Catholic Corner – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

Sacramental Efficacy Despite the Corruption of the Church?

Therefore, the serious believer is thrown back upon his or her own inner resources. Thankfully, the Sacraments are still efficacious despite the corruption of the Church . . . .

Suppose I go to what used to be called Confession, but is now foolishly called Reconciliation. The priest, I have reason to believe, is a practicing homosexual, a sodomite, a child molester, and doesn't believe a word of traditional doctrine. The Roman Catholic Church is his mafia, his hustle, except that he lacks the honesty of the mafioso who in private will admit that he is a criminal out for self and pelf. We all know that there are plenty of priests like this.

Forgive me, father, if I can no longer bring myself to accept the doctrine of sacramental efficacy given the deep moral corruption of you and your church. I grant the abstract logical possibility that the efficacy of sacraments is untouched by the corruption of their ministers. But how, in your presence, could I achieve the heart-felt compunction necessary for true confession knowing that you are a moral fraud? Would the achievement of that state of compunction not be more likely in the depths of my privacy in claustro?

Steven Nemes’ Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics: Some Questions

The review is a well written and very fair summary of von Hildebrand's book. (I read portions of the latter in graduate school days but I do not currently have it in my library.) Here is the review's main critical passage together with my remarks.

[Von] Hildebrand’s arguments for the objectivity of value therefore seem unsuccessful. It is true that one experiences an object as possessing some value which motivates a particular form of response to it. But it is another matter whether one has grasped a value in the object on its own or in the object as it is related to oneself in experience. Food is experienced as delicious, but there is no property of gustatory value inhering objectively in chicken tikka masala. It can be appetizing to one but not to another. Or consider that human beings love fruit, but dogs and cats generally do not.

BV: Nemes invokes the fact that for beings capable of gustatory experience, what is appetizing/delicious/tasty can vary across individuals in a species, and across species. This is because the property of being appetizing is not an intrinsic property of the edible or potable item, but involves a relation to the consumer. I have been called 'Old Asbestos Tongue' on account of the pleasure I derive from fiery comestibles. The positive or negative gustatory value resides not in the comestible itself, but in the relation between consumer and comestible between, say, 'Old Asbestos Tongue' and the jalapeno pepper. My constitution is such as to allow for the enjoyment of what others will find highly disagreeable. Hence, de gustibus non est disputandum. There is nothing to dispute since there is no fact of the matter. It is 'subjective' in one sense of this polysemous term.

But how negotiate the inferential move from

1) That which has the value of tasting good often varies from individual to individual and from species to species

to

2) The value of tasting good is subjective, not objective.

This looks to be an illicit slide. (1), which is plainly true, is consistent with the negation of (2). For it could be that the value of tasting good is objectively the same for all despite different edibles being tasty to different people or animals.

That is to say: tasting good could be an objective value despite the fact that different edible items have this value for different people. The perceiver-relativity of taste, which makes taste subjective, is consistent with the objectivity of gustatory values.

If values are essences and essences are ideal objects that subsist independently of our value responses (Wertantworten), as von Hildebrand maintains, then, while different perceivers find different things appetizing/delicious/tasty, this needn't affect the value itself. The tasting of an incendiary comestible involves a physical transaction; the intellectual intuition of the value does not. One does not taste the value, one tastes the jalapeno-laden enchilada; and one does not intellectually intuit the enchilada, one tastes it.

SN: Similarly, a purported moral value can be “noble” in the eyes of the “virtuous” but repellent to the “profligate.” It could well be that the difference in perception is accounted for merely in terms of the different structures of the persons involved.

BV: It is not the value as ideal object that is noble, but a person who has the value. The person is noble in virtue of instantiating the value. The base are value-blind (wertblind): they cannot 'see' or appreciate the value that noble people instantiate. But that fact is consistent with the value's objective existence in itself apart both from anyone's appreciating it and anything's instantiating it.

My point is that von Hildebrand has the resources to turn aside Nemes' objections. The latter are not rationally compelling. Give von Hildebrand's Platonism about values, Nemes' arguments are non sequiturs. This is not to say that von Hildebrand's axiology is true; it is to say that Nemes hasn't refuted it.

