Category: Christian Doctrine

Body, Soul, Self

  Tony Flood writes:

Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.
 
Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.
 
Tony is referring to this sentence of mine: "Those of us who champion  free speech miss him [Hitchens] and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul." What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person's self.  But why true self?  Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then 'my' soul, or rather me qua soul is 'my' true self. There are a number of different questions here, all very difficult.
 
To begin, we need to clarify our terminology. 'Soul' (psyche, anima, Seele) is ambiguous.  It could refer to the life-principle in living things.  'Soul' could also be used to refer to the subject or possessor of a person's mental states. For the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, "Each actual human being is essentially  a pure mental substance . . . " and ". . . a person has mental properties because their [sic] soul has mental properties." (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 80)  
 
Now ask yourself which of the following is true:
 
(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body.  Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.
 
(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.
 
A substance may be defined as any individual entity metaphysically capable of independent existence, where 'individual' implies unrepeatability and impredicability.
 
(A) is the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. A person is one substance, the individual human being, the soul of which is not a substance. 
 
(P) is the Platonic-Cartesian view. It is substance-dualist. In the book mentioned, Swinburne defends substance dualism according to which "each human consists of two parts — a soul (a pure mental substance) and a body (a physical substance)." (p. 141)
 
So, when I wrote in my Substack entry about Hitchens taking care of himself, or rather his body, I signaled my inclination to accept the Platonic-Cartesian view. You can destroy your body with hooch and weed, but not your soul.  
 
Now which of the two views above is more biblical? This, I take it, is the question that exercises Tony, and I suspect that his view is either (A) or neither. I suspect that Tony's view is that the Platonic-Cartesian view is wholly unbiblical and thus that Christianity has little or nothing to do with Platonism.  
 
Serendipitously, Tony's question ties in nicely with a discussion I had with a man at the monastery about Mark 12: 18-27 and Christ's argument against the Sadducees re: bodily resurrection. Don't we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae and general resurrection?
 
Combox open.

The God Question and the Christian Proposition

A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent.  Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added):

P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting considerable pressure on Europe, which should not have happened according to the grand progressive narrative elaborated since the eighteenth century—this philosophy of history, according to which humanity, under the leadership of the European avant-garde, was supposed to emancipate itself irresistibly from religious claims, dogma, and doctrine. The vitality that Islam as a whole has maintained, or rather reinforced, goes against a historical perspective that the weakening or “secularization” of Christianity seemed, to many, to validate. Islam is, in any case, the religion that refuses to come to an end and that affirms itself in ways that are manifestly public and triumphalist, casting doubt at least on the grand narrative of secularization. This challenges the consciousness upon which the self-confidence of modern Europe once rested.

Progressivism will not reconsider its approach to the religious question. What, then, does it do? On the one hand, it radically modifies its definition of progress in order to make Islam a part of the grand narrative. Europe no longer represents progress as the framework for the coming forth of a new association of humanity, of an industrial or socialist society, as August Comte or Karl Marx thought; on the contrary, it now represents progress because it has totally renounced self-affirmation and has reinvented itself as unlimited openness to the other—even when this other goes as directly as possible against our principles, particularly those concerning the equality of men and women. Since we now measure the quality of our progressivism by our disposition to welcome Islam unconditionally, Islam obliges us by confirming our grand narrative rather than refuting it. But since it is necessary all the same to take account of the fact that Muslim customs conflict with some of our essential principles, we decree with confidence (in a complementary strategic move) that secularism will take care of the problem by requiring Muslims to remove at least the visible signs of the subordination of women. While the first move boasts of its acceptance of Muslims as they are, the second promises that secularism will make them what they ought to be. Thus is removed all limitation on the welcoming of Islam, whether in the name of its present difference or in the name of its future similarity. Of course, this similarity will be slow in coming; progressivism lives by waiting.

MavPhil 'intervention': European progressivism is so progressive that it transmogrifies into ethno-masochism and cultural suicide. The progressivity of this progressivism is that of  a progressive disease. With the exception of Hungary, Europe is decadent-unto-death, and there is no decadent like a French decadent. (Am I being fair, Vito?) Of course, we over here are decadent as hell as well, but not as decadent, since about half of our population is willing to punch back against ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government, and all the rest of the depredations of cultural Marxism.

