Catholic Corner – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

The Question of Private Judgment

I have commented critically on the Roman Catholic teaching on indulgences. One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Church on faith or morals may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church. Two quick observations on this accusation.

First, for many of us private judgment is not merely private, based as it is on consultation with many, many public sources. It is as public as private. Everything I've read over the years from Parmenides on down in the West, the Bible on down in the Near East, and the Upanishads on down in the Far East feeds into my 'private' judgment. So my 'private' judgment is not merely mine as to content inasmuch as it is a collective cultural upshot, albeit processed through my admittedly fallible and limited pate. Though collective as to content, its acceptance by me is of course my sole responsibility.

Second, the party line or official doctrine of any institution is profoundly influenced by the private judgments of individuals. Think of the profound role that St. Augustine played in the development of Roman Catholic doctrine. He was a man of powerful will, penetrating intellect, and great personal presence. Imagine going up against him at a theological conference or council.

So the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run. A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc?)

What I have just written may sound as if I am hostile to the Church. I am not. Nor have I ever had any negative experiences with priests, except, perhaps to have been bored by their sermons. All of the ones I have known have been upright, and some exemplars of the virtues they profess. In the main they were manly and admirable men. But then I'm an old man, and I am thinking mainly of the priests of my youth.

I have no time now to discuss the Church's guidance by the third person of the Trinity, except to express some skepticism: if that is so, how could the estimable Ratzinger be followed by the benighted Bergoglio? (Yes, I am aware that there were far, far worse popes than the current one.)

Of course, I have just, once again, delivered my private judgment. But, once again, it is not merely private inasmuch as it is based on evidence and argument: I am not merely emoting in the manner of a liberal such as Bergoglio when he emoted, in response to the proposed Great Wall of Trump, that nations need bridges, not walls. Well, then, Vatican City needs bridges not walls the better to allow jihadis easy access for their destructive purposes. Mercy and appeasement even unto those who would wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, and are in process of doing so.

Addendum

But how can my judgment, even if not merely private, carry any weight, even for me, when it contradicts the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, when we understand the source and nature of this authority? ('Magisterium' from L. magister, teacher, master.)

By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible.

In a nutshell: God in Christ founded the Roman church upon St. Peter, the first pope, as upon a rock. The legitimate succession culminates in Pope Francis. The Roman church as the one true holy and apostolic church therefore teaches with divine authority and thus infallibly. Hence its teaching on indulgences not only cannot be incorrect, it cannot even be reasonably questioned. So who am I to — in effect — question God himself?

Well, it is obvious that if I disagree with God, then I am wrong. But if a human being, or a group of human beings, no matter how learned, no matter how saintly, claims to be speaking with divine authority, and thus infallibly, then I have excellent reason to be skeptical. How do I know that they are not, in a minor or major way, schismatics diverging from the true teaching, the one Christ promised to protect? Maybe it was some version of Eastern Orthodoxy that Christ had in mind as warranting his protection.

These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox.

On the Specificity of Traditional Catholic Claims

Just over the transom from Vito Caiati:

I want to thank you for recommending Garrigou-Lagrange's L'éternelle vie et la profondeur de l'âme, which I am reading now and enjoying, while casting an eye of the relevant sections St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, with which I was already somewhat familiar.

I find Garrigou-Lagrange's thoughts on the nature, capacities, and final destinies of souls after death fascinating and often quite moving; at the same time, I simply cannot accept the idea that any living person, no matter how rich a philosophic tradition informs his thought, can possess anything like the extent and specificity of knowledge of final things that are claimed in his or St. Thomas’ books. On these matters, we face, other than the promises and hints found in scripture, nothing but mystery that is impenetrable by human reasoning. Why pretend that we “know” more? It is one thing to use the ancient philosophers to explore theological questions and quite another to create a theology of the soul from them, which is what I think is at work here. As a Roman Catholic, I don’t want to take a sola scriptura position on this matter, but greater epistemological modesty should inform our efforts in speaking of final things. I can’t help feeling that there is a certain naiveté behind all of this talk of the afterlife, however much it is draped in luxuriant concepts and subtle distinctions.

I too am troubled, if that is not too strong a word, by the extreme specificity of paleo-Thomist theology as perhaps best exemplified by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. I must say, though, that I find this theology 'infinitely' preferable to the diluted pablum now served up in the Church as she succumbs to secularism and works out her own extinction. But I digress.

The doctrine of the immutability of the soul after death is an example of what I mean by extreme specificity:

The ordinary magisterium of the Church teaches that the human soul, immediately after death, undergoes judgment on all the actions, good or bad, of its earthly existence. This judgment supposes that the time of merit has passed. This common doctrine has not been solemnly defined, but it is based on Scripture and tradition. There are no merits after death, contrary to what many Protestants teach. (Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul, p. 50)

Garrigou-Lagrange supports the doctrine from Scripture and the traditional commentary thereon. For example, he quotes John 9:4 where Jesus says, "I must work the work of Him that sent me whilst it is day; the night cometh when no man can work." He then lists various Fathers. "These Fathers teach that after death no one can longer either merit or demerit." (52) He continues in this vein for several pages drawing upon different passages and different Fathers.

What bothers Dr. Caiati also bothers me, namely, the presumption to know things beyond our ken. There is something epistemically immodest and perhaps even epistemically pretentious about claiming to have such a detailed knowledge of soteriological mechanisms.

