After 9/11, no one should be surprised to learn that Islam is turning the West’s superiority back on itself. What is surprising is that a lone historian saw this coming in the 1930s. [emphasis added.] The great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, friend of G.K. Chesterton and a prolific historian, was prescient as no other writer about the resurgence of Islam in our own era.
Here are just of the more salient passages from his work on the threat of Islam to the West:
“We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will rise.”
“The future always comes as surprise. . . .but I for my part cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.”
“And in the contrast between our religious chaos and the religious certitude still strong throughout the Mohammedan world. . .lies our peril.”
“There is nothing inherent to Mohammedanism to make it incapable of modern science and modern war.”
“[Islam] still converts pagan savages wholesale. . . .No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of morality, its organized system of prayer, its code of morals, its simple doctrine. In view of this, anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a rival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the old pressure of Islam on Christendom.”
I would like to believe that James V. Schall, S. J. has a better understanding of Catholicism than I do, but I just now read the following from his otherwise very good On Revelation:
Catholicism is a revelation, not a religion. The word “religion” refers to a virtue by which we know what we can about God by our own human rational powers, “unaided,” as they say. Revelation means that, in addition to all we know by our own powers, another source of knowledge and life exists that can address itself to us, can make itself known to us.
The first sentence in this paragraph is the conjunction of two claims. The first is that Catholicism is a revelation. The second is that Catholicism is not a religion. The second claim is plainly false. If Catholicism is not a religion, what is it? It is not a branch of mathematics or a natural science. It is not one of the Geisteswissenschaften. It is not philosophy or a branch of philosophy such as natural theology.
Schall is of course right to tie religion to human beings: God has no religion. But it doesn't follow that Catholicism is not a religion. It is a religion based on divine revelation. God reveals himself to man, and man appropriates that revelation as best he can using the limited postlapsarian resources of intellect and will and emotion at his disposal.
Schall may be confusing the genus with one of its species, religion with natural religion the Merriam-Webster definition of which is accurate:
a religion validated on the basis of human reason and experience apart from miraculous or supernatural revelation; specifically: a religion that is universally discernible by all men through the use of human reason apart from any special revelation — compare revealed religion.
Catholicism is a revealed religion and therefore a religion. Or will you argue that 'revealed' in 'revealed religion' functions as an alienans adjective? I hope not.
Now what about the first claim, namely, that Catholicism is a revelation? That's a lame way of putting it in my humble opinion. If Catholicism is a religion based on revelation, then, since religion is a human enterprise as Schall rightly notes, it involves an interaction between God and man. So it cannot be a pure revelation which is what Catholicism would have to be if it is not a religion.
Compare the Bible. It is the word of God. But that is only half of the story. The Bible is the word of God written down by men. Similarly, Catholicism is divine revelation appropriated by men. It is therefore neither purely divine nor purely human.
I could be wrong, but I don't think what I have just written is too far from Catholicism's own self-understanding.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994) is an outstanding aphorist of a decidedly conservative, indeed reactionary, bent. What follows are some of his observations on the Catholic Church of the Second Vatican Council. I found them here thanks to Karl White. I've added a couple of comments in blue.
The phenomena of the decay of Catholicism are entertaining; those of Protestantism dull. (p. 191)
Tongues of fire didn’t descend upon the Second Vatican Council, as they did upon the first assembly of the apostles, but a stream of fire – a Feuerbach. (p. 245)
If one were to translate Ludwig Feuerbach's name into English it would come out as Firebrook. (Of course, one does not translate proper names; at most one transliterates them.) Feuerbach was an important influence on Karl Marx. He is famous or notorious for the notion that God is an unconscious anthropomorphic projection. Man alienates himself from his best attributes by unconsciously projecting them, in maximized forms, upon a nonexistent transcendent being.
A single council is nothing more than a single voice in the real ecumenical council of the Church: her complete history. (p. 265)
Popular Catholicism is the target of all progressive anger. Popular faith, popular hope, popular charity exasperate a clergy of petit bourgeois origin. (p. 266)
For the left-wing Catholic Catholicism is the great sin of the Catholic. (p. 248)
Catholics have lost that sympathetic capacity of sinning without arguing that sin doesn’t exist. (p. 274)
The problems of man can be neither exactly defined nor even remotely solved. Whoever hopes that Christianity can solve them ceases to be a Christian. (p. 285)
Add 'here below' at the end of the first sentence, and then the aphorism is true.
The progressive Catholic is only active in zealously seeking for whatever he can still hand over to the world.
