and sarcasm into a form of compliment. Jokes made at the expense of another person are justified by a narrative of fraternal love—e.g. "He and I are good friends, so I can do this to him or say this about him." Somehow we have the notion that being friends justifies what in most other societies would be taken as a form of hatred or abuse.
It is in this same culture that we have the saying that one ought to have "thick skin" so as not to be disturbed by the rudeness or selfishness of others. But this solution is self-deceptive and stems from pride. The proper reaction to rudeness or selfishness from a purely human point of view cannot be to somehow stifle, suppress, or ignore what is done to us and how we feel about it; such a view presupposes that the emotions are evil and that a truthful encounter with them is likewise unacceptable. The proper reaction to rudeness can be only the honest assertion of one's dignity, of which no circumstance may justify its abuse. Hence, for example:
A dismissive response, equally dishonest, would be like the following:
In such cases, good-willed persons might recommend to the victim to have a "thick skin," but how can this advice, as it is commonly given, be in any way healthy for an individual? Thick skin implies the opposite of an honest encounter and expression of one's internal state.
Why is this issue important? Because most people suffer from an unconscious (and in many cases, conscious) belief that they deserve to be treated poorly, that they are not worthy of being treated well. They unwittingly invite abuse into their lives in one form or another and do not stand up to it because for one reason or another they think that such abuse is justified. Such people do not think that they possess an inherent dignity (or they may intellectually believe this but not act on it accordingly), and hence they do not assert their dignity.
The assertion of dignity must follow upon the honest belief in one's self-worth, and the assertion of dignity must always take a form of honest communication: calling out the evil for what it is and extending the opportunity for reconciliation by the honest stating of one's feelings.
Hence even people who advise thick skin themselves reveal how much self-loathing they unconsciously harbor because anyone who actually values himself could never encourage another human being of practically measureless dignity to act in such a way that would compromise that dignity.
American culture is actually very unique in the world for being one of the only places that has turned insults and sarcasm into a form of compliment. Jokes made at the expense of another person are justified by a narrative of fraternal love—e.g. "He and I are good friends, so I can do this to him or say this about him." Somehow we have the notion that being friends justifies what in most other societies would be taken as a form of hatred or abuse.
It is in this same culture that we have the saying that one ought to have "thick skin" so as not to be disturbed by the rudeness or selfishness of others. But this solution is self-deceptive and stems from pride. The proper reaction to rudeness or selfishness from a purely human point of view cannot be to somehow stifle, suppress, or ignore what is done to us and how we feel about it; such a view presupposes that the emotions are evil and that a truthful encounter with them is likewise unacceptable. The proper reaction to rudeness can be only the honest assertion of one's dignity, of which no circumstance may justify its abuse. Hence, for example:
Offensive person: You're an idiot.It doesn't matter how the offensive person reacts. If he apologizes, then all is well. Most likely, he won't. Either way, contrast this response of honesty (1. stating one's feelings; 2. pointing out the injustice of the act openly) with one of dishonesty:
Honest person: I may be ignorant about certain things or wrong in this situation, but your insulting my character is hurtful and unjustified. If I'm wrong, correct me. There is no need to insult me.
Offensive person: You're an idiot.This is only one example of how a dishonest person might respond. Any response that does not bring to light the injustice of the offensive person's act without being judgmental (e.g. saying, either directly or indirectly, that a person is somehow "evil" for doing something wrong) or does not state one's feelings in reaction is a dishonest one.
Dishonest person: Only idiots themselves call other people idiots.
A dismissive response, equally dishonest, would be like the following:
Offensive person: You're an idiot.In trying not to take seriously the offensive person's insult, the dishonest person deflects any possibility of forgiveness, of bringing the injustice to light so that it may be repented, of reconciliation, etc.
Dishonest person: Whatever.
In such cases, good-willed persons might recommend to the victim to have a "thick skin," but how can this advice, as it is commonly given, be in any way healthy for an individual? Thick skin implies the opposite of an honest encounter and expression of one's internal state.
Why is this issue important? Because most people suffer from an unconscious (and in many cases, conscious) belief that they deserve to be treated poorly, that they are not worthy of being treated well. They unwittingly invite abuse into their lives in one form or another and do not stand up to it because for one reason or another they think that such abuse is justified. Such people do not think that they possess an inherent dignity (or they may intellectually believe this but not act on it accordingly), and hence they do not assert their dignity.
The assertion of dignity must follow upon the honest belief in one's self-worth, and the assertion of dignity must always take a form of honest communication: calling out the evil for what it is and extending the opportunity for reconciliation by the honest stating of one's feelings.