Can one be quite sure that there is no merit after death, no chance of metanoia? Suppose that after death the scales fall from Christopher Hitchens' spiritual eyes and he sees that he was wrong in his atheism and that his cocksure atheism was driven by overweening pride and arrogance and that he had been blinded by his brilliance like Lucifer. He repents. If I were God, I would send him to purgatory and not to hell for all eternity. I could argue in detail for this competing view, in which there is merit after death.

Perhaps I will be told that if the magisterium teaches infallibly that the soul, immediately after death, is judged, and that this judgment presupposes and thus entails that the time of merit has passed, then we can and do have objectively certain knowledge in this matter. If so, then my little theological speculation is but a private judgment lacking objective certainty. But then we are brought back to the problem of private versus collective judgment and the problem whether anyone can justifiably credit the claim of any institution of men, even if divinely instituted and inspired, to render a collective judgment that is objectively certain with respect to questions of faith and morals.

The truth is absolute and infinite and largely beyond our ken in this life. No institution has proprietary rights in her.

Michael Liccione on Private and Collective Judgment

Herewith, some comments on an excerpt from Michael Liccione, Faith, Private Judgment, Doubt, and Dissent.

So understood, private judgment can yield at least a measure of certitude, but not in any fashion certainty.

I agree that private judgment cannot deliver certainty, if objective certainty is in question. But I should think that the same is true of any collective judgment as well, including the collective judgments of the Roman Catholic magisterium. I am a cradle Catholic, but my 'inner Protestant' demands his due. In what follows, I will quote Liccione, agree with much of what he says, but try to explain why I cannot accept his ultimate conclusion.

If no human collectivity can be counted on implicitly to preserve and transmit the deposit of faith in its fullness, still less can any fallible, human individual. One can, for a lesser or greater time, feel certain that one is in possession of the faith once delivered; it can and does happen that the cognitive content of one’s faith thus contains much truth; one can even and thereby develop a genuine relationship of love and trust with Jesus Christ. But by one’s own profession one is no closer to infallibility, and probably less so, than any external human authority.

I agree with the above.

Faith must accordingly co-exist with a principle if not always a feeling of doubt, and be hedged about by that principle. For if councils and popes can err even in their most solemn exercises of doctrinal authority, then so a fortiori can anybody who eschews for themselves or their own faith community the kind of authority those sources have claimed. Ultimately, then, one’s faith is a matter of opinion. No matter how great the certitude which which one holds one’s religious opinions, they are just that—human opinions, always and in principle open to revision, just as any and all churches are human organizations semper reformanda.

If there is no ecclesial any more than individual indefectibility, then there is no ecclesial any more than individual infallibility. In principle if not always and everywhere in practice, everything remains up for grabs. If by nothing else, that is proven by the apparently limitless capacity of Protestantism to devolve into denominations and sects who can agree only on the proposition that, whatever the Bible means, it doesn’t have God giving the Catholic or even the Orthodox Church the kind of interpretive authority they claim.

The above too strikes me as correct as long as it is understood that matters of opinion needn't be matters of mere opinion and that some opinions are better than others, whether these be the opinions of individuals or the opinions officially endorsed by groups.

Faith so constituted and developed is radically different from what the Catholic and Orthodox churches both think of as faith. On the latter showing, part of the content of faith is that the Church teaches about faith and morals with an authority divinely bestowed and maintained; the differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy about how “the Church” manifests such authority are secondary; in either case, the assent of faith entails accepting, as divinely revealed, what the Church definitively proposes as such. Such assent is not a matter of opinion, as it would be if it were a merely human product rather than a divine gift. It does not merely entail certitude; the certitude is itself based on the objective relation of certainty. By that latter relation, what is believed is understood to be unchangeably true because its ultimate object, a God who neither deceives nor can be deceived, is the same who proposes, through his Church, what is to be believed. When faith so understood is accepted as a gift of the Holy Spirit, and thus of grace, it is a virtue infused into the soul and its faculties, chiefly the mind. While its cognitive content can and should deepen and develop along with the coordinate virtues of life, nevertheless one either has such a virtue or one does not. It is not a human product and does not depend on human opinion. And if one has it, then one has eo ipso abandoned private judgment in matters pertaining to it.

The crucial proposition is the following. For the Catholic and Orthodox churches, "part of the content of faith is that the Church teaches about faith and morals with an authority divinely bestowed and maintained . . . ." Part of what one believes, then, is that the Church teaches with divine authority: God himself teaches us through the Church. If so, then its specific teachings with respect to faith and morals are objectively certain. Being taught by God himself is as good as it gets, epistemically speaking. We also note that if the Church teaches with divine authority, then this teaching itself, namely, that the Church teaches with divine authority, is objectively certain.

But what justifies one's belief that this particular church teaches with divine authority? If it teaches with divine authority, then not only are the particulars of the depositum fidei objectively and absolutely secured beyond all private judgment, but also the meta-claim to teach with divine authority is objectively and absolutely secured beyond all private judgment. But how do I know — where knowledge entails objective certainty — that the antecedent of the foregoing conditional is true?

That is, how can I be objectively certain that the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach with divine authority?

Of course, I can believe it, and perhaps I can believe it reasonably. Reasonable belief does not, however, amount to objective certainty. So I can't be objectively certain of it, whence it follows that I can't be objectively certain that the collective judgment of the Roman Catholic magisterium with respect to faith and morals is infallible. But I hear an objection coming.