His review raises for me a fascinating question: does phenomenology by its very nature, and given that intentionality is its central motif, support realism or idealism? For von Hildebrand and J-P Sartre the former; for Husserl the latter. I should take this up in a separate entry.

For now I recommend that Nemes study chapter V, "Objectivity and Independence," in von Hildebrand's What is Philosophy?

Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis

Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and obedient faith and trust. On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an ethics of belief, we feel the anxious concern for intellectual honesty. His question, Wie kann ich ein ehrlich Philosoph sein? is ours. On the other side, that of Thomas, we feel the willingness to take doxastic risks, to go beyond what can be strictly known, or even shown to be possible; we desire truth whether or not it can be philosophically validated; we are open to the allowing of church authority to override the judgment of the individual, even if in the end we cannot accept the Church's magisterium.

Husserl was drawn to the Catholic Church in his later years. But he felt too old to enter her since he would need at least five years to examine each dogma, as he explained to Sister Adelgundis. (See John M. Oesterreicher, Walls are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ, London: Hollis and Carter, 1953, p. 80.)

A comparison with Simone Weil is apt. She lurked outside the Church for years but could not bring herself to enter. Intellectual scruples were part of it. She was strongly opposed to Blaise Pascal's bit about just taking the holy water and going through the motions in the expectation that outer practices would bring inner conviction.

Husserl's attitude was that it would be intellectually irresponsible to accept the dogmas prior to careful examination to see if they are rationally acceptable. To which the believer will say: How dare you question God's revelation? God has revealed himself in the Incarnation and you will waste five years 'examining' whether it is logically possible when it is a foregone conclusion that you with your scrupulosity of method will be unable to 'constitute' in consciousness the Word and its becoming flesh? It's a fact that lies beyond the sphere of immanence and irrupts into it, and thus cannot be 'constituted' from within it. What can be constituted is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, not an absolute transcendence. What's actual is possible, and what's possible is possible whether you can understand how. If it is actual, then it is possible even if it seems self-contradictory!

Oesterreicher: "But to do so [to examine the dogmas] is to judge the Judge, to try the word of God, forgetting that it is the word of God that tries us." (Walls are Crumbling, p. 80) Oesterreicher goes on to say that Husserl tries to shift "the centre of being and truth" "from God to ourselves." (ibid.) That is exactly right, and this shift is the essence of modern philosophy from Descartes (1596-1650) on. The 'transcendental turn' does indeed make of man the center, the constitutive source of all meaning and being.

"It is this luminous authority which gives faith its certainty." (p. 81) But how do you know that this certainty is not merely subjective? Objective certainty alone is of epistemic worth. And how do you know that the authority really is an authority? Josiah Royce's religious paradox is relevant here.

One option is just to accept the faith and seek understanding afterwards. Fides quarens intellectum. And if understanding doesn't come? Well, just keep on believing and practicing. On this approach, faith stands whether or not understanding emerges. "I accept the Incarnation without understanding how it is possible; I accept it despite its seeming impossible." Faith does not have to pass the tests of reason; reason has no veto power over faith. There is a Truth so far above us that the only appropriate attitude on our part is like that of the little child. "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 18, 3)

Would this response move Husserl? No. Should it? Not clear.

Perhaps Wittgenstein in his Vermischte Bemerkungen gives the best advice:

Go on, believe! It does no harm.

Believing means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted, you can't then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it acceptable. (Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch, p. 45e)

Somebody Else’s Faith

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. III, p. 251, from the entry of 25 January 1959:

He entered the monastery on somebody else's faith and lived there on somebody else's faith and when finally he had to face the fact that what was required was his own faith he collapsed.

Bernanos on Prayer

Georges Bernanos has the protagonist of his The Diary of a Country Priest (Image Books, 1954, pp. 81-82, tr. P. Morris, orig. publ. 1937) write the following into his journal:

The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!

This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame.

But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?”

The above needs no commentary from me. It needs thoughtful, open-minded rumination from you. I respect a person's right to remain a secularist and worldling, but a measure of contempt comes into the mix should the person's secular commitment be thoughtless and unexamined.

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method: Theocentric or Egocentric?

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy. She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith.