Hence even people who advise thick skin themselves reveal how much self-loathing they unconsciously harbor because anyone who actually values himself could never encourage another human being of practically measureless dignity to act in such a way that would compromise that dignity.
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Dietrich von Hildebrand on Patience, pt. 2: Holy Patience
[325] Patience respects the hierarchy of goods
The patient man, in the first place, preserves the right order in the scale of his interests. The requirements of the moment, no matter how imperious, can never displace or overshadow his attention to higher values. The intensity of his attention to a thing will not be determined by its dynamic appeal, its aggressive presence at a given moment or the noise with which it is advertised, but by the objective weight of its content. His emotional accents are ordered in a fashion proportionate to the objective order of values. He possesses a prompt readiness to bear any cross that he cannot avert from himself without injury to charity or infringement of some duty.
He has the art of waiting, and he knows that, though he might justly reproach somebody with having caused him a needless loss of time, a loveless rebuke sometimes amounts to a greater evil before God than a measure of lost time. Our neighbor's sluggishness, too, as his other awkward and annoying traits, belongs to the things we must bear in charity.
It is because he generally refrains from letting himself go that the patient man achieves this order. He maintains himself at a certain distance from his nature and its stirrings. Even when intensely set upon attaining a purpose, he does not lapse from the status of habitare secum [dwelling within oneself]. He watches lest he overestimate a thing [326] merely because he is striving after it at the moment. He is on guard against delivering himself over to the autonomous logic of that striving which tends to impart an undue weight to any chosen aim merely on the strength of its being chosen.
Patience never pursues limited aims inordinately
In the second place, he never engages himself totally for a partial aim—which means that he never becomes blind to the consideration he owes to others, restricting his vision to himself and his own affairs as an exclusive whole. He knows that such a total engagement is illicit; that God demands of us a confrontation of all things with Him and with one another. Still less would he push such a total engagement to its extreme limit, at the cost of sacrificing even his own important concerns of another order. He would not stake everything on a card, to the point of dissolving his fundamental nexus with God—as the Flying Dutchman who, impatient to round a cape more rapidly, wagers his soul thereon; or as Esau who sells his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Though we are at liberty, and in certain cases, in duty to bound to do everything in our power to attain a legitimate purpose, no obstacle and no ill-success must ever be allowed to throw us off our balance. The true Christian is determined to preserve in all circumstances his open and devoted attitude to God: that basic constitution of his soul which guards him against ever losing hold of the habitare secum; for he is well aware that he cannot remain in communion with God except in such a state of composure and self-possession.
Patience recognizes the sovereignty of God over time
Above all, the true Christian never pretends to a false position of supremacy over the universe. Indeed, Christian patience issues [327] from religio: the consciousness of being a creature of God, whose property we are, without whom we can achieve nothing, and in whose hands all our endeavors, actions, and accomplishments are placed. The true Christian assents to his creaturely dependence on God, and consciously derives from it the informing principle of his life. "My days are in Thy hands" (Ps. 30:16).
He knows that God is also the Lord over Time; that He has assigned to the course of events its temporal extension; that we must recognize the interval of time that separates the taking of a decision from the reaching of the intended aim as a reality willed by God: "All things have their season: and in their times all things pass under heaven" (Eccles. 3:1).
He loathes the hybris [hubris] which lies in the pretension to override the autonomous operation of the causae secundae and to secure effects by a mere fiat. That is why patience in this first and inferior sense, too, is an integral component of a life centered in Christ. It contains a specific response to the omnipotence of God and to our absolute dependence on Him, as well as an acceptance of our creaturely finiteness. He who has patience abides by the Truth; the impatient man, posing at least in a partial sense as though he were God, submits to the bondage of the illusions of pride.
Patience is appropriate even when pursuing high goods
The second form of patience belongs to a much higher level. It refers to the realization of things valuable in themselves, and in particular, the spreading of the kingdom of God. It is in this context, again, that the second dimension of patience—that which makes it akin to constancy and perseverance—assumes its full significance. Here it is a question of intrinsically noble and all-important aims, whose furtherance we ought to seek with impetuous zeal. The moral advancement of ourselves and of others, the triumph of justice, the dissemination of the true Faith, the [328] conversion and the progress of a soul specially entrusted to our care—these, to be sure, are things for which we must yearn in our every fiber and strive after with our whole being; our concern for these can never be too intense.
Woe to those who can take but a moderate and conditional interest in these aims. With a burning eagerness should we engage in their service; for "the kingdom of God suffers violence." So far as these things are concerned, it would be wrong of us to take our time. Rather we should emulate the response of St. Matthew the Apostle to the inexorable call, Sequere me: "Jesus... saw a man sitting in the customhouse, named Matthew; and he saith to him: Follow me. And he arose up and followed him" (Matt. 9:9).