"You believe it because the Church teaches it. And since the Church teaches with divine authority, you can be objectively certain that what you believe is true. And since part of what the Church teaches is that it teaches with divine authority, you can be objectively certain that the Church teaches with divine authority."

This objection, however, is plainly circular. I want to know how I can know with objective certainty that a particular church, the Roman Catholic Church, is the unique divine mouthpiece, and I am told that I can know this with objective certainty because it is the unique divine mouthpiece. But this doesn't help due to its circularity.

Liccione speaks above of the assent of faith as a divine gift and not as something I create from my own resources. Thus my acceptance of the Church's absolute authority and reliability with respect to faith and morals is a gift from God. But even if this is so, how can I be objectively certain that it is so and that my acceptance is a divine gift? Again the circle rears its head: it is objectively certain that the acceptance is a divine gift because it is God who gives the gift through the Church.

What Liccione is claiming on behalf of the Church is that it is an objectively self-certifying source of objectively certain truth with respect to faith and morals. As objectively self-certifying, it needs no certification by us. The Church is like God himself. God needs no external certification of his beliefs; he is the self-certifying source of his own certainty which is at once both subjective and objective.

Unfortunately, this doesn't help me. After all, I am the one who has to decide what to believe and how to live. I am the one who needs salvation and needs to find the right path to it. I am the one who needs to decide whether I will accept the Church's authority. The Church doesn't need my certification, but I need to certify to my own satisfaction that the Church's CLAIM to be the unique objectively self-certifying source of objectively certain moral and soteriological knowledge is a CREDIBLE claim that I ought to accept.

The aporetic philosopher regularly finds himself in a bind. What bind am I in now? It looks to be the old business about Athens and Jerusalem whose recent heroes are Husserl and Shestov. Autonomous reason demands validation of all claims by its own lights. Faith says, "Obey, submit, stop asking questions, accept the heteronomy of the creature who owes everything to his Creator, including his paltry reason and its flickering lights. Accept the divine gift of faith in humility."

To end on a romantic note, it seems somehow noble to stand astride the two great cities, with a leg in each, seeking, but not finding the coincidentia oppositorum, maintaining oneself in this tension until death reveals the answer or puts an end to all questions.

Catholics Defending Communists!?

Hats off to Rod Dreher for condemning the Jesuit magazine America for publishing an article defending commies. Excerpt:

Wait a minute. No fair-minded and intellectually curious person could object to an essay in a Catholic magazine criticizing the excesses of capitalism. It’s also easy to see the justification for publishing an essay defending democratic socialism from a Catholic point of view. And nobody could reasonably complain about an essay like Dorothy Day wrote in 1933, explaining why some idealists are drawn to Communism.

But an essay defending Communism? Really? What to make of this?

My own views are very strong. A couple of weeks ago, I knelt in Warsaw at the grave of the Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity labor union movement. He was beaten to death by agents of the Communist government for opposing them. This is what Communists did to Father Jerzy:

So yes, in Poland, Communism and the Catholic Church had a “complicated” relationship.

Bergoglio the Secularist on the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes

Dr. Vito Caiati reports:

Something that the Argentinian did this week really annoyed me.

Specifically, in his homily on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, Bergoglio continued his devious discouragement of belief in miracles, flagitiously denying the great nature miracle by which Christ fed a multitude with just five loaves of bread and two fish.

As you know, the Gospel of Mathew describes the miracle as follows: “Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass; and taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children” (Mt 14:19-21; cf. Mk 6:40-44 and Lk 9:14-17, which have essentially the same wording, and Jn 6:10-14, which diverges only slightly).

Whatever happened here, it is quite clear that the very small quantity of matter contained in five loaves and two fish, was exponentially enlarged after Christ’s “blessing.” Thus, something miraculous occurred.

Now, here is Bergoglio’s exegesis of this event:

“Jesus.., .after having recited the blessing, gave the bread to be distributed, revealing in this the more beautiful significance: bread is not only a product of consumption: it is a means of sharing. In fact, surprisingly, in the telling of the multiplication of the loaves, multiplication is never mentioned. On the contrary, the verbs utilized are “break, give, distribute.” (cf. Lk 9:16) In short, the act of sharing rather than the multiplication is emphasized. This is important: Jesus does not perform an act of magic; he does not transform the five loaves into five thousand loaves and then day: “Now distribute them.” No, Jesus prays, blesses those five loaves and begins to distribute then, trusting in the Father. And those five loaves never finish. This is not magic; it is faith in God and in his providence” https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2019/documents/papa-francesco_20190623_omelia-corpusdomini.html).

Notice that the concept of miracle nowhere enters into this analysis; rather, Bergoglio engages in a sleight of hand, counterpoising the notion of “magic” with that of “faith in God.” His deprecation of multiple loaves, of which none of the Gospels in fact speak, insinuates that such a multiplication, certainly within the powers ascribed to Christ by the Evangelists, would have to be magical rather than miraculous. Now, magic is defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as “All practices . . . , by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others.” Jesus was, of course, accused of magic (as in Mt 12:24 or Lk 11:15), but the Gospels reject this falsity and instead proclaim that “Jesus accompanies his words with many “‘mighty works and wonders and signs’, which manifest that the kingdom is present in him and attest that he was the promised Messiah” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 547). In other words, when personally present here on Earth, Christ revealed His divine power through miracles. It is precisely this power that is denied in turning the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves and two fish into a simple “act of sharing.” Here, we have the Incarnation filtered through the decadent left-wing “humanist” ideology that is the hallmark of this pontificate.

