Catacomb Joe sends us to this Rod Dreher piece in the European Conservative.
Believe it or not, the Trial of the Century just happened in a courtroom in Helsinki. The Finnish parliamentarian and physician Päivi Räsänen this week returned to the dock to face hate crimes charges for having quoted the Bible in defense of Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality.
Substack latest
I list six such salutary roles.
Today at Substack.
Vallicella, William F. (2016) "William E. Mann, GOD, MODALITY, AND MORALITY," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 33 : Iss. 3 , Article 8. DOI: 10.5840/faithphil201633368
Available here. A long and meaty review article including a discussion of divine simplicity and Mann's approach thereto.
Substack latest. A passage from G. K. Chesteron examined.
I recommend this informative and characteristically well-written post by long-time friend and correspondent, Malcolm Pollack.
It appears that among the wages of wokery are a decline in enrollment.
Related: UK Christianity Out With A Whimper
The short answer is that the cure for an ersatz religion is genuine religion.
Colin Dueck in a review of Joshua Mitchell:
So, what is to be done? Mitchell’s answer in American Awakening is the observation that an essentially theological problem requires a theological solution. If the destructive ersatz religion of left-wing identity politics rests on a mistaken premise of all-encompassing group innocence versus group guilt—as it obviously does—then the answer is to recover that older spiritual awareness and humility that all human beings are flawed sinners as individuals. Here, Mitchell is in the best tradition of leading 20th-century conservative philosophers, who understood that the ideological authoritarian movements of that era could not only be stopped by political method; they also had to be confronted through a deeper understanding of their spiritual roots. [The idea is better conveyed by replacing 'could not only be stopped by political method' with 'could not be stopped by political method only.']
Why is 'wokery' an essentially theological problem?
Mitchell says that twenty-first century progressives believe in a kind of hierarchy of human sin and transgression based upon a series of group dichotomies: male versus female, white versus non-white, straight versus gay, Western versus non-Western, and so on. In each pairing, the latter group is the historical victim, and the former group the victimizer. Sin or guilt, like innocence, is therefore assigned by group. For oppressor groups, sin cannot be washed away, other than by apologetics ['apologies' works better here] that never end. For oppressed groups, there is no guilt or transgression in the first place, only the innocence of victimhood.
As Mitchell notes, identity politics removes the traditional religious scapegoat and finds a new one. In the older understanding, the sacrifice of the guiltless Christ—the one true innocent—is needed because all human beings are irredeemably sinful. In the newer progressive understanding, some groups are sinful, and some are not. This unleashes a new form of political activism. To be specific, it encourages a form of politics that is collectivist, utopian, and revolutionary—really an ersatz religion. We have seen their kind before. It does not end well.
As you can see, this article is of high quality. You really should read the whole of it. One quibble, though. On Christianity, human beings are not irredeemably sinful; if that were the case they could not be redeemed. The Christian idea is rather that human beings are all so deeply and originally sinful that they cannot redeem themselves by their own individual or collective effort and so need a divine Redeemer.
What explains the bien-pensant substitution of the first word for the second? I give three reasons.
Substack latest.
Over at Substack. If you haven't made the acquaintance of Simone Weil, may I introduce you?
Substitute "Do not allow us to be led into temptation" for "Lead us not into temptation." For why on earth or in heaven would the Father of Lights want to lead us into the darkness of temptation?
………………
Vito Caiati comments:
With regard to today’s short post, “A Proposed Change to the Pater Noster. I think that you may find Aquinas’ understanding of the petition “Lead us not into temptation” worthy of your consideration. Specifically, in the “Explanation of the Lord’s Prayer” (Expositio in orationem dominicam), he writes:
But does God lead one to evil, that he should pray: "Lead us not into temptation"?
I reply that God is said to lead a person into evil by permitting him to the extent that, because of his many sins, He withdraws His grace from man, and as a result of this withdrawal man does fall into sin. Therefore, we sing in the Psalm: "When my strength shall fail, do not Thou forsake me."[23] God, however, directs man by the fervor of charity that he be not led into temptation. For charity even in its smallest degree is able to resist any kind of sin: "Many waters cannot quench charity."[24] He also guides man by the light of his intellect in which he teaches him what he should do. For as the Philosopher says: "Everyone who sins is ignorant."[25] "I will give thee understanding and I will instruct thee."[26] It was for this last that David prayed, saying: "Enlighten my eyes that I never sleep in death; lest at any time my enemy say: I have prevailed against him."[27] We have this through the gift of understanding. Therefore, when we refuse to consent to temptation, we keep our hearts pure: "Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God."[28] And it follows from this petition that we are led up to the sight of God, and to it may God lead us all! (https://isidore.co/aquinas/PaterNoster.htm)
This interpretation of the text in question not only avoids the clearly undesirable implication that God would “want to lead us into the darkness of temptation” but it also logically follows from the fifth (“forgive us our trespasses”) and sixth (“deliver us from evil”) petitions, the former asking forgiveness for our sins and the latter protection against all the evils of the world, many of which flow from them. Thus, these concern the effects of past sin, ours or our ancestors, while the seventh implores God not to remove the very grace that protects us from sinning again, given our fallen state.