As for the "complementary strategic move," good luck with that! Do you Frenchies have the WILL to defend your superior culture against that of the Muslim invaders? Will European secularism "take care of" Muslim barbarism? Maybe. But addiction to la dolce vita is vitiating, weakening in plain English, and you Europeans may end up in dhimmitude. (My use of the Italian phrase may be inappropriate given the current 'stiffening' in my ancestral country, powered by a fiery Italian female.)

The rest of the discussion is pretty good too.

Le Figaro: The Catholic and Republican frameworks that hold together French society have become dislocated, as Jerome Fourquet explains at the beginning of his work L’Archipel francais. And so, we seek alternative religions. The philosopher Jean-Francois Braunstein recently published La religion woke. Alain Finkielkraut, what do you make of the idea of looking at wokeism as a religion?

A.F. I am not comfortable with this metaphorical use of the term religion. I am not convinced by the concept of secular religions. The promise of a radiant future is not religious. In his book, Pierre Manent sets up a very illuminating debate between Pascal and Rousseau. Original sin occupies a central place in Pascal’s thought. Manent writes: “The claim to overcome human injustice by ourselves, the injustice in which we are born and in which we will live as long as God has not delivered us, is the beginning and indeed the height of our injustice.” Rousseau says the opposite; he excludes the hypothesis of original sin: “I have shown that all the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it; I have stated the manner in which they are born. I have followed their genealogy, so to speak, and I have shown how through the continuous deterioration of their original goodness, men finally become what they are.”

Rousseau replaces original sin by the original crime: property, inequality. Those we call the oppressors are the successors of this crime. For Rousseau, politics must take responsibility for the whole of reality, and its final purpose becomes the elimination of evil. This project can take no other form than the elimination of the wicked; this is what the totalitarian experience teaches us. This is why we see the unexpected return of a meditation on original sin in late nineteenth-century thought. We human beings do not have the strength to deliver ourselves from sin.

Now, with wokeism, we return to the original crime, as if totalitarianism had never happened. With wokeism, evil has an address: evil is the male, white heterosexual over 50. Evil must be eliminated at all costs. Thus, cancel culture arises and spreads.

P.M. The new ideology no longer sees in human bonds the expression and fulfillment of human nature, but what threatens freedom and injures the rights of the individual. The new progressive finds his way in society as in a suspect country. The sole common cause is the protection of nature—but protection against whom? Against human beings, who stain or destroy nature, in one way or another. Political ecology introduces a principle of distrust or of limitless enmity between human beings and with respect to humanity as such. The desire for an earth without people turns humanity against itself and thus feeds the project of effacing what is special about humanity, of making human beings animals like the others, and so, in the end, inoffensive. Thus, at the moment when we claim to base all collective order on the sole principle of human rights, we wish to remove from humanity all that is distinctive by promulgating the rights of animals, plants, and rocks against humanity. Those who speak on behalf of species incapable of speaking need fear no refutation. All of nature provides them with an inexhaustible supply of motives in their accusations against other human beings.

As I have said, contemporary progressivism would have us admit that our species has no real or legitimate privilege over other species, which ultimately have as many rights as we do. And yet there is one point concerning which progressivism absolutely refuses to consider us as animals like the others: it rejects the idea that our lives should be organized according to the difference between the sexes, the natural polarity between males and females. How can we be animals like the others if the human order must construct itself on the basis of the negation of this natural difference that we have in common with animals? In this way, contemporary ideology succeeds in combining a radical contestation of the human difference with a radical contestation of the animal part of our natures. We have only to open the Bible to the book of Genesis to recover a bit of common sense.

 

Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity

The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a  contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment.  The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical. As opposed to what? As opposed to a life in which praxis is paramount.