Integralism in Three Sentences

Here:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

The crucial proposition is the first. By 'end of human life' is meant the ultimate or final goal or purpose of human life, not its cessation or stoppage. It is presupposed that all human lives share the same final purpose. And what might that be? For a traditional Catholic, the Baltimore Catechism gives the answer:

LESSON FIRST
ON THE END OF MAN
1. Q. Who made the world?
A. God made the world.
2. Q. Who is God?
A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.
3. Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image
and likeness of God.
6. Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world,
and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

The Catholic integralist is making the following claims. First, every human life has an ultimate purpose. Second, the purpose is not different for different people: all, regardless of race, sex, or any other difference, share the same purpose. Third, the final common purpose is known and not open to doubt or debate: it is not a matter of conjecture or speculation or private opinion. Fourth, the final common purpose is to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with him in the next. And of course the Catholic integralist is committed to the presuppositions of these claims, e.g., that there is a God, that he created everything distinct from himself, that man has a destiny that transcends this life, and so on.

Suppose all of the above is true. Then the political order here below must subserve the divinely ordained eternal order. The temporal power, the State, must be subordinated to, and therefore cannot be separated from, the true church, the Roman Catholic Church. If so, classical liberalism is an erroneous and pernicious political philosophy.

One consequence of this view seems to be that state power can be justifiably used to coerce dissidents. Some of them hold that human life has no purpose at all. Others hold that it has a purpose but one that is determined by the individual. Still others think that there is a common ultimate purpose but that it is secular and humanistic and therefore atheistic.

And then there are the classically liberal theists who hold that when it comes to the final purpose of human life and how to attain it, there is reasonable belief, but no knowledge. If there is no knowledge in this area then coercion of atheists, agnostics, and non-Catholics could not be justified. Finally, there are those who, while holding that there is knowledge in this area, knowledge that justifies the coercion of dissidents, reject the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Some Protestants for example, or Islamists.

My view is that we ought not stray too far from the classically liberal view of the Founders. We do not KNOW that the Catechism worldview is true. ONLY IF it were known to be true could it be justifiably imposed via the awesome power of the State. In a well-ordered Republic, the dissent of secular humanists, atheists, and non-Catholic theists ought to be tolerated. At the same time, State power must never be used to violate the consciences of Catholics by, say, forcing them to support the grave moral evil of abortion on demand with their tax dollars.

Government by ts very nature is coercive. I stand for limited government and limited coercion.

So that's my initial take on Catholic integralism. It is a non-starter.

Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order

The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll leave that question for later. Here is the passage:

If perchance I had to write a treatise on ethics, I would rank good humor as the first of our duties. I do not know what ferocious religion has taught us that sadness is great and beautiful, and that the wise man must meditate on death by digging his own grave. When I was ten years old, I visited the Abbey of La Trappe; I saw the graves the monks were digging a little each day, and the mortuary chapel where the dead were laid out for an entire week, for the edification of the living.

These lugubrious images and the cadaveric odor haunted me for a long time; but the monks had tried to prove too much. I cannot say exactly when and for what reasons I left the Catholic Church because I have forgotten. But from that moment on, I said to myself: "It is not possible that they have the true secret of life." My whole being rebelled against those mournful monks. And I freed myself from their religion as from an illness.

("Good Humor" in Alain on Happiness, tr. Cottrell, New York: Frederick Unger, 1973, p. 198. Paragraph break and italics added. Propos sur le bonheur was originally published in 1928 by Gallimard.)

The Attitude of the Worldling

Alain above frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don't share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his "whole being" that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.

For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility. The worldling doesn't take them as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:

Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it. Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets. It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions! Don't spend your life digging your grave and preparing for death. Live!

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us. One should make friends with finitude, enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined. Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

A frat boy might put it like this:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Or in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and human chatter and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon. Our communications technology is like a Faraday cage that blocks all irruptions from the Unseen Order.

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.

Is the worldling ignorant?

I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to myself? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? That this life is a vanishing quantity unworthy of wholehearted devotion? That what really matters is beyond matter and beyond mind in its presently paltry and darkened state? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations from Elsewhere, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned, and, I should add, in good faith. In the end, a leap of faith is needed. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live. You will have to decide whether to live in accordance with your sense of life, whether it be of the worldly sort or the otherworldly.

Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature. I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No. Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience? No. So the will comes into it.

Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?

Some might be, but in general, he is not. Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable. It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist. One can of course dogmatize and one can of course be a 'presuppositionalist' of one sort or another. But those are not respectable positions.

Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a blogger.

It Used to be Hard to be a Good Catholic

John Fante, Full of Life, HarperCollins 2002, pp. 86-87. Originally published in 1952.

I liked an atheistic wife. Her position made matters easy for me. It simplified a planned family. We had no scruples about contraceptives. Ours had been a civil marriage. We were not chained by religious tenets. Divorce was there, any time we wanted it. If she became a Catholic there would be all manner of complications. It was hard to be a good Catholic, very hard, and that was why I had left the Church. To be a good Catholic you had to break through the crowd and help Him pack the cross. I was saving the break through for later. If she broke through I might have to follow, for she was my wife.