Thus, too, did St. Peter and St. Andrew leave their fishing nets and all their work, and without glancing back, follow Christ. No less immediate and wholehearted was the response of St. Anthony, who, upon hearing the words of the Gospel, at once went to live as a hermit in the desert. No less eager and integral, many centuries later, was the response of St. Francis of Assisi.
And yet, even in this zeal, holy patience is absolutely necessary, and an essential part of holiness. For holy patience means our response to the truth that it is not we but God alone who determines the proper day and hour for the fruitful performance of certain actions and even more exclusively, the ripening of our seed and the harvest of our labors.
The rapidity of our immediate response may sometimes differ in our inward dedication and our outward actions
A keen distinction must be made between our inward dedication to God and to His kingdom in ourselves and in others, and our action proper (on ourselves and on others). The call of God once perceived, our response cannot follow quickly enough. We should immediately and unconditionally respond to the sequere me, giving [329] ourselves to God without demur or reserve as did Mary: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word." All hesitation here would be a perilous error.
But this unhampered inward dedication to God does not by itself involve the performance of all single acts which it entails in a general and essential sense. Particularly does this caution apply to extrinsic and public action, that is, the works of the apostolate.
Certain saints—among them, as we have seen, St. Francis and St. Anthony the hermit—immediately drew the full consequences from their conversion. But this is a great privilege of grace. Our sense of discretion must enlighten us about whether we may take the decisive step with its full implications at once, or had better remain for a period in inward maturing. There exists a danger of skipping over necessary stages.
Sometimes it also happens that a sincere but not so highly privileged Christian, instead of awaiting a more unmistakable and concrete call of God, overreaches himself in a kind of natural enthusiasm and anticipates certain acts fraught with grave obligations, without being able to posit them with a true inward decisiveness. Many converts immediately want to enter a religious Order, though they lack actual vocation and have not measured the whole significance of such an enhanced dedication to God.
The Church knows this danger; that is why she requires an adequate interval of inner maturing for all great steps in religious life. Unless a particular and a rare grace makes up for it, man needs an appropriate space of time for all deep and great things.
The attitudes deep things require cannot, in general, attain their complete validity and reality except after a period of organic development, whose length varies greatly according to each case. For every deep, fateful word there is a fullness of time in which alone it can be legitimately and fruitfully spoken. Anticipate it hastily by acting without discretion, and your utterance of it will be shadowy, devoid of maturity, and invalid. Again, let the "destined hour" pass [330] unused, and you will no longer be able to speak that word except in an empty and purely formal fashion.
It is touching to read how the chamberlain in the Acts of the Apostles hastens to be baptized by the deacon Philip; for him, thanks to a special grace of God, the destined hour—the fullness of time—was at hand there and then. But the Church by no means modelled [sic] her general practice in admitting converts upon these cases, recorded in apostolic times, of an instantaneous and definitive conversion.
On the contrary, in the first centuries she imposed on the catechumens a long course of preparation through the successive stages of which they had to pass before being admitted to Baptism. Even today, every adult baptism must be preceded by a certain period of instruction and maturing. As regards the preparation for monastic life, the Church only allows the taking of temporary vows at first; final vows require a preparatory stage. Nor does she admit a definitive private vow of virginity without an antecedent temporary one. Thus, in forming these decisive resolutions concerning our inner and personal life, too, we must exercise holy patience, and accord time the significance in human affairs with which God has invested it.
Evangelization also calls for patience
Even more does the same caution apply to the apostolate or our activity devoted to the winning of other people's souls. Anxious as we may be at once to communicate the Truth we have unmeritedly [sic] received and to light up other souls with the fire Christ has kindled in ours, we must always bear in mind that we ourselves cannot fruitfully sow before the divine seed has unfolded to a certain degree in our own souls—which, again, means a period of maturing.
Undoubtedly a special grace of God may overrule this, too; but generally speaking, a time of silence must precede the time to [331] speak. St. Paul, after his conversion, lived in silence for several years before he started his work. Nay, the Savior Himself only began His public activity after thirty years of complete privacy; not that He, in whom the fullness of Divinity resides, needed a process of maturing: but He chose to give us an example of the rhythm which God has imposed on human life.
Notwithstanding all our zeal, then, we must observe the obligation of patience even as workers in the vineyard of the Lord. With careful discretion we must try to perceive the striking of God's own hour for our work to start in His vineyard rather than insist, in a spirit of natural enthusiasm and impatience, on determining it by ourselves. Suppose we are animated by a glowing zeal: if, at the same time, we have patience, we may be infallibly sure that we no longer live by our nature but by a supernatural principle of life.