Question: Is the life of the monk the highest life for the Christian? Is the monastic life the highest form of  imitatio Christi?  Christ was no anchorite.  He did not flee from the agitation of the cities and from the people except for relatively short periods. He associated with the canaille, with publicans and prostitutes. His ministry was among them where he risked everything and in human terms lost everything.

Despite their drastic differences, Socrates too moved among the people  and met a predictable fate. He lived in no ivory tower where he could think and write in peace and in leisurely retirement. He wrote nothing. His academy was the agora. His was the dialectic of the streets, not that of the learned essay. A battle-hardened soldier, he knew how to translate military valor into civil courage. Among his interlocutors were powerful and vicious men.  He took risks, offended them, and was executed by the State.  But back to Christ.  Let us hear St. Neilos the Ascetic. This is from his Ascetic Discourse in the Philokalia, that marvellous compendium of Patristic teachings.

For philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both His life and His teaching. For by the purity of His life He was the first to establish the way of true philosophy. He always held His soul above the passions of the body, and in the end, when His death was required by His design for man's salvation. He laid down even His soul. In this He taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life's pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body: he must not overvalue even his soul, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.

The apostles received this way of life from Christ and made it their own, renouncing the world in response to His call, disregarding fatherland, relatives and possessions. At once they adopted a harsh and strenuous way of life, facing every kind of adversity, afflicted, tormented, harassed, naked, lacking even necessities; and finally they met death boldly, imitating their Teacher faithfully in all things. Thus through their actions they left behind a true image of the highest way of life.

Although all Christians should have modeled their own life on this image, most of them either lacked the will to do so or else made only feeble efforts. There were, however, a few who had the Strength to rise above the turmoil of the world and to flee from the agitation of cities. Having escaped from this turbulence, they embraced the monastic life and reproduced in themselves the pattern of apostolic virtue. They preferred voluntary poverty to possessions, because this freed them from distraction, and so as to control the passions, they satisfied their bodily needs with food that was readily available and simply prepared, rather than with richly dressed dishes. Soft and unnecessary clothing they rejected as an invention of human luxury, and they wore only such plain garments as are required for the body. It seemed to them a betrayal of philosophy to turn their attention from heavenly things to earthly concerns more appropriate to animals. They ignored the world, being above human passions.

I draw your attention to the third paragraph. Christ did not flee from the agitation of the cities. He did not ignore the world and its turmoil. He was not above human passions. The God-Man was fully human. He did not die like a Stoic sage. He experienced to the full the brutality of the brutal Romans, dying like a man in utter agony of body and in despair of spirit, abandoned.

So the question is: Is the monastic way a way to evade true imitation of Christ? I myself am of the monkish disposition and not at all inclined to go into the agora like Socrates  or into the temple with its moneychangers like Christ. Luther I find repellent; the anti-rational but also anti-mystical Kierkegaard fascinating but wrongheaded; the Roman church wishy-washy despite its deep depths of mysticism; it is the East and the mystical depths of Orthodox Christianity that attract me. Athens is closer to Constantinople than to Rome.

And so I ask my question in the spirit of Socratic self-examination. I do not have an answer.  The unexamined life is not worth living, and the highest examination is the examination of one's own life.

Related:

Kierkegaard: "To Hell with the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

Christianity and Individualism

Mark Tooley:

Easter is a timely reminder of Christianity’s development of individualism, which is now widely derided by many on both sides of the political spectrum. 

Yes.

Many on the post-liberal left replace individualism, which they equate with greed and capitalism, with raucous identity politics stressing communal identities based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or some other category of victim group. Many on the post-liberal right disdain individualism as self-centered autonomous materialist hedonism disconnected from family, religion and community, degenerating into endless categories of personal expressivism. They propose hierarchy, tradition and subordination to institutions as alternatives.

That's right.

Easter is the supreme example of extraordinary, supernatural inspired individualism. Jesus the individual, as God Incarnate, redeemed the whole world through His suffering, death and resurrection. He was shunned by all, His people, His followers, His family, yet He sacrificially prevailed against all sin, death and hell. Humanity was not saved by the collective but by one individual.