It was indeed hard to be a good Catholic in the 'fifties and earlier. You had to do this and refrain from that. It put you at odds with the secular. But then, in the 'sixties, the Church decided to become 'relevant' to use a prominent buzzword of the era. The effect of the pursuit of 'relevance,' however, was to render itself irrelevant. A Church that is just another pile of secular leftist junk is of no use to anyone. Not to true leftists who have no need for a superannuated substitute. The true hipster scorns the oldster trying to be hip. Not to the young who seek order and structure and transcendent guidance. Such seekers are nowadays drawn to Islam. One such was John Walker 'Jihad Johhny' Lindh. He was baptized and raised 'Catholic' but ran off to join the Taliban.

A more recent example is Jacob Williams, Why I Became Muslim.

On the Folly of the Vatican II 'Reforms'

CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA

nymag.com

Andrew Sullivan: The Corruption of the Vatican’s Gay Elite Has Been Exposed

A Christological and Mariological Query That Leads into the Philosophy of Language

Theme music: What If God Was One of Us (just a slob like one of us)?

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, checks in:

Karl White wrote in your post of 12-6-18: "If Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in response to human actions." In what way COULD "Jesus" be a 'person of the Godhead'? If I understand the classic narrative correctly, Mary, his mother, was a virgin who was made pregnant by the "overshadowing" of the Holy Spirit. So: there was an egg! A contingent egg, with DNA. And something fertilized it, supernaturally.

That's right. On the classical narrative, Jesus was born of a virgin without a natural father. The fertilization of the ovum in Mary was by a supernatural, miraculous, process. So while Jesus came into the world the way the rest of us poor schleps do, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, the pregnancy that eventuated in his birth was caused by the third person of the Trinity acting supernaturally upon natural material, namely the contingent ovum in contingent Mary, who is of course a creature who wouldn't have existed at all if nothing material had been created.

That was the moment of Jesus' conception. An eternal, pre-existent entity named 'Jesus' could not have existed before that conception, unless of course Mary's DNA contribution was of no account - but in that case, we were not given 'the man Jesus Christ, made in every way like his brothers so that He might be merciful and faithful as High Priest'. Heb. 2.27. Also see 1 Tim. 2.5,6. Because – to be made like us 'in every way' either means just that, or it doesn't. He was made in every way like us. If Mary made a DNA contribution at the moment of conception, then her son 'the man Jesus Christ ' did not pre-exist. Am I at all thinking clearly here?

Yes, Dave, you are thinking quite clearly, and I agree with you. But there are some nuances that give rise to questions that lead us into the philosophy of language and metaphysics.

You and I take 'Jesus' to refer to a particular man, a composite of human soul and human body, born of a woman at a particular place at a particular time. And I take it that we understand 'born' to imply that an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. To be born, then, is not for an immaterial Platonic soul-substance to acquire a material body, but for a soul-body composite to come into existence. On this 'Aristotelian' conception of being born, nothing that is born pre-existed its being born. Being born is not an alterational (accidental) change, a change in an already-existing substratum/subject of change, but an existential (substantial) change, whereby something first comes into existence.

But couldn't someone who accepts the Chalcedonian one person-two natures view say that 'Jesus' refers to the Son, the second person of the Trinity? In the earlier thread, Fr. Kirby says, "The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead, if we understand 'the man Jesus' to be denominative rather than descriptive." I take it that a denominative term is one whose reference is not determined by the descriptive content, if any, that the term bears or suggests. Such a term refers directly as opposed to a descriptive term that refers via a description that an entity must satisfy in order to count as the referent of that term. If we take 'the man Jesus' to be denominative, then 'man' plays no role in determining the term's reference. The reference can succeed even if the referent is not a man. (And of course the Son, taken in himself and apart from the Incarnation, is not a man, i.e., does not have a human nature, but only a divine nature.) If so, then the following identities hold and hold necessarily:

The Son = the man Jesus.

The Son = Jesus.

It then follows that Jesus or the man Jesus is a person of the Godhead. To clarify this further we need to dip into the philosophy of language.

How does 'Jesus' refer? Does it refer via a description that the name abbreviates, or does it refer directly? Suppose by 'Jesus' we mean the Jewish carpenter born in Bethlehem to the virgin Mary by the agency of the Holy Spirit. The italicized phrase is what Russell calls a definite description, and his thesis about ordinary proper names is that they are definite descriptions in disguise. On this theory, 'Jesus' refers to whomever satisfies the description we associate with the name. It follows that the referent of the name must have the properties mentioned in the description. For example, 'Jesus' cannot refer to anything that was not born of a woman. Now the second person of the Trinity, necessary, co-eternal with the Father, etc., was not born of a woman, or born at all, nor was he from all eternity a carpenter, etc. Recall how I explained 'born' above: an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. If this is what is meant by 'born,' then the Son (second person of the Trinity, Word, Logos) cannot be born. But then how are we to understand the Incarnation? The idea, of course, is that God the Son came into the material world by being born of a virginal human female. But how is this possible if nothing that is born pre-exists its being born?

We seem faced with an aporetic triad:

Jesus was born;

The Son of God was not born;

Jesus is the Son of God.

What's the solution? There is no problem if two different senses of 'born' are in play. I suppose I will be told that the Son is born in the following sense: the pre-existent Son which has prior to the Incarnation a divine nature only, acquires at the Incarnation a human nature in addition to the divine nature. Thus there is one person (suppositum, hypostasis), and that person is the second person of the Trinity, God the Son who, before the Incarnation has exactly one nature, the divine nature, and after the Incarnation exactly two natures, one divine the other human. Being born, for the Son, is then an alterational change in the Son: the pre-existent Son acquires a second nature.