To be sure, we are not in all circumstances obliged to make the time of our action dependent on the degree of receptivity we may suppose to exist in the souls we deal with. There are cases when, with St. Paul, we must set forth the truth opportune, importune ("in season, out of season"). Yet, even then, we are not relieved of the duty of patience; for St. Paul says further: "Reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine" (2 Tim. 4:2).
Still more is patience our duty in regard to the blossoming of the seed which we are allowed to sow in the Lord's vineyard. As Pascal wrote, "Christ will us to fight with Him, not to conquer with Him." We must be humble enough to renounce any pretension to determine ourselves the time of the harvest. While doing everything in our power to hasten the extension of the kingdom of God for which we are working, we must let God alone decide when He shall grant it.
Even in cases when our business concerns some object eminently pleasing to God, which indeed we ought to pursue with consuming zeal, we must not cease saying, "Not as I will but as Thou wilt." At the start of his activity. St. Dominic lived for four [332] years among the Albigensian heretics without converting a single one of them. Yet, he became neither impatient nor discouraged; he did not give up his effort. By the end of his life, he and his sons had converted sixty thousand people. It is in this higher sphere that the second dimension of patience—the aspect of perseverance and indefatigable zeal—reveals its full importance.
Holy patience frees zeal from impatience
Once more, we encounter here the fact, repeatedly stressed in the foregoing pages, of an organic mutual union on the supernatural plane between aspects apparently antithetic. The nearer we draw to God, the more we see develop in ourselves a coincidentia oppositorum—a reconciliation between two equally valid demands which seem to imply an opposition or at least a tension.
It is only on a basis derived from Christ that we can achieve an accord between these two attitudes: hunger and thirst after justice and holy patience. In the natural framework, zeal appears inseparable from impatience.
But the saints accomplish the miracle: on the one hand, they say with the Apostle of the Gentiles, "The love of Christ presseth us," and live up to the message of Christ, "I am come to cast fire on the earth. And what will I, but that it be kindled?" (Luke 12:49); on the other hand, they await in holy patience and inward peace the time when God shall choose to manifest the fruits of their labors.
What holy patience expresses is a living recognition of the truth that the Lord God alone can bring forth the fruit; that, even in this highest sphere, man—with whatever blessings of grace—can do no more than disseminate the seed he has received from God, thus establishing the conditions for the operation of grace in his fellow man's soul. As St. Paul put it: "I have planted, Apollo watered: but God gave the increase" (1 Cor. 3:6).
[333] Holy patience is an ultimate act of surrender to God
Holy patience, seen from another angle, embodies an ultimate act of our surrender to God, and therefore a status of consummate self-possession. For only in the measure that we have surrendered our inmost being to God do we possess ourselves. He who has holy patience has accomplished the process of dying unto himself, and entered the peace of Christ which "surpasseth all understanding." "In your patience you shall possess your souls" (Luke 21:19).
In holy patience, we become children of Him who with inconceivable longanimity "maketh his sun to rise upon the good and bad and raineth upon the just and the unjust" (Matt. 5:45) and who does not weed out the cockle but sorts the chaff from the wheat at the harvest only.
In this sense, holy patience may be described as a sister of wisdom and of contemplation. As these virtues cause us to consider and appreciate everything in a perspective centered on God, thus evoking to the full the beauty and depth of all things, so also in the attitude of patience we emphatically let God act, thus allowing all things to unfold from above—as proceeding from their Origin—and by so experiencing their operation again render to God what is God's.
Holy patience is the fruit of faith, hope, and charity
Holy patience is a fruit of faith, hope and charity. Faith teaches us that God the universal Lord is also the Lord of Time; that He alone appoints the proper hour to everything; that we must place the success of all endeavors, including such as are eminently pleasing to Him, in His hands; that we must believe in the possibility of success though no pledge of it be visible to the human eye; and that consequently we must labor for the kingdom of God whatever the odds seem to be.
[334] Hope keeps us from getting discouraged in spite of all failures and all delays in achieving success and expects "against hope" everything from the goodness of Him "with whom nothing is impossible." Charity impels us to love God and His holy will above everything, and prevents us from expostulating with Him or renouncing our work in His vineyard on account of any defeat sustained. Particularly is patience an offspring of charity insofar as it is assimilable to constancy and perseverance—an offspring of the charity, that is, which in St. Paul's words "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things" (1 Cor. 13:7).
The fruits of holy patience, finally, are meekness and that inner peace of Christ "which the world cannot give." Patience, then, is closely related to the very flower and perfume of Christian life.
Holy patience acknowledges man's creaturely status.