Better a small church with Catholics than a numerous one with Rotarians. (p. 334)
Today’s Church is so nice as to exclude everything from the revealed traditions which public opinion condemns. (p. 319)
The current pope prays for that progress which Bury – its historian – called the “substitute for Providence.” (p. 319)
The thing that exasperates today’s Christian about the Middle Ages is Christianity. (p. 319)
The new liturgists have abolished the sacred pulpits in order that no scoundrel can assert that the Church intends to compete with the secular ones. (p. 319)
Catholics don’t have the slightest idea that the world feels betrayed by the concessions made to it by Catholicism. (p. 325)
The progressive clergy crowns the towers of the church of today not with a cross but with a weathervane. (p. 325)
Only the Catholic on the brink of losing his faith is outraged by the Church’s dazed state, sent by Providence.
St. Thomas Aquinas: an Orleaniste of theology? (p. 350)
Aggiornamento is the sellout of the Church. (p. 363)
The progressive Catholic collects his theology from the garbage can of Protestant theology. (p. 363)
Intending to open her arms to the world the Church instead opened her legs. (p. 363)
Instead of a theology of the mystical body the theologians of today teach a theology of the mystical masses. (p. 363)
Today it is impossible to respect the Christians. Out of respect for Christianity. (p. 379)
Here is a review of this new book by Robert Reilly. (HT: Monterey Tom) Excerpt:
Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture is simply the most famous of the many examples of Christian outreach in the midst of an era in which conflict and misunderstanding seem insoluble by being inevitable. As Mr. Reilly points out, the pope’s particular approach to credo ut intelligam was an example of charity, which makes the violent reaction of many Muslims to his remarks “all the more ironic.”
I would say instead that the violent reaction shows just what crazy fanatics Islamists are.
The trouble with the Islamic world is that nothing occurred in it comparable to our Enlightenment. In the West, Christianity was chastened and its tendency towards fanaticism held in check by the philosophers. Athens disciplined Jerusalem. (And of course this began long before the Enlightenment.) Nothing similar happened in the Islamic world. They have no Athens. (Yes, I know all about al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, et al. — that doesn't alter the main point.) Their world is rife with unreasoning fanatics bent on destroying 'infidels' — whether they be Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or other Muslims. We had better wake up to this threat, or one day soon we will wake up to a nuclear 'event' in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles which kills not 3,000 but 300,000. People who think this is 'inconceivable' or 'unimaginable' have lousy imaginations. Militant Muslims and their leftist enablers need to be opposed now, and vigorously, before it too late.
Fr. Robert Barron here fruitfully compares the Catholic Church's rigoristic teaching on matters sexual, with its prohibitions of masturbation, artificial contraception, and extramarital sex, with the rigorism of the Church's teaching with respect to just war. An excellent article.
Although Fr. Barron doesn't say it explicitly, he implies that the two topics are on a par. Given that "the Catholic Church's job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives," one who accepts just war rigorism ought also to accept sexual rigorism. Or at least that is what I read him as saying.
I have no in-principle objection to the sexual teaching, but I waffle when it comes to the rigorous demands of just war theory. I confess to being 'at sea' on this topic.
On the one hand, I am quite sensitive to the moral force of 'The killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances' which is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine. Having pored over many a page of Kant, I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature, wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances. But what would have been the likely upshot had the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in WWII? Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us. But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens. The Catholic doctrine implies that if Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age for two centuries — he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Indeed, if the killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done. This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish."
This extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true. If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant. If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant.
But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics. No problem with that — if the metaphysics is true. For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know it is true? Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism. (Not every naturalist is an eliminativist loon.)
If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that one absolutely must resist the evildoer, and absolutely must not turn the other cheek to a Hitler?
An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered. But a leader of a nation is in a much different position. Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me. Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her rigorism remains tenable.
To sum up these ruminations in a nice, neat antilogism:
1. Some acts, such as the intentional killing of noncombatants, are intrinsically wrong. 2. If an act is intrinsically wrong, then no possible circumstance in which it occurs or consequence of its being performed can substract one iota from its moral wrongness. 3. No act is such that its moral evaluation can be conducted without any consideration of any possible circumstance in which it occurs or possible consequence of its being performed.
The limbs of the antilogism are collectively inconsistent but individually extremely plausible.
It would be nice to be able to expect from popes and presidents a bit of gravitas, a modicum of seriousness, when they are instantiating their institutional roles. What they do after hours is not our business. So Pope Francis' clowning around does not inspire respect, any more than President Clinton's answering the question about his underwear. Remember that one? Boxers or briefs? He answered the question! All he had to do was calmly state, without mounting a high horse, "That is not a question that one asks the president of the United States." And now we have the Orwellian Prevaricator himself in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose latest Orwellian idiocy is that Big Government is the problem, not him, even though he is the the poster boy, the standard bearer, like unto no one before him in U. S. history, of Big Government!