The trouble with this answer is that it implies that Jesus is not "made in every way like his brothers." He is born in a different way. He is born in a Platonic or rather quasi-Platonic way whereas we are born in the 'Aristotelian' way. Dave and I did not exist before we were born/conceived. Jesus did exist before he was born/conceived assuming that 'Jesus' is used denominatively as opposed to descriptively. When we were born/conceived, we didn't acquire something that we lacked before, human nature; we were nothing at all before. But when Jesus was born he acquired something he did not have before, human nature.

My interim conclusion is that it is deeply problematic to take 'Jesus' as referring to God the Son. Insofar forth, Dave is vindicated against Karl. Jesus is no member of the Godhead.

Word of the Day: Dégringolade

Merriam-Webster:

a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition) : DOWNFALL

Example from Why I Left by Jim Holt:

I will now confess to the obvious: the foregoing account of my spiritual dégringolade, while true in every detail, is a caricature. My alienation from the Catholic Church was not mainly intellectual. It was moral, even emotional.

Are Atheists Vincibly Ignorant?

In Catholic thought there is what is called vincible ignorance. Here is a definition:

Lack of knowledge for which a person is morally responsible. It is culpable ignorance because it could be cleared up if the person used sufficient diligence. One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known; guilt then depends on one's lack of effort to clear up the ignorance.

For present purposes, it suffices to say that 'God' refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists are vincibly ignorant. Some might be, but not qua atheists. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God. Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.

If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant.

This puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.

More on the Hypostatic Union

I am very impressed with Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, The Catholic University of America Press, 2017, xiv + 534 pp. It deserves to be called magisterial, the work of a magister, a master. I am presently working through Chapter One, "The Ontology of the Hypostatic Union."

White and I are concerned with the intelligibility of the one person, two natures doctrine. (See yesterday's entry for background.) Fr. White of course considers the doctrine to be intelligible while I have my doubts. This entry presents one of the problems I am having.

Christ is one person in two distinct individual natures, the one divine, the other human. The one person is the Word (Logos), the Second Person of the Trinity. The Word is eternal, impassible, and necessary. In the patois of possible worlds, the Word exists in every metaphysically possible world. The hypostatic union is the union of the Word with the individual human nature (body and soul) of Jesus where the hypostasis or suppositum is the Word. It is that which has the nature or exists in the nature. White tells us that this union is not

. . . merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God. Rather the Word subsists personally as man in a human nature. Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son existing as man. (113)

We are being told that the person of Jesus is the eternal Word, the Son, not a human person. There is human nature in Jesus, but no human person in Jesus. So it not as if there are two persons, the person of the Word and the person of Jesus. There is only one person, the person of the Word. To think otherwise is the Nestorian heresy.

This raises the following question.

If the Word is a necessary being, and the union of the Word with human nature is not accidental, but essential, are we to conclude that the Word has a concrete human body and human soul in every possible world, and thus at every time? It would seem so. If x is united with N essentially, then x is united with N in every possible world in which x exists. So if x is a necessary being, then x is united with N in every possible world, period, which is to say that there is no possible world in which x is not united with N. Therefore,

1) If the Word is united to a human nature essentially, then there is no possible world in which the Word is not united to a human nature.

But then how is this consistent with the belief that the Incarnation was an historical event that occurred at a particular time and whose occurrence was contingent, not necessary? God became man to save man from the sin he incurred with Adam's fall, a fall that was itself contingent upon Adam's free choice to violate the divine command. That is,

2) There are possible worlds in which God does not create at all, and possible worlds in which God creates humans but there is no Fall, no need for Redemption, and thus no need for Incarnation.

Therefore

3) There are possible worlds in which the Word is not united to a human nature.

Therefore

4) It is not the case that the Word is united to a human nature essentially. (From 1, 3 by modus tollens)

Therefore

5) The Word is united to a human nature accidentally.

But this is contrary to the orthodox view at least as explained by Fr. White who draws upon Thomas. White tells us that "the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word as an intrinsic, 'conjoined instrument.' The being of the man Jesus is the being of the Word." (83) We are also told that the unity is "substantial not accidental." (83)

Why does Aquinas think that the Word must be united to the humanity of Jesus intrinsicaly and essentially as opposed to extrinsically and accidentally? Because he thinks that this is the only way to avoid the Nestorian heresy according to which there are two persons, the person of the Word and the person of Jesus.

The reasoning seems to go like this. In an ordinary man, body and soul form a substantial unity. If in Jesus body and soul formed a substantial unity, then Jesus would be a different substance and a different suppositum (hypostasis) from the Word, and Nestorianism would be the upshot. To avoid this, the proposal was made that body and soul in Christ do not form a substantial unity as they do in ordinary human beings. Thus on the so-called habitus theory, the third theory of the hypostatic union mentioned in Peter Lombard's Sentences, ". . . both the body and the soul are said to accrue to the person of the Word 'accidentally' as qualities or properties of the Word, but without subsistence in the Word." (85) This implies that body and soul are accidental to each other, which of course is unacceptable given the background Aristotelian commitments of Thomas.

So while the habitus theory aims to be anti-Nestorian, it ends up in an implicit Nestorianism according to White's Aquinas. You've got the Word and over against it the body of Jesus and the soul of Jesus as an accidental, not a substantial, unity. On this scheme the individual humanity (body and soul) of Jesus is accidental to the Word.