It constitutes one of the basic traits that distinguish a true Christian in statu viae, in the sense even that it connotes in a twofold fashion as specific reference to the character of earthly existence as a status viae—a journey destined to lead us to our ultimate goal. First, it expresses our assent to our creaturely and finite condition, and more particularly, our response to the significance of time as an aspect of the divine plan of creation, as an essential constituent of the status viae, the world of "that which passes" in contradistinction to eternity. Second, patience represents a basic condition for winning through to our eternal salvation, since it implies a capacity for waiting without despairing of our effort for the kingdom of God, an attitude of perseverance in the midst of all obstacles and all sufferings, an intrepid hope for victory, and a humble but sustained preparation for eternity.
Not only is patience an indispensable virtue; beyond that, it discloses a formal apprehension of the basic condition of status viae [335] and of the relation between terrestrial life and eternal life. Thus are the mysterious words of Our Lord on patience related to these others: "He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved" (Matt. 24:13).
He alone who possesses patience—encompassed by disappointments, worn down by defeats, painfully aware of the narrowness of the road to salvation—can yet give proof of the constancy demanded by God, and hold on to the one thing necessary with a devotion not only unflagging but ever increasing. In him alone can the hunger and thirst after justice unquenchable on earth—which is Christ Himself—and the undying fire that the Lord came down to kindle, burn throughout his entire life. Only the patient man, who lives by Christ, can persevere unto the end: "In your patience you shall possess your souls" (Luke 21:19).
---
Source: Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2001), 325–335.
The patient man, in the first place, preserves the right order in the scale of his interests. The requirements of the moment, no matter how imperious, can never displace or overshadow his attention to higher values. The intensity of his attention to a thing will not be determined by its dynamic appeal, its aggressive presence at a given moment or the noise with which it is advertised, but by the objective weight of its content. His emotional accents are ordered in a fashion proportionate to the objective order of values. He possesses a prompt readiness to bear any cross that he cannot avert from himself without injury to charity or infringement of some duty.
He has the art of waiting, and he knows that, though he might justly reproach somebody with having caused him a needless loss of time, a loveless rebuke sometimes amounts to a greater evil before God than a measure of lost time. Our neighbor's sluggishness, too, as his other awkward and annoying traits, belongs to the things we must bear in charity.
It is because he generally refrains from letting himself go that the patient man achieves this order. He maintains himself at a certain distance from his nature and its stirrings. Even when intensely set upon attaining a purpose, he does not lapse from the status of habitare secum [dwelling within oneself]. He watches lest he overestimate a thing [326] merely because he is striving after it at the moment. He is on guard against delivering himself over to the autonomous logic of that striving which tends to impart an undue weight to any chosen aim merely on the strength of its being chosen.
Patience never pursues limited aims inordinately
In the second place, he never engages himself totally for a partial aim—which means that he never becomes blind to the consideration he owes to others, restricting his vision to himself and his own affairs as an exclusive whole. He knows that such a total engagement is illicit; that God demands of us a confrontation of all things with Him and with one another. Still less would he push such a total engagement to its extreme limit, at the cost of sacrificing even his own important concerns of another order. He would not stake everything on a card, to the point of dissolving his fundamental nexus with God—as the Flying Dutchman who, impatient to round a cape more rapidly, wagers his soul thereon; or as Esau who sells his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Though we are at liberty, and in certain cases, in duty to bound to do everything in our power to attain a legitimate purpose, no obstacle and no ill-success must ever be allowed to throw us off our balance. The true Christian is determined to preserve in all circumstances his open and devoted attitude to God: that basic constitution of his soul which guards him against ever losing hold of the habitare secum; for he is well aware that he cannot remain in communion with God except in such a state of composure and self-possession.
Patience recognizes the sovereignty of God over time
Above all, the true Christian never pretends to a false position of supremacy over the universe. Indeed, Christian patience issues [327] from religio: the consciousness of being a creature of God, whose property we are, without whom we can achieve nothing, and in whose hands all our endeavors, actions, and accomplishments are placed. The true Christian assents to his creaturely dependence on God, and consciously derives from it the informing principle of his life. "My days are in Thy hands" (Ps. 30:16).
He knows that God is also the Lord over Time; that He has assigned to the course of events its temporal extension; that we must recognize the interval of time that separates the taking of a decision from the reaching of the intended aim as a reality willed by God: "All things have their season: and in their times all things pass under heaven" (Eccles. 3:1).
He loathes the hybris [hubris] which lies in the pretension to override the autonomous operation of the causae secundae and to secure effects by a mere fiat. That is why patience in this first and inferior sense, too, is an integral component of a life centered in Christ. It contains a specific response to the omnipotence of God and to our absolute dependence on Him, as well as an acceptance of our creaturely finiteness. He who has patience abides by the Truth; the impatient man, posing at least in a partial sense as though he were God, submits to the bondage of the illusions of pride.