Jesus is the exemplar of the anti-tribal whether you accept his divinity or not. But isn't the God of the Old Testament a tribal god, the god of the Jews who sticks up for them and smites their enemies?  Maybe so, but God himself is not a member of the tribe of gods. In himself, God is anti-tribal. His identity is not a tribal identity. If we are made in his image and likeness, then we are meant to be individuals too.  Normative individuality is pre-delineated in our divine origin. In simpler terms, God made us to be individuals, and it is our vocation and task to achieve individuation by lifting ourselves out of the social and the tribal from which we must start, but in which we must not remain.  Perhaps  we could read Christ as the highest manifestation and achievement of radical self-individuation.

This fearsome call to the individual has animated all of Christendom and bequeathed to us concepts of individual dignity, purpose, duties and rights, which ultimately resulted in societies that aspired to equality and opportunity for all. What is sometimes called classical “liberalism” is the respect for individuals and their consciences that unfolded across several millennia thanks to the Biblical God’s summons to each person.

This is my view as well. It is presently under assault both from the post-liberal Left and the post-liberal Right, e.g. Patrick Deneen and Ryszard Legutko, et al. 

Addressing one prominent contemporary critic of individualism and “liberalism,” Hanssen warns: “[Patrick] Deneen needs to be more careful, in taking aim at radical autonomy, that he doesn’t cast aspersions on the entire tradition in which Christianity has played a crucial role in elevating the dignity of the individual. It is the individual substance of a rational nature that is immortal: not the family, not the community, not the state.”  

Exactly right!  Speaking for myself: 

1) The individual is the primary locus of value, not the family, the clan, the tribe, any group, association, race, sex . . . .

2) Self-individuation is a task, a project, and for the believer, one presumably extending beyond this life and into the next.  We are to become who we are, and to be who we are becoming.  

3) Tribalism is tearing us apart. We are on a path toward increasing social malaise as a result.

4)  The cure for tribal self-identification is not an opposite tribal self-identification. White tribalism, for example, is not  a truly ameliorative and long-term answer to black tribalism.  I do concede, however, that tribalism pro tempore may be tactically necesary, here and there, for purposes of self-defense.

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

Substack latest.

You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.'  It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes offense at standard English takes offense inappropriately.

Another Theological Conundrum: Hypostatic Union and the Contingency of the Incarnation

In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry.

'Hypostatic Union' ". . . refers to the divine person of the Word uniting a human nature to himself  in his own person." (113, emphasis in original) This is the familiar one person (hypostasis)- two natures doctrine.  The one person is the Word (Logos), the second person of the Trinity.  The union is called hypostatic because it is the union of two natures in one hypostasis. The two natures are divine nature and human nature. Both natures are to be understood as individualized, not as universals. They are natures of one and the same self-subsistent individual, the Word. There is no "confusion of natures," which is to say that the  two natures are really distinct, distinct in reality and not merely in our thought, though not separable in reality.  These two natures are nonetheless essentially together: neither can exist without the other.  It is not as if there is "merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God." (113) There is only one being, the Word, which possesses two distinct but really inseparable natures.  Fr. White then concludes:

Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of the person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son [the Word or Logos or second person of the Trinity] existing as man.

I have two questions.

First, is human nature conjoined to the Word at every time? It would have to be given that the two natures are essentially, and not merely accidentally, united. The Word is essentially divine. So if the two natures are essentially united, then the Word is essentially human: it possesses essentially a human nature.  That implies that at no time is the Word not in possession of a human nature. Now the Incarnation is the acquisition by the Word of a human nature. The Incarnation is an event — call it the Christ event — that occurred at a particular time in a particular place.  Before that time, the Incarnation was at best prophesied.  A contradiction would seem to ensue:

1) The Word possesses human nature at every time;

2) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature at every time.

How do we negotiate this aporetic dyad? More simply, how remove the contradiction? Can it be removed without adding 'epicycles' to the theory that raise problems of their own?