I thank Vito for his erudite comment and for exposing my ignorance of the fact that the doctor angelicus had addressed my puzzlement long ago. I am having some trouble, though, making sense of Thomas' explanation. He seems to be saying the following.
Man freely sins. God freely responds by withdrawing his grace. This withdrawal of grace either causes or raises the probability that man commit further sins. "Lead us not into temptation" is thus a request that God not withdraw or withhold the grace we need to keep from sinning. Accordingly, God leads us into temptation when he withdraws or withholds the grace we need to keep from sinning. I am sorry but I find this a rather strained attempt at making sense of the petition, "Lead us not into temptation."
How does it go in Greek? Not knowing Greek, I cannot say. In any case, Christ did not speak Greek. So we cannot be sure of the sense of the words Christ used when he taught his disciples the "Our Father."
Aquinas quotes Aristotle in the passage above. But did The Philosopher have the word sin' or the Greek equivalent in his philosophical vocabulary? Was there a Greek equivalent that has the same sense as 'sin' when used by Jews and Christians? Sin is an offense against God. Can one sin against the Unmoved Mover, against Thought thinking itself (noesis noeseos)? Can one sin against any of the Greek gods, Zeus for example? I don't know. Nescio, ergo blogo.
If Islam is the religion of peace, then it is also the religion of archeological preservation. Modus tollens or modus ponens?
Images here.
Substack latest.
Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:
It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)
Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind, and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot. I hope you agree with me that there is something utterly mad about torturing and murdering people over such an abstruse matter, one so far removed from any conceivable method of rational settlement. I say this as a hard-core, life-long committed student of metaphysics who has a healthy contempt for such benighted neo-positivist 'philosophistines' as David Stove. But even if it doesn't come to bloodshed, the threats of 'cancellation' and dhimmitude for the heterodox are intolerable.
Admittedly, reason is weak and inconclusive. But fideistic faith is blind: the certitude it provides is merely subjective. For if the Christian's subjective certitude of the Trinity were also objective, then the same would hold for the Muslim's subjective certitude of the opposite, with the result that one and the same proposition would be both objectively true and objectively not true. To avoid this result one would have to throw out the Law of Non-Contradiction. But then one would have taken one step too far. But what I just wrote is slightly tendentious. To put the point with the proper caution: the jettisoning of LNC is to be avoided if at all possible. For LNC is the supreme law and norm of the discursive intellect.
The dogmatic Christian will claim that his subjective certainty that God is triune is also objective; but the dogmatic Muslim will do the same with respect to the negation of the characteristic (orthodox) Christian claim. Obviously, they can't both be right. So one must be wrong. Each will call the other wrong. But neither will be justified in so doing.
Although there is scholarly debate as to what exactly Pierre Bayle's ultimate philosophical position is, the following argument can be attributed to him (cf. Richard H. Popkin, "Pierre Bayle's Place in 17th Century Scepticism" in Paul Dibon, ed. Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe De Rotterdam, Elsevier, 1959, pp. 1-19):
1. Reason is too weak and confused to discover the truth about the world and how we should live in it.
Therefore
2. One must rely on faith as the guide to, and divine revelation as the measure of, the truth about the world and how we should live in it.
This is a non sequitur for a couple of reasons. First, one response to the supposed truth of (1) might be a universal epoché (εποχη) of all contention-inspiring beliefs and a resolve to stick to the mundane and follow the customs of one's time and place, and in the relaxed manner in which worldly people do this: one goes along to get along without getting too worked up over anything. Among meat-eaters one eats meat, among vegetarians vegetables only. Among church-goers, one goes to church. And this without dogmatizing about the evils of factory farms, the supposed health dangers of red meat, etc., and in the case of the church-goers without taking seriously the talk of "turning the other cheek," etc. In the teeth of (1), one abandons the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One sticks to the classical Pyrrhonian path of Sextus Empiricus & Co., a path that leads not upwards to the object sof religion, downwards to a tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian.
Second, the above argument gives one no reason to accept the Christian faith and the Christian revelation as opposed to, say, the Muslim faith and revelation. (See the Bayle quotation above.) Given that we need divine revelation, which of the competing putative revelations should we accept? From the fact that we need revelation to set us straight, it does not follow that the Christian revelation will satisfy our need. Besides, there is reasonable dispute about what exactly the Christian revelation is. On both fronts we are thrown back upon our fail and exigent reason.