But I digress. Here are a couple of important points in rebuttal of Francis (emphasis added):
To begin, we note that “trickle-down” economics is a caricature used by capitalism’s critics and not its defenders. Those of us who embrace free markets do so not out of a belief that the breadcrumbs of affluence will eventually reach those less well-off, but, rather, out of a conviction that the free market is the best mechanism for increasing wealth at all levels. As for being confirmed by the facts, we believe the empirical evidence is conclusive. Compare the two sides of Germany during the era of the Berlin Wall or the China of today with the China that hadn’t yet embraced an (admittedly imperfect) form of capitalism. The results are not ambiguous.
To this I would add that it is a mistake to confuse material inequality with poverty. Which is better: everyone being equal but poor, or inequality that makes 'the poor' better off than they would have been been without the inequality? Clearly, the second. After all, there is nothing morally objectionable about inequality as such. Or do you think that there is a problem with my net worth's being considerably less than Bill Gates'? There is nothing wrong with inequality as such; considerations of right and wrong kick in only when there is doubt about the legality or morality of the means by which the wealth was acquired. My net worth exceeds that of a lot of people from a similar background, but that merely reflects the fact that I practice the old virtues of frugality, etc., avoid the vices that impoverish, and make good use of my talents. I know how to save, invest, and defer gratification. I know how to control my appetites. The relative wealth that results puts me in a position to help other people, by charitable giving, by hiring them, and by paying taxes that fund welfare programs and 'entitlements.' When is the last time a poor person gave someone a job, or made a charitable contribution? And how much tax do they pay? There are makers and takers, and you can't be a giver unless you are a maker, any more than you can be a taker if there are no givers. So, far from inequality being the same as poverty or causing poverty, it lessens poverty, both by providing jobs and via charity, not to mention the 'entitlement' and welfare programs that are funded by taxes paid by the productive.
You don't like the fact that someone has more than you? Then you are guilty of the sin of envy. And I think that Francis is aware that envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Here is a question for socialists, redistributionists, collectivists, Obaminators: Is your redistributionism merely an expression of envy? I am not claiming that envy is at the root of socialism. That is no more the case than that greed (also on the list of Seven Deadlies) is at the root of capitalism. But it is the case that some socialists are drawn to socialism because of their uncontrollable envy, a thoroughly destructive vice.
There’s a more fundamental misunderstanding at work here, however. When Francis talks about “economic power,” he misapprehends a fundamental aspect of free markets – they only provide power consensually. Apart from government, no one can force you to buy a product or purchase a service. There’s a similar error in his citation of Saint John Chrysostom’s aphorism: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood.” The economics of capitalism are not zero-sum. Trade only occurs when both sides are made better off by the transaction. The wealthy don’t get rich at the expense of the poor.
Lefties hate business and especially big corporations. I give the latter no pass if they do wrong or violate reasonable regulations. But has Apple or Microsoft ever incarcerated anyone, or put anyone to death, or started a shooting war, or forced anyone to buy anything or to violate his conscience as the Obama administration is doing via its signature abomination, Obamacare?
On the other hand, did the government provide me with the iPad Air I just bought? You didn't build that, Obama! Not you, not your government, not any government. High tech does not come from politicians or lawyers, two classes that are nearly the same — yet another problem to be addressed in due course.
Be intellectually honest, you lefties. Don't turn a blind eye to the depredations of Big Government while excoriating (sometimes legitimately) those of Big Business.
But if one needs institutionalized religion, one could do far worse, assuming one can stomach the secular-humanist liberal namby-pambification and wussification that the post-Vatican II church can't seem to resist, the dilution of doctrine and tradition that empties into the nauseating Church of Nice.
There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order. Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents. Suppose all that.
Still, religion would have its immanent life-enhancing role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning. Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering. Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent. Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk. Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'
People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists. The church should be a liberal-free zone.
This from a graduate student in philosophy who describes himself as a theologically conservative Protestant who is toying with the idea of 'swimming the Tiber':
In a recent post you say this: ""Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic Church is a good recent example.)"
Until I read this comment, I, for some reason, was under the impression that you were a Catholic. I was wondering if you would be willing to elaborate on this comment, say more about your take on the Catholic Church, direct me to a post in which you say more about these issues, or direct me to some literature on this topic that you think would be useful.