My second question is a modal counterpart of the first. The Incarnation is a contingent event. There was no necessity that it occur.   Had Adam not sinned there would have been no need for a Redeemer. Man would have continued blissfully in his paradisiacal, prelapsarian state. The soteriological significance of the Incarnation is that only by the Son's becoming man and suffering the ultimate penalty could man be restored to fellowship with God.  For the offense against God was so great that only God could expiate it. But if the divine and human natures are united essentially in one person, the Word, then, given that the Word is a necessary being, it follows that the Incarnation is a necessary event. A second contradiction seems to ensue:

3) The Word possesses human nature in every possible world;

4) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature in every possible world.

(4) is true because there are worlds in which there is no Fall and thus no need for Incarnation. For those who don't understand Leibnizian 'possible worlds' jargon, the contradiction amounts  to saying both that the Word is and is not human necessarily. Bear in mind that if x has a property essentially, and x is a necessary being, then x has the property necessarily.

There is a third question the 'exfoliation' (unwrapping) of which I will save for later, namely, if the Word has a human soul in virtue of having human nature, how does that human soul integrate with the conscious and self-conscious life of the second divine person? A person is not merely an hypostasis or substratum, but one that is conscious and self-conscious.  A person is not an object but a subject or a subject-object. A number of further difficult questions spin off from here. Time to hit 'post.'

Doubting the Teachings of One’s Religion

I argued earlier that besides its salutary role in philosophy, doubt also has a salutary role to play in religion. But I left something out, and Vito Caiati caught it:

I have been thinking about your recent post “A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and Religion” and would like to pose a question to you: While it is certainly true that the religionist “doubts the teachings of other religions,” does he not do the same with some or many of the teachings of his own religion?  In raising this question, I have in mind the intellectual believer, imbued with an inherent religious sensibility and inclination, desirous of affirming the foundational propositions of his faith, including those that appear illogical or contradictory, but who, however much he wills it, is often suffused with doubt about their veracity. I would go so far as to argue, speaking as a Christian and Roman Catholic, that certain dogmas and doctrines by their very nature engender such doubts. None of this necessarily entails the abandonment of belief, but it renders the faith of the religionist more tenuous and unstable than many would like to admit. His struggle to uphold one or more members of a set of beliefs is, at least for those not gifted with special grace, a characteristic property of his faith.  At best, he should acknowledge the tension and understand that he will repeatedly transverse an arc between belief and doubt and that the warm convictions of one moment will often dissipate in the cold misgivings of another. The gap between what is affirmed and what is consistently believed is for the religionist of this type never entirely closed.

That is a very fine statement and I cannot disagree with it. Religious believers who are both sincere and intellectually sophisticated will in the main, and as a matter of fact, question the truth of their beliefs and the efficacy of their practices.  Dr. Caiati doesn't quite say it, but he does suggest that this is as it ought to be. Whether or not he would commit himself to the further step from the factual to the normative, I will commit myself to it: one ought to, at least sometimes, question truth and efficacy of beliefs and practices.  It has always seemed to me that a living faith, as opposed to a convenience and a soporific, must maintain itself in the teeth of doubt. A vital faith, a living faith is animated in part by doubt and a spirit of inquiry.  He who finds first had to seek; but here below the finding is never secure and final and so must be renewed by further seeking.  

Vito speaks of certain doctrines and dogmas that by their very nature engender doubts. Some of these are harder to believe than others. The hardest to believe are those that demand or seem to demand the  "crucifixion of the intellect."  Trinity and Incarnation are the two main main examples. One cannot be a Christian and deny them* (in the way one could be a Christian and deny Transubstantiation). It is, however, difficult to make logical sense of them (in the way that it is not difficult to make logical sense of the Resurrection.)  See my Trinity and Incarnation category for details, and this relatively short and precise entry in particular: The Logic of the Trinity Revisited.

Religious faith here below must remain "tenuous and unstable" to the intellectually awake. The tenets we hold to must remain tentative and thus "tenuous."  Doxastic 'grip,' like physical grip is subject to the world's loosening. No one's grip is absolutely secure.  There is no helping that unless you want to sink into the somnambulance of the worldling who has the world and its pleasures and "fire insurance" to boot.