My tentative conclusion, then, is that the infirmity of reason, though a fact, does not straightaway license any embrace of fideism which, for present purposes, can be characterized roughly as reliance on pure blind faith in matters of religion. (Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is a good 19th century example of a fideist.) Fideism comes in different varieties. There is Wittgensteinian fideism, to mention just one variety. I have something to say about it over at Substack.
What are our options? Perhaps only these:
A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others who, in different ways and to different degrees, develop the theme of the infirmity of reason.
B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.
C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane, if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tri-personal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet to me.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)
D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.
I recommend and practice (D). Or are there other options?
Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably. My question is whether, and to what extent, that upshot would matter. What if there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide?
My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be. If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.
Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had.
"But then your faith will have been in vain!"
Yes, I said that myself at the outset. But it is true only from a point of view external to my life, a point of view that cannot be my point of view. What then is that to me when I no longer exist? In life, I can view my life from outside: I can play the spectator of my life. But if and when I no longer exist, I cannot play that role. If my faith is lived here and now by me in full conviction of its non-vanity and non-illusoriness, then nothing that happens after my annihilation can retroactively mark my lived faith as vain and illusory. It will have served a good, life-enhancing purpose, and indeed the only purpose it could have served if my earthly tenure ends in utter annihilation.
"The believer believes that God exists independently of whether or not anyone, including himself, believes that God exists. The sincere belief in God is belief in a transcendent being."
Yes, that is right, but it doesn't follow that God exists. It also does not follow that God does not exist. The life-enhancing content of the belief is what it is whether or not the transcendent object of the belief exists. My point is that sincere belief in God suffices for this life, and suffices sans phrase (without qualification) if this life of mine ends utterly with death.
"What do you mean by 'suffices for this life.'"
I mean that a sincere lived (existentially appropriated and practically manifested) faith in God suffices to confer upon this life value, purpose, and moral structure, making it affirmable as good, and worth living.
"But if a believer took this attitude you are describing and apparently also advocating, then that believer would be in some doubt as to whether there would be any post-mortem experiential confirmation by the believer himself of the transcendent validity of his faith. If so, his faith would not be subjectively certain to him, and would then be neither knowledge nor faith!"
I respectfully disagree! It would not be knowledge, of course, but it would be genuine faith. A faith that is subjectively certain is not a living faith, but a crutch, a convenience, a cop-out, an evasion. Living faith, genuine faith, is faith sustained in the teeth of doubt. Only then is it authentic.
"Why is an authentic faith one that lives with doubt?"
Because our predicament in this life is not such as to allow us any certainty about such ultimate matters as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, whether we have a higher destiny, whether we are called to divine fellowship, whether theosis is a real possibility, and so on. One ought not dogmatize about the uncertain. To do so is to pretend to enjoy an insight that one does not enjoy. Such epistemic pretension is a kind of hubris that could have tragic consequences. Think of all the people who have been murdered and tortured to death because others claimed to be certain about what they had no right to believe they could be certain about.
"But aren't you dogmatizing when you claim that one cannot be certain about the matters in question?"
No, because I am claiming merely that there are plausible reasons to believe that there are no rationally compelling reasons to believe that one can be certain about the things that the dogmatists claim to be certain about.
Genuine faith is not blind, but it is at best reasoned faith. Experience, however, teaches that reason is weak and vacillating. This experientia docet is not a dogmatic pronunciamento. In plain English, I am not dogmatizing when I report what experience teaches. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot apprehend its own infirmity. It is weak, but not impotent. Its infirmity affects both arguments for and arguments against God, the soul, and rest of the ultimate matters. And this includes arguments for and against the veridicality of a putative divine revelation.
We are not wholly in the dark or wholly in the light. Our predicament is a chiaroscuro, a play of light and dark. It is as if we are in a cave in which there is light enough to discern reasonably a possible route of escape from a condition which is admittedly not wholly satisfactory, but darkness enough reasonably both to doubt whether there is an escape and to suspect that those who claim to see a way to the fullness of light of being empty dreamers, wishful thinkers, utopian reality-deniers, mentally unstable, or even utterly mad. Some in the cave will reasonably argue that their condition is as good as it gets and that we must accept reality and not muck things up by reaching for the unattainable. They will deny, with justification, that their condition is speluncular. Other in the cave will reasonably argue the opposite. Neither party is entitled to dogmatize.
If our condition is cave-like, then a reasoned faith is as good as it gets and its ongoing vitality feeds from its tension with reasoned unfaith.
Here below we ought not allow our inquiry into the ultimate matters to degenerate into either denialism or dogmatism. Saying this, I am not dogmatizing, but expressing my reasoned conviction. Thus place is made for reasoned faith which is neither blind nor dogmatic.