This request allows me to clarify my relation to Catholicism. (This clarification may be spread over a few posts.) I was brought up Catholic and attended Catholic schools, starting in the pre-Vatican II days before the rot set in, when being Catholic was something rather more definite than it is now. Many with my kind of upbringing were unfazed by their religious training, went along to get along, but then sloughed off the training and the trappings as soon as they could. For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with. Only some have it, just as only some have a philosophical predisposition. Having the former predisposition is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a religion's taking firm root. Another necessary condition is that the person have some religious and/or mystical experiences. Without the predisposition and the experiences, religion, especially a religion as rich in dogmatic articulation as Roman Catholicism, will be exceedingly hard to credit and take seriously in the face of the countervailing influences from nature (particularly the nature in one's own loins) and society with its worldly values. For some Catholics of my Boomer generation, the extreme cognitive dissonance between the teachings of the Church and the 'teachings' and attitudes of the world, in particular the world of the '60s, led to radical questioning. For example, we were taught that all sins against the 6th and 9th Commandments were mortal and that premarital and extramarital sex even in those forms that fell shy of intercourse were wrong. The 'teachings' of the world and the surrounding culture were of course quite the opposite. For many brought up Catholic, this was not much of a problem: the cognitive dissonance was quickly relieved by simply dropping the religion or else watering it down into some form of namby-pamby humanism. For others like myself who had the religious predisposition and the somewhat confirmatory religious/mystical experiences, the problem of cognitive dissonance was very painful and not easily solved.
And, having not only a religious, but also a philosophical predisposition, it was natural to turn to philosophy as a means of sorting things out and relieving the tension between the doctrines and practices that had been the center of my life and the source of existential meaning, on theone hand, and the extramural wide world of sex, drugs, rock & roll, and the secular values of 'making it' and getting ahead, on the other. The sex bit was just one example. The fundamental problem I faced was whether any of what I was brought up to believe, of what I internalized and took with utmost seriousness, was true. Truth matters! As salutary as belief is, it is only true beliefs that can be credited. This brings me to a fundamental theme of this weblog, namely, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. I see this as a fruitful tension, and I see the absence of anything like it the Islamic world as part of the explanation of that world's inanition.
It is a fruitful tension in the West but also in those few individuals who are citizens of both 'cities,' those few who harbor within them both the religious and the philosophical predisposition. It is a tension that cannot be resolved by eliminationof one or the other of the 'cities.' But why is it fruitful?
The philosopher and the religionist need each other's virtues. The philosopher needs reverence to temper his analytic probing and humility to mitigate the arrogance of his high-flying inquiry and overconfident reliance on his magnificent yet paltry powers of thought. The religionist needs skepticism to limit his gullibility, logical rigor to discipline his tendency toward blind fideism, and balanced dialectic to chasten his disposition to fanaticism.
So am I a Catholic or not? Well, I am certainly a Catholic by upbringing, so I am a Catholic in what we could call a sociological sense. But it is very difficult for a philosopher to be a naive adherent of any religion, especially a religion as deeply encrusted with dogma as Roman Catholicism. He will inevitably be led to 'sophisticate' his adherence, and to the extent that he does this he will wander off into what are called 'heresies.' He will find it impossible not to ask questions. His craving for clarity and certainty will cause him to ask whether key doctrines are even intelligible, let alone true. Just what are we believing when we believe that there is one God in three divine persons? Just what are we believing when we believe that there once walked on the earth a man who was fully human but also fully divine?
I distance myself both from the anti-Catholic polemicists and the pro-Catholic apologists. Polemics and apologetics are two sides of the same coin, the coin of ideology. 'Ideology' is not a pejorative term in my mouth. An ideology is a set of beliefs oriented toward action, and act we must. So believe we must, in something or other. Religions are ideologies in this sense. But philosophy is not ideological. For more on this, see Philosophy, Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion: Four Theses.
I am skeptical of organizations and institutions despite the fact that we cannot do without them. The truth is something too large and magnificent to be 'institutionalized.' The notion that it is the sole possession of one church, the 'true' church, is a claim hard to credit especially in light of the fact that different churches claim to be the true one. Also dubious is the notion that extra ecclesiam salus non est, that outside the church there is no salvation. And note that different churches will claim to be the one outside of which there is no salvation. That should gve one pause. If it doesn't, then I suggest you are insufficiently critical, insufficiently concerned with truth, and too much concerned with your own doxastic security. Why do I need a church at all? And why this one? Why not Eastern Orthodoxy or some denomination of Protestantism?
Now if you are a philosopher this is all just more grist for the mill, along with all the things that Catholic apologists will say in defense of their faith. They will say that their church is the true church because it was founded by Jesus Christ (who is God) and has existed continuously from its founding under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit whose inspiration guarantees the correctness of the teachings on faith and morals.
They will tell me that a church is necessary to correct the errors of private opinions. Now it must be frankly admitted that thinking for oneself, treading the independent path, and playing the maverick can just as easily lead one into error as into truth. If thinking for oneself were the royal road to truth, then all who think for themselves would agree on what the truth is. They don't. But let us not forget that that church dogmas often reflect the private opinions of the dominant characters at the councils. The common opinion is just the private opinion that won the day. You say Augustine was inspired by the Holy Spirit? That is a claim you are making. How validate it? Why don't the Protestants agree with you? Why don't the Eastern Orthodox agree with you?
This only scratches the surface, but one cannot spend the whole day blogging. This may turn out to be a long series of posts.