My point is that, on the one hand, this is how it should be given the contingency of the Fall and the contingency of the Incarnation. The Word is not essentially incarnated; it is accidentally incarnated. The humanity of the Word is accidental, not essential. That would seem to fit nicely with the Christian narrative. But on the other hand, if it is not the substance of the Son who dies on the cross, if it is not God himself who enters history and dies on the cross, if it is a man who is only accidentally and for a time united with the Word, then the debt that only God himslef can pay has not been paid in full.

So I think we can understand why the one person, two natures doctrine was deemed orthodox. But if I am right in my reasoning above, the orthodox doctrine entails the absurdity that the Word has a "concrete body and soul" (113) at every time and in every possible world.

To put it another way, the Incarnation makes no sense unless it is a contingent event, but it cannot be on the radically anti-Nestorian view of White's Aquinas.

Thomas Joseph White on the Hypostatic Union: Questions

Vito Caiati writes,

I am struggling, in particular, to understand what [Thomas Joseph] White is proposing with regard to the hypostatic union on pages 82-84 [of The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, The Catholic University of America Press, 2017]. He follows Aquinas in affirming “a substantial union of God and man. . . . [in which] the two natures remain distinct, without mixture or confusion, and [in which] the union must not occur in the nature of Christ” (82). In this substantial union, “The hypothesis [hypostasis] of the Word does not replace the human soul of Christ. . . . However, just as in man the body is the instrument of the soul, so in the incarnate Word, the human nature of Jesus is the instrument of the Word. . . . [in that] the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word as an intrinsic, ‘conjoined instrument. . .“ (83).

I do not understand what is being affirmed here. If the Word is “united” to the humanity of Jesus “as an intrinsic ‘conjoined instrument’” has not something been done to this humanity that renders it more than human? In other words, can one really hold that in this process of union, the natures remain distinct? I am particularly confused because White appears to argue for precisely this position in affirming that “in Christ there is no autonomous human personhood or human personality. He is the person of the Son and Word made human, subsisting in human nature” (83). Well, if this is so, what import does his human soul have on his thoughts and actions?

The Word (Logos) is the Second Person of the Trinity. It is the one person (hypostasis) that has the two natures, the divine nature and the human nature. Thus there are not two persons, the Second Person and the human person of Jesus; there is only one person, the Second Person of the Trinity. This latter person is the person of Jesus. If there were two persons, a divine person and a human person, then that would be the Nestorian heresy. (I could explain later, if you want, why this heresy is a heresy.) In other words, the person of Jesus is the eternal Word, not a human person. There is human nature in Jesus, but no human person in Jesus.

But this is not to say that the man Jesus merely embodies the Word, i.e., it is not to say that the Word is to Jesus as soul to body. That would be the Apollinarian heresy. The Word in Jesus does not merely assume a body; The Word assumes (the nature of) a fully human man, body and soul. So while there is no human person in Jesus, there is a human soul in Jesus. Here, perhaps, we have the makings of trouble for the Incarnation doctrine on White's Thomistic construal thereof, as we shall see in a minute.

In sum, one person, two distinct natures, one divine, the other human. The person is divine. The natures are individual natures. They are not multiply realizable or multiply instantiable like rational animal which is found in Socrates and Plato equally but not in an ass. (Schopenhauer somewhere quips that the medievals employed only three examples, Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to run athwart a tradition so hoary and noble?) And yet the individual natures are not themselves self-subsistent individuals. They need a support, something that has the natures. This is part of the meaning of hypostasis. There has to be something that stands under or underlies the natures. The hypostatic union is the union of the two natures in one subsistent individual, the Word. (White, p. 113)

Now this one divine person is united to the (individual) nature of Jesus as to an essential, not accidental, instrument. But this union is not identity. There is no identity of natures or confusion of natures. The divine and human natures remain distinct. They are united, but they are united essentially, not accidentally.

Caiati asks, " Can one really hold that in this process of union, the natures remain distinct?" Yes, if union is not identity. So I don't see a problem here.

Caiati also asks, "what import does his human soul have on his thoughts and actions?" This is a much more vexing question, and I rather doubt that we are going to find a satisfying answer to it within the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme that Fr. White employs.

Who is it that is thinking when Jesus thinks? Suppose he is debating some rabbis. He hears and understands their objections and thoughtfully replies. Is it the Word who is the subject of these mental acts? Is the Word thinking when Jesus thinks? If yes, then his human soul is not the 'seat' of his intellectual operations. Suppose Jesus feels hunger or thirst or the excruciating pains of his passion. Does the Word feel these pains? How could it if it is impassible? If it is not impassible and does the feel Jesus' pains, then what role does the human soul in Jesus have to play? How can Christ be fully human, body and soul, if his human soul plays no role either intellectually or sensorially?

There is also the will to consider. If Jesus is obedient to the end, and does the will of the Father, then he wills what the Father wills. "Thy will be done." He would rather not undergo the Passion, but "not my will but thine be done." This makes sense only if Jesus has his own will, distinct from the Father's will, a will 'seated' in his human soul. That is, the faculties of willing have to be different, even if the contents of willing are the same. But then it is not the Word that wills in Jesus.

On the other hand, if the human soul in Jesus is indeed the 'seat' of his intellectual and voluntative and sensitive and affective functions, then the person in him, the Word, is severed from his soul. But this drains 'person' of its usual meaning which includes soulic functions. The one person in two natures threatens to become a mere substratum or support of the two natures.