Patience is appropriate even when pursuing high goods
The second form of patience belongs to a much higher level. It refers to the realization of things valuable in themselves, and in particular, the spreading of the kingdom of God. It is in this context, again, that the second dimension of patience—that which makes it akin to constancy and perseverance—assumes its full significance. Here it is a question of intrinsically noble and all-important aims, whose furtherance we ought to seek with impetuous zeal. The moral advancement of ourselves and of others, the triumph of justice, the dissemination of the true Faith, the [328] conversion and the progress of a soul specially entrusted to our care—these, to be sure, are things for which we must yearn in our every fiber and strive after with our whole being; our concern for these can never be too intense.
Woe to those who can take but a moderate and conditional interest in these aims. With a burning eagerness should we engage in their service; for "the kingdom of God suffers violence." So far as these things are concerned, it would be wrong of us to take our time. Rather we should emulate the response of St. Matthew the Apostle to the inexorable call, Sequere me: "Jesus... saw a man sitting in the customhouse, named Matthew; and he saith to him: Follow me. And he arose up and followed him" (Matt. 9:9).
Thus, too, did St. Peter and St. Andrew leave their fishing nets and all their work, and without glancing back, follow Christ. No less immediate and wholehearted was the response of St. Anthony, who, upon hearing the words of the Gospel, at once went to live as a hermit in the desert. No less eager and integral, many centuries later, was the response of St. Francis of Assisi.
And yet, even in this zeal, holy patience is absolutely necessary, and an essential part of holiness. For holy patience means our response to the truth that it is not we but God alone who determines the proper day and hour for the fruitful performance of certain actions and even more exclusively, the ripening of our seed and the harvest of our labors.
The rapidity of our immediate response may sometimes differ in our inward dedication and our outward actions
A keen distinction must be made between our inward dedication to God and to His kingdom in ourselves and in others, and our action proper (on ourselves and on others). The call of God once perceived, our response cannot follow quickly enough. We should immediately and unconditionally respond to the sequere me, giving [329] ourselves to God without demur or reserve as did Mary: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word." All hesitation here would be a perilous error.
But this unhampered inward dedication to God does not by itself involve the performance of all single acts which it entails in a general and essential sense. Particularly does this caution apply to extrinsic and public action, that is, the works of the apostolate.
Certain saints—among them, as we have seen, St. Francis and St. Anthony the hermit—immediately drew the full consequences from their conversion. But this is a great privilege of grace. Our sense of discretion must enlighten us about whether we may take the decisive step with its full implications at once, or had better remain for a period in inward maturing. There exists a danger of skipping over necessary stages.
Sometimes it also happens that a sincere but not so highly privileged Christian, instead of awaiting a more unmistakable and concrete call of God, overreaches himself in a kind of natural enthusiasm and anticipates certain acts fraught with grave obligations, without being able to posit them with a true inward decisiveness. Many converts immediately want to enter a religious Order, though they lack actual vocation and have not measured the whole significance of such an enhanced dedication to God.
The Church knows this danger; that is why she requires an adequate interval of inner maturing for all great steps in religious life. Unless a particular and a rare grace makes up for it, man needs an appropriate space of time for all deep and great things.
The attitudes deep things require cannot, in general, attain their complete validity and reality except after a period of organic development, whose length varies greatly according to each case. For every deep, fateful word there is a fullness of time in which alone it can be legitimately and fruitfully spoken. Anticipate it hastily by acting without discretion, and your utterance of it will be shadowy, devoid of maturity, and invalid. Again, let the "destined hour" pass [330] unused, and you will no longer be able to speak that word except in an empty and purely formal fashion.
It is touching to read how the chamberlain in the Acts of the Apostles hastens to be baptized by the deacon Philip; for him, thanks to a special grace of God, the destined hour—the fullness of time—was at hand there and then. But the Church by no means modelled [sic] her general practice in admitting converts upon these cases, recorded in apostolic times, of an instantaneous and definitive conversion.
On the contrary, in the first centuries she imposed on the catechumens a long course of preparation through the successive stages of which they had to pass before being admitted to Baptism. Even today, every adult baptism must be preceded by a certain period of instruction and maturing. As regards the preparation for monastic life, the Church only allows the taking of temporary vows at first; final vows require a preparatory stage. Nor does she admit a definitive private vow of virginity without an antecedent temporary one. Thus, in forming these decisive resolutions concerning our inner and personal life, too, we must exercise holy patience, and accord time the significance in human affairs with which God has invested it.