Religious faith is a faith seeking understanding. It is not a blind faith without understanding, but neither is it a faith that goes beyond a clear understanding, superadding intellectual assent to a clearly conceived proposition.   Perhaps the Pauline image is apt: religious faith is a seeing through a glass darkly.  The glass of the discursive intellect is a distorting lens through which the Incarnation must appear logically impossible even though in truth it is actual.  

Let me put the question to myself directly: Do you or do you not accept Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, as your only hope for salvation? My acceptance takes the form, not of an acceptance of a ready-made proposition or set of propositions, but the acceptance of a task to be pursued in all seriousness, the task of investigating the matter in all its ramifications via reasoning, prayer, meditation, examination of conscience, study of all relevant literary sources, including scripture, commentaries thereon, the works of the great and not-so-great philosophers of all times and places,  with no slighting of Athens, or Jerusalem, or Benares, or Alexandria, and seeking out the few living who may have been vouchsafed a higher degree of insight than that which I find in myself.

_________________

*I spew from my mouth those miserable 'liberals' who would remake Christianity in their own stunted image. They are free to reject the doctrine, and I defend their right to do so; but they ought not be allowed to change it to suit themselves.  Christianity is what it is; its definatory tenets are essential to it and cannot be jettisoned without jettisoning the whole thing.

Addendum (6 February 2022):

Malcolm Pollack comments on the above  here.  In an e-mail he writes,

I hope you are well. I set off in 2022 imagining I was going to write a lot more (I'd been tapering off lately), but things are now so completely insane that I hardly know what to say. How does one analyze, or comment productively on, what goes on in a madhouse? Why even bother? And why continue to elaborate the various and infinitely detailed breakdowns and malfunctions of a system that's going over a cliff? I can hardly bring myself, any longer, to raise a pen.

There is indeed something absurd about continuing to add to the analytical literature on our social and political collapse. For example, what is the point of this excellent article by Anthony Esolen? It will not be read by those who need its instruction, and even if they did read it, it would do them no good. You cannot appeal to the reason of those bereft of reason, or to the consciences of those who either lack a conscience or whose conscience was never properly formed. 

So why do I continue to think about and write about these things? The short answer is that I have a theoretical bent. I enjoy figuring things out.  "All men by nature desire to know." (Aristotle). This is so even if few live up to their (normative) nature. The bios theoretikos and all that. Intellectual types derive intense pleasure from reading, study, thinking, and all cognate activities.

Even if the subject-matter is disgusting as is that of the medical and social pathologists, the pleasure of understanding is a delight.  The feculent can be fascinating.

Theory has its escapist joys. But in the end we would prefer to act upon the world and its recalcitrant denizens and bring about improvement. But even if we know what needs to be done to bring about, not mere change, but improvement, the tasks are formidable and perhaps insurmountable especially since we who oppose the current madness are divided among ourselves, which is the topic of this article which explains the Boomer versus 'Based' generation gap on the Right. Excerpt:

Do you hate America and want it to fail? 

A lot of younger right-wingers would say yes . . . in a certain sense, they do. And they have reasons for saying that. What young man with any sense wants to die for the Joe Biden regime in the Ukraine? Who wants to pay taxes so Kamala Harris can shower money on illegal immigrants and left-wing shock troops?

That’s a hard message to hear for anyone who lived through the 1960s and the Cold War. For a long time, to be on the Right—to defend liberty and morality and decency—meant to be a patriot and to love America. And it still does. But the enemies of freedom and decency who hate America are no longer godless communists abroad, they are the godless leftists at home who are currently in power.

If America means transgender rights and suffocating biomedical security measures, then those who love freedom will come to hate America—or, to be more specific, the current regime that has taken control of what used to be America.

Young people on the Right don’t hate liberty and morality and decency; they despise woke ideology. The older idea of “America” that the Boomers love is gone, as far as the younger generation is concerned. Most Boomers will never share this antipathy, but they must learn to distinguish between America the nation and America the state. The American state—as the COVID lockdowns, Russiagate hoax, and the political prosecution of the January 6 protestors show—is at war with the American people. (Many older conservatives recognized this distinction and gave Rush Limbaugh a pass when he famously remarked on air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail.)