White's view is that the Incarnation, although ultimately a mystery, can be rendered intelligible to the discursive intellect in the Thomistic way. I doubt it. But there are other ways, and they need to be examined.

The Cross Won, but the Battle Never Ends

I ended my European tour in June at Rome where all roads are said to lead. After hours of prayer and meditation in Santa Maria Maggiore, I spent a long time in the vicinity of the Coliseum where I noticed something I had missed on previous visits:

The brutal Romans contributed mightily to civilization, but it took Christianity to civilize us truly. But now the Church of Rome is collapsing under the weight of its own decadence. It will most likely survive as a remnant, stripped down to essentials and purified by suffering and worldly losses. Such losses will do it good. The Church needs to spend a generation or two in the desert, there to examine its collective conscience and to ponder the mission it has abandoned.

All institutions require reform and renewal from time to time, as do their members. But it is not reform or renewal when an institution is diverted from its founding purpose. It is rather destruction. The whole point of the church founded by Christ was to stand against the world and point us, and indeed lead us, beyond it. "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36) Betraying its mandate, the Roman church has become just another piece of cultural junk. Cozying up to secularity, the Church seeks to maintain itself as an organizational hustle for the clerics it serves while abandoning the deposit of faith it is supposed to be preserving.

The vast, ancient edifice needs fumigation. The termites, from Bergoglio on down, need to be sent scurrying. The rotten hierarchy needs to be defunded. My trenchant but obviously figurative talk of termites and fumigation will elicit howls of protest from some. "Eliminationist rhetoric!" But consider this report from a correspondent, Dr. Vito Caiati:

In its October 7th edition, Corriere della Sera offered excepts from Pope Bergoglio’s just released book on the Virgin Mary , including the following paragraph, which well reveals his insidious method of undermining dogma and tradition. I provide the first paragraph of this longer reflection, followed by my translation.

Da quando è nata fino all’Annunciazione, al momento dell’incontro con l’angelo di Dio, me l’immagino come una ragazza normale, una ragazza di oggi, una ragazza non posso dire di città, perché Lei è di un paesino, ma normale, normale, educata normalmente, aperta a sposarsi, a fare una famiglia. Una cosa che immagino è che amasse le Scritture: conosceva le Scritture, aveva fatto la catechesi ma familiare, dal cuore. Poi, dopo il concepimento di Gesù, ancora una donna normale: Maria è la normalità, è una donna che qualsiasi donna di questo mondo può dire di poter imitare. Niente cose strane nella vita, una madre normale: anche nel suo matrimonio verginale, casto in quella cornice della verginità, Maria è stata normale. Lavorava, faceva la spesa, aiutava il Figlio, aiutava il marito: normale.

From her birth until the Annunciation, at the moment of the encounter with the angel of God, I imagine her [the Virgin Mary] as a normal girl, a girl of today, I cannot say a girl of the city, because she is from a hamlet, but normal, normal, educated normally, open to marrying, to having a family. One thing that I imagine is that she loved the Scriptures: she knew the Scriptures; she had carried out catechesis but informally, from the heart. Then, after the conception of Jesus, she was still a normal woman. Mary is normality, is a woman that almost any women in this world is able to imitate. No strange things in life, a normal mother: even in her virginal matrimony, chaste in that frame of virginity, Mary was normal. She worked, shopped, helped her Son, helped her husband: normal.

Leaving aside the triteness of these reflections, they constitute, first, a masked assault on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which proclaims that “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 494). While we cannot know the intimate effects of such “singular grace and privilege” on Mary’s being and consciousness, we are certainly bound to hold that she was no “normal girl.” Moreover, Bergoglio’s words can be taken to deny the perpetual virginity of Mary, in that while he speaks of her being “chaste in the frame of virginity,” he simultaneously regards her “after the birth of Jesus” as “a normal woman” since there are “no strange things in life.” Again, the Church affirms that although Jesus emerged from the body of the Theotokos, her virginity was not in any way altered. Now, if this is not a “strange thing,” that is, an absolutely unique miracle, what is? Bergoglio is constantly at work undermining the foundations of the faith to the benefit of post-modern skepticism and relativism.

Una ragazza normale? One could try to read this as an emphasis on Mary's humanity, or one might say that Bergoglio is a foolish man who doesn't understand the dogmas of the Church of which he is pope; but in the end I believe my learned correspondent is right: this is an insidious undermining of dogma and tradition. How could Bergoglio not know the doctrinal content in the Catechism?

For a man like me there are two main problems with the RCC, or rather two main impediments to my returning to it, as I would like to do, being a cradle Catholic. One is at the philosophical level: how is it possible that the dogmas including the Mariological dogmas (Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, Assumption) be true? Suppose I solve this problem to my own satisfaction. Then the second problem, that of the corruption of the institution, jumps out at me. The church hierarchy and the rank-and-file priests are filled with unbelievers who apparently believe in the Church in precisely the way mafiosi believe in the mafia: it's their thing, a hustle that keeps them fat and happy in a worldly sense and allows free play to their concupiscence. I am alluding, of course, to priestly pederasty, pedophilia, and ephebophilia. How can I in good conscience support such a church by attendance or monetary contributions? If the Church is now just another pile of secular-leftist junk, and a haven for homosexuals, then it ought to be defunded.

Am I suggesting that for every priest the Church is a fraud and a hustle? Of course not. But as Rod Dreher has forcefully documented over many, many entries at the American Conservative, the rot resides in the hierarchy itself from Bergoglio on down. This fact makes the problem very serious indeed.