Evangelization also calls for patience
Even more does the same caution apply to the apostolate or our activity devoted to the winning of other people's souls. Anxious as we may be at once to communicate the Truth we have unmeritedly [sic] received and to light up other souls with the fire Christ has kindled in ours, we must always bear in mind that we ourselves cannot fruitfully sow before the divine seed has unfolded to a certain degree in our own souls—which, again, means a period of maturing.
Undoubtedly a special grace of God may overrule this, too; but generally speaking, a time of silence must precede the time to [331] speak. St. Paul, after his conversion, lived in silence for several years before he started his work. Nay, the Savior Himself only began His public activity after thirty years of complete privacy; not that He, in whom the fullness of Divinity resides, needed a process of maturing: but He chose to give us an example of the rhythm which God has imposed on human life.
Notwithstanding all our zeal, then, we must observe the obligation of patience even as workers in the vineyard of the Lord. With careful discretion we must try to perceive the striking of God's own hour for our work to start in His vineyard rather than insist, in a spirit of natural enthusiasm and impatience, on determining it by ourselves. Suppose we are animated by a glowing zeal: if, at the same time, we have patience, we may be infallibly sure that we no longer live by our nature but by a supernatural principle of life.
To be sure, we are not in all circumstances obliged to make the time of our action dependent on the degree of receptivity we may suppose to exist in the souls we deal with. There are cases when, with St. Paul, we must set forth the truth opportune, importune ("in season, out of season"). Yet, even then, we are not relieved of the duty of patience; for St. Paul says further: "Reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine" (2 Tim. 4:2).
Still more is patience our duty in regard to the blossoming of the seed which we are allowed to sow in the Lord's vineyard. As Pascal wrote, "Christ will us to fight with Him, not to conquer with Him." We must be humble enough to renounce any pretension to determine ourselves the time of the harvest. While doing everything in our power to hasten the extension of the kingdom of God for which we are working, we must let God alone decide when He shall grant it.
Even in cases when our business concerns some object eminently pleasing to God, which indeed we ought to pursue with consuming zeal, we must not cease saying, "Not as I will but as Thou wilt." At the start of his activity. St. Dominic lived for four [332] years among the Albigensian heretics without converting a single one of them. Yet, he became neither impatient nor discouraged; he did not give up his effort. By the end of his life, he and his sons had converted sixty thousand people. It is in this higher sphere that the second dimension of patience—the aspect of perseverance and indefatigable zeal—reveals its full importance.
Holy patience frees zeal from impatience
Once more, we encounter here the fact, repeatedly stressed in the foregoing pages, of an organic mutual union on the supernatural plane between aspects apparently antithetic. The nearer we draw to God, the more we see develop in ourselves a coincidentia oppositorum—a reconciliation between two equally valid demands which seem to imply an opposition or at least a tension.
It is only on a basis derived from Christ that we can achieve an accord between these two attitudes: hunger and thirst after justice and holy patience. In the natural framework, zeal appears inseparable from impatience.
But the saints accomplish the miracle: on the one hand, they say with the Apostle of the Gentiles, "The love of Christ presseth us," and live up to the message of Christ, "I am come to cast fire on the earth. And what will I, but that it be kindled?" (Luke 12:49); on the other hand, they await in holy patience and inward peace the time when God shall choose to manifest the fruits of their labors.
What holy patience expresses is a living recognition of the truth that the Lord God alone can bring forth the fruit; that, even in this highest sphere, man—with whatever blessings of grace—can do no more than disseminate the seed he has received from God, thus establishing the conditions for the operation of grace in his fellow man's soul. As St. Paul put it: "I have planted, Apollo watered: but God gave the increase" (1 Cor. 3:6).
[333] Holy patience is an ultimate act of surrender to God
Holy patience, seen from another angle, embodies an ultimate act of our surrender to God, and therefore a status of consummate self-possession. For only in the measure that we have surrendered our inmost being to God do we possess ourselves. He who has holy patience has accomplished the process of dying unto himself, and entered the peace of Christ which "surpasseth all understanding." "In your patience you shall possess your souls" (Luke 21:19).
In holy patience, we become children of Him who with inconceivable longanimity "maketh his sun to rise upon the good and bad and raineth upon the just and the unjust" (Matt. 5:45) and who does not weed out the cockle but sorts the chaff from the wheat at the harvest only.
In this sense, holy patience may be described as a sister of wisdom and of contemplation. As these virtues cause us to consider and appreciate everything in a perspective centered on God, thus evoking to the full the beauty and depth of all things, so also in the attitude of patience we emphatically let God act, thus allowing all things to unfold from above—as proceeding from their Origin—and by so experiencing their operation again render to God what is God's.