The course that you have followed has led you to posit the subject as the start and center of philosophical inquiry; all else is subject-related. A world constructed by the acts of the subject remains forever a world for the subject. You could not succeed — and this was the constant objection that your own students raised against you — in winning back from the realm of immanence that objectivity from which you had after all set out and insuring which was the point. Once existence is redefined as self-identifying for a consciousness — such was the outcome of the transcendental investigation — the intellect will never be set at its ease in its search for truth. (31-32)

Moreover, this shift in meaning [of existence], especially by relativizing God himself, contradicts faith. (emphasis added) So here we may well have the sharpest contrast between transcendental phenomenology and my philosophy: mine has a theocentric and yours an egocentric orientation. (32)

The Stove Dilemma and the Lewis Trilemma

This from R. J. Stove, the son of atheist and neo-positivist David Stove:

When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.

Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase "By what authority?" into my mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?

This reminds me of the famous 'trilemma' popularized by C. S. Lewis: Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This 'trilemma' is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar. I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here.

Just as I cannot accept the Lewis 'trilemma' — which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable — I cannot accept the Stovian 'dilemma' which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative. ". . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was." Why are these the only two alternatives? The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church. One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East. After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the 'rock' upon whom Christ founded his church. That is at least a possibility. If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be. It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.

Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has 'cornered the market' on all religiously relevant truth. Perhaps no temporal institution has the hot line to the divine.

I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an obviously worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice.

My point is a purely logical one. I am not taking sides in any theological controversy, not at the moment, leastways.

Maximilian Kolbe

Today is the feast of Maximilian Kolbe.

Although it is a deep and dangerous illusion of the Left to suppose that man is inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself, there are a few human beings who are nearly angelic in their goodness. One can only be astonished at the example of Maximilian Kolbe and wonder how such moral heroism is possible. And this even after adjusting for a certain amount of hagiographic embellishment.

Is there a good naturalistic explanation for Kolbe's self-sacrifice?

Wikipedia:

At the end of July 1941, ten prisoners disappeared from the camp, prompting SS–Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick ten men to be starved to death in an underground bunker to deter further escape attempts. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, "My wife! My children!", Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

According to an eyewitness, who was an assistant janitor at that time, in his prison cell, Kolbe led the prisoners in prayer. Each time the guards checked on him, he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. After they had been starved and deprived of water for two weeks, only Kolbe remained alive. The guards wanted the bunker emptied, so they gave Kolbe a lethal injection of carbolic acid. Kolbe is said to have raised his left arm and calmly waited for the deadly injection.^[13] He died on 14 August. His remains were cremated on 15 August, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary.^[20]

Continence: Notes for a Sermon I will Never Give

The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.

Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.

Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.

Illustrate by adducing the sad cases of Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein.

Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.' Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short. People have miserably limited vocabularies and cannot think critically.

The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Standards are low. Don't expect much.

Cognitive Dissonance on Good Friday

It was Good Friday. I was 11 or 12 years old, possibly 13. I was with the boy next door, also raised Catholic. He wanted to play. It was around two in the afternoon. Christ had been on the cross for two hours according to the account we had been taught. I recall to this day the cognitive dissonance induced by the collision of the worldliness of my playmate and the Catholicism inculcated in me by my pious Italian mother and the priests and nuns in the days before Vatican II.

An acquaintance of mine, a former altar boy with a similar upbringing, told me he never believed a word of it. I would guess that most of those who attended the Catholic schools for 8-12 years mainly just went long to get along and then dropped it all when the world issued its call. The etymology of 'inculcate' suggests that it is not the right word. The teaching wasn't stamped into me, but planted in me, in soil fertile and receptive unlike the stony and weed-choked psychic soil of most of my classmates. In compensation, they were spared the cognitive dissonance.

Intentionality in Thomas and Husserl

My Serbian correspondent Milosz sent me a reference to an article in which we read:

What attracted these Catholics to Husserl was his theory of intentionality—the notion that human consciousness is always consciousness “of” something. This appealed to Catholics because it appeared to open a way beyond the idealism of modern philosophy since Kant, which had threatened to undermine the possibility that human beings could possess an objective knowledge of realities outside the mind, including God.

Husserl’s phenomenology seemed to offer a solution to this problem. His promise to return “to the things themselves” sounded to many Catholics like a vindication of medieval scholasticism, which stressed that human beings have the capacity to objectively know reality independent of the mind. This led some Catholics to dub phenomenology a “new scholasticism.” By pointing “beyond” modern philosophy, they hoped that phenomenology could also serve as a path “back” to medieval thought, so that one might begin from the perspective of modern philosophy and end up somewhere closer to Thomas Aquinas. Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism.