A Christian Koan for Christmas Eve

From my Facebook page, three years ago, today. My writing is uneven in quality. But the Muse was with me below.
…………………………..
 
Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself. The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.
 
Addenda (24 December 2021)
 
1) "Pride of life" above alludes to 1 John 2:16:
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. (KJV)
2) Goethe considered the cross "the most disgusting thing under the sun." See Walter Kaufmann's  essay, Goethe's Faith and Faust's Redemption. A similar attitude in Nietzsche. That the central Christian symbol is a Roman torture device shows that Christianity is a slander upon life, the only life there is.  That, in a sentence, is what I take to be Nietzsche's attitude toward the Christian cross.

3) How did we get to be so proud? Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

4) The Islamic hate for the Christian cross.  Raymond Ibrahim details the ongoing murder of Christians by Muslims.  But didn't George W. Bush tells us that Islam is the religion of peace?  What a know-nothing that pseudo-con Dubwa was and is. Living proof that being a nice, regular guy is not enough. Patriots owe a lot to Donald Trump for having put paid to both the Clinton and Bush dynasties.

5) On the other hand, Daniel Pipes reports that Muslims are converting to Christianity like never before. But a word of caution. Some of the converters are pious frauds:

Some Muslims convert tactically for practical reasons, especially to facilitate emigration to the West. A Church of God pastor, Said Deeb, quotes desperate Muslims telling him, “Just baptize me, I will believe in whoever just to leave here.” National Public Radio paraphrases Şebnem Köşer Akçapar of Koç University in Istanbul to the effect that “only some of the refugees are genuine converts. Others are using religious persecution as a way to get to the West.” Aiman Mazyek, head of the Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, reacts with acute skepticism about growing numbers of Muslim converts to Christianity.

6) Vito Caiati sends this excerpt from W. H. Auden's For the Time Being:

Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.

Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience

"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.

Barth KarlImagine someone who would  pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force.  Imagine him declaring, "The only  permissible passages are those initiated by me  and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!"  "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry."  "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"

The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a  refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.

Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?

Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"

The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.

Trust or verify?  The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.

I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things.  Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe.  All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal.  Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.

But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object.  That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.

The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct.  So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.

Little child Matthew Seek and Find Matthew

Kerouac’s Beat(ific) Visions and the Cross

A good essay by Joshua Hren at First Things.

What Hren says is complemented by this entry of mine from 31 October 2010:

The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this:

Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this.  I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality.  I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes.  I hope it will all turn out true.

It is fitting to conclude Kerouac month with the last section of Jack's last book, a section in which, while alluding to the Catholic mass, he raises his glass to his own piecemeal suicide:

Forget it wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow's another day. Hic calix! Look that up in Latin, it means "Here's the chalice," and be sure there's wine in it.

Kerouac cross

William Lane Craig . . .

. . . on the headwaters of the human race. A very intelligent article. I have had similar thoughts.  Here is an excerpt from an entry dated 30 August 2011:

But how can God create man in his image and likeness without interfering in the evolutionary processes which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal? As follows.

Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. (This can be argued with great rigor, but not now!)

As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine intervention without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through a spiritual encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not  emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone.

This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with a serpent or an apple or the being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a
spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace certain  Pauline passages, but by socio-cultural-linguistic means.

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message.  Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other — but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and literalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Our question was whether rejecting the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails rejecting the doctrine of the Fall.  The answer to this is in the negative since the mere possibility of an account such as the one  just given shows that the entailment fails.  Man's fallenness is a spiritual condition that can only be understood in a spiritual way.  It does not require that the whole human race have sprung from exactly two animal progenitors that miraculously came into physical existence by divine agency and thus without animal progenitors.  Nor does it require that the transmission of the fallen condition be biological in nature.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, 1960. (Source)

Given what we know from yesterday's Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense, and not ethical in the Dane's sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.

Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn't do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men's wives.  Am I being fair?