Holy patience is the fruit of faith, hope, and charity
Holy patience is a fruit of faith, hope and charity. Faith teaches us that God the universal Lord is also the Lord of Time; that He alone appoints the proper hour to everything; that we must place the success of all endeavors, including such as are eminently pleasing to Him, in His hands; that we must believe in the possibility of success though no pledge of it be visible to the human eye; and that consequently we must labor for the kingdom of God whatever the odds seem to be.
[334] Hope keeps us from getting discouraged in spite of all failures and all delays in achieving success and expects "against hope" everything from the goodness of Him "with whom nothing is impossible." Charity impels us to love God and His holy will above everything, and prevents us from expostulating with Him or renouncing our work in His vineyard on account of any defeat sustained. Particularly is patience an offspring of charity insofar as it is assimilable to constancy and perseverance—an offspring of the charity, that is, which in St. Paul's words "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things" (1 Cor. 13:7).
The fruits of holy patience, finally, are meekness and that inner peace of Christ "which the world cannot give." Patience, then, is closely related to the very flower and perfume of Christian life.
Holy patience acknowledges man's creaturely status.
It constitutes one of the basic traits that distinguish a true Christian in statu viae, in the sense even that it connotes in a twofold fashion as specific reference to the character of earthly existence as a status viae—a journey destined to lead us to our ultimate goal. First, it expresses our assent to our creaturely and finite condition, and more particularly, our response to the significance of time as an aspect of the divine plan of creation, as an essential constituent of the status viae, the world of "that which passes" in contradistinction to eternity. Second, patience represents a basic condition for winning through to our eternal salvation, since it implies a capacity for waiting without despairing of our effort for the kingdom of God, an attitude of perseverance in the midst of all obstacles and all sufferings, an intrepid hope for victory, and a humble but sustained preparation for eternity.
Not only is patience an indispensable virtue; beyond that, it discloses a formal apprehension of the basic condition of status viae [335] and of the relation between terrestrial life and eternal life. Thus are the mysterious words of Our Lord on patience related to these others: "He that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved" (Matt. 24:13).
He alone who possesses patience—encompassed by disappointments, worn down by defeats, painfully aware of the narrowness of the road to salvation—can yet give proof of the constancy demanded by God, and hold on to the one thing necessary with a devotion not only unflagging but ever increasing. In him alone can the hunger and thirst after justice unquenchable on earth—which is Christ Himself—and the undying fire that the Lord came down to kindle, burn throughout his entire life. Only the patient man, who lives by Christ, can persevere unto the end: "In your patience you shall possess your souls" (Luke 21:19).
---
Source: Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2001), 325–335.
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Thomas Loundsbury Quotation on Resisting Growth
We must view with profound respect the infinite capacity of the human mind to resist the introduction of useful knowledge.
– Thomas R. Lounsbury (1838-1915)
– Thomas R. Lounsbury (1838-1915)
Friday, May 23, 2014
"In the winds that would blow then"
In a powerful scene from A Man For All Seasons, Thomas More rebukes William Roper for his blind eagerness to cut down all law in order to stop the devil. Roper does not see that in doing so, he would be doing the very work of the devil himself in causing social and moral chaos. Further, Roper doesn't realize his own weakness; he believes that he possesses the internal strength to face the devil directly. More questions:
Now, realize that someday all of those distractions will end permanently. You will have none of them whether you like it or not. And what winds will be blowing then?
Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!Consider that there are other winds and other things that we use to protect ourselves from those winds. Consider, for example, the winds of our own weakness, the weakness that Roper was blind to. What have we planted thick with in order to keep ourselves from feeling those winds? Perhaps we're afraid to face them when we know that we should. Perhaps, knowing that we could not stand up to those winds, we fear them and hide behind distractions. What would we do if those distractions were gone? Like the Joker from The Dark Knight, who says, "I'm a dog chasing cars... I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! I just do things." We wouldn't know what to do with ourselves either if we had to face the truth of sin directly. So we distract ourselves.
Now, realize that someday all of those distractions will end permanently. You will have none of them whether you like it or not. And what winds will be blowing then?
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Paul VI on Obscenity in the Name of Art
We take this opportunity to address those who are engaged in education and all those whose right and duty it is to provide for the common good of human society. We would call their attention to the need to create an atmosphere favorable to the growth of chastity so that true liberty may prevail over license and the norms of the moral law may be fully safeguarded.
Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men's baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities (§22).
---
Source: Pope Paul VI, Humanæ Vitæ, Encyclical letter on the Regulation of Birth, Vatican website, accessed April 29, 2014, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html, number 22.
Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men's baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities (§22).
---
Source: Pope Paul VI, Humanæ Vitæ, Encyclical letter on the Regulation of Birth, Vatican website, accessed April 29, 2014, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html, number 22.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)