The article is annoyingly superficial, and the last sentence quoted is just silly. Do I need to explain why? At the very most, Husserl's doctrine of intentionality prior to the publication in 1913 of Ideas I could be interpreted as supportive of realism, and was so interpreted by many of his early acolytes, among them, the members of the Goettingen and Munich circles. And so in some very vague sense, Husserlian intentionality could be taken as pointing back to medieval thought and to Thomas Aquinas in particular, assuming one didn't know much about Thomas or Husserl. But the claim that "Husserl’s phenomenology thus opened up the possibility that modern, secular philosophy could be converted to Catholicism" is risible. Roman Catholicism consists of extremely specific theological doctrines. No one could reasonably hold that a realistically interpreted Husserl could soften secular philosophers up for Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Transubstantiation, etc. The most that could be said is that the (arguably merely apparent) realism of the early Husserl was welcomed by Catholic thinkers.

But now let's get down to brass tacks with a little help from Peter Geach. I will sketch the intentionality doctrine of Thomas. It will then be apparent, if you know your Husserl, that there is nothing like the Thomistic doctrine in Husserl.

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts and perceptions is possible. Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance whom I have named 'Max Black.' How are we to understand the relation between the mental act of my thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, namely the cat I am thinking of? What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max? Or perhaps Max is in front of me and I am seeing him. What makes my seeing a seeing of him?

Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:

What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X — it is thus that our mind 'reaches right up to the reality'; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the 'ordinary' way called esse naturale. This solution resolves the difficulty. It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95)

But what the devil does that mean? Allow me to explain.

The main point here is that of-ness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object. Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my thinking of Max and Max. My thinking of Max just is the mental occurrence of the very same form or nature — felinity — which occurs physically in Max. Max is a hylomorphic compound, a compound of form and (signate) matter. Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind. It is his form that is in my mind. But if felinity informs my mind, why isn't my mind a cat? Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in. One and the same form — felinity — exists in two different modes. Its mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale.

Because my thought of Max just is the intentional occurrence in my mind of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max. There is no gap between mind and world. One could call this an identity theory of intentionality, or perhaps an 'isomorphic' theory. The knower is not enclosed within the circle of his ideas. There is a logically antecedent community of nature between mind and world that underwrites the latter's intelligibility.

What if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to cease to exist while I was thinking about him? My thinking would be unaffected: it would still be about Max in exactly the way it was about him before. The Thomist theory would account for this by saying that while the form occurs with esse intentionale in my mind, it does not occur outside my mind with esse reale.

That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality. If you can see your way clear to accepting it as the only adequate account of intentionality, then it supplies a reason for the real distinction of essence and existence. For the account requires that there be two distinct modes of esse, an immaterial mode, esse intentionale, and a material mode, esse naturale. Now if F-ness can exist in two different modes, then it cannot be identical to either and must be really distinct from both. (Cf. "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul, pp. 62-64.)

I don't have time to explain in detail how Husserl's approach to the possibility of knowledge differs from the above. But if you consult his The Idea of Phenomenology, which consists of five lectures given in 1907, just a few years after the publication of the Logical Investigations in 1900 which so inspired his early followers, you will soon appreciate how absurd is the notion that Husserl's phenomenology is a "new scholasticism."

The Commonweal article under critique is here.

Philosophische Gesellschaft Göttingen (1912)

Front Row (from Ieft to right): Adolf Reinach, Alexandre Koyre, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Max Scheler, Theodor Conrad.
Back Row: Jean Hering, Heinrich Rickert jr., Ernst Rothschild, Siegfried Hamburger, Fritz Frankfurter, Rudolf Clemens, Hans Lipps, Gustav Hübener, Herbert Leyendecker, Friedrich Neumann.

Ash Wednesday

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

You Are Going to Die.

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over eight years now. In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed. So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

Subsidiarity as Bulwark against the Left’s Assault on Civil Society

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest left-ward drift of Democrat administrations such as President Obama's, on the one hand, and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other. The Left is totalitarian by its very nature, and as the Democrat party drifts ever left-ward, it becomes ever more totalitarian and socialist and ever more a threat to individual liberty and the private property that is its foundation.

Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Democrat candidates. 'Federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead. Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose the Left. The argument is this:

1) The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state. (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)

2) Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.

Therefore

3) If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose Obama and the Left.

The truth of the second premise is self-evident. If you wonder whether the Left does in fact encroach upon civil society, then see my post Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society.

Bergoglio the Benighted Aims to End Latin Mass Permission

There was and is 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, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy.

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.' And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule. Why re-name confession 'reconciliation? What is the point of such a stupid change?

A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need. Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant. Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were? And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular. The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.

The church should be a 'liberal'-free zone.

Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment

Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire to save the world, Tom was driven by contemptus mundi to flee the world and retreat to a monastery, which is what he did in 1941 at the age of 26 when he joined the Trappists. A convert to Catholicism, with the zeal of the convert, he took it to the limit the old-time doctrine implied: if the temporal order is but a vanishing quantity, then one should live with eternity ever before one's mind.

Both became disillusioned,* but in different ways. Van lost his secular faith, broke with Marxism, and went back to the serene but lifeless precincts of mathematics to become a distinguished bourgeois professor of the subject. Tom remained a monk but dropped the contemptus mundi. Van abandoned activism for mathematical logic and romantic affairs. Tom dropped his quietism — not entirely, however — and became active in human affairs, the peace movement in particular, during that heady period of ferment inside and outside of the Church, the 1960s.

Both met their ends in foreign venues by unusual means. Unable to stay put like a good monk in Gethsemani, Tom flew to Bangkok for a theological conference where he died of accidental electrocution in December of 1968 at the relatively young age of 53. Van's addiction to sexual love and 'romance' led to his destruction, and in the same Mexico City where the long arm of Stalin, extended by Ramon Mercader's ice axe, finally slew his erstwhile mentor, Trotsky. Van couldn't stay away from Anne-Marie Zamora even though he believed she would kill him. Drawn like a moth to the flame he flew from Boston to Mexico City. And kill him she did. While he was asleep, Zamora pumped a couple of rounds from her .38 Special into his head. Trotsky was done in by the madness of politics; Van by the madness of love.

What is the moral of this comparison?

Superior individuals feel the lure of the Higher. They seek something more from human existence than a jejune bourgeois life in pursuit of property, pelf, and social status. They seek transcendence, and sometimes, like Marxist activists, in the wrong places. No secular eschaton is "right around the corner" to borrow from the prevalent lingo of the 1950s CPUSA. Man cannot save himself by social praxis. The question as to how we should live remains live. Tom chose a better and nobler path than Van. But can any church be the final repository of all truth?

For sources, see articles below.

Related:

Like a Moth to the Flame

Trotsky's Faith in Man

A Monk and his Political Silence

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*Is 'disillusioned' a predicate adjective of success? If a person becomes disillusioned about X, does it follow that X really is an illusion? Or can one be wrongly disillusioned about X, i.e. come to believe falsely that X is an illusion? I would say that 'disillusioned' is not a predicate adjective of success.

ADDENDUM (11/13): WAS THOMAS MERTON ASSASSINATED?

This just over the transom from Hugh Turley:

Dear Mr. Vallicella,

In your article “Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment” you repeated a popular error when you wrote that Thomas Merton "died of accidental electrocution.”

It is understandable that you could repeat this mistake because there was deliberate deception to conceal the truth about Merton’s death and the falsehoods have been repeated for over 50 years. In 2018 I co-authored The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation with David Martin.

There is absolutely no evidence to support the accidental electrocution story.

I invite you to visit our website and look at the official documents from Thailand concerning Merton’s death and find more information. http://www.themartyrdomofthomasmerton.com

There is also a video of a presentation that I gave in New York City in September.

https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=9O1A7KHOUY2X

Yours for the truth,

Hugh Turley

I confess to not having considered, until now, the possibility that Merton was assassinated. So this is news to me and I take no position on the matter. The reviews of Turley's book I have so far located are all positive. If there has been an attempt to rebut his (and his co-author's) claims, I would like someone to let me know.

Here is one of the favorable reviews. And here is a June 2019 article by the authors on the ongoing cover-up of what they take to be the